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Energy conservation through guilt
The other day I received a letter from SDGE, my local power company giving me a run down of my electric and natural gas usage compared to 100 of my neighbors with similar house sizes. We aren't the most efficient, but we aren't the least efficient, either. Of course, there were tips in there on how to reduce consumption, but the letter is quite clever in making people a bit competitive to encourage them to conserve more.
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MovieConverter available on the App Store
I'm pleased to announce that my MovieConverter app is now available on the iOS App Store. The app is designed for iPad users that want to import and edit video that was taken with a compact digital camera in iMovie.
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Are there tricks to interviewing to get good candidates?
Last week I had a discussion with some of my colleagues about interviewing. As they have come from a computer science background, their questions consisted of things like showing how a linked list works, how to do bitwise operations, etc. I actually struggle with these questions as I don't have a computer science background, I haven't been in college for 16 years, and I pretty much haven't touched this type of code in years since I've been doing Objective-C development. So do these questions help find solid candidates? I have no idea.
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Another Lion change wreaking havoc
One common practice when subclassing a class is to use an application specific prefix so that if Apple adds a similar class in the future, it doesn't conflict. For ReceiptWallet, I always used RW. One of the classes I subclassed was NSTextView so that I could draw text in gray when no text is entered. This is similar to NSTextFieldCell's setPlaceHolderString method. I named my member variable placeHolderString and added a property. The code worked fine on Snow Leopard, but when it was run on Lion, we had reports that the placeholder text was drawn twice and blurry.