Luke Ryan Jernejcic RSS Feed

About

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 12:00:00 GMT

I am constantly striving to learn new technology and learning how to apply itto business practices today.

Resources

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:00:43 GMT

I thought that it would be useful to have a page that you could always use as a resource for the products and services that I use. This page will serve as a living document that I will add to and remove from as my needs and the products themselves change. I hope that you can glean some helpful tools from these resources.

Disclosure: I use affiliate links when available. However it does not in anyway impact what I use or recommend. I have personal experience with everything listed below and recommend them because I believe that they would be helpful to others and not because of any commissions associated with them.

Productivity:

Backblaze: I believe that remote backups are important. I have tried several other provides such as Mozy and Carbonite, but Backblaze has worked out the best for me. It doesn’t bog down my system and is incredibly reliable.
Evernote: Anything that I might want to refer to later I keep in Evernote. I syncs everywhere and there free version is very generous in it’s functionality. See Michael Hyatt’s posts for thorough tutorials for using Evernote.
Harvest App: I have dabbled with Harvest for a few years. They have a decent free version for a freelance with only a couple clients. Eventually I upgrade to a paid plan so I could track more projects. It is priced better and I have the software to be more versatile than FreshBooks, which I was previously using and would still recommend taking a look at.
Downcast: Podcasts are my new classroom, but iTunes was not handling them very well. Downcast makes it very easy to rank your podcasts, set download rules, and has enhanced playback features. Definitely worth the cost.
Freshdesk: This helpdesk / support service is great. I wrote this post on why I love Freshdesk. It’s a great offering at a great pricepoint, and it makes it so easy to keep track of communication with clients.
1Password: There are too many sites being broken into to use only a handful of passwords. Take the advice of security experts and use a password manager so you can easily give every account a unique password. 1Password is available across most platforms: Mac, iOS, and Windows
DropBox: Not the cheapest option for file synchronization, but it is pretty universal, reliable, and secure. Many apps will integrate with DropBox for file sharing and app data synchronization. Definitely not a service I could live without. The free version will handle basic usage.
Asana: There are a ton of project managers out there, but I have found Asana to be the best balance of features. It has workspace, projects, and you can group tasks (which I do according to status, i.e. todo, doing, holding, etc.). It integrates other services including Harvest. Only thing it is lacking is better mobile apps.
Bitly: Bitly lets you shorten URL’s on social networks like Twitter. What I find most useful about it is that it provides statistics on how many times links have been used and when they were used. Also functions as a decent bookmark library.
Chime Squirrel: Yes, this is my app, but I literally use it everyday, so I have to mention it. I use it for productivity at the office during the day and for exercising at night. I also using it for timing my french press coffee on weekends 🙂

Development:

Webfaction: I have a thorough review of WebFaction . A lot people recommend BlueHost, which is a good service, but I think WebFaction is an easier service to use and have a better product.
Shopify: I have recently helped a couple people setup an online store for their small businesses. I have been very pleased with the value that you get for the price with Shopify. It’s very customizable, and yet users find it very easy to use the day-to-day functionality.
Sublime Text: This is a great editor for coding. It is highly customizable and has a good free option. I think the paid option is a little overpriced, but not prohibitively.
SourceTree: I love Git and I use it a lot on the command line. However, SourceTree makes is much easier to view diffs and history. I find myself using this daily.
Vim: I have started a new adventure into Vim, and I quite enjoy it. It’s pretty much standard on most Unix machines, including Mac. It has a learning curve, but it is well worth the effort to learn it even if you don’t plan on using it full time.
Xcode: I think Xcode is a pretty good IDE. I wouldn’t use it for non-Apple development, but it’s pretty sweet for iOS programming.

Blogging:

WordPress.org: There is no better way to have a blog than with a custom WordPress installation. This blog is running on it as are a majority of blogs on the internet. It can be as complicated or as simple as you need it to be. I recommend staying simple if your are starting out.
Headway Themes: This blog is currently designed using Headway Themes. It is what-you-see-is-what-you-get design software in the form of a WordPress plugin. I have had it for quite a while. I don’t think it necessarily does as good as a developer could do, but it is pretty close. More importantly it makes it quick and easy to see results.
Draft: Draft lets you write collaboratively with other people using a markdown editor. I write my posts using it, and Nathan Kontny has done a superb job with and continues to grow it. It consistently gets new features every few weeks.
ScreenFlow: Screen capture software. Great tool for doing demos and tutorials.
MailChimp: Every blog needs a mailing list. If you don’t have one you need to start one. MailChimp is my choice because they have a good free plan and plenty of room for growing into a paid plan.
Google Adsense: I don’t server too many ads, but I use Adsense over at 52Chevy.com. Adsense is a good place to get started with ads, but if your blog is bigger you can find better services.
Google Analytics: Everything needs to be tracked. You need to see how your blog is doing, where your readers are, and what content people find useful. Analytics will tell you all that and more.

Graphic Design:

Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop: I have been using Lightroom since pre-1.0 and love it. At $9.99/month I felt it was a price point that was fair, and so I currently am doing this. If they raise the price after a year I’ll probably jump to something else though.
Unsplash: I recently discovered this site. Every ten days they put out a new batch of photos that are completely free to use for whatever you want. The pictures are high quality and worth downloading if only to put on your computer for your screensaver.

Other Goodies

Blue Bottle Coffee: I got hook on this back when they were Tonx Coffee. Then Tonx got bought by Blue Bottle Coffee and I have remained a fan. They now have 4-week subscriptions which is perfect for how much I drink at home (pretty much only weekends).

Goals for 2015

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 06:40:55 GMT

Flexibility is a crucial skill to have when making long term plans. Things never work out exactly as you would like. Last year, instead of making resolutions I made goals for myself. It was a way to be proactive with where my life was going and becoming more of the kind of person that I want to be.

My Goals Last Year

My goals were:

Create 3 apps.
Blog once a week.
Read 24 books.
Journal every day.
Lose 12 pounds.
Review my goals once a month.

I wish that I could say that I was successful in all my goals, but I was not. I only got one brand new app out and it wasn’t very successful. I managed to blog once a week for the first six months; definitely the best I have ever done even if I fell short. I only read nine books; again starting the year strong and falling off half way through the year. Journaling was one of my most successful goals, only missing four days of the entire year. I did pretty well with losing weight until August, when I gained some of back. I did a poor job of reviewing my goals; I either forgot or felt that I didn’t need to review my goals.

To be honest, it was difficult to look back at these goals when I was reviewing the year last month. Then my wife reminded me: when we try to reach goals all progress is good progress. That really helped me out. I may not have gotten more apps out, but I got some good update to Chime Squirrel out, and I made progress on my second app. I was more successful at blogging than I have ever been. I still read more books that I had before the previous year. I’m finally documenting some of my life and processing it through my journaling.

This Year’s Goals

I feel that while I may have fallen short having my goals laid really did give me some momentum. It gave me a measuring stick by which I could see that I had forward movement. So this year I am continuing with the goals.

Here are my goals for 2015:

Journal every day before bed

This goal was very fulfilling last year, so I am doing it again. But this year I am going to try to make it more intentional. I am going to go more in-depth into my days and try to journal more of my feelings and emotions to the things that are happening around me.

Memorize 1 verse per month

My wife really wanted to meditate on scripture together. So every month we will come up with a verse that will be our mantra for the month.

Read 1 book / month

I am dialing this goal back a bit after last years results. It is more books than I read last year. With the birth of our first child I know that finding time to read is going to be more difficult than ever. I still want to push myself. In fact I am actually listing two books that I want to get read: Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Roth (which I actually finished reading this week) and MONEY Master the Game by Tony Robins.

Health goal

I want to take my health more seriously this year. I want to be my best self for my children and not be hindered by the state of my body. In December I found out I have degenerative disk disease which has been causing lower back pain for the last four years.

In addition, I want to lose 1 pound/month to reach my target goal of 148 lbs and do Whole30 / Paleo for the month of January (Since today is January 31st, I am proud to say I was successful at keeping to my Whole30).

Pay off the 4Runner

Which the expectation of our new child, last year I sold my 1999 Toyota Tacoma Xcab TRD (which I LOVED!) and bought a 2007 Toyota 4Runner. Last year we finished our car payments by paying off our 2008 Honda CR-V nineteen months early. We took a five year loan to get the 4Runner, but I want to get it paid off this year. We hate debt, but there is not a lot of margin in our budget so this will be tough.

Monthly goal review

It is very easy to lose track of goals over the process of an entire year. This time I want to be more intentional with my goals. By doing a monthly review I hope to keep my focus on them. To keep from making the same mistake as last year and skipping my reviews, I created a recurring item in my ToDo app.

Release 2 apps: Wingman plus one more

I still want to become successful at app development. This year I want to finish the app that I had started last year, Wingman. It is a fairly large project, so I do not know that I will be able to get out a second app, but I am aiming high.

Increase my income by 10%

With the birth of our child, my wife quit her job to be a full-time mom. It’s something that we both want for our family. Money is going to be significantly tighter with this decision, and to help offset it I want to find a way to make some more income. This goal is decently vague allowing me room for creativity.

Blog once a month

Making time to blog is not easy for me. This is evident because I am publish the post for January on the very last day of the month! I often feel like my time should be spent programming or marketing or expanding my knowledge. Still, I believe that writing and providing useful content to people is a noble goal. I tweaked this goal from last year to make it more manageable.

And Action

It is the last day of January, and as you have seen I have made good progress on some of my goals already. Diet, Journaling, three books read. The one area that I am already concerned about is the app development. The year is young. I am going to give it my best shot!

I'm Back!

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 13:00:03 GMT

Hello World! Again…

Well it has been several months since my last post. I left with the intention to put more of my focus into my new project. I wish I could say that I was super successful in that endeavor, but sadly I was not.

Now I am back. I have some new fuel for my project, but I am also going to try to get back to my writing. Of course I am going to be doing a new experiment here.

Instead of going to exact consistency in my writing (once every monday) I going to do some free play. I will try to get a post out every week. I might put out several a week, and sometimes I might miss a week or two. I might even start skipping putting pictures in every post as I find that to be a burden.

I am trying to remove constraints. My hope in doing this is that I will be able to share ideas more freely and get them out of my head. I recently found a new tool to help me in this.

I know first hand how difficult it is to find a good writing app for writing blog posts. I have tried a few. Evernote probably worked the best. In the end, I settled back on using a plain text editor and writing in Markdown.

This is my first post using the new Desk app. It is a new tool from John Saddington. Almost a full year in the making, I have been following John’s update on this software since he first announced it. I saw his journey from the outside, but I could see how much heart he put into the project. It is exciting to see it come to fruition.

Recently John wrote in a post that sometimes users serve technology and sometimes technology serves users. Various companies take different positions on this view. Personally I have always believed in the latter: technology exists to serve people. John has developed a technology that fullfils the latter.

I know that Desk won’t make me write more. I am still going to be facing time constraints in addition to just doing the work. But having the rights tools make it that much easier to start the job.

So hear’s the first post and the many more to follow! And please support indie developers like John… check out Desk and see if it’s right for you.

Putting Things Aside To Focus

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:00:16 GMT

Balance. As a solopreneur, finding balance between work, side projects, family, chores, reading, etc… Finding balance can feel like a job by itself. I don’t know that it stops feeling that way. Life is a balancing act. However, I have also found that sometimes, to move forward, I need to stop balancing and let everything tip to one side.

As I previously mentioned, I’m on to a new project. Wingman may be one of my biggest personal projects yet. I am using a new language. I am using new tools. I am doing new things with those tools. And I love it!

But with so much newness going on and such a limited amount of time, it can all get very daunting. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed.

I make some progress on the app. Then I go to my day job. Then I come home to work some more and find that much of what I learned the previous day is hazy. I feel like I’m doing 2 steps forward and 1.9 steps back.

Shifting for better focus

Instead of trying to keep each day balanced, I will instead put all my focus into the app.

See I have found that if I spend all my free time on a new project I make quick and significant progress. Not just because I am throwing more time at it, but because the extra time has a compounding effect. The gaps between the work get minimized. As a result the new things I learn stay fresh.

When learning something new, it can be hard for the brain to process all the new information that you throw at it. It can turn into a fight to keep up with everything else you need to get done and are learning. By temporarily focusing on the new skill you solidify the knowledge in your mind.

When I was working on version 3 of Chime Squirrel, I followed this method. For almost two months I spent all my “free” time working on it. I made a ton of progress fairly quickly. I felt like I had put out some of my best work.

Where I am going

For the next couple of months I am going to take a similar strategy with Wingman. I am going to put aside things like my reading time and my blogging so that I can keep my mind focused on the project at hand.

I do hope to still get blog posts out. But they will likely be more programming focused so that I stay on task. I will also remove my self-imposed 500 word requirement for posts to shave off some extra time.

Have you found an effective way to focus and progress on new projects?

In Wilderness I Sense

Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:00:56 GMT

“In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.”

— Charles Lindbergh

If you work in the tech industry like me, your life revolves around science. It’s all one’s and zero’s whizzing by all day long. Stuck at a desk, it is easy to lose track of the natural world around us.

But step outside. See nature. Walk in a forest. Spend a day at the beach. Watch the development of an unborn child. Suddenly all the science fades away. There’s something more there than science can give us.

I think that Lindbergh had it right in this quote. He was scientifically way ahead in his field. He set world records for flight while it was still in its infancy. And He did it through understanding our world and how things worked. But because of his field, he study of science forced him into nature.

I am guilty of failing to see nature. It is in our nature to tear things apart. We want to understand how things work. But I get so focused in the detail that I miss the whole. I miss the part that can’t be understood but can only be experienced.

Lindbergh had it good. His science could only be executed in the wilderness. We may not be so lucky. If so we need to be more intentional about our experiences.

The lesson you and I have to learn is to see past the details and experience the whole. Let us be open to experience without the burden of science.

Agile Web Development with Rails 4 Book Review

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 13:00:01 GMT

Written by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeier Hansson, [Agile Web Development with Rails 4](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937785564/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1937785564&linkCode=as2&tag=mostlybinary-20 ‘Agile Web Development with Rails 4’) is one of the original books on developing with Ruby on Rails.

I picked up the 1st edition back in 2006. It was to light my path towards a professional Rails career. Instead I was quickly acquired by a .NET shop and my Rails dreams were put aside. After newer additions, I picked the book up several times only to get distracted with something else again. With the release of Rails 4, and with some encouragement from a friend, I picked the book back up, eager to use Rails for my next project. This week I finished the book.

