Thursday, October 31, 2013

Basketball Startup Mentality

The two top winning NCAA coaches server at Indiana colleges getting those wins that is Bobby Knight with Indiana University and Gene Keady with Purdue University. What is often forgotten or not highlighted as much is the results of their dedicated to preparation off the courts.

Coach Knight while at IU has a 98% of players graduating with a 4 year degree, the average for the NCAA is 42%. While Keady when at PU has a 78% of players graduating with a 4 year degree. Both are records with the NCAA.

I see daily startup people miss-use the pivot term so lets correct that with preparation:

BasketballHoop= Market and Customer Fit potential
Basketball = startup idea
Center Pivoting=startup non tech founder pivoting for a better angle of attack on idea
Guard Receiving The Pass= tech founder with different viewpoint unobstructed by obstacles
Opponent=obstacles to market and customer fit


Pivot only works if team can accept new viewpoints to get a better unobstructed view of market and customer fit. In the case of one idea, one viewpoint that never works and soon burns out after a weak effort towards market and customer fit.

Prepare for startups like preparing for winning basketball both on the court of startups and off the court of startups.  Over prepare...and if you cannot over prepare than damn effing stop using a basketball term you fail to understand.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

KItKat Oct31 or Nov 1?

Google updated the Google apps in the Play Store and uploaded a new bugdroid kitkat animation to youtube. Thus it appears that KitKat, Android 4.4 OS will launch on either Oct 31 or Nov 1.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

KitKat Delayed?

Supposedly KitKat is delayed until November. But let's clear the air, Nexus 5 will be delayed until probably Nov1st.

KitKat the Android OS 4.4 will still be demoed on Monday and released as wells as Nexus5. The interesting part will be what new UI components Google added to the UX design.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

OOP MVC android

There is one pattern that fits android as far as MVC is concerned.  Its called Passive MVC as it gets all the crud and crap out of the activity class file. Karina Sokolova's examples cover both activities and fragments.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

TO Managers of VC funds

To Managers of VC funds:

When you do a keyword search to find developers to bother to interest in a tech cofounder position in a far away city rather than do some analysis of fit of that potential lead you do both a disservice to profession of sales and the profession of recruiting.

PLEASE FUCKING STOP It!  And the savvy developer is going to challenge you anyway to fly to their city and talk them because we as developers are not FUCKING RETARDED!

Not to mention the brand damage you do that startup you are attempting ot help in the first place.

PLEASE GET A FUCKING clue.!

Secure Preferences

I found this project Secure Preferences, it obfuscates shared preferences using 256 bit AES. Does not fully stop illegal hacking of apps but does make an incremental step towards making that much harder.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

FourAndroid UX code

I have not put up FourAndroid code yet at github. So while I get some more coding completed to do that, you can start looking at the progression of the example application class, GWSApp.java. Right now image caches have been added.

Both memory and L1 caches using OkVolley and VolleyImageCache example.

FontLoader, customfont directions

Okay, the directions on how to use HoloEverywhere FontLoader is as this gist.  If you want to make use of adding RawLazyFont to add more styles just follow the template and you will see where to add them but you probably should have a regular font style for the font that you adding simulated font styles to at least.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

What A Mobile Dev/Designer Is

Why go through coding/curating a UX/UI library for android? Other than obvious need to use it to prototype several applications must be a reason other than its not there, right?

I am looking for the startup founder that gets what a designer/developer on the front end is. Some of you have peers or friends in web design/development and you see the pattern of becoming adapt with a front end stack by playing around with libraries and developing new ones. Its the same on the mobile native front end as well.

Someone that processes stuff and never builds and never immerses themselves with the build process never gets this. This is why I avoid recruiters as there is nothing in it for me or you to spend time explaining it to them.

The other reason is that it feeds the api changes of the different android versions into something that I will remember and use again and again.  This is also why you should be wary of those who ask for an application example as the whole process is half the equation and without the understanding that aspect of the equation you get a mismatch of results and expectations...ie the old dictate wrong design to the developer or designer.

