andyvanee

Well, today was my last day at Guru Digital Arts College. It’s been an amazing six months! I had a great feeling about the school from the day I walked in for a tour, and they didn’t disappoint. ...

Small, single-purpose utility applications have a long lineage in computing history. They are the cornerstone of the UNIX philosophy, and are rampant on mobile platforms. They are the small building blocks in a larger task. These are apps that scratch an itch. They do things that could be done in another way, but with less time and effort. ...

As a sideline to one of my bigger projects, I decided to build a little webapp that would search Twitter for a hashtag. Fairly basic, but it’s got a few interesting little features: ...

I keep discovering new uses for Automator. I’m not sure when the “Services” option became available, but it’s worth checking out. I had previously wrote a text-to-markdown action, which converted the clipboard contents from markdown to HTML. This was convenient, but it involved copying, running the app and then pasting. The script did this: pbpaste | Markdown.pl | pbcopy ...

I am a Quartz Composer junky. I love tinkering with ideas and hacking together logic gates within this kind of visual programming environment. I think this it’s the best way to teach core CS techniques that are often obscured in text-based code. Things like logic gates, the value of modularity, and application structure start to really make sense when you lay them out visually. It’s like a UML diagram that functions and evaluates in real-time. ...

I’m a command-line guy at heart when it comes to programming. It seems much more organic to know what every project file is doing and how each one contributes to the whole. Which files might break things, which files are optional and which files can be refactored or optimized. ...

I’ve just picked up Gene Wolfe’s collection of short stories, “Endangered Species” for a second read. I stopped after the introduction to think about it for a while. It’s that good. ...

It’s been bugging me for a while that I didn’t understand the method behind jQuery’s function chaining. So I built the smallest functional version of it. I call it aQuery (for andy, or awesome). ...

Developing native apps is a pain. Yes, you have the luxury of fixed screen dimensions and access to hardware features that may not be available elsewhere, but when you’re done, you have an app that only works on one platform. ...

School has started and I’ve been very busy with projects, but haven’t had time to write. And in fact there’s not a lot to write about. Sure, I’ve been working on a lot of cool stuff, but the big picture hasn’t come into focus. ...