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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.