• Downsizing our house

    [This is the first post in a series of posts that I've been saving up until our house sold.]

  • Review: Charles Proxy - Useful development tool; ugly interface

    During the testing of one of my projects, our QA folks mentioned a tool called Charles Proxy that they used to throttle the connection speed down to 3G speed as some issues can only be reproduced on slow connections. I pretty much ignored the product as I wasn't assigned any bugs related to this. A few weeks later, I was assigned a bug dealing with 3G. As I really didn't want to try to reproduce the issue on a device over 3G (the iPhone simulator makes it easy to reproduce issues, but as Apple points out, there is nothing like testing on a real device), I downloaded Charles Proxy and gave it a whirl. Unfortunately the limitations in the demo quickly required me to cough up the $50. As much as I was reluctant to cough up the money for an app that doesn't look like a Mac app, it has already paid for itself.

  • Facebook app ruined design

    This past week, we launched a major update to an app where we got to start over from scratch with a new design and a completely new code base. While I never encourage a developer to read reviews on the App Store (the reviews are sometimes written by clueless people who have an axe to grind; some are legitimate gripes).

  • Review: iFrogz Luxe Original Case

    Last time I was in Portland for work, one of my co-workers had an iFrogz Luxe Original case on his iPhone 4S that he had picked up at the AT&T store during a closeout of cases. Up until then I hadn't been using a case for my iPhone. Since I run fairly often, I put my iPhone in an armband holder and having a case on it would make it hard to fit in. Furthermore, most cases are difficult to get off and I didn't want to have to go through that everyday.