NetFlix bimbos-RXJAVA4Android

So why did I react to Netflix bimbos lying to me in a recruiter email when they stated that my android exp overlapped what they were doing?Well, I specifically knew some things Netflix has worked on in the java area that disprove that point.

RXJava is different than say AKKA's application of functional programming to android java and java in that AKKA hooks into a scala toolkit that runs on server side whereas RXJava stands completely alone to allow you to concurrency in java.

Android article link and this is the full github link to rxjava-android. Its convince me nough that I am switching over to using it. The only word of caution is that the lifecycle hooks have not been added yet. But I think most of us can hand roll our own quite easily.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Netflix Bimbos FUCKYOU

Every once in awhile a firm will earn a spamlist entry due to overzealous Bimbo head recruiters who do not think but rather decide to do such things as lie in emails, etc.Amazon earn their spot on such a list for auto adding my email to spam infused internal recruiting system.

Netflix now earns that honor for just effing Fuck not listening when I said no over and over again... NETflix fuck you ANd YOUr BIMBO reCRUITRS!

Maybe after a few google bombs firms will sie the fuck up.

Better than ViewHolder

Garvelink authored a post Better CustomViewGroup and put up a github repo showing why the ViewHolder pattern is considered harmful. Its a must read post for those designing UIs for android applications.


Sunday, October 13, 2013

Chicago Android Expert

You ask Chicago Android Developers these things;

1. Can we Load Custom fonts from res/raw?
        Their answer is no.(Wrong just have to keep in mind that you want to reduce the font loading to 2.5 megs or less using a static and to cache it properly)

2. Can we set kerning on text?
NO we cannot.(Wrong again, extend textview and use spannable)

This is why I get so pissed off at iphone first because of design as its a sack of shit sold by iphone lazy ass developers who do not know the internals of android.

Custom Fonts

Loading custom fonts at application startup needs to be light and fast. Obviously you should not try load 10 megs in custom fonts.

But how to do it and not loose any nice typographical control over your design?  If you look at FontLoader from HoloEverywhere you will find that if you customize it you can reduce your custom font set as the basic fonts kept per font family are:

bold
bolditalic
italic
regular

Mine own will get reduced to about 1.7 megs.



Friday, October 11, 2013

FontStacks-International

This applies for api 11 to api 19 for android. It seems that to get this right as far as an font stack to use for all human language scripts that you would set typeface in themes per human language and have separate text controls for both headers and content in order to have different typefaces.

The stacks I have come up with are this pairings:

Full Noto
Full Droid

You can get the full droid stacks from

sdk/platform/android-18/data/fonts

Its extra work but gives you full typographical control across all the human languages and scripts.

Noto comes from ChromeOS and you can find it at code.google.com just search for it.

Startup Asking for Code or App

If you are a startup that asks for code or app as proof of skills do not make these mistakes:

1. do a job ad in a major startuphub forum and than do a bait and switch to project bid, worse if you oh gosh pay for the damn job ad.
2. Most developers have a no lie policy when hey turn over app code as proof of skills. Its not hard, understand effing NO PART people.
3. Every interaction with a potential developer your startup is being interviewed, ACT LIKE IT AND MAKE AN effort to SUCCEED IN thAt INTErVIEW.

DO I HAVE To TALK TO YOU LIKE YOU ARE EFFING FIVE YEARS OLD!  Chicago startups are the worse as they use the Groupon, lying/cons as examples to emulate.

Is this a new Android Font?

So in my explorations of typography, fonts, design, and android I came to this link of a project a few days ago:

https://code.google.com/p/noto/

While it does have signs that it maybe a web font, Ican help wondering if it might be a new font for either android 4.4 or android 5.0. The indication that its is a web font is the inclusion of both arimo and cousine in the downloads as pairing fonts.

The indication that it maybe a new android font, the inclusion of  tinos, arimo, and cousine together. You get a better clue if you review Steve Matteson's previous font designs.


Thursday, October 10, 2013

FastPrototyping-Typography

My UI lib, now named FourAndroid, is somewhat a fast prototyping library. Part of that fast prototyping is having font family stacks that are easily changed.

