What I Learned
As you may have heard, Obtiva got bought by Groupon. I’ve been traveling a bunch, so this coming week is my first full week in the Groupon office post-transition. And, well, someday maybe I’ll write retrospectively about Obtiva, but today isn’t that day. I’ll probably write about what I’m going to be doing at Groupon,...
Programming Language Survey Results
A couple of weeks ago (already!) I asked two simple questions of my Twitter followers: what are (up to) four programming languages that you know and love, and what are (up to) four programming languages that you would like to learn?
Aro...
Kaleidoscope
It’s funny how knowledge leads to knowledge. You start digging deeper into one thing, and discover threads leading off into related fields. I began by researching maze algorithms, decided I wanted to see what mazes in more complex tesselations would look like, and after one thing or anouther found myself learning about Wythoff constructions.
The...
Mazes in CoffeeScript
Several people have asked how I did the Javascript demos in my maze algorithm articles, and while I’ve answered them a couple of times in the comments, I thought it might be interesting enough to warrent its own post.
The demos are ac...
Theseus 1.0
Whenever I tackle a new programming language, I need a project to apply it to. Just experimenting with syntax isn’t enough; there has to be a real context for it, or it doesn’t stick. Some years ago I discovered a great “default” project: generating mazes.
Mazes explore a lot of the nooks and crannies of a...
Ekawada: Approved for Sale!
Last night I received a long-awaited email: Ekawada is finally approved for sale in the App Store!
It’s been a pretty wild ride, from start to finish. The first commit was made on May 25, but I’d been tinkering on it for at least...
Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 5
In making Ekawada a free app, one of my hopes is that people with little or no experience with string figures might be tempted to download it and give it a try. But a list of string figures and some cryptic instructions are...
Ekawada: Submitted!
Last night I finished the marketing site for Ekawada (at least, the first draft of it), plugged the last of the memory leaks reported by the Instruments tool, created some app icons that I finally felt did the app justice, and…and… YES...
Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 4
For many people, string figures are games that they learned as children, and haven’t touched since. The years are rarely kind to memory, so what this means is there are a lot of people who remember doing figures, but can’t remember wha...
Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 3
String figure books are great resources, but they can be incredibly frustrating, too. Even if you’ve never tried to use one, it’s not hard to imagine having a string looped around your fingers, trying to hold the book open with your kn...
Design Forces in Ekawada, Part 2
In my previous post, I talked a bit about one of the “forces” that influenced the design of Ekawada, my as-yet-unreleased string figure catalog app for iOS. In this post, I want to talk about another of the forces that affected the app......
A look inside Ekawada’s design
Around the time I was thinking of doing a native iOS app for cataloging string figures, my co-worker (and master designer) Ryan Singer posted this article and video about “designing with forces”. My take-away from it was that you don