Flirting with Rails

Straight out of college in 2006, no head-hunter I talked with had even heard of Ruby On Rails. It was a different job market back then. It was pretty much .NET or PHP if you wanted to do web development. With no Rails positions on the horizon, I went with .NET.

.NET is not a bad framework by any means. But the MVC methodology that Rails exposed me to felt way ahead of the .NET framework. It wasn’t even until 2009, that .NET came out with an MVC framework. It took way too long in my opinion.

Last year I picked up the book again, only to get distracted once more with creation of the version 3 release of Chime Squirrel. Now I am on to my next project—Wingman—and this time I need a server side component. I saw that this is my chance to use Rails in a production environment.

I picked up the book about two weeks ago and worked my way through the book again.

In Review

[Agile Web Development with Rails 4](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937785564/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1937785564&linkCode=as2&tag=mostlybinary-20 ‘Agile Web Development with Rails 4’) is geared towards new Ruby On Rails developers. It’s assumed that you have some programming experience but it doesn’t need to be with Ruby. There is a whole section to bring new developers up to speed with Ruby’s syntax.

This book has an interesting setup. Instead of being a reference manual like many programming books, this one is split into three sections.

The Intro

The first section introduces you to Rails. It walks you through setting up a development environment. Then it takes you through setting up a basic application.

While following the app created in this section, you learn the underpinnings of Rails. It shows the basics like creating a new Rails project, working with models, and most importantly the methodology behind Rails and it’s take on MVC.

It also has a chapter on Ruby syntax. This is really my only experience with Ruby, and this chapter was more than enough to get me comfortable with Ruby.

The Core

The second section makes up two thirds of the book. The reader here gets walked through the creation of a commerce web app.

This piece of the book also functions as an example of how the workflow for a Rails app is intended to be. They want rapid iterations and lots of client feedback. Throw in a lot of testing and now you are a Rails programmer!

I quite like the lead-by-example method to this book. Surprisingly it does not have a lot of useless fluff in it. While the chapters walk you through features, they are actually quite useful for reference as well. Nothing felt like it was too specific to the example app, but it was presented in a generalized sense of how the topic at hand would apply to the average Rails app.

With chapters on session management, database migration, unit testing, functional testing, and templating, I will be referring to these chapters frequently as I work on my next project.

The Reference?

The last section leaves the example app behind. It takes the to-be programmer into the depths of Rails, but not so deep as to drown.

While the examples are useful, putting this descriptive section at the end was perfect. You already have a working knowledge of what a Rails app looks like. And while you were not lead blindly through it’s creation, there is a lot of unknown about how things work.

Here we get explanations about the various parts that make up Ruby On Rails: Active Record, Action Dispatch and Controller, and Action View.

It doesn’t go very deep into these, an entire book could probably be written for each one. What it does give you is enough of an understanding of each one to get an idea of what they are capable of. It leaves you with enough information to understand what Rails is doing and ready to be able to dig deeper on your own when the time comes.

Timing

Rails has come a long ways since the first edition of this book came out. It is not an underdog anymore, but a competitor against the largest players on the web scene. [Agile Web Development with Rails 4](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937785564/ref=aslitl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1937785564&linkCode=as2&tag=mostlybinary-20 ‘Agile Web Development with Rails 4’) is an awesome book for anyone new to the framework. It will get you past novice quickly.

Do you have a favorite book or resource for those new to Rails? Let us know in the comments below so we can all learn together.

iOS 8 Takeaways From Apples WWDC Keynote

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:00:09 GMT

Like Christmas, it comes once a year. It is a joyful day for every iOS and OS X developer. I am talking about Apple’s keynote at it’s annual WWDC event. Joyful that it was live streamed this year, I walked away with more excitement than I thought I would have.

I previously wrote about How Apple Could Improve iOS 8 And The iPhone. As of today they have tackled two of those items: better battery life and more iCloud storage.

Battery Usage

The first comes in the form of better app power monitoring though. It doesn’t actually improve battery life.

Now users can see precisely how much power an app is using. Knowledge is half the battle and this will go a long ways towards helping people to better control the battery usage on their devices.

iCloud Storage

The iCloud storage limitations got better today. While you are still stuck with only five gigabytes for iCloud accounts at the free level, you can upgrade to twenty gigs for only $0.99/month. It’s not great, but it’s not a bad price either. Users can also upgrade to 100Gb+ starting at $3.99/month. That’s decently competitive with other storage solutions.

Health App

One of the things I am most excited about is the new Health app. It’s Apple’s way of aggregating all your health information from other apps into a single place.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about Apple getting into the healthcare space and I can see the start of something really great here. I expect many health apps to integrate quickly with the Health app, and we end up getting a better over view of our own health. This could help to open up healthcare in a good way.

Widgets!

I have wanted widgets for a while. When the Notification Center was originally released, I kept expecting the “one more thing, widgets!” It didn’t come.

Now they’re here! I still have an idea to let developers update their app icon dynamically, but this is still great. It does feel a little limited, but I don’t doubt that developers will make use of it.

Invite The Family

For as long as I have had an iPhone I felt that I should not have to pay twice for apps that me and my wife use. So we shared an iTunes account. It wasn’t super inconvenient, but it wasn’t convenient either.

Now as long as both accounts use the same credit card, purchases will transfer across accounts! It seemed like a no brainer to me. CD’s, movies, hardware. Tech is often shared across a house hold, so I am very happy to see this happen.

Continuity

When they first started demoing the new Continuity features I wasn’t too excited. But by the end I could see that there was something too this.

I have long felt that there was potential to better integrate devices with their desktop counterparts. Document syncing seemed to be that answer. Apple took it to the next level.

Now you can literally pick up one device and finish where the other left off. It will sync the file, yes, but it will open straight into the document that you were editing.

Your phone knows what app and file you are using on the desktop and vice versa. Swipe the icon on the lock screen and now you’re editing that file on your phone.

They demoed this using their own apps, but I am curious to see if this is opened up further for third party developers. It will be a big win for productivity.

Extensions

I get tired of hearing from androidians talking about sharing data between apps. Thing is I see the usefulness in it. Still, I very much believe Apple was doing the right thing for security by keeping apps in walled gardens.

Well now apps can offer data and functionality to other apps. They’re still walled in for security, but one app can call to another to get data, pass over data, and even allow the other app to provide UI elements.

This is another very excited feature. It opens the door to third party keyboards. I can see a lot of functionality being built around this. And the best part is that the user can control that access between apps!

This is another instance I am glad Apple put thought into doing it right and didn’t just open things up. Take a lesson world!

Messages

I hate group texts. Apple finally fixed that. You can now add and remove people from a group text. And best part, you can also mute the conversation!

I always hated getting stuck on massive group texts with tons of people that I didn’t even know responding. I also hated responding to a bunch of people I didn’t know, because I didn’t realize it was a group text.

It’s an area that seems pretty obvious to me: it’s very easy to solve from a technology standpoint.

The other great new feature in Messages is that as a part of Continuity your non-iMessage texts (the green bubble conversations) also show up in the Messages app on your computer!

Touch ID

It’s finally open to developers. Basically it unlocks the keystore for the user, effectively unlocking an app or encrypted data inside of the app.

It’s still completely secure in that developers never touch the fingerprint data. Easy win.

A New Hope?

Swift is a new programming language by Apple. I’m not joyed by the prospects of having to learn a new language, but I think this could end up being very good.

In the keynote, they noted massive performance improvements. That makes it worth considering.

Swift promises to work along side Objective-C, which means as developers we still have access to the enormous number of libraries out there and we don’t have to throw out our existing code right away.

Too Much

I enjoy following the keynotes at WWDC. This year I was not expecting much.

Truth is that there is way more new features than I listed here. I finished that keynote very excited to see where the platform is going. There is a lot of new functionality available to developers.

There is always talk about iOS getting stale or left behind. Today’s keynote takeaway is that the iOS and OS X ecosystem has never looked brighter.

What feature are you really excited to see? What one thing were you hoping for that they missed?

Lead Like A River

Tue, 27 May 2014 13:00:04 GMT

“The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them.

“Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.”

— Lao-tse, Chinese sage, from How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

7 Apps For Better Health

Tue, 20 May 2014 14:00:10 GMT

Healthcare is a field who’s use of technology lags far behind that of most other industries. Yet it is one that has some of the greatest potential. From something as “common sense” as a custom 3D printed cast to a custom 3D printed airway, the potential of tech to save cost, lives, and enhance the quality of live of patients is extraordinary. Yet when I went into my doctor’s office this month, the computers were still using Windows XP, an operating system that Microsoft has stopped releasing security updates for.

Health and Tech

Fortunately the tech industry is presenting options for us to take some control over our health. With all the talk about Apple getting into wearable technology with an iWatch that may include health sensors, there is much to be hopeful for. Apple disrupts industries. I get excited when I think about the possibilities if Apple were to break into healthcare.

But I’m getting ahead of things. There are many technologies that can help us to take control of our own health right now. Software is just one way to do it, and here are my 7 iOS apps that I use consistently to enhance my health.

Chime Squirrel

When I was having back problems, the chiropractor put me on an exercise regimen with lots of stretching involved. I started by clocking my stretches with my watch. But that got tedious fast.

After not being able to find a good interval app, I decided to write my own. I created Chime Squirrel. I use it every day for my workouts and I love it.

Heart Rate

Heart Rate is a fun app to see what your heart rate is. I uses the flash on your phone to light up your finger. Then it uses the camera to detect your pulse from the difference in brightness. When your heart pumps there is an influx of blood that darkens your finger over the camera for a split second. It will log it and additional info for you.

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is an app for to logging food and workouts to track your calorie consumption and expenditure. Sure there are lots of kinds of diets, but the basic and most affective is cutting calorie consumption. There are a lot of apps that do this, but MyFitnessPal has the best library of foods to lookup for tracking. You will want that because constantly entering food nutrition is a task that will quickly disrupt your usage of any app.

Nike Training Club

Nike Training Club is geared for girls, but exercises are exercises. It consists of many routines. Select one, then it guides you through the full routine with timers for each exercise and break. It has routines to target specific areas of the body, and it has videos incase you aren’t sure how to do an exercise.

Pedometer++

From the [FitBit][bit] to the Misfit, there are a lot of options for pedometers. But with the new sensor in the iPhone 5S, I find that I don’t really need to wear a pedometer because I always have my phone on me. And to access that data I use Pedometter++. It was one of the first apps to take advantage of the new iPhone 5S features. It graphs your steps and lets you set a step count goal. It is simple and does what it does well.

RunKeeper App

Whether walking, running, biking, or doing some other cardio activity, RunKeeper does a really good job of tracking you. I found it to be the most intuitive and accurate to use. It will track you via GPS and steps. At the end of your workout it will give you time, elevation changes, steps and much more. It also integrates with MyFitnessPal to automatically log your workouts and calorie consumption for you.

Weight Diary

Weight Diary is an app to track your weight. But it does it in a way that is much more informative than most other apps. See other apps just track your weight and plot points on a graph. But our weight fluctuates day to day. So the most informative thing to get an idea of our weight to plot out a running average. Weight Diary does this very well and multiple views for daily, weekly, monthlys, etc. A running average helps with the emotional roller coaster of, “Oh no, I gained 3 pounds yesterday.” I used to use WeightBot, but it has become buggy with recent iOS versions and support is non-existent. Give Weight Diary a try instead.

Other Health Apps

There are so many other apps you can use to help your health. My wife has an app to identify which foods have gluten in them because she has celiac disease.

Information technology is an area that can be very helpful for our health. It’s super easy to use and create, even though the health care industry lags behind even that.

With wearable tech becoming much bigger, I hope that start seeing consumer hardware for tracking our health.

Do you use any apps or hardware for managing your health?

Shipped, The Backstage Look At Dashboard

Tue, 13 May 2014 13:00:33 GMT

Today is the release of Dashboard, my new, FREE app and my second (personal) app to be published for iOS! While I am a little behind in my goal of three apps for the year, I am proud to get another one out. It is another itch scratcher, an app that I had a need for and that I hope others will find useful. This week we look at the itch that Dashboard is scratching.

Direction

I don’t drive to unfamiliar places very often. My sense of direction is pretty good. Still I find myself constantly with a maps app open when I’m driving. Why? Because I like to see what’s going on around me. I like to see the traffic conditions. This awareness makes me a better and more informed driver.

Another thing the maps apps give me is a compass. Tell me where North is and I am pretty good at finding my way around. I wish more maps apps came with compasses on them.

And I cannot ignore the speedometer. I know there’s already one on the vehicle, but I find that having a speedometer at a slightly higher elevation helps me to keep my eyes on the road. It’s kind of the next best thing to having a HUD (heads-up-display) like the kind fighter pilots get (I dream of one day having a true HUD in my car).

There is something else that makes me a better driver. By better I mean “happier” and what driver isn’t better at driving than when they’re happy (especially California drivers). I love listening to music and podcasts while I’m driving. This doesn’t always bode well with my maps app though. I often find myself needing to skip a song or rewind a podcast a minute or two to hear something interesting again. But switching apps is far from convenient.

I want an app that meshes these features together. Not necessarily to do it all, but something that would do the important things well.

My solution

The problem is that I couldn’t find any app that did all of these. And many apps are not really designed for at-a-glance usage.

Dashboard was built to help by combining these needs into an interface that was easy and quick. It has a minimal interface because too much data would be distracting, but it gives enough information to help increase the situational awareness of the driver. And it has some quick and easy to use music controls built right in so that there isn’t any crazy app switching going on.

There is a lot of room for growth, so many areas that I would like to take it. But right now it’s simple and useful. It is shipped, and that’s the most important thing. There are a lot of directions to take it for the next release. But I am really anxious to hear what other people think first.

The future of Dashboard

Here are some of the ideas that I am considering for the future:

Directions: While it’s not something I use a lot, I think adding navigation in will make it even more useful for a lot of people.
Trip tracking: How far did you go? How long did it take? What was your average speed? These are things that I am always curious about, and with export functionality it could provide useful information about your commute. A lot of modern cars will give you some of these, but not all of them; and my car doesn’t give me any of them.

I do not have a timeframe for these features. I have already started on my third app and my focus will be there for the next few months. But I very much look forward to revisiting Dashboard for the next version. Until then, I hope it’s current state is enough to be helpful to people.

And now, the disclaimer: No one should interact with the app while driving. But that is the point of Dashboard. It is meant to be hands off. Safety and local laws are always to be observed by the user and this is not meant to be a sneaky a way around any of that. If the temptation is too high then don’t even download the app.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the app. It’s free! So head over to the App Store and download it and let me know what you think.