For those not in design, its the difference between a rich story line emphasized by music of a Pink Floyd album and something of pop garbage by Miley Cyrus.Or Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, etc.

While the roboto fonts are an improvement in the typography of an android application. Its just not enough of a rich palette. But there are some tricks and extra classes you can add that enlarge that roboto font palette to something more robust and easy to use.

The UI library will be larger with more fonts but you will be able to cycle through different font palettes in the IDE on the fly to see which way your app design should go which is neat feature to have.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

ChicagoTechCoFounder

When requesting talk time to ask me about becoming a tech cofounder for a Chicago startup please respect my time since you are wanting to make a short cut and choose someone in days rather than take months.  We as developers have a vocation in which we choose problems to solve by writing code and write the code as our daily vocational habit.

When you as a startup disturb that habit because you cannot figure out what a digital calendar and invite system is in relation to setting up an meeting or interview than most of us have to say that your startup execution becomes somewhat questionable to say the least.

This is not your freshmen's year of college. Its somewhat like you are asking someone to marry you blind, its not going to happen by itself you will have to earn the trust of the developer by doing those things that denote trust. And if you cannot respect the developers skills by understanding that developer is getting asked daily to do things for firms than maybe you should not talk to that developer.


Monday, October 7, 2013

Four Android




If you have not looked at lately:

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Froyo is at less than 3%.  Thus, most of us should be switching to supporting Gingerbread through JellyBean.

But is that the right decision? Why not a more radical approach? Just altogether forget other version and just focus on Android 4.x versions.

If you are a startup you want your app on new android devices anyway and focusing on the older version ramps up the cost in dev time. Besides you can do all the new Ui effects that put iOS to shame.

Are you Four Android?

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Design Crap

Nothing pisses me off than design crap trying to be awesome design. So here is a typical design agency of Chicago website:

PunchKickInteractive

Go to the site for a little bit..now notice what is missing yet?

Now if you a real designer its somewhat obvious right away what is missing.  That magical application of the numerical relationship 1.618.

This effing why I do not go through recruiters as recruiters cannot tell the fakes from the reals. 1.618 is the reason we have grids as a design tool. You do not have one without the other, unless you want to fake it.


Friday, October 4, 2013

When I give Developer Reerrals

Another stupid startup, another stupid clusterfuck..

When I Give Developer Referrals.

1.Firm asking is required to buy my meal at my location as I am interviewing the firm to see if they will treat the developer I refer to them right.

You startup founders are old enough adults to understand that you have to get hod of transport to meet the requirements of that meeting. If you cannot touch shit Sherlock. And if I have to give a speech about being adult to a startup founder than FUCK YOU!



Wednesday, October 2, 2013

UI obssessing

So android.support.v8 got released so now I can put together fully the UI library have been obsessing about for awhile. Screenshots to be forthcoming.

The interesting thing is I have all these damn emails from recruiters; got to see an updated resume, got to go to their location, etc. None of that matters to UI application development on android. What matters on android is using that java knowledge and digging through android source code and learning internals of android to craft new solutions to UI challenges.

And I am sorry I can pretend I like other programming just as much as I do figuring out how to solve an UI challenge on android, but its still somewhat lying. For example, one aspect I have found is the aspect of increasing callbacks seems to negatively impact the butter fast speed of the UI.

The anti-pattern idea is to extend the bus concept in that you are not just doing java classes that represent events but also represent commands in a MVC-MVVP set of patterns as we have two or more things in that we can scope the event objects on the bus by lifecycle of the fragment itself or the fragment activity or the lifecycle of the application itself.

Back to code, screenshots and videos coming soon.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

RoR Hard Way,startups

I got my wish to one of Lon Chow's startup investments is looking for a backend geek with ruby for a tech cofounder in Chicago and the have agreed to a working app as proof.
Its my two favorite areas local and mobile.

The interesting part is that I have not touched RoR in awhile so I have to bootstrap. In my case I am porting an app/backend from 1.9 ruby and rails 3 to ruby 2 and rails 4 and adding some stuff. Should be some fun exciting days ahead.