Segmentation Faults.

Tumble tumble tumble. Ported my blog over for more attention.

This is Ami:

Posted 4 months ago — 3 notes

Oh Christmas, that sweet time of year when I watch TV shows and play video games with my brother. And go snowboarding with a horde of asian families.

I’ll probably be playing around with Android this break – yes, the rumors are true! I gifted the iPhone to dear mother, and I’m now the proud owner of a Nexus S. (No, not a Galaxy Nexus – I’m a not-so-proud subscriber of AT&T.) Still getting over the bliss of having everything integrated with My Google Life ™, I’ve come to realize that I might’ve traded one company’s narrow ecosystem for another’s. But at least here I have choice…right?

One thing I do know to be true – offline docs are awesome when traveling.

Posted 5 months ago

Something that bothers me a lot about certain apps on the iPhone (Gmail and Wunderlist, I’m looking at you) is the way they implement navigation.

You’ll notice this on any Apple-made app – take Settings, for example, and tap an item. The item is highlighted blue before swooshing over to the next pane. More importantly, when you hit “back” the pane swooshes back and the original highlighted item fades back to white.

The Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines even explicitly mention this:

If a row selection results in navigation to a new screen, the selected row highlights briefly as the new screen slides into place. When the user navigates back to the previous screen, the originally selected row again highlights briefly to remind the user of their earlier selection (it does not remain highlighted).

Terrible things happen when guidelines are ignored.

Obviously, it’s just lame if you don’t highlight a row when a user taps it (on tap down, not release). The user doesn’t get feedback in time and is left praying he tapped the right thing upon release.

And what happens when you don’t wait until a user goes back, to deselect a highlighted row? You lose context. However subtle it is, the impact is there. Your brain is suddenly flooded with a list of options, hopelessly alone in a sea of menu items. You didn’t go back. You got introduced to the same menu, and you’re back to square one. You’re looking around the list, getting a feel for the environment, before figuring out “what next”. It’s just not the same.

So please, app developers – all I ask is that you highlight menu items properly. It’s not that hard to implement, and a subconscious part of your users’ minds will thank you.

Posted 5 months ago

Oink, Kevin Rose’s latest project, is finally out! It’s in a space that particularly interests me, combining location / mobile with real-life recommendations so the Internet is actually, well, useful. And not just some virtual world of likes and pokes.

It’s really pretty. The mini loading animation and papery background are nice touches. It does get a little laggy after using it for a few minutes, and there’s the occasional crash – all expected with a new app like this.

Oink ultimately feels like a Twitter-esque implementation of Yelp (less persistence, more focused on new activity) with a strong tie to location. Everything is more relevant on Oink, in terms of social, time, and location. (Conveniently, there are tab views for “Popular”, “Places”, and “Live”.) What makes me really excited about Oink is how it combines features of things I use – Yelp, Foursquare, Instagram (sort of), and Twitter – without being bloated.

I can share a picture, but it’s not just to shout “hey look I have a social life.” It’s also to say “hey I’m eating a Boloco burrito” (scratch the social life…) and “I’m at Boloco” and “I like Boloco.” These are things with different meanings to different connections on the Oink social graph. My roommate might be sad I had dinner without him, someone new to Boston might see that Boloco is popular near him, and another Bostonian might be looking for a good burrito place.

Oink is pseudo-open right now – anyone can download the app and see what’s going on. However, there’s an approval process of some sort that prevents people from creating a profile immediately. You need to get approved as a “builder” – it took an hour for me, though, so it doesn’t seem too big of a deal.

(Get Oink at www.oink.com.)

Posted 6 months ago

Unity on Ubuntu 11.10 is disgusting. It doesn’t really make things prettier, adds some pretty big usability issues (autohiding launcher, shared taskbar + menubar, difficult discovery of apps from menu, etc), and as of now is devouring 40% of my 8GB RAM.

Pretty tired and disappointed, only worsened by how ugly the alternatives are. I was happy with Ubuntu classic desktop, it didn’t bother me. That’s all I asked for.

That is all.

Posted 7 months ago

Reading tech news these days, I’m surprised by the flood of steve jobs posts. I mean, put pretty bluntly, he’s dead. How can all this news be coming out now?

And then I realized that the only news is the soon-to-be-released biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (amazon). The AP seems to have obtained an advance copy of the biography, slowly publishing stand-alone articles based on the book. Looks to be a deliberate move by the publishers to create hype for the book, although it’s interesting that they released the whole thing rather than just teasers.

Anyhow, it’s a pretty rare combination of a charismatic, public-facing man who was very private yet also (apparently) had a lot to say. I’m personally looking forward to this book. If it doesn’t turn out to be something earth shattering, it’ll at least be a good drama.

And meanwhile, it’s pretty embarrassing that excerpts from a book are making it to the press as news. Something pretty unique to Jobs’ secretive life, I guess.

Posted 7 months ago

It took forever, but my blog is here! I’m pretty sure you need one of these to be cool, so, you know, I had to get one.

If all goes according to plan, check this place for my latest nuggets of wisdom. Tutorials, ramblings, sweeping absolutes on the state of technology. The usual. I’ll try to keep headlines as link-baity as possible.

(Sad thing is, I’m only half joking.)

Oh, and here’s a picture of my roommate sleeping with a dragon.

Posted 7 months ago