Harvest vs. FreshBooks

Tue, 06 May 2014 13:00:31 GMT

There are three things that a solopreneur needs to do: tracking time spent on projects, invoicing clients, and tracking expenses. There are plenty of ways to accomplish these. But if you want to accomplish them as quickly and easily as possible, I put forth these two excellent cloud accounting solutions: Harvest and FreshBooks.

I have been freelancing part time since I graduated from college. Being part time imposed restrictions on the tools I used that were costly. In contrast, the expense of such tools put restrictions on my efficiency. It didn’t take long for me to realize that manually creating invoices in Word and tracking expenses for taxes in Excel were imposing on the growth of my business. I went on the hunt for a better solution and quickly came upon FreshBooks.

Recently I outgrew the FreshBooks free plan. Before paying for the service monthly I went looking to see what else was available. That’s when I gave a serious look into Harvest.

Similarities

The two are competing companies. They are shooting for the same audience, and as such they have very similar offerings:

Free accounts (functional, though limited)
Time tracking and timesheet approval
Project budgeting
Invoicing
Expense tracking
Saving pictures of receipts
Extensive 3rd-party integration
Both increase in rate at about $10/user

They both cover the basics very well, and that made it hard to choose between the two.

Differences

If you need more, then the difference really becomes more apparent. Here are the important things I found to be different.

	Harvest	FreshBooks
FREE PLANS
Number of clients	4	1
Allowed projects	2	Unlimited
PAID PLANS
Cost for access to all feature	$12.00	$19.95
Allowed clients	Unlimited	25 (lowest level)
[Freshdesk](http://lrj.me/frshdsk "Freshdesk") support	Yes	No
Apps	Desktop / Web / Mobile	Web / Mobile
Snail mail invoices	No	Yes
Has a cute squirrel mascot	No	Yes

I put who I think the champion of each of item is in bold.

The Winner

If you don’t do a lot of freelancing, the free version on either platform should suffice. As I started adding more clients I needed more than free. I ended up leaving FreshBooks behind and moving over to Harvest, and I am not regretting it.

I love Harvest’s desktop app. It is very intuitive and makes it easy to start and stop my time tracking on projects. Since I don’t really invoice people but use the invoice feature for tracking income from Apple and Google, I really did not have a need for the snail-mail invoicing FreshBooks offers, but it was a feature that I have used in the past and I still think it is pretty cool if you need it.

The biggest thing I originally did not like about Harvest was that the mobile app was seriously old and lacking, but literally a week after I upgraded to a paid plan they released the next version of their iOS app. I have to say it’s pretty good. I have no regrets about switching now.

The Harvest web app is cleaner to use and easier to navigate. I find the time tracking feature to more intuitive than that of FreshBooks’. Still, FreshBooks was a good company to use.

I would suggest trying the free plan on each service and go for a test drive. In the end, neither one is a bad choice. I just think that Harvest is better.

I Am Luke And I Ship

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:00:19 GMT

Start. Ship. Hustle. Release. Push. One does not have to invest much time in our startup and socialized culture to hear these words. It isn’t uncommon to see them in action in any number of lives in the news and social media. But making them a reality in our own lives can be difficult. Do we even know what that looks like for each us individually?

In March I wrote about my issues with burnout. I took the month off to rest and regather my thoughts. Truth is April came and I still wasn’t feeling rested. I have been slow to get started on my next iOS app Dashboard.

Then something happened. My brother came up with an app idea that I got/am really excited about. It rekindled the fire and passion in me. Unfortunately it was not for my current project.

Dashboard was partially started and far from complete. I was very tempted to abandon it. I wanted to jump onto the next project. It would not have been the first time (or even the second) that I abandoned a project for a new one. Fortunately my wonderful wife stepped in and told me I needed to finish my current one. So I did.

An Emotional Battle

In the end shipping is most important. Your next project might be better, more important, more urgent. But the current project probably was too, and the project after the next one probably will be as well. We cannot let that distract us or we will never make progress on our goals.

See, the one area where we are most likely to fail in our hustle is in never finishing. We start to loose the passion and then hustle on the next project that excites us. Seth Godin talks about our fear of failure and it’s affect on us in Fear of Shipping. In The roller coaster of shipping, Seth talks about the emotional battle that we will face with every project. It is a battle we repeat with every project. It’s a battle against project abandonment, and it is not an easy to cycle to break out of.

Just Ship It

I have put a lot of time into Dashboard over the last couple of weeks. I took an extra day off this past weekend and spent all three days working on it. At this point I consider it a minimal vial product, but it has come out well. I am proud of it. Yes, there is a lot of functionality that I want to add to it, but right now it’s ready to ship. It is ready to see how people use it and get feedback.

The only way to break the cycle of project abandonment is by shipping.

Ideas aren’t important. There are plenty of ideas in the world. Execution is important. Shipping is important. Just don’t ship junk. Jeff Goins reminds us that there is a fine line between shipping and sucking.

So let’s not leave projects incomplete. Find someone to hold you accountable to your projects whether that be your wife, a friend, a Meetup, or a mastermind group. If need be, let the next project fuel the flames for your current project.

What are you working on right now? What are you struggling to get shipped?

Dashboard

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 02:10:18 GMT

——— DISCONTINUED ———

Dashboard was created with the commuter in mind. A commuter does not generally need direction, but knowing what traffic is directly ahead is very beneficial. But map apps to not make it easy to interact with music. Dashboard solves that problem.

Dashboard is an app that acts as a simple heads up display.

Dashboard Features

The top view gives you live traffic information from Google.

The bottom view is swipeable and offers two displays:

The first provides speed and the direction of travel enhanced with configurable compass that points to the direction of travel or points north.
The second display provides music controls for play/pause, previous, skip, rewind, and forward.

Dashboard is at a 1.0 release. There is a lot of room to grow, so please send me your ideas using the in-app “Support” button. I want your feedback!

Resources I Use

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:00:07 GMT

Productivity:

Evernote: Anything that I might want to refer to later I keep in Evernote. I syncs everywhere and there free version is very generous in it’s functionality. See Michael Hyatt’s posts for thorough tutorials for using Evernote.
Harvest App: I have dabbled with Harvest for a few years. They have a decent free version for a freelance with only a couple clients. Eventually I upgrade to a paid plan so I could track more projects. It is priced better and the software is better Freshbooks, which I was previously using and would still recommend taking a look at.
Downcast: Podcasts are my new classroom, but iTunes was not handling them very well. Downcast makes it very easy to rank your podcasts, set download rules, and has enhanced playback features. Definitely worth the cost.
Freshdesk: This helpdesk / support service is great. I wrote this post on why I love Freshdesk. It’s a great offering at a great pricepoint, and it makes it so easy to keep track of communication with clients.
1Password: There are too many sites being broken into to use only a handful of passwords. Take the advice of security experts and use a password manager so you can easily give every account a unique password. 1Password is available across most platforms: Mac, iOS, and Windows
DropBox: Not the cheapest option for file synchronization, but it is pretty universal, reliable, and secure. Many apps will integrate with DropBox for file sharing and app data synchronization. Definitely not a service I could live without. The free version will handle basic usage.
Asana: There are a ton of project managers out there, but I have found Asana to be the best balance of features. It has workspace, projects, and you can group tasks (which I do according to status, i.e. todo, doing, holding, etc.). It integrates other services including Harvest. Only thing it is lacking is better mobile apps.
Bitly: Bitly lets you shorten URL’s on social networks like Twitter. What I find most useful about it is that it provides statistics on how many times links have been used and when they were used. Also functions as a decent bookmark library.
Chime Squirrel: Yes, this is my app, but I literally use it everyday, so I have to mention it. I use it for productivity at the office during the day and for exercising at night. I also using it for timing my french press coffee on weekends 🙂

Development:

Webfaction: I have a thorough review of WebFaction. A lot people recommend BlueHost, which is a good service, but I think WebFaction is an easier service to use and have a better product.
Sublime Text: This is a great editor for coding. It is highly customizable and has a good free option. I think the paid option is a little overpriced, but not prohibitively.
SourceTree: I love Git and I use it a lot on the command line. However, SourceTree makes is much easier to view diffs and history. I find myself using this daily.
Vim: I have started a new adventure into Vim, and I quite enjoy it. It’s pretty much standard on most Unix machines, including Mac. It has a learning curve, but it is well worth the effort to learn it even if you don’t plan on using it full time.
Xcode: I think Xcode is a pretty good IDE. I wouldn’t use it for non-Apple development, but it’s pretty sweet for iOS programming.

Blogging:

WordPress.org: There is no better way to have a blog than with a custom WordPress installation. This blog is running on it as are a majority of blogs on the internet. It can be as complicated or as simple as you need it to be. I recommend staying simple if your are starting out.
Headway Themes: This blog is currently designed using Headway Themes. It is what-you-see-is-what-you-get design software in the form of a WordPress plugin. I have had it for quite a while. I don’t think it necessarily does as good as a developer could do, but it is pretty close. More importantly it makes it quick and easy to see results.
Draft: Draft lets you write collaboratively with other people using a markdown editor. I write my posts using it, and Nathan Kontny has done a superb job with and continues to grow it. It consistently gets new features every few weeks.
ScreenFlow: Screen capture software. Great tool for doing demos and tutorials.
MailChimp: Every blog needs a mailing list. If you don’t have one you need to start one. MailChimp is my choice because they have a good free plan and plenty of room for growing into a paid plan.
Google Adsense: I don’t server too many ads, but I use Adsense over at 52Chevy.com. Adsense is a good place to get started with ads, but if your blog is bigger you can find better services.
Google Analytics: Everything needs to be tracked. You need to see how your blog is doing, where your readers are, and what content people find useful. Analytics will tell you all that and more.

Graphic Design:

Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop: I have been using Lightroom since pre-1.0 and love it. At $9.99/month I felt it was a price point that was fair, and so I currently am doing this. If they raise the price after a year I’ll probably jump to something else though.
Unsplash: I recently discovered this site. Every ten days they put out a new batch of photos that are completely free to use for whatever you want. The pictures are high quality and worth downloading if only to put on your computer for your screensaver.

Chime Squirrel Video: An Introduction

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:00:12 GMT

Back in 2012, I was seeing a chiropractor for some back problems and was put on a stretching routine. There were plenty of exercise apps, but they were all overly complicated for my needs. I had the itch to create an app that would give me recurring alarms, be simple, and get out of my way. Out of that, Chime Squirrel was born.

This week I am posting this Chime Squirrel video. I hope that helps my current and future users to better understand the app, and that it helps you to better understand its potential uses. Enjoy!

If you would like more details check out the Chime Squirrel Guide. It goes into further detail and includes screenshots for further clarification. If you are still stuck you can reach me using the support form.

Did this video answer any or questions? Are there any areas that you would like to more clarification on? Let me know in the comments.

4 Reasons Freshdesk Is Your Support Haven

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 14:00:00 GMT

When starting out with a new app as a solo developer, one of the most popular ways of offering support is through an email address. It doesn’t take long to realize that email is difficult to manage. Communication with a customer can stretch out to weeks and months, and it can become lost in a sea of many such emails. FreshDesk is the perfect support tool for the bootstrapper to solve this problem.

When I released Chime Squirrel a couple years ago, I did not get a lot of support requests. So I managed everything through email. But as I started to get some decent traction about a year later it started to become tough to manage. Sometimes customers would start a fresh email, so then I didn’t have a thread to reference. Maybe they took a couple weeks to get back to me after I gave them some info. I found myself wasting time trying to understand the context of my support requests or trying to hunt down people I needed to followup with at a later time.

So I went on the hunt for a support solution that would work for me. There are many solutions out there to choose from. The most popular one is probably Zendesk.com. But my search turned up another similar service I had not heard a lot about at the time. It was Freshdesk.

This review is from the perspective of a part-time entrepreneur. I am bootstrapping my business, while working a full time job. So I have no real funding and money is tight. This is how I compared the services and settled on Freshdesk.

^ All pricing is based on the monthly rate when billed annually.

Pricing

TIE

The first thing I look at when checking out services is the price. I don’t want to look at anything I can’t afford to begin with; I don’t care what the features are.

Freshdesk starts free for up to three support agents (not to be confused with your customers, for which there is no limit). Zendesk on the other hand starts at $1/month for each agent. Honestly, at this price I would not have a problem choosing Zendesk. If you never plan on needing more than what Zendesk offers at the bottom level, then I would say Zendesk wins.

Feature Pricing

WINNER: Freshdesk

Feature comparison is a little hard here. Both offer FAQ and full support at the basic level.

Zendesk gives you forums and social integration at the basic level. But if you want more you have to pay $25/agent. I am working on my second app, so I also need to support two portals. That feature is only offered here at the top level, which is a ridiculous $195/agent. That’s a really steep price for any bootstrapper.

Freshdesk is a little more stingy at the basic level, but it’s free so I can’t hold it against them. In fact I applaud them for their free plan as it is fully functional for the basics. For the next step up you pay $16/agent. At this point you get community forums and social integration. And leveling up once more I get my multi-portal support at $25/agent. A little more than I would like to spend without more significant income, but it’s manageable and reasonable.

To sum it up, Freshdesk has advanced features that are fairly priced and within my reach. Zendesk has a good product with a lot of good functionality that I can afford, but advanced features will not be within reach anytime soon.

Mobile Apps

WINNER: Freshdesk

Just out this week that I wrote this post! The design on the Freshdesk app is perfect. The navigation is well thought out, putting a lot of info, the right info, in a small area. It took longer than I would have liked to come out, and I almost went with Zendesk because of it, but I am very glad I stayed put.

I used the Zendesk app a lot during my trial. It worked, but it wasn’t very well thought out. I felt like it was designed two years ago and hasn’t been touched since. And I’m not the only one; it only has two and half stars in it’s rating. I would give it three just because it works.

iOS SDK

WINNER: Freshdesk

I have not actually implemented this in my app yet, but I am excited to. Right now you have to apply to use this feature, but it is free. It creates an environment where you basically chat back and forth with your customer (not necessarily realtime). And it all happens within your app. The customer can keep all their communication within the app. I can’t think of a better place for that interaction to happen.

Zendesk also has an SDK, but it’s very basic. You implement a table view and it creates a little form. Then further communication happens through your normal portal. I don’t see any benefit to this over just setting up your own email view. I think it is easier to setup your own email view and then you can get much more functionality out of it, like including log files.

