Fingertips

The iPad is great for customer surveys, questionnaires and other promotional use

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:57:50 +0100

Last week during the Auto Zürich Car Show, hostesses from Volvo used an iPad app we made to sign up visitors interested in driving the new C30 Electric free for a year.

Thanks to Javier Vázquez for snapping these pictures.

The iPad has proved very effective for these kind of promotions, not only since it’s so friendly and easy to use, but first and foremost because it’s just plain fun.

One thing we hear over and over is that it’s much easier to keep people engaged when using the iPad. With more traditional methods, respondents often get distracted while they wait for their answers to be written down or entered into a laptop.

Another benefit of the iPad is that its form factor invites sharing. This allows respondents to get more actively involved, either because the large display makes it easy for them to see what’s going on, or because it’s natural to hand the iPad back and forth so that they can enter their own answers.

In only a few days, we built the iPad app for this promotion and distributed it internally to Volvo’s iPads in Switzerland using the Ad Hoc method. The app saves its data locally and submits it in the background to the website for this promotion whenever a network connection is available.

Interested in an iPad app and/or website like this for your own promotional activities? Get in touch.

Using Amiok to quickly check if configured sites on a shared Apache server respond properly

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:50:04 +0100

Every time I make a change on a shared host I get a weird sense of doom. I know that it might break something in one of the 50 sites on that box. Usually all is well, but sometimes you get a desperate call from a client.

We have automated test in all of our projects so why not for our servers? All high profile sites have managed hosting, site monitoring, and other goodness. It's the little sites that get the wrong end of the monkey. In the face.

I wrote a little tool called ‘amiok’. Amiok checks the sanity of the sites in the Apache virtual host configuration. It does a GET on the root of all the configured sites. If they return a sensible status code we know they're probably fine. All the other sites are reported.

$ gem install amiok
$ amiok
....................
example1.fngtps.com     Internal Server Error
example2.fngtps.com     Can't find server

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Eloy will be speaking at SecondConf 2011

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:39:55 +0200

This September I will be attending SecondConf in Chicago where I’ll be speaking about MacRuby. The talk will be on how it works, its current state, and its use cases.

If you are in the area and would like to meet, then don’t hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, as with all good conferences, I’ll be at the pre-conference party with bells on. And be sure to ask me for madeprogress stickers!

Appsterdam Guru Session: Test Driven Development

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 06:53:01 +0200

Yesterday Eloy hosted the first Appsterdam Guru Session about Test Driven Development for Objective-C using MacRuby.

Thanks to Marga Keuvelaar of Obvious Matters for snapping the picture on the right.

If you want to try the exercises in your own time, you can find them in the TDD-workshop repository on GitHub.

Here’s also a short video with some highlights from the session:

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Thanks to Matt Feigal for his hard work organizing the event and SourceTAG for the venue.

How to prevent jagged edges when using CSS transformations in Mobile Safari

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:28:24 +0200

On the iPad and iPhone, using CSS transformations in Mobile Safari often results in elements with ugly jagged or stair stepped edges.

In most cases it’s easy to get nice anti-aliased edges by wrapping whatever you want to transform in an additional element that adds a few pixels padding:

<style>
#wrapper {
  -webkit-transform: rotateZ(5deg);
  -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
  padding: 2px;
}
</style>

<div id="wrapper"><img src="appie.jpg"></div>

Note that this technique doesn’t work when -webkit-backface-visibility is set to visible (which is the default).

Our Appie with and without jaggies.

Here’s a demo page in case you want to see for yourself (only shows jagged edges on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch).

RubyKaigi 2011

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:29:40 +0200

Two years ago Eloy and I attended RubyKaigi for the first time. The long trip to Japan kept us away last year, but this year RubyKaigi was organized for the last time and we were a gold sponsor, so we just had to go!

Eloy on stage (photo by Florian Hanke)

Eloy gave a lightning talk together with fellow MacRuby committer Vincent Isambart where they showed how you can write a Mac application on the fly using Interactive MacRuby. They even managed to squeeze in some details about their presentation tool which was written using the MacRuby Graphics library.

A big thank you to the RubyKaigi organizers for putting up another great event. We hope the conference will continue to live on in some other form.