Nice Review in Google Play

This one made me smile:

A Google User - October 7, 2012 - Motorola Droid RAZR with version 1.3.3

Brilliant!!!!

Andy, you are a frigging GENIUS! And thanks very much for providing this great tool for free! I mean there are apps that are absolute crap and I've paid for them only to delete them later. Just the calculator and graphing parts of this app beats the pants off of everything I've tried so far which is over 25 apps. And I know what I'm talking about. I use a TI-Nspire and a TI-89 Titanium. I just can't believe that I finally found this great app for my phone. :) Thanks again and all the best

Calculus Tools on Google Play

Profile Link on stackoverflow

So I've been working on trying to get my stackoverflow account up to 2000 reputation in order to get the dofollow profile link on my account.  I've made it to ~750 so far, and it's a real pain.  That's probably about 10 hours on the site, or 70 reputation/hour.  On the bright side, it has accomplished something else.  My account on stackoverflow has floated up to the 6th Google result for my name by virtue of having so many pages across the site I've contributed to linked to it.  Before this, I had ~100 rep and the result was no where to be found. This in some ways makes having a nofollow link before there a pointless endeavor.  If my account page couldn't make it into decent results for my name, what possible weight could it be passing along to my personal link?  However, it does make the reward for reaching 2k rep even better because in the process you've littered links to your profile all around the site--boosting the status of your account page and thus the link you've earned.

9-Patch on iOS

9-Patches are pretty common for Android Developers.  Furthermore, they're absolute essential for making graphics on the platform.  A while back to save designers time, TuneWiki for iOS used them for all of our stretchable assets.  Unfortunately, iOS does not have native support for it, and there's really only one library.   I used this 9-patch library for iOS with my modifications for @2x support.  I'd like to personally comment that it turned out to be a terrible idea.  The overhead for image processing we experienced slowed our app down considerably--so much so that every conversation about performance ended in "Could we please just have our artists make an extra set of images?".  Thus, we stopped using it.  The issue relies in having to extract 9 pieces from the original image, and redraw each one of them (5 pieces with modifications).  Despite me having contributed to the project, I recommend that no one consider using it.  Just demand your artists create separate images and use -[UIImage stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:topCapHeight:]

Bad App Reviews

Launched a new site the other day: Bad App Reviews.   Basically, I'm going to be cataloging all the bad app reviews for apps on Google Play.  If anyone finds it interesting, I'll probably expand to the iOS App Store as well.  So far it's provided somewhat valuable comedic value when looking up competitors :)