Both of these are great services. I don’t think you can go wrong with either one. But if money is tight and you want the most value for it, I suggest going with Freshdesk. I have been using it for a few months and love it, and now that the iOS app the service feels complete.

I would love to hear about what service you use for your support. Do you have any hacks to make it better?

A Guide To Chime Squirrel

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:00:41 GMT

Chime Squirrel is an iOS app for iPhone and iPad. It’s purpose to present a quick and intuitive interface for creating recurring “alarms”. These alarms are called chimes inside of the app. They do not require user interaction to turn the sounds off but instead make a single “chime” sound. The goal in doing so is to present reminders without being distracting. This helps you to be more productive and more aware at the same time.

This is a guide to the settings and options available within Chime Squirrel.

Terminology

Quick Chime: A chime with few options but speed in setup. Use it to make a quick chime that you probably don’t need to save for later.
Interval Chime: A type of chime that is highly customizable. You can set different lengths of time–called Intervals— for when the app should sound.

Upgrade

Free

Chime Squirrel is a free app. You have unrestricted access to the Quick Chime functionality, and you can create a single Interval Chime. You have access to the default chime sound.

Pro

Upgrade to Pro to get these additional features:

Create an unlimited number of Interval Chimes.
Change the theme of the app. Presently there are three. You can preview the theme by going to the Settings.
New Sounds. There are four sounds that can be selected for Interval Chimes. You can preview the sounds by going to the Preferences for an interval chime and tapping on the sounds.

The Menu

The Menu allows you to navigate around the app. The options available in the menu are:

Quick: Takes you to the Quick Chime. This area is meant to create a chime very quickly. To accommodate that philosophy, there are very few settings to customize. You set how long until the app chimes and how long you want it to repeat for. Only one Quick Chime exists. See Quick Chime Settings for details.
Interval: Takes you to the Interval Chimes List. You can create an unlimited number of Interval Chimes if you are a Pro user or you can create a single one if you are not. Interval chimes are highly customizable. You can create multiple interval lengths, change the chime sound, and more. See Interval Chime Settings for details.
Settings: Takes you to the app settings. In there the app can be set with a preferred orientation, change the app theme (requires Pro), or upgrade/restore to Pro.
Rate: Takes you to the app store to rate the app. Good ratings are always appreciated.
Feedback: Lets you compose an email to send to me. Feedback is always welcome and I am here to help if you run into any problems.
F. A. Q.: Pulls up a website with frequently asked questions about Chime Squirrel. This part of the app is currently down as I work to migrate to a new host.

Chime Running View

The Chime Running screen is where you start and stop a chime and see its progress.

The Elapsed time is counter for long all the chimes have been running. It corresponds to the progress of the Outer Ring.

The Remaining time is long long is left until the app stops playing chimes.

The Interval Countdown time is a countdown until the current chime is complete and the app makes the chime sound. It corresponds to the thick, Inner Ring.

The Outer Ring shows the progress for all the chimes. It is a summation of the runtime. When it is full, the chime is done.

The Inner Ring shows the progress for the current running chime. Once it is full the app will make the chime sound.

The Left Button allows you to start and stop the stop the chime. Stop is basically pausing a running chime.

The Right Button allows you to reset the chime. It will set the elapsed time and running chime back to zero. You can reset a running chime and the chime will keep running but start back at zero.

Quick Chime Settings

Tap any field to delete the content inside and display the keyboard to enter a new value.

The Chime Frequency is how often the app will make the chime sound.

The Stop After fields tell the app how long it should keep repeating the chimes for.

The Chime Title is used in the iOS alerts when a chime sounds.

Interval Chimes List

The Interval Chime List shows all of the Interval Chimes that have been created and allows you to create a new one.

Tap any chime to go to it’s running view where you can start, stop, or edit the chime.

The icon to the right of the chimes shows the progress for any running chimes. It can be tapped to start or pause a chime.

Add New will create a new Interval Chime for you and take you to its settings screen.

Interval Chime Settings

The first row shows the chime Title, Repeat Type, and Repeat Length. Tap it to go to the Interval Chime Preferences and change any of these settings.

The Intervals section shows the Intervals for the chime. Intervals are how often the app will make a sound. They are run in the order that they appear and can be rearranged by tapping edit in the upper-righthand corner of the screen. Every Interval Chime needs at least one Interval.

Tap on Add Interval to create a new one.

Interval Chime Preferences

The Title appears when running the chime and in alerts when the app is closed.

Repeat lets you decide what method you want to use to repeat the intervals. This decides how many times the intervals repeat. Select Sets to repeat all the intervals the specified number of times. Select Run Time to specify a length of time to run for.

Ask for value on every run: When selected, every time the chime is started the app will ask for the Repeat value.

Chime Sounds are the sound that the app makes at the end of an Interval. This is a Pro feature that requires an in-app upgrade. The app will still preview the Chime Sound for non-Pro users but it will reset back to the default.

Interval Settings

The Interval Title is display when the chime is running. When the app is closed it is also displayed for the currently completed interval.

Length is how long the Interval runs for.

Volume

When the app is open the volume is controlled using the same volume as your music (swipe up from the bottom of the screen to see the volume slider in the Control Center). If you have music playing while the app is open, the music will fade out for the chime to play and then back in when the sound is complete.

When the app is closed, the volume is tied to your ringer volume. It creates the same notifications as other apps. If you have music playing the phone is controlling the chime sound and music mix.

Uses

There are many uses for Chime Squirrel. I personally use it every day as a pomodoro timer and for exercising.

I hope that you will find the app helpful as well.

Support, Feedback, and Feature Request

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:00:34 GMT

It is my intention to make stable apps that are useful to people. If you run into a problem, I would appreciate a quick email from you. Just use this form to get a hold of me for support.

Be sure to check out the the Chime Squirrel Guide. I will keep it updated as new questions are asked.

Of course if you just really like my app, I love to hear words of appreciation as well.

Support Form

Reach out to me directly on Twitter

5 Things I Learned In March

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:55:23 GMT

It is my personal belief that we should never stop learning. As a result I consume a fairly large amount of information. Being a software engineer, there is never a shortage of things to learn. But if you don’t stop to look at what you have learned the knowledge can slip by unappreciated and possibly forgotten. We tend to go for long periods without reflecting on the new knowledge.

Sitting still and reflecting on where I have come in life has never been something that I was good at. I would rather spend my time learning more. Consuming more information. Thinking about what I need to do in the present to make a better future. There is value in this mindset but only if there is balance.

I was having a hard time coming up with a post idea this week. My wife suggested something that she does on her blog: “what I learned this month.” Seemed easy enough. At least until I sat down to write this post. But lets follow up with that at the end.

Here are some of my takeaways, 5 things I learned in March:

It is important to take breaks

I program at work. Then I come home and program more. The past few years my after work projects have been with the intention of personal growth and monetization. The thing is, I started to get burned out this year. I mentioned this in my post Recapping Goals. So I took March off for my personal projects. And with March almost over I can report that this has been a great thing. This break really refreshed me and I am getting very excited to start on my next project.

Twitter really does connect the world

I didn’t really start using Twitter until last year; that was a big mistake. This month I conversed with the likes of Michael Hyatt, Pat Flynn, and Craig Albert on Twitter. In addition I helped a couple people with programming questions for Ghost and Django, people I have never met. I think this is really cool. Do they know me or even remember me? Probably not. But that is okay. It is amazing that I have access to them at all and that I can converse with them.

Automation with Grunt is crazy useful

Node.JS has become all the rage. I haven’t jumped on too much of it, but I cannot deny the range of tools that have sprung from it. Grunt is like a “master tool.” It lets you automate a bunch of other tools. I have used it on several projects now, but it was mostly pre-configured in those intances. Well in my down time this month I start my first open source project: GhostThemeStarter. I created the Gruntfile.js from scratch and have put a lot of thought into the functionality in it. It has been a joy to use, and I have found out just how flexible the platform is. This is a tool that I will be keeping around.

Sticking to a writing goal is hard

I’m a programmer. Writing is not my strong point. But as I previously mentioned I don’t take enough time to reflect on my life. That has made it increasingly hard to keep the blog ideas flowing. Several times I have come up with an idea that I thought was going to be great, only to have forgotten it when I went to write my post several days later. I am definitely going to be putting more effort into writing things down.

“Too expensive” is a relative term

Seth Godin wrote in [What does, “it’s too expensive,” mean?](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/sethsblog/2014/03/what-does-its-too-expensive-mean.html “What does, ‘it’s too expensive,’ mean?“)_ that what we think a product is worth is a very personal thing. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the actual price tag. Instead of pricing for everyone, he says to search for the people who do see the value. This was followed up in his post this week, [Your Story About Money](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/sethsblog/2014/03/your-story-about-money.html ‘Your Story About Money’)_, where he talks about peoples value of money being based on the stories they have concerning their money. Both are worth a read, so check them out.

Going forward

I never stop learning. The internet makes it so easy. But I need to learn how to reflect back on my days, weeks, months more frequently. And writing… I very much need to start writing more things down as they come to me. Assuming that I will remember doesn’t work out too well.

What have you learned this month? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter.

A Guide To Chime Squirrel

Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:10:55 GMT

This is a guide to the settings and options available within Chime Squirrel… More

How Apple Could Improve iOS 8 And The iPhone 6

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:00:23 GMT

I love my Apple products. I get excited for their new stuff to come out. I watch the keynotes live when they’re available and live news streams when they’re not. But as much as I love Apple’s products, they are not perfect. With iOS 8 and the iPhone 6 coming this year, there are many areas that I would like to see Apple improve upon. They can make improvements from a user’s perspective as well as from a developer’s perspective.

Apple is far from perfect. I love the way that they are able to focus on making a product like they have tunnel vision. It shows that they are not easily swayed by what others are doing but instead can build something with a very pure perspective.

The web is bubbling with the predictions for what is coming in the next iPhone and iOS releases. Here is a list of what I am hoping for.

Social App Reviews. As a developer, it is frustrating when people leave a one star review without ever asking for assistance. I think it would be awesome if Apple provided a way to developers to reach out to these users through the app store. They shouldn’t release email addresses. Instead they could create a form to let a developer send a single message to the user to inquire of their issues and offer assistance. Developers and users alike would benefit.
Better Battery Life. I generally get better battery life than others, but I couldn’t make it two full days. Instead of making the next phone thinner, they should use the extra space for battery. It matters to people.
Bevel-less iPhone Display. I really don’t like the bevel on devices. It is precious real estate that I look forward to manufacturers reclaiming for us. Just look at some of the mockups on the web; they are gorgeous. Doing this would solve two problems: making the screen larger and making the device smaller. Granted we are expecting a screen that is larger than the current device, but it would be smaller in relativity.
Quicker UI Animations. I like the zooming of the folders in iOS on the home screen, but come on. They’re too slow. I feel like I could brew coffee quicker. Things have sped up a little in iOS 7.1, but not enough. The transitions might be smooth, but the speed almost feels like the device is lagging–which it isn’t.
More iCloud Storage. Apple is gracious enough to give you 5GB of cloud storage for your documents and backups when you buy one of their devices. How much more do you get when you buy another device? Zero! They want you to backup your devices to their service, but they never give you more. What they need to do is give you 5GB per mobile device that you attach to your iCloud account. This issue prevents people from reliably backing up to iCloud.

All of this is not to bash Apple. I just think that these are a few things that need to be addressed. There is always room to improve. I think that most of the platforms could improve in these areas. Apple is a leader, and they need to lead in these areas.

What is on your wish list of improvements from Apple this year?

Recapping Goals: When Life Gets In The Way

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 16:00:48 GMT

During the first week of January I revived this blog. In that first post I wrote about the goals that I wanted to accomplish in 2014. We are now 2 months into the year, and I think that it is time to revisit those goals.

I setup goals that I felt would really push myself. I wanted 2014 to be a year of real, personal growth. I am not doing as well as I had hoped. The last 2 months have had some personal hardships that took away my focus and greatly affect my motivation. But some areas I did very well in.

Here’s the replay:

Create 3 apps. Zero apps so far. I don’t even have one in the queue yet. I started on one but got frustrated by an incomplete API that I was trying to connect to. That’s always a risk when you create an app that relies on somebody else’s product.
Blog once a week. So far I have been nailing it! I has not been easy and this week was particular difficult do. But looking back at my homepage, I am pretty proud that I have stuck with it so far.
Read 24 books. I read Tribes, The Oath, Paddle Your Own Canoe, and I am half way through Trident K9 Warriors. Not too bad, but I do need to keep on top of this before it snowballs.
Journal every day. Also accomplished, though admittedly one day this week I only wrote “I don’t feel like writing anything today.” Hey, it counts. It’s within the rules that I setup for myself. If I was not so lenient I probably would not have made this far and would have been discouraged.
Lose 12 pounds. I’m at 156 pounds right now, still shooting for 148. Most of that was lost during January. February was my birthday, so I ate too much in celebration and flatlined for the month. I’m going to have to push myself harder in March.
Review my goals monthly. I’ve been doing this, but I think I could be more intentional about it. The Buffer Blog had a post this week that said to schedule 30 minutes on the calendar at the end of every month to review your goals. I am going to try doing this and be more intentional in my review.

Rolling With It

Even though I am falling behind on the apps—an already ambitious goal—I am still going to try do this. And at the same time, I have given myself permission to not work on it this month. I think I really need to take a month off to rest my mind. Instead I am going to be spending some time on more fun projects: moving this blog over to the new Ghost blogging platform and learning some graphic design.

Life changes and as such you need to be able to re-evaluate goals and adjust accordingly. I’m staying ambitious and looking forward to moving more quickly and efficiently at the start of next month.

A Slight Reframe

I saw an interview with Grant Cardone on the Eventual Millionaire blog where he says to multiple your goals by 10. You very often fail to reach your goals. So set them high and you are likely to actually surpass your smaller goal. I creates a mental shift in planning such that while reaching for a larger goal you effortlessly pull yourself past the original smaller one. I’m not stretching myself that much, but I am encouraged as set ambitious goals.

Recapping goals is very important to do on a monthly basis, so how are your goals coming along? Have you stuck with any of them? Take a look at the interview with Grant and let me know how that affects your planning and mentality.

Life Hacking With Twitter: Streamline your media consumption to make margin in your life

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:00:02 GMT

Two weeks ago I went on an RSS fast to try to make more margin in my life. So far it has been very effective. Today I want to explain how I have shed the RSS feeds and how it has actually made me more social.

Life Hacking Twitter

To recap, the goal of the fast to make more time in my day by getting rid of all my RSS feeds. To stay current I allow media to filter up through Twitter. Any sites that were important to me I either followed in Twitter or I subscribed to their email newsletter if they didn’t have Twitter.

