Trouble with Time Zones and Day Light Savings in iOS

As you all know, Suneth and I are working on 60Hz 2.0 and we had the weirdest date related problem yesterday. We have a weekly calendar which tells you when your library shows air and what are the premiering (returning or new series) airing on any particular day.​

Yesterday, our calendar looked like this!!​

​Huh??

After a lot of digging around the problem was this: yesterday, Sydney timezone rolled back an hour due to day light savings.​

We calculate each day by dropping its time component from [NSDate date]. We use a special category which gives us today [NSDate today] and work our way back to calculate the week and all the other relative days. For the first cell, which is correct, we have April 7th, Midnight. When it comes to Monday, Sydney rolled an hour backwards. Instead of getting April 8 Midnight, we're getting April 7th, 11PM. This accounts for the second 7th of April! After looking for bugs in all over the code, we finally figured it out.​

The fix was to simply take midday for today calculations. Adding 12 hours to today fixes and stays away from all kinds of DST issues (I hope).​

Windows 8 Should Have Shipped With... Windows

I think Windows 8 is great. It is fast, the UI is simplified and it is a much needed reset for the Windows ecosystem.

The problem is, however, the way Microsoft’s latest desktop offering ignores the desktop users altogether. Windows, as its name states, has always been about desktop + windows. This is a metaphor that has worked for as long as I’ve been using computers! It’s been tweaked a whole bunch, but at a basic level, the idea totally works! Windows 8 is really a touch first OS now. It is awkward to use mouse with it.

So here’s Microsoft’s “vision” for the future:

A future where people do one thing at a time (and everything’s a giant screen :S)...? Well, actually, there’s more to that vision. There’s a very powerful theme running all over this video that many people don’t pick up on, and that is, context.

Context is everything. With a world that is constantly changing and moving, it has becomes so much more important. Problem is, computers haven’t been great at this. Humans are a funny bunch and computers have a hard time predicting anything with enough confidence to enable a fluid software experience that changes with context.

This is why Google Now! really excites me. It is Google’s stab at a move in the right direction. It is automatic and it tries to be a little bit smart for you -- in the background.

I digress.

If we combine the lack of context with the single task focus on Windows 8, it is not a good cup of tea for most desktop users. Microsoft thinks people would just work on a presentation or queue music or surf the web (or 2 at a time). But this is how my desktop looks like:

Yep - It’s a mess. And people are generally messy. So here’s my pitch to Microsoft:

Stay true to the namesake. Let Metro apps work in a Window mode! Here’s a sample metro app (Outlook):

Let it window down to this:

The toolbars will form the application’s ribbon. The top menus like tabs in IE will also become tabs up top. Being on the desktop mode, developers can allow for more complex options in the ribbon too. Like Android where menu button and ActionBar overflow works interchangeably, so will the ribbon and full screen toolbars. There's a lot of missing features here, but you get the idea.

If the user is detected to be in the desktop, the app should start windowed like above. If they maximize or start the app on a tablet, it should automatically go into the tablet mode layout. Given the power of XAML and it’s great great layout system, I don’t think this is impossible.

This would have taken us to a new UI design language without completely alienating all Windows Desktop users.

Let people work in the desktop. It works best for multitasking. Keep the new start menu, but add more daring context awareness. Then we’ll have a wonderful OS with a more coherent experience.

Happiness Must Be Earned

If my last 12 months have proven me anything, it is that being brave and working hard on your passions is the only way to be happy. Good things come to those who are proactive and willing to make it happen. 

About a year ago, I decided to do something a little odd. I decided to take 20% pay cut from my already average graduate pay and spend 2 days a week working on my passions. Don't get me wrong, I'm already in the field I love and feel that I have most to contribute to. It's just that, I felt the calling -- the calling to give life to my own ideas that I am always telling people about! I really had the urge to learn more about running a business and being an entrepreneur.

So, I took Friday off and became a permanent part-timer at my day job, Vigil Systems.

It was odd at first. I felt like I was just giving money away. My friends were getting pay rises while my professional career seemingly stood still. To keep myself from feeling this way, I decided that my financials cannot suffer despite the dip in my pay. I used to save a large chunk of money from my pay. Now, I save the exact same amount as before. I've exchanged more savings with a downgrade in my lifestyle. I eat out less, plan more for things I have to spend.

Next I had a huge sense of urgency. I wanted to succeed right away! I often got into disagreements with Suneth on the direction we were taking. I was that over committed girlfriend who wanted to go where this was heading on day one. Oh dear.

We built 3 things in the past few months.​

First was a music app that never saw light of day. I swear it was such a cool app that we couldn't figure out what to do with it. Shame shame shame. But I learned a significant amount about doing drawRect: operations in iOS UIViews. How to animate, do KVO and use layers to animate parts of a view. Lots of fun!