Twitter is great. It is accessible from anywhere, even “dumb” phones. My favorite app is TweetBot for iOS and Mac.

Enter Pocket

While it is easy to read Twitter, I don’t always have the time to read the articles that come up in the feed. If I just read everything I found interesting the moment it came up in Twitter, then it would take up a lot of my time like my RSS feeds did. To overcome this I started opening up articles and saving them to Pocket. Pocket has apps on iOS and Mac so I could read them later when I had time. This was pretty effective, but I was still wasting time opening the articles to save them, and it was not an easy workflow on mobile devices.

Turbocharging Twitter with IFTTT

I was familiar with the service IFTTT (If This Then That) but never really found a good use for it personally. I realized it could really help me in this situation. I setup what they call a “recipe” so that whenever I star a tweet, IFTTT will automatically submit the page to my Pocket account. It works perfectly! It might take a few minutes to sync, but that’s okay because if I wanted instant I would have opened the article to begin with.

In think that it is the best use of the starring functionality in Twitter. I never have to leave my twitter app or even take my eyes off what I’m reading. Easy, simple, non-interruptive.

If you are looking at doing something similar (and you should be), you can grab the IFTTT recipe for yourself here.

Results

I thought that I would be in danger of constantly trying to empty my pocket account. Instead I find a peace of mind knowing that the content will always be there when I’m ready for it. I also love that I now have this archive of articles (when you finish an article on Pocket you archive it) that I can reference at any time. David Allen, among others, talk about getting things out of your head and onto paper, and this results in a very similar freeing up of the mind.

There was also an unexpected side effect to all this: I have become more social. Since I’m getting everything through Twitter, I find it easy to respond to articles and what people are saying about them. By consuming media this way you enter into the conversation that is happening around it. It is quite eye opening.

It has only been two weeks, but I do not have any plans to return to the RSS world at this point. RSS has it’s place, but I am finding that this new workflow has a lot of benefits to it. I think everyone should give this a shot.

Have you considered a similar endeavor? I really think you should give it a try. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

1 Web Host Meets 5 Most Important Criteria

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:00:00 GMT

Making an app go live is exciting! Starting a new blog is exciting! And when we are ready to start such a venture, the first question always becomes, where do I host it? And that search leads to a host of questions like: who’s reliable, what’s cheap, what’s good, what’s easy, what’s quick? Fortunately many of us have already gone before you, and this is my recommendation.

What makes a good web host?

What makes a good host is fairly relative. I am going to assume someone who is in the range from not technically skilled to a small company with an app. For such a person or company I see these as the main criteria for a good host:

Relatively Cheap. You probably do not have significant income at this point, so being reasonably priced is very important. And of course reasonable for some is not for others. In this group of people I consider $20/month to be on the more expensive side and sub $10/month to be ideal.
Easy To Use. If you are an app developer then this may not be as important, but I have learned that easy is good if not just for the sake of saving time. If you are non-technical then this is crucial.
Reliability. It doesn’t matter what you want to host, we always want 100% uptime. If your site is down when people want to use it (and we can’t control when that is) then you can loose you audience.
Performance. People don’t like waiting. I don’t as a developer and you don’t as a customer. Making people wait with a slow site will drive them away.
Support. Because things will happen. A host should be responsive. They should be knowledgable. They should be friendly. Support can make or break a hosting provider.

Experience

I have been doing websites since the late ’90s. I have used a few different web hosts for technologies ranging from WordPress to Ruby On Rails to Django to static HTML to Microsoft .NET websites. My favorites have been BlueHost, Linode, Rackspace, and WebFaction.

The One: WebFaction

All the mentioned hosts have their benefits. But WebFaction is the one that best meets meets all 5 of the listed criteria:

Relatively Cheap. Their plans go as low as $5.50/month going up to $9.50/month depending on the time length you commit to.
Easy To Use. No cPanel here. They have custom administration software that is the easiest I have ever seen. They have done a superb job here. You can get WordPress installed in a single click. And they also have single click installation for Rails, Django and others. I could geek out with how easy they have made it to do different things, but that is too long for here.
Reliability. I have only once had an issue with my site going down. I contacted support and they told me what was going on (issue with another user on the machine). Then they gave me several solutions to resolve it. In this case they moved my account to newer, faster hardware with better software in place to prevent this issue. They moved everything over for me, and it all just worked. Super easy.
Performance. Outside of that last issue, WebFaction has had great performance. I ran a side-by-side test against A-Small-Orange with WordPress, and WebFaction was twice as fast. That said I found Linode to be even faster than WebFaction, it was the fastest server I’ve ever been on, but it was at the expense of #1 and #2 above.
Support. I mentioned some of the amazing support in #3. They have never made me feel ignorant or like I was being a bother. They are professional and timely and knowledgable. I once went over my resource limit, and they didn’t shut down my site but sent me an email explaining the situation. Then they helped me assess how my site was causing the issue.

Will WebFaction be for everybody? Definitely not, but for most of us they are perfect. I hope to one day have so successful of a blog or app that I outgrow them. But they now offer dedicated hosting, so they will be able to my needs and yours to a huge scale and for a long time.

So stop debating and signup for WebFaction.

Do you have a favorite web host or a great experience with WebFaction? Give a shoutout in the comments!

Why can't I find the time for my work?

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 16:56:01 GMT

Let’s say it’s Thursday already. On Monday you started off the week with a list of things that you wanted to accomplish. Well, where are you at on that list? If you are like me, you are probably half way through the list. And now you are asking, why can’t I find the time to work on these projects that I want to do?

Information is good

I love reading. I am a techie, so there is always a constant flow of information just waiting for me to consume it. And consume it I do. I have 87 sites that I pull into my RSS reader, Feedly. I mentioned some of my favorites in my post The 5 Best Blogs For Entrepreneurial Growth. Reading is something that I look forward to… multiple times a day!

Now there is a lot of good to reading the things I follow. I read about news, developers, blogging, life hacks, and people. Reading all this gives me a feeling of growth. I know that I am learning. I know that keeping up to date with news is a good thing, even a responsible thing. So I have kept up with these feeds, occasionally trimming the list.

RSS Feeds Are Distracting

I have come to a point where I wonder if all this reading is also a distraction. It’s not intentional, but every time I see the app (I use ReadKit on Mac, and Reeder 2 on iOS), I see more stuff to read. So I dig into what’s listed and try to get through it as quick as possible so I can get back to my other work.

I was talking to my wife about this. I have been having some trouble keeping on top of my goals (you can see them here). Time is just so limited. I come home from work and try to accomplish as much as I can, but I have been having trouble getting a significant amount of time to develop my new project.

Finding margin

Several times over the past two weeks I have heard and read about people trying to create more margin in their lives. Michael Hyatt’s podcast was one of those places.it really got me thinking that I need to be more intentional about creating more margin in my life. Cutting down sleep was not an option as I’m already at about 7 hours. Cutting down exercise was not either, especially since I probably need to be doing more of it.

Intentional Reading

I kept coming back to the time I spend reading RSS feeds. I really feel like I needed the time that they were taking up. At the same time I felt like they are really important. I needed to find a better balance.

Then came another realization. I have been finding a lot of great content shared on Twitter lately. And it got me thinking: is everything in my RSS feed important? Do I need to read or skim every article that comes through? I was already skimming titles for some of my feeds instead of reading all of them. But maybe I can let the best content bubble up through Twitter. Plus, it is easy to skim Twitter feeds. It’s also super easy to catch up on twitter because it is more of a real time platform. I use TweetBot on iOS and on Mac, so it is not a major shift in routine.

RSS Fast

I decided that I am going to do an RSS fast. Fasting is the idea of abstaining from something for a period of time for personal growth. Fasting is often used for spiritual purposes but it can work for any area of life, even professionally.

So today I deleted all 87 RSS feeds from my account on Feedly. For the rest of February, I will not add any RSS feeds back into it. I am not even going to open it because there isn’t anything in it anymore.

Now I am going to let Twitter be my source of info. I will trust that the things people are sharing are the best and most important content. Will I miss some things that would interest me? Yes. But my hope is that I will gain better reading and information and have more time to focus on development.

Quick Results

It’s only been maybe eight hours and I am already feeling like I have more time. Clearing out my feeds did cause a little anxiety. Surprisingly I found that I was already following some of them on Twitter. I am feeling an odd sort of freedom right now, but we will see how the rest of the month plays out.

Cutting something off to reclaim time is hard. But cutting back can make things a lot easier. Are there areas in your life where you could salvage some time by cutting back?

The 7 Best Developer Tools

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 16:00:18 GMT

We tend to be very fascinated with the lives of others. We can learn a lot about how people get things done by looking at the tools they use. Doing so allows us to emulate their successful, freeing up our brains to focus on our unique endeavors.

I love seeing what other people use. Lifehacker weekly showcases relatively successful people and the tools that they use in their How I Work series. While I do not find myself anywhere near their success, I too have favorite tools. So I put together my own list of favorites.

Xcode. For a long time there was not much of a choice but to use Xcode for development of iOS apps. Things have opened up more now with platforms like Xamarin and RubyMotion. Still, as time has passed Xcode has continued to improve and now I personally find it to be a great tool. I won’t discount the others, but for free you can’t beat Xcode.
Sublime Text 3. I’ve only recently started using Sublime Text. I was put on a JavaScript project at the office and have found this to be an excellent editor for JavaScript and also for scripting languages. It has a very flexible plugin system making it an extensible platform. There’s a free version with no limits so you can try it out without risk.
VIM. I’ve always loved that VIM was pretty much on every linux based system I used, but it was confusing and I never used it much past doing a quick edit to a document from the command line. Recently after listening to an episode of the Giant Robots podcast I decided to give it another try. I love it! There’s definitely a learning curve, but I do find it a joy to use once you get the memory muscle.
SourceTree. This is the best git client I’ve found! I love git on the command line, but this software makes it so much more of a joy to use. It makes it incredibly easy to dig deep into your projects version control with very little effort. This guy is free, and it’s a steal.
1Password for mac, iOS, and Windows. As developers, we accumulate hundreds of passwords. This software will help you keep track of it all. I love the random password generate and DropBox integration. It’s available on most platforms and is worth the money.
WebFaction. I’ve tried a dozen hosts, and WebFaction is the best. The performance is amazing for the price. You will get nearly VPS performance at a fraction of the cost. The control panel is a breeze to use (it’s custom and way better than Cpanel). And they also have very helpful support. You can even signup for a demo account without a credit card.
Evernote. I dump anything that I might need to reference later into Evernote. Code snippets, product reviews, blog ideas, life hacks; I put them in here. Then I install the Chrome plugin so when I search Google I also see the results from my Evernote. It’s a great place to keep things. The free version is plenty adequate for me, but the pro version has some features that you might find useful.

One thing noticeably missing is a good project management / todo app. I am currently playing around with Trello and Asana. Both are worth looking at. On my iPhone I use Todo for household items.

Tools are an important part of our workflow. We do have to be careful that we do not become obsessed with them (something I struggle with, always trying out new ones). They should help you to get something done. They are the means to an end and not the end themselves.

Do you have a favorite tool that didn’t make my list?

5 Best Blogs For Entrepreneurial Growth

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:58:14 GMT

If you are like me, you are trying to start a business, but you are really only in expert in one field. For me that that is programming. Starting a business is so much more than that! Building a great product is not enough. You have to know how to market. You have to know pricing and income. Shoot, you probably need to know how to gauge the value of your ideas to begin with!

I used to wish that I had double majored in business. Fortunately for us, there are thousands of people who share their expertise with us. Our education is just beginning. Here are my five most valuable resources.

Seth Godin

The guy is certifiably a genius. Many of his posts are just a couple of paragraphs. But those paragraphs are richer then Claim Jumper’s Six-Layer Chocolate Motherlode Cake (also a personal favorite). As a time-strapped creator, I value the amount of content he manages to stick into such a small amount of space. Just make sure you spend time actually putting thought into his words; don’t just read over them. His book Tribes is great for getting good overview of his mission, and Linchpin is a great book for putting those ideas into practice.

Michael Hyatt

If you are working on a business, you need a platform, and Michael is THE expert on doing that. His blog is full of content on how to work on your platform. I definitely underestimated the importance of my platform in the beginning. But I have learned a ton through his blog, and he has a book called Platform that is worth a read to jumpstart your own platform.

Nathan Kontny

Nate is the solo developer of a rapidly growing web app called Draft (which I am using to write this very blog post). You cannot put a price tag on his knowledge. If you are a developer trying to make if on your own, Nate is just a couple steps ahead of you and twenty years wiser. He writes on everything from marketing, to development, to your platform. His views are well rounded and will help you see your work in a new light. You will come to think of him as sort of a mentor.

Jon Acuff

Everybody on this list excels at being open and honest, but Jon here seems to have a propensity for digging up his own dirt. He spent year in the corporate grind, only to find out that he was meant for so much more. He writes on his successes. He writes even more on his failures. I find his blog to be a huge encouragement in the day to day. He also adds a fair amount of humor. He has a book called Quitter that explains his past and encourages you to find your future. Another book called Start will help you get, well, started on that future.

Buffer Blog

Be careful with one; it can be a time drain. This is the blog of the company behind the Buffer app. These posts can be excruciatingly long, but it’s only because they are exceptionally thorough in their work. They are well researched. The focus is often on social media, but they are fairly well rounded. It’s an especially great resource when you need to dig deep in things like social media, writing, or business development.

These are the five blogs that I have chosen as the schoolroom for this season of my life. Each deserves your daily attention. I have tried to keep them fairly diversified as there is so much I need to learn as I grow my business.

What other blogs have you found to be the most beneficial from an entrepreneurial viewpoint? What areas do you feel like you are lacking knowledge?

Recruit The Awesome, Befriend The Average

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 17:00:49 GMT

“It’s arrogant to assume that you’ve made something so extraordinary that everyone everywhere should embrace it. Our best work can’t possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can.” — Seth Godin

As developers we like to think that we can appeal to everybody. But focusing on being awesome means missing a lot of customers. And that is okay.

But we have a problem when you believe your product works for everyone and then trap people into staying. Users do not like being stuck with something that does work for them. You have to leave a way out for them, or they will feel betrayed and defensive, and then they will likely go on the offense to discourage others from using your product.

What Not To Do

Over the past two weeks I have been evaluating my choice of WordPress theme. I found one that seemed exceptionally promising. It was also exceptionally expensive, but there was a lot of hype about it. I did a lot of research. I even emailed support and asked them for a demo, but they said that they would not provide one. They would answer questions, but I could not use the software until I purchased it. So I bought it.

I struggled trying to make it work for a week and a half. In the end I was literally going to have to disable various plugins on this site, some that I find essential to my setup. It just was not going to work. So I asked for a refund. I exchanged 11 emails with support before being forwarded to another department, who told me that they do not do refunds.

I was shocked; I totally felt taken advantage of. It was a large sum of money. I feel like I put a lot of effort into research before purchase. I worked with support for more then a week after the purchase to try to make it work with my setup. But in the end it wasn’t a match.

The whole situation really made me put a lot of thought into business/consumer relationships. I looked back to see if I could have avoided this whole mess. What did I miss?

Consumer Take Note

To be fair this company’s refund policy does state that they only do refunds unless the software is broken. But their site advertises that the software “works on any WordPress setup.” Broken is apparently a very relative term. Several other things on the homepage also were not found in the software.

Moral of the story is, never buy something if you can’t look at it first unless they offer a money back guarantee. If you are not willing to loose the money then run away. (And there are times when I am willing to the risk the money; I do it on the App Store all the time, but the quantity is a lot smaller.)

Responsible Business

Business owner, you need to help your customers know what they are paying for. If your product is truly awesome, then you are going to have a lot of average people that it will not be a good fit for.

Stand behind your product. Put some trust in your users. If you are afraid that you might be taken advantage of then work to mitigate it, but not at the expense of delighting your users including the ones that aren’t going to stick around.

Even an average user who finds your product does not work for them has the potential to sing your praises to others. They still have something to say about your product and your brand. The customer you lost could be your salesman. So make sure to leave the relationship on a good note.

Working Together

Businesses need to take this relationship seriously. Instances such as my own do so much harm to their brand. Truth be told, they have some good software and their support personal were great. But now I encourage others to avoid it unless they have already used it and are absolutely, 100% sure that it would do what they want. If they offered a refund or had worked to understand my situation, I would adamantly have encouraged everyone to give it a try.

I feel that there is generally a high level of trust in the tech community. I love that! So if you are a developer, do not betray that trust. It hurts you and it hurts the community.

Can you think of a time when you were delighted by a company after finding that their product did not work out for you?

Life vs. Desk

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 20:00:41 GMT

They say that we are safer now. The dangers that our forefathers faced is behind us. We have OSHA. We have unions. We stay in doors–all day.

But really we go to work everyday oblivious to the dangers that are hidden in our offices. The rare instances of workplace violence are not our only threat. The real threat, the one we face 8 hours every weekday, is the desk.

I have first hand knowledge of the dangers that the desk brings to the workforce. I have been suffering through chronic back pain for the last 3 years. And there have been many studies pointing out the dangers of sitting all day. It is not just about bad chairs and back pain. The American Cancer Society found that during one of their studies the likely hood of death increased by 94% for women and 48% for men who sit more then 6 hours per day.

Olivia Judson wrote in The New York Times about another study. Men who normally walked 10,000+ steps per day were switched to a regimen of less then 1,300 steps per day. After only 2 weeks their bodies had already become worse at metabolizing sugars and fats.

The last few years, more people have been making the switch to standing when they work. Gina Trapani on LifeHacker was one of the first I read about. It took some getting used to, but she said “I haven’t once considered switching back to a sitting desk full-time. Honestly, I barely give it a thought at all anymore.”

Recently I found out that Michael Hyatt also uses a standing desk. His article has a nice info-graphic further breaking down the dangers.

So, in light of all the info, I decided I wanted to try a standing desk as well. I originally wanted a mechanical one that you could raise and lower, but they were too expensive. In my search I came across Kee Lite pipe fittings sold by SimplifiedBuilding.com. They are a little expensive, but you can bet that they will last a lifetime.

I put a fair amount of effort planning the desk. I used the TouchDraw app on iPad to plan it out. Here is the blueprint:

Surprisingly, designing and planning probably took longer then actually building it. Being a guy to sits at a computer all day, I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with my hands. It is made out of apple-ply, Kee Lite pipe fittings, and the piping used for chain-link fencing (which is very cheap and easily accessible). You could use any wood for the top that want. It’s a very flexible design, and that’s one of the things that I like so much about it.

The desk is built large enough to share with my wife. I enjoy standing, but she chooses to sit most of the time on a cheap (but comfortable) bar chair we picked up at Ikea. In the end, we both love the desk!

I show it off when people come over. I don’t think everyone really knows what to make of it. However, I had a good friend who saw it and decided that he wanted to switch to a standing desk as well. Unfortunately, he has a desk that is literally built into the wall, so I had to come up with a tabletop design. Feeling a bit more responsible since I was doing it for somebody else, I put even more work into the blueprints. Here is the design that I ended up with (note that the pricing on the blueprints is probably not accurate anymore).

Then one weekend, we headed over to Home Depot, grabbed our supplies, and built it. Outside of the painting it only took us a couple of hours. He is enjoying standing more, especially since he’s been working from home more frequently.

I am glad that I switched my home desk to a standing desk. Now I am working on some plans for another table-top version that I can use at work. This one will be a little more intricate since I have 3 monitors of all different sizes that I need to support.

I don’t know a lot of people who have made the switch to a standing desk, but I have not heard anyone say that they wish they had not made the switch.

Do you use a standing desk? If not, have you considered one?

4 Ways To Make The Apps You Use Better

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 20:00:10 GMT

We all love apps, right? There’s tons of them out there. You could find one to do almost anything it seems like. But how long do we spend trying to find the perfect one? How many do we end up deleting because it is missing that one crucial feature? It is easy to come to the conclusion that there just isn’t an app for that thing we want to do. Why didn’t the developer add in the one essential feature?

I have been there. I’ve found apps lacking in key features. I found them with bugs hiding that pretty much stop my work in its tracks. It’s not fun. When you have invested a lot of time and data in the app if can be terrifying.

I am also on the other side. As a developer I wonder what people want in the apps I develop. I try to think of how and where they will use the app. A lot of attention goes into planning the flow so things are easy for the user.

In the end, I am not the user. I ask people and put the app out there to get feedback, but the reality is that developers cannot perfectly predict how people are going to use their app. Also, people will use it in different ways. And the hardest thing is that no matter how much we solicit feedback, relatively few users are willing to send any.

This past week I was contacted by several people from a blind users group about their usage of Chime Squirrel. They use a feature on iPhone called Voice Over that literally reads the screen and where they tap on their phone or iPad. But it wasn’t working in the app. The truth is that it was not a feature I had put any work into, I did not expect it to be a viable market.

The first person to reach out to me was Joseph. He did a great job in his email describing his predicament. He went so far as to tell me how to turn on Voice Over so I could test it myself. He was exceptionally helpful as were the others that contacted me. I could not ask for better users!

Here are four things that you can do as a user to make your apps better:

Use us, the developers. We don’t want you to struggle using our apps. If you don’t know how to do something, or something went wrong, we want to hear it.
We want your feedback, so send it. Negative reviews are not very helpful. Email us, tweet us, user the support button in the app. If we’re unresponsive then by all means leave an honest review.
Understand that development time is limited. We are constantly trying to find a balance between features, simplicity, testing, and time. There are many people like me who are spending their nights and weekends trying to make something great. It’s a balancing act.
Know that not every feature will be implemented. There are a lot of users and we have to taylor the app to fit a wide audience. Your feature may not fit with the goal of the app, and that’s okay. I have no problem sending people to another app that would better fit their needs, but I appreciate them giving my app a try.

This is about being a team and working together.

Joseph’s thorough email definitely helped me to get this release out quickly. It took me a week to get the accessibility changes done; I had to rework some of the app. I submitted version 3.1 of Chime Squirrel to Apple. I hope that it addresses the issues of those that contacted me. I am thrilled to have these people using my app. I am honored that they reached out to me. Most importantly, their actions made this experience less of a consumer transaction and more of a team effort.

Have you taken the time to contact an app developer with your ideas and bugs? Do you see your relationship with app developers as being a team?

This Year, Set Goals Instead

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 20:00:20 GMT

It’s that time of year again. Everybody is looking to make their New Year’s resolutions, thinking about what they want to change about them selves or do better. However, I do not think that is the best way to go about adjusting your life: looking at the past instead of into the future.

I have never been one to set New Year’s resolutions. I usually ignore all the hype and just move on with my life. Let’s face it, most people fail. But over the past year I find myself in a position where I need to be more intentional. I want to accomplish more, but my resources (time, money, etc.) are getting more scarce.

So this year I am going to be more intentional. I am setting goals. The difference between a resolution and a goal can be a subtle one. For me it is about framing things in a way that I am going to accomplish something. A goal is positive. A goal is measurable.

So here are the five goals that I want to achieve this year:

Create 3 apps.
This one is very ambitious. I put out Chime Squirrel last year and even did a major revision. I worked on it all year but had started it the year before. I hope it has been helpful for people; it has been for me. But I want to put things out more quickly so I can get feedback, gauge potential, and adjust or move on.
Blog once a week.
I have never been very good at keeping up with this blog, but I have always wanted to. I just finished reading Platform by Michael Hyatt and am almost done with Tribes by Seth Godin and I am more motivated then ever. My hope is to make this blog a way that I can give back to the community of developers and entrepreneurs that I have gleaned so much from.
Read 24 books.
Last year I read 18 books, more then the previous 7 years combined. This is still going to be a stretch but a very rewarding one. My goal is 12 personal development books (development, business, etc.), and 12 fiction and non-fiction books.
Journal every day.
I did pretty good at this last year, probably journaling about 20 days a month the last few months. I think it would really awesome to not miss a day. I hope that being more consistent will also help me to slow down and pay more attention to what is going on around me. I use the awesome Day One..
Lose 12 pounds.
In July I started off on a 1,820 calorie diet using the MyFitnessPal app (and tons of help from my wife, the chef). Except for December (too many holiday treats), I stayed on target and managed to loose two pounds a month. My target weight of 148 pounds is very achievable if I’m consistent. Slow and steady is the way to do it.
Review my goals once a month.
I just added this one in. Things change, especially over a year’s time. This allows me some flexibility as things. Doing so means adjusting goals instead of giving up on them. It keeps my goals at the forefront of my mind.

Let’s be positive and achieve something this year! It is good to be flexible, but let us stay committed to the lives that we want to create. Let’s better ourselves and those around us.

So now you. Have set measurable goals for yourself this year?

Press Release: Chime Squirrel 3.0 Released

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 17:00:01 GMT

Chime Squirrel 3.0 available on the Apple App Store

An app geared towards productivity by providing non-obtrusive, recurring alarms

CALIFORNIA — October 13th, 2013 — Available today, Chime Squirrel is a utility app that provides recurring alarms to users to alert them to change tasks. It allows them to better focus more on the task at hand and push future tasks to the back of their mind.

With a focus on productivity, the key feature is speed. Users can get in and very quickly setup their recurring alarm (a.k.a. chime) and get back to their task. Chime Squirrel tries to stay out of the way so the user can place their focus on more important things.There are two main areas of Chime Squirrel, both easily accessible from the slide out menu on the left side of the app. The first is the Quick Chime, where the user sets how long into the future the user wants the chime to sound and then enters how long they want to the chime to repeat. The second are Interval Chimes and allows users to set multiple interval lengths and repeat the set of intervals for either a specific amount of time or repeat for a set number of times. It also features background notifications, music dimming, all device orientations, two themes, and four chime sounds.

Chime Squirrel is available now as a free download, with an in-app upgrade to Pro for $1.99. Pro upgrade required for themes, changing chime sound, and to create more then one Interval Chime. Designed for and requires iOS 7. Available in English, world wide.

Developed by MostlyBinary, a web and mobile applications developer.

###

If you would like further information about Chime Squirrel and MostlyBinary, or you would like to schedule an interview, please contact:

Luke Jernejcic
Twitter: @chimesquirrel

Download the app on the App Store.

Apps by MostlyBinary

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 03:08:19 GMT

Chime Squirrel

Born out of a need for a friendly reminder to stretch and rest my eyes at work, Chime Squirrel is a non-obtrusive iOS app. It presents “friendly reminders” at specific intervals. Chime Squirrel was originally release with a single interval and a total runtime setting but has since grown in functionality. Now with multiple interval lengths to create “sequences”, the user can then select total runtime or the number of sets to run. With these additions its usefulness is now extended. It is useful areas including productivity methods (Pomodoro Technique anyone), exercise routines (sprint, rest, sprint, rest), and even cooking. Read more…

Linchpin by Seth Godin - Review

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:00:49 GMT

I recently finished Linchpin by Seth Godin. Seth does a superb job of describing the characteristics of being a linchpin. He leads your thought process, describing the characteristics that one needs to acquire to become a linchpin in the world.

This was an exceptional book. I feel like I learned a lot and that I missed a lot. I definitely plan on going back and reading it a second time.

Read it. Then go and do something with it.

Get it on Amazon

Released Version 1.1.1

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 03:54:17 GMT

Pushed out 1.1.1 a while ago but wanted to log the update here as well. Here is what has changed:

Enhancements:

Phone 5 compatible!
New logo! We feel that this better encompasses the purpose of the app.
Fine tuned the UI.
Added Chime Title for displaying a message in the background notifications.

Fixed:

Background notifications not firing under specific situations.
Total Time not displaying at the one minute mark.
iOS 6 bug that would prevent editing chime details.

I hope you find these updates useful.

I have big plans for version 2.0 and work is already in progress! Be on the look out for it in a couple of months.

Unhide folders in OS X

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 20:00:25 GMT

I frequently find myself having to copy or dig into the Library folder on my Mac. Apple has decided to make the folder hidden, so I usually press CMD-SHIFT-G on the keyboard and type out my path. But here is another option:

Open Terminal, and type:

$ chflags nohidden ~/Library

This will work for any folder that is hidden, and if you change your mind, just change nohidden to hidden to hide it again.

Scan Wireless Networks On Mac OS X

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:00:22 GMT

I have been having some trouble with Synergy across my Windows and Mac computers. They connect over wifi, so that is where I started. Instead of finding a bloated or costly piece of software, I searched out a more natural, built-in solution.

I really have not had any issues for the past year. It just crept up on me over the last few weeks. This leads me to believe that it has something do with the connection and not the software. With seven wifi networks around, the wifi channel number was a natural place to start.

You can run a command from Terminal on the Mac to get the info on the wireless networks around you:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -s

It lists the channel of the networks right there and makes it easy to see an unused channel number.