Next was Momento Jar. It is somewhat a failed product. What I learned out of it cannot even be summarised in this post. ​I managed to pick up an entire platform (Ruby on Rails), made huge leaps in app design work, learned to engineer bigger apps, learned more things about running a business than ever before! And best of all, Suneth and I made M2D2 Pty Ltd official!!

Next, tvQ 2. Sexiest app we ever made I reckon. It is very polished. I just started making a product video for it! iMovie... here I come!!​ tvQ 2.0 is still a work in progress.

It's difficult to go through everything learned over the year but what I walked away from all of this is a huge sense of accomplishment, despite not having much success financially. I have never learned so much in a course of 12 months! My ideas are more creative and most importantly, much more workable. After the initial change, Friday has been the day I look forward to the most. I have a huge sense of purpose every time I tackle my own ideas.​

What's more interesting is that I feel happier than ever before! I feel like my decision to spend more time doing things I love has earned me more happiness credits! It has event brought me around to start taking care of my own health. I've started running again. Overall, life's taken on a better path.​

I hope I have success sometime down the line.​

Special mention to Vigil, which was very understanding when I decided to take a day off from an already a tiny technical team (4 people!). In hindsight, I think they managed to exchange old me to a happier, more driven and a far more technically competent employee!

When the right time comes, I hope you'll decide to take on all kinds of adventures in your life too. Not just your professional life but your personal life as well. Don't feel bound by what you have now. Exchange them to a greater future and write a new chapter in your story. You'll be better for it -- you would have earned your happiness.

(Image Credit: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/04/features/work-smarter-happy)​

Coming up with a fresh icon for 60Hz app

We've been working hard to get tvQ 2.0 out on the App Store (currently doing some beta testing). We really needed a new icon that captured the essence of our new UI and still kept a somewhat familiar vibe.​ Needed it to be cleaner, more modern and still very much recognisable on the iPhone dashboard.

Here's the old ​design and icon:

So we began by looking some existing icons that reflected somewhat of the vibe that we needed our icon to give out to the users. Here are some icon designs that really inspired us...​

Of course, there was some dribbble.com surfing as usual and Suneth found this fantastic pinterest collection: http://pinterest.com/johnsonyung/app-icon/.​

I think it is important to look at what else is out there. Creativity is really a fusion of a collection of ideas put together in a very personal way. And all these ideas don't have to be original. As a part time designer, it isn't so easy to come up with a completely original design either.​

So here's the look and feel of our rewritten tvQ app:​

And here's the new icon... I think we've managed to do an icon that reflected the new design but kept a little bit of the old feel. Love it!​

Problems with Bootstrap and Google Maps

If you are having problems with image controls not showing up properly on Google Maps while using alongside Twitter Bootstrap, use this:

#map-holder img { max-width: none; }

Gem: Export to Excel

Creating excel spreadsheets (with charting) has never been easier. This looks like an amazing bit of code if you’re writing a data driven app that requires exporting to excel!

gem install axlsx

Build for a need

As developers we love to build cool stuff. It is like building legos. We love putting the blocks together to form something amazing. Often though, we tend to not think about the larger implications. We don’t ask ourselves if this is what is needed? Is it even useful? We often have the opinion of “we build it because we can”.

This may very well work for you in your own personal time. However, if you’re trying to make a difference, be it the world around you or at your workplace, you have to stop just doing stuff. We shouldn’t just leave the task of rationalising the need for something to people in the marketing department. We have the chance to get down and dirty with a product and really mould it. To do that, we should really question its purpose carefully.

There’s so much time and money wasted in the tech industry where people build things that aren’t needed. We should try to break away and use new techniques like The Lean Startup to make useful things. “Build it and they will come” is not a thing.

Selectively merging branches with git

git-checkout is the key here. Here are the quick steps:

1. Checkout the branch you want to merge into: git checkout production
2. git checkout feature_branch_name <list of files> to merge just the changes from specific files: git checkout push-notif-branch app/controllers/controller.rb config/certificates/* …
3. Git automatically does a git add into your initial branch with the files you specified. Just follow up with a git commit -m “message” and you’re done!

Rails Validating Field vs Association

​One really interesting thing I came across recently is validating a field vs association. I’ve always written something like this (assume this is a… Company model with a attribute called owner_id and a belongs_to association called owner):

validates_presence_of :owner_id

What’s better to write is:

validates_presence_of :owner 

This actually makes sure that your :owner_id actually maps to a real object in the database. So you can’t just set a random integer as owner_id and get away with it!

Sadly this has made testing a little bit harder. Tearing through FactoryGirl documentation again now!

Ruby on Rails: Deleting data models without deleting from database

Act as paranoid is a great little gem if you want to keep your models to hang around for audit purposes till some later process clears it out. Calling ActiveRecord.destroy first time removes it from all queries and the next destroy removes it from the database entirely. Fantastic. Rails 3.2 compatible.