I am not sure that this will fix my issue, but it is definitely a useful command to keep handy.

WordPress is SLOW on Webfaction

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 19:00:33 GMT

I have found that my WordPress install seems to be running especially slow. Now I am running multi-site, but still, I only have maybe 200 posts across all sites, so it should not be a big deal. After a quick google I found this post on the Webfaction forum. Here is the recommended steps that sped things up for.

Add this to your ~/webapps/[wordpress-app-folder]/.htaccess file after any rewrite rules:

Action php53-cgi /php53.cgi
AddHandler php53-cgi .php

Then SSH into your WordPress application folder (where the .htaccess file is) and add this symbolic link to PHP:

ln -s /home/php-cgi/php53.cgi php53.cgi

I hope it helps with you install as well.

Python Mac Error: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory …init.py

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:53:11 GMT

This is a situation that I have come upon in Mac OS X Mountain Lion:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/distutils/__init__.py'

For whatever reason this file is basically missing from the Python install by default. We will not talk about why for Apple has always seemed to install bad versions of Python.

Python needs the __init__.py file to know that it should look inside the folder for code. To fix this error, enter this command:

sudo touch /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/distutils/__init__.py

And that should resolve the issue.

Chime Squirrel Released!

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 03:04:53 GMT

Chime Squirrel has finally been approved for the Apple App Store. It is now available for purchase for $0.99!

I am very excited to finally get this app out, and even more excited to start collecting some feedback and see what you do with it and where you would like to see it go.

Alright down to business. Since the initial push to Apple was turned down, here are the new features that have been added to version 1.0.3:

Background notifications! Big feature, and it was already in the works when the app was first denied (we are trying to adopt a “release early and often” approach). It makes the app much more useful especially if you are using long intervals. One note: background notifications don’t go off if you lock the phone with the app open. This is an iOS 6 bug and a report has been filed with Apple. We are presently looking into a workaround. Until then make sure you press the home button before locking your phone.
UI overhaul. We redid all the wallpapers, made over the logo, moved navigation to the top of the display, and other little UI tweaks.

We have some great ideas for where we want to take things, but would love some feedback and opinions. Head over to the Support page or hit us up on Twitter.

1.0.3 Submitted

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:25:19 GMT

After Apple denied version 1, I went back and added a few features that I had already intended to add in the next version. I will admit that I was very disappointed and a bit discouraged after the app was denied, but these features were coming and I am much more excited about this release. Watch for a more thorough feature list once the app is (hopefully) accepted.

Chime Squirrel

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:11:51 GMT

Chime Squirrel is a little but powerful app that helps you remember to do repetitive tasks throughout the day, change up your exercise routines, and make you more productive. Set the chime intervals to any length you need, set it run for however long you want, then push the app to the background to get your reminders at the interval times of your choosing.

One of the key features of Chime Squirrel is speed. It is designed to get you into the application and your chime quickly started so you can get back to your activities.

Chime Squirrel is different from the other alarm applications because its “alarm” doesn’t require you to turn it off; it’s a chime, like a clock. It gives you a quick chime(sound/alarm), then goes quietly back to sleep on it’s own, counting nuts until the next interval completes.

FEATURES

✓ Variable interval chimes present a highly customizable chime that is not limited to a single interval length.^ (1 variable chime is included free, upgrade to Pro for unlimited interval chimes)
✓ Special screen to quickly setup chimes.
✓ Multiple chime sounds.^ ✓ Light and dark themes to fit your taste or your environment.^
✓ Quickly start chimes from the first screen that the app opens to.
✓ Special completion chimes so you know when you’re done.
✓ Runs in the background.
✓ Graphical user interface when running the app in the foreground.
✓ Repeating interval sequences.
✓ It’s universal!

^Requires in-app upgrade.

BEST USES

✓ Use it as a Pomodoro timer or for other time-based productivity methods.
✓ Setup custom workouts with variable intervals.
✓ Chime on the hour to remind yourself to get up from your desk and stretch.
✓ In school? Setup a quick chime at 5 seconds and breeze through those flash cards!
✓ Just got lasik and your surgeon you putting those drop in your eyes all the time? Yeah, this will help you!
✓ _________ <-– Tweet me @chimesquirrel or use the Feedback button in the app to let me know how you are using Chime Squirrel.

Documentation

Chime Squirrel Video

Chime Squirrel Manual

Create Random Django Compatible Usernames in Objective-C

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:00:40 GMT

I’m working on an app right now that lets anonymous users update data. Only I don’t quite want them to be anonymous. I want to be able to keep track of “who” data belongs too in order to provide individual service. So I needed to create unique usernames to register with the server. I extended the NSString class and add a UUID method. Problem with that is the resulting string was too long for Django. So I added another method to convert it to a base 64 ASCII string of alphanumeric characters (and two special characters). Here’s my implementation file.

#import "NSString+UUID.h"

@implementation NSString (UUID)

+ (NSString *)Base64Encode:(NSData *)data{
    //Point to start of the data and set buffer sizes
    int inLength = [data length];
    int outLength = ((((inLength * 4)/3)/4)*4) + (((inLength * 4)/3)%4 ? 4 : 0);
    const char *inputBuffer = [data bytes];
    char *outputBuffer = malloc(outLength);
    outputBuffer[outLength] = 0;

    //64 digit code
    static char Encode[] = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_-";

    //start the count
    int cycle = 0;
    int inpos = 0;
    int outpos = 0;
    char temp;

    //Pad the last to bytes, the outbuffer must always be a multiple of 4
    outputBuffer[outLength-1] = '=';
    outputBuffer[outLength-2] = '=';

    while (inpos < inLength){
        switch (cycle) {
            case 0:
                outputBuffer[outpos++] = Encode[(inputBuffer[inpos]&0xFC)>>2];
                cycle = 1;
                break;
            case 1:
                temp = (inputBuffer[inpos++]&0x03)<<4;
                outputBuffer[outpos] = Encode[temp];
                cycle = 2;
                break;
            case 2:
                outputBuffer[outpos++] = Encode[temp|(inputBuffer[inpos]&0xF0)>> 4];
                temp = (inputBuffer[inpos++]&0x0F)<<2;
                outputBuffer[outpos] = Encode[temp];
                cycle = 3;
                break;
            case 3:
                outputBuffer[outpos++] = Encode[temp|(inputBuffer[inpos]&0xC0)>>6];
                cycle = 4;
                break;
            case 4:
                outputBuffer[outpos++] = Encode[inputBuffer[inpos++]&0x3f];
                cycle = 0;
                break;
            default:
                cycle = 0;
                break;
        }
    }

    NSString *datastring = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:outputBuffer];
    free(outputBuffer);

    return datastring;
}

+ (NSString *)uuid
{
    NSString *uuidString = nil;
    CFUUIDRef uuid = CFUUIDCreate(NULL);
    if (uuid) {
        CFUUIDBytes bytes = CFUUIDGetUUIDBytes(uuid);
        NSData *uidBytes = [NSData dataWithBytes:&bytes length:sizeof(bytes)];

        uuidString = [self Base64Encode:uidBytes];
        CFRelease(uuid);
    }
    return [uuidString substringToIndex:[uuidString length] - 2];
}

@end

Working well for me. Now I need to look into getting Django TastyPie APIs setup to use this.

Base 64 implementation credit goes to StackOverflow. I’m afraid that I don’t remember where I pulled the UUID method from, though I have tweaked it a fair amount since.

IIS Exception: System.Security.SecurityException… fail

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 21:00:31 GMT

I was trying to push some updates for a website to the production machine. After pasting the new files into the web directory, I hit the site and got this error:

Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type ‘System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′ failed.

I found this post on an MSDN blog. To sum it up, the NTFS file system is tracking where the file came from, and I downloaded my zip file through Internet Explorer (also tried through FireFox but same issue).

Solutions:

That first post and many other said that after deploying the files, right click on the DLL’s, and if the file is one of the ones causing your problem you see “Security: This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.” and an “Unblock” button to the right. Click the “Unblock” button and then search out any other files and repeat.
Lots of people found this solution to work. I on the other hand did not. It seems that it was not saving my settings as with every view of the file properties it was showing the file as still blocked (and more importantly IIS was still choking). The next solution is what worked for me.
NTFS is basically setting a “Zone” flag. So what we can do is reset the zone flag. Open a command prompt, navigate to where your zip file (or any file you want to remove the zone from) and run this command:

  echo. > my_blocked_file.zip:Zone.Identifier

Then copy and paste you files as usual. Totally worked for me. None of the files were showing up as blocked and IIS ran fine. Credit for this solution due to this StackOverflow article (nothing new there).

Any.DO, A Beautifully Design Android App

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:00:45 GMT

I’ll be upfront: I haven’t had an Android for a couple years now, and the main reason why I bought an Android was because I wasn’t willing to leave Verizon for AT&T to get an iPhone. Let me also say that while I prefer and love my iPhone 4S, I very hopeful for Android and excited to see where it goes. Unfortunately, when I had an Adroid I was on version 1.4, and I’d have to say the apps were exceptionally lacking in design quality. Technically, the built in controls in android were just ugly, where as in iOS a developer with no design experience can build a decent looking app because the default controls already have great–though basic–design. But we’re starting to see a shift in android land.

One app that breaks the android stereotype is Any.DO, a todo app with a minimalist UI. One of the things that sets it apart from the hord of other todo apps is that it is heavily gesture based. Pull down for a new task, pull and hold to enter a new task by voice. Changing tasks happens on the same screen with a tap. Really, this app reminds me a lot of the DayOne app for iPhone, though possibly a bit more beautiful. The biggest deal breaker for me is that it doesn’t have recurring tasks, to me the feature the differentiates todo apps from being either a list or a tool.

Check out Any.DO, and yes iPhone owners, they now have an iPhone app as well as a web app in the works.

Any.DO is a great todo app, though fairly basic. I don’t know that will actually find a place on my phone personally as it would have to push Wunderkit (my list) or OmniFocus (my tool) out of my workflow, but asthetically I find the app inspiring. Any.DO continues the trend of bringing great UI to the android platform and elsewhere.

Change The Primary Monitor In A Dual-Monitor OS-X Setup

Mon, 28 May 2012 18:00:17 GMT

Do to some unexpected circumstance I ended up loosing my 2008 24″ iMac this week (my work machine), leaving me with my old 2006 MacBook Pro (my personal machine, the first of the Intel models). I have been intending to upgrade my personal equipment, but have been waiting for Apple to release the new models (been waiting since October). Well now I am more motivated to get the process started.

First thing, this week I got a new monitor, the Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24″ LED LCD Monitor off Amazon. I am still working out my opinion of the monitor and may write up a review of it at a later time.

First issue I come up with is that the external monitor is always secondary to the MBP display. Obviously with a 15″ MBP and a 24″ monitor, I’m going to be using the 24″ monitor primarily. I want the menu bar on the external monitor. I want everything to default to the nice, big monitor! At first I wrote it off; I didn’t see any method to get it done and did not have time to research it.

Today I had some time and googled it, figuring there had to be a way even if through 3rd party software. Turns out it’s pretty darn easy and it is indeed built right into OS X. Here we go:

Step 1: Open up the Displays page in the Settings app.

Step 2: See that little white bar on the tiny monitor below. It symbolizes the primary screen and as it turns out that you can drag it between monitors. Do so and you will see the primary monitor change.

Step 3: Never mind, you’re done!

Like many things in computers, once you know what do you it is surprisingly easy. I am glad this worked as Photoshop wasn’t letting me drag some things between the monitor and it would have been exceptionally annoying.

Rethrow An Exception in C#

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:00:07 GMT

So generally, when I want to re-throw an exception that I caught in C#, I just throw a new exception like this:

try {
    // ...
} catch (Exception ex) {
    // ...
    throw new Exception(ex.message); // or throw new Exception("", ex.message);
}

This just never sat well with me, so today I decided to figure out if there was a better way to handle this. Seems like there just had to be.

Shoot, it is so simple!

try {
    // ...
} catch (Exception ex) {
    // ...
    throw (ex);
}

throw (ex); will re-throw the exception that was caught as if it was not caught.

If by chance you didn’t catch the exception object, you can still re-throw it like this:

try {
    // ...
} catch {
    // ...
    throw;
}

I am in shock that all these years I was unaware of this. Enjoy! And thanks to the Microsoft docs, which I should visit more often.

How To Auto-Increment Your iOS Version Number

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:00:27 GMT

Previously I wrote up how to auto-increment your build number. I mentioned how I wanted to figure out how to do the same for the version number. The thing that makes the version number different and more difficult is that version numbers generally have sub-versions. My bash scripting skills are minimal so I did not take on the task at the time and planned to revisit it.

Well Paul Capestany picked it up where I left off. You can see his solution on github. To understand how to install and use this script, please see the previous post for instructions.

I like Paul’s solution, but one thing that does not appeal to me is that the build number is used for the last piece of the version number, i.e. 2.4.X. The way I see things, the build number is a continuously incrementing number that should never be reset. So I went on and edited the script so that the last section increment by one every time, just like the build number. The intention behind this is that it will be reset (manually of course) when you do major version updates.

Here is the script that I ended up with (you can find the github gist here):

# Increment the build number with every build.
BUILDNUM=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print CFBundleVersion" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}")
BUILDNUM=$(($BUILDNUM + 1))
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :CFBundleVersion $BUILDNUM" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}"

# this splits a two-decimal version string, such as "0.45.123", allowing us to increment the third position.
VERSIONNUM=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print CFBundleShortVersionString" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}")
NEWSUBVERSION=`echo $VERSIONNUM | awk -F "." '{print $3}'`
NEWSUBVERSION=$(($NEWSUBVERSION + 1))
NEWVERSIONSTRING=`echo $VERSIONNUM | awk -F "." '{print $1 "." $2 ".'$NEWSUBVERSION'" }'`
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :CFBundleShortVersionString $NEWVERSIONSTRING" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}"

I ended up leaving the incrementing of the build numbers in there, as I generally use both and I figure pretty much everybody else will as well.

One thing that may come up is that this only works for the last section of the version number. I figure you always want to update this piece. Unfortunately you cannot do the same with the first two sections. The computer really cannot tell when you are releasing a “significant” build, so as mentioned previously it is best to update those two manually when you make major revisions to your app.

Thanks again to Paul Capestany for commenting on the previous post with his solution. It was immensely helpful in coming up with this.

My objective-c return type is giving `Expected a type` error

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:00:23 GMT

Man, I hate when the solutions are so simple. Well for me, I had added the type into the implementation of a class, it was working fine. Then I needed to add it as the return type. Check. Update the interface so that callers can see it. Check. But then I was getting an error: Expected a type. Seemed weird as everything was working fine the implementation file.

In my defense I didn’t write this class, I inherited it. I didn’t realize that there were some imports in the implementation file that were not in the header file.

SOLUTION: Move the import from the implementation to the header file.

Make sure that you have the correct import. It’s one of those little bugs/mistakes that make you shake your head… at yourself.

FYI, a couple of other possible issues/solutions mentioned on this stackoverflow are circular imports or a typo in the previous line.

Stop Forced Portrait Orientation in iOS App

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:00:33 GMT

I have an iOS app at the office that I have inherited, and one of the bugs that I found when I started was this:

I have the device in a landscape orientation. I have a UINavigationController with a UITableView (we will term as the “parent”); pushed another UITableView (we will call him the “child”); then pop the child off with the nav back button; and when the view returns to the parent the device orientation always changes to portrait. Event if I try rotating the device at this point, it still stays in a portrait orientation.

I have several similar scenarios in the app, but there was only one exhibiting this problem. Well even though I could not find anywhere in the code that forced a portrait orientation, after searching the web for a little while to find the solution I decide to just try and be a little more explicit with things. So I add this code into the parent view.

- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation
{
    return YES;
}

Guess what. It works! I am still not sure what the cause was before. I did a quick search through the Apple docs to see what the default is for this method (if there is a super), but I did not see anything about defaults.

I am still new to iOS development, but I am learning not to take anything for granted. Before wasting time search for solutions to bugs, make sure that your code is explicit for the situation. Being explicit also helps make things easier to debug as you can trace though those methods.

How To Auto-Increment Your iOS Build Number

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:32:17 GMT

UPDATE: The scripts on this page have been updated to auto-update the version number as well and can be found here.

Things do not always go smoothly in Xcode, as I have mentioned before. Since I have had to do many builds with small tweaks and upload them to TestFlight to test my app, I started to get lazy with my build numbers. As such, I decided that it was time to figure out how to automate incrementation of it.

There is a lot on the web documenting different ways to this. Many of them seem overly complicated. The two most helpful sources for me were by Fredrik Olsson and, of course, StackOverflow. With these posts and their comments I was able to work up a solution that met my requirements:

Be as simple as possible.
Only increment on release and ad hoc builds.

A lot of the examples floating around are using a script that calls a script. I do not to have to track another file for something like this, and I do not want to be messing with multiple languages in the same project. I want it in Xcode, in the project settings, period. And a lot of the default examples only show how to increment but not how to control when it happens. Maybe I am picky, but I want the build number to increment on significant builds but not when I build the project seventeen times to debug something.

So here is the script that I came up with from Fredrik’s example and the comments on his post:

buildNumber=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print CFBundleVersion" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}")
buildNumber=$(($buildNumber + 1))
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :CFBundleVersion $buildNumber" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}"

And where to put this? I am using Xcode 4.3.2. From the Project Navigator, click on your project, then click on your target. Then click on the Build Phases. On the bottom right click on Add Build Phase, then Add Run Script. Drag the new section to right above Copy Bundle Resources. Then past the script above into it. And then check the box for Run scripts only when installing.

Seems to be working pretty well for me. Ultimately I would like to get it where it combines a build number prefixed with the version number, but I did not have the time to figure that out. If anybody else is doing it that way, leave me a comment.

Also the original script from Fredrik Olsson uses a separate variable, not the Xcode build variable. If that sounds more appealing to you, check it out.

Xcode Archives Aren't Showing Up In The Organizer

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:46:12 GMT

Xcode is currently becoming the biggest pain to work with since I developed a Blackberry app. When I was trying to build an ad hoc distribution (which I still have not been able to get working yet), Xcode suddenly stopped showing my archives in the Organizer. Having spent all day trying to get the ad hoc install working, I ~~was~~ am currently very frustrated with Xcode/Apple/iOS. When my archives stopped showing up I really felt like I was not making any progress and that I was actually moving backwards! I basically spent the past day trying to get back to where was yesterday.

I found a good list of solutions on Stackoverflow. The most voted solutions did nothing for me. But towards the bottom, I found one that fixed my issue. Set this path to the value:

TARGET -> BUILD SETTINGS -> INSTALLATION DIRECTORY = /Applications

The actual value that I use is $(LOCAL_APPS_DIR), which is the default value that I found in some of my other projects.

I never changed this value myself. There was no mention of it in any of the ad hoc install tutorials that I was following. Somehow Xcode change it. Very frustrating. This is not a guaranteed solution to the problem for everyone, as obvious from the list of solutions and comments on the problem. So be sure to check out that Stackoverflow excahnge if this doesn’t fix it for you.

Set the UIImagePickerController to still photos only

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 01:35:34 GMT

Working on my iPhone app today I came across the need to setup the camera to only take still photos, and therefore ignore videos and hide the video camera. The Apple docs mention that to do this you just set the mediaTypes attributes to only [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects: (NSString *) kUTTypeImage, nil]. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a pain to figure out just how to pull in kUTTTypeImage. Here’s how you do it:

Add the MobileCoreServices framework to your project.
In the header file that is used to create the UIImagePickerController, add #import <MobileCoreServices/UTCoreTypes.h>
User cameraUI.mediaTypes = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects: (NSString *) kUTTypeImage, nil];

I hope that helps. You can also use kUTTypeVideo is you want to use only video and not include still images.

Do you need a quality satchel?

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:57:01 GMT

So I’ve had my Leather Back Satchel for about half a year now, and I have to say that I love it. It is most definitely heavier than I thought it would be… much heavier. But once I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.

I wanted to post a longer article, but time has been strained lately, so I’m just post these pictures for now. If you have any questions let me know.

Where's crontab?!

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:10:53 GMT

Are you running Ubuntu and trying create a cron job, and everywhere you look you see the command crontab, but command not found is all you get when you try to use it? Yeah, that one never stumped me either 😉

I’m was working on setting up a cron so that I can email blog posts into django-articles (gotta love this app), and everywhere I look it mentions crontab. Took me a while to figure it out, but it turns out that the command crontab is installed with package cron–at least on Ubuntu. So if you are missing this command, do an sudo aptitude install cron and then you should have your crontab command.

I hope this saves someone a little time and frustration. I know I was surprised that it took me so long to find out which package this command belonged to (I thought it was its own package actually, so that slowed me down a bit).

Need A Cheatsheet For Django-South?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 07:16:35 GMT

One of the greatest things about Django is it’s emphasis on apps and reusability and the community that follows it. My Django projects always have apps in them, and one of my most recent favorites is Django-South. The problem is that South is one of those apps that I often use once when I setup my project and then don’t touch for a while (outsite of migrations updates). So to help myself out–and hopefully others as well–I have composed a table of the commands that I use most often in South

Command	Description
./manage.py schemamigration app\_name –initial	If you have not previously run you app through `syncdb` use this command to set it up with [South](http://south.aeracode.org/).
./manage.py convert\_to\_south app\_name	Use you already ran your app through `syncdb`.
./manage.py migrate app\_name –fake	Use this if your like me and often use `--initial` when I should have used the `convert\_to\_south` command. This tells South that your database is already setup for the current schema.
./manage.py migrate	Migrate the database schema for all the South enabled apps.
./manage.py migrate app\_name	Migrate only the specified app’s database schema
./manage.py schemamigration app\_name –auto	Update the schema migration for the app.

These are the commands that you will need the most, but of course South is a very well done app and you should check out the South documentation for more advanced options.

Droid X Cannot Find Position With The MyLocationOverlay Class

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:34:33 GMT

I have not done very much android programming, but I am getting the hang of things now. But there was one issue that came up during my most recent project where I was unable to get the MyLocationOverlay to work. It either crashed my app, didn’t find my location, or did this constant GPS lookup where I had to actually kill the app to stop it from accessing the GPS and killing my battery. I spent many hours trying to figure it out and pushed it to the end of the task list to figure out later.

When I returned to the issue, I found an article by Dimitar Darazhanski which perfectly described the issue that I was up against. As it turns out, when Motorola implemented their version of android (rant: come on people, just leave the stock OS alone), they didn’t implement the MyLocationOverlay class properly. There are reports of this having been fixed in the last update but definitely is not on my phone. This issue has also been reported to come up on a couple other Motorola phones.

To fix the issue, you can override the MyLocationOverlay class. You can find a copy of such an implementation here. When I downloaded it I had to modify a few things like image references, but it worked great. My application is now running perfectly on my Droid X.

IE8 Doubling Heights And Borders And Such

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:01:47 GMT

Well I had yet another problem with IE today, but this time it was only happening in Internet Explorer 8. I had a header and footer where the height was specified as 100px, but the browser was doubling it… and not just to 200px, but it was practically creating a copy, with the top border being displayed at the top and straight through the middle at 100px.

Well, in both areas I had some anchors like this:

<a name="header" />

Yeah, IE8 doesn’t like self closing tags. I have seen this issue before in IE 7 (which was working for me this time). You need to actually add a closing tag to all self-closed tags (although I think it works okay on <br />) like this:

<a name="header"></a>

That worked for me. Hopefully Microsoft will finally get this right in IE9.

How To Detect Length In TinyMCE

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 04:19:25 GMT

How To Detect Length In TinyMCE

When it comes down to browser WISIWYG editors, TinyMCE is one of my favorites. Don’t get me wrong, I would personally rather write is straight up HTML or reStructured, but for clients I feel this it is a great tool.

But when integrating TinyMCE, you have to worry about the length of the data because you have database limitations. So as a user is typing, you need to be able to detect not only the length of the text that the user has entered, but also the length of the HTML that TinyMCE is adding behind the scene.

Here is a code segment that I used the other to display the length to the user and then turns red if they go over the maximum length. I use jQuery in this example, but you can do whatever you want in the function.

tinyMCE.init({
    // ... settings ...
    handle_event_callback: function() {
        $('#characters').val(tinyMCE.getContent().length);
        if ($('#characters').val() > 500) {
            $('#characters').css('color', 'red').css('border-color', 'red').css('background-color', '#fdd');
        } else {
            $('#characters').css('color', '#000').css('border-color', '#777').css('background-color', '#eee');
        }
    }
});

Sending HTML Emails In Django-Registration

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 05:55:19 GMT

I have been working on a project that uses django-registration for registering our users. This allows us to make sure that they have given a valid email address, and to some extent helps to prevent bots on the system.

One of the things that we want to do is make things easy for our users, but the checked out version of django-registration only sends text emails which requires the user to manually copy and paste the registration link in their browser. Not very user friendly for users that are not as well versed in computers or mobile platforms. So I went about fixing this myself.

To do this, I found an article at StackOverflow. Essentially the answer is just to follow the standard Django method of attaching an HTML version to the text version of the email. The StackOverflow question just confirmed that there was no way to do this without modifying the source for django-registration, which is not ideal, but oh well.

So do this, modify models.py function send_activation_email:

Thank you for registering with {{ site }}.

Go to [ http://{{ site.domain }}{% url registration\_activate activation\_key %} ](http://%7B%7B%20site.domain%20%7D%7D%7B%%20url%20registration_activate%20activation_key%20%%7D) activate your account.

Your account will expire in {{ expiration\_days }} days unless you activate it.

Django-CSS Custom Filter Using Slimmer

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:25:29 GMT

Since I started thinking about building this site, one of my goals has been to try out some optimization features that may be available. One of those features was the ability to compress CSS files. By compressing CSS files, a site will load faster because there is one less request that the browser has to make. But I wanted to still take it one step further. I wanted to remove the whitespace from the CSS as well, therefore compressing and shrinking the size of the CSS.

Originally I was going to use django-compressor, but I found that it didn’t actually compress the CSS files, but rather it just joined them. Then I found django-css, which used django-compressor but also add a filter to actually compress the code.

I know that the names are terminology are confusing but there’s nothing I can do about that. So for future reference, when I say compress I mean the compression of the code and the removing of unnecessary characters. I will use the full name when referring to django-compressor.

Upon adding the compressor app from django-css, it worked exactly like django-compressor. So I was left with implementing the filter to compress the CSS. Django-css comes with some filters for CSSTidy and YUI. I didn’t really want to mess with some of those libraries; I felt that they were a little bloated for what I wanted to do. So a quick search found python library called slimmer at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/slimmer/.

Slimmer did exactly what I wanted. It was no frills, simply removed comments, whitespace, and line breaks. So I was left with implementing the filter. I actually had a found an article elsewhere on the web that helped me get started, but I was not able to find it at the time of this writing… but thank you anonymous author.

To setup the filter, I created a new folder in the django-css folder filters and called it slimmer. Then I created the __init__.py file and put this code inside:

import slimmer
from compressor.filters import FilterBase, FilterError

class SlimmerCSSFilter(FilterBase):
    def output(self, **kwargs):

        filtered = slimmer.css_slimmer(self.content)

        if self.verbose:
            print err

        return filtered

Then I just added this line in my settings.py to tell compressor to use the filter:

COMPRESS_CSS_FILTERS = ('compressor.filters.slimmer.SlimmerCSSFilter',)

And that was that. I ran it and it worked great. All whitespace was out, all comments were out, and all the code was one line. Very efficient.

Well I hope that this was able to help. I’m sure that there is room for improvement, so leave any tips or suggestions below.

Django Sitemap

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:25:02 GMT

In setting up this blog I came up with the problem of setting up a sitemap. I did not want to use a django flatpage because I already a template and use for them, not to mention the amount of work that it would take to maintain. A quick search on Google turned up that django already has some sitemap functionality built right into the contrib! Awesome! Here is the code that was used.

First I created a new app to hold the logic for my site maps: site\_sitemap. The models.py looks like this:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import Sitemap
from django.db import models

from articles.models import *

sitemaps = {
    'articles' : GenericSitemap({
    'queryset': Article.objects.filter(status__name__exact='Finished'),
    'date_field': 'publish_date'},
    changefreq = 'weekly', priority = 0.4)
}

Then in the urls.py I put this:

from site_sitemap.models import sitemaps
....
url(r'^sitemap.xml$',
    'django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap',
    {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
    name='sitemap'),

And that was about it.

Hello world!

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:20:50 GMT

My name is Luke Jernejcic. I work by day as an ASP.NET web developer, and after hours I mess with all sorts of various technologies ranging from Django to some RoR to the random bits of PHP.

I have setup this blog as a place where I can post my thought about things like coding, solutions to programming problems, and the random life factoids that come up.