For a 45 minute train that they planned to run 1.5 hours late, they told everyone it was:
“On Time”
…until 60 seconds after leaving the station.
The train was sat there for 15 minutes beforehand, with no announcement. Instead, they waited for the earliest moment when no-one could leave or seek alternative routes.
Now, that’s what I call Customer Service ;)
…and the last working version of Parse.com’s SDK isn’t listed on their website any more.
So … if you see this (which you probably will, on any non-trivial project):
Undefined symbols for architecture i386:
“_FBTokenInformationExpirationDateKey”, referenced from:
…then you MUST download and install the Facebook API into your iOS / Xcode project. Especially if you’re not actually using Facebook!
Parse.com for iOS is currently setup so that you CANNOT use ANY LIBRARIES AT ALL, unless you ALSO use the Facebook library. Oops.
A little bit of naive linking by the Parse.com engineers. C-linking is a PITA to get right, so I don’t blame them.
1. Facebook won’t let you download their API / library any more.
Instead you have to “install an application” on your system that spews to random places on your machine (where? Well … the app won’t tell you, but on the Facebook website they say it all goes in ~/Documents) – and you’re not allowed to change them.
Wrong place, wrong installer (shouldn’t be hard-coded, shouldn’t “hide” the location). And a pain to deal with, when all that was needed or wanted was a simple ZIP file…
2. Facebook’s latest SDK requires iOS 6 to even compile it – even if you’re not using iOS 6. No-one should be hard-coding to iOS 6, though – so I’m surprised that FB is targetting it as default. iOS 5 is the main target version of iOS for now.
3. Once you find a 6 SDK, you have to add a bunch of extra frameworks which don’t exist except on iOS 6, and set them to “Optional” in the “Project Settings > Build Phases > Link with Libraries” phase.
Details are on the FB iOS Getting Started page, although they’re pretty hard to find (they’re hidden inside a drop-down with an unrelated title).
(incidentally: the FB iOS install page has always been way too long, so I suspect someone decided to “tidy it up” by hiding 95% of it. I think a better solution would have been to remove all the cruft, and fix the install process :))
…anyway, once you get past all that, things go smoothly. NB: when I wrote this, I was on a hack-day at Facebook’s offices, and it took 30 minutes to get Parse’s API installed, because of the above problems. It would have been even longer if I’d not used Facebook in the past, and knew how to navigate their install page.
With my recent fixes to “auto-scaling” in SVGKit, I can now take in images, apply various effects, and lay them out in a grid:
…next step: get this stickers-game working…
This is very easy, but lots of people find this difficult with good reason!
Here’s a quick guide to how image-scaling is implemented with SVGKit, so you can effortlessly scale your images.
In app development, the most common thing people do with an SVG is “render it to fit a specific area on screen”. This is very wise – it’s making use of the core feature of Scalable Vector Graphics: resolution independence.
Unfortunately, achieving that aim is a lot less obvious than you would expect. Most of the SVG Spec is extremely well written, but for this aspect the authors “had a bad day”, and wrote some rubbish prose that’s not technically possible. This leads to a lot of confusion…
I’m trying to make SVGKit for iOS/Mac be 100% standards compliant, and the lack of specification in this area has made it very difficult. Worse … people using the library are often confused by simple items like “how do I make the SVG file fit into a small area on screen?”.
It’s been difficult to work through, and I’ve decided to document what I *think* the authors intended – and how I’m implementing it in our open-source library.
(from 1982. Blogged now because … the named individual who apparently came up with this scam)
(for those that haven’t been following: four years after Langdell tried to bully an award-winning iPhone game into giving him their money, using his invalid trademark to threaten legal action … the USPTO has finally started cancelling each of his trademarks. Trademark law is FUBAR: 4 years for a fraudulent(*) TM to be cancelled? Ouch.)
(*) – my opinion, but: read the case notes … he apparently committed blatant fraud to keep-alive a trademark that legally had already expired
For the last couple of months, one of our dev machines has been literally incapable of opening a simple Android project. It crashes every time, on startup, while displaying the Eclipse logo:
Re-installing everything had no effect. We tried everything, and the only thing that worked reliably was to keep deleting the project and re-synching from SVN every time we wanted to start Eclipse
Today I finally discovered the cause: Mylyn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_Experiment
(unsubstantiated, but hilarious): “If the measurement is close enough to the surface, light rays can curve downward at a rate equal to the mean curvature of the Earth’s surface. In this case, the two effects of curvature and refraction cancel each other out and the Earth will appear flat in optical experiments.”
…”an increase in air temperature … of 0.11 degrees Celsius per metre of altitude would create an illusion of a flat canal, … [or if] higher than this … all optical observations would be consistent with a concave surface, a “bowl-shaped earth””
…”Ulysses Grant Morrow, … found that his target marker, eighteen inches above water level and five miles distant, was clearly visible he concluded that the Earth’s surface was concavely curved”
(the history of maps and globe representations of the Earth is full of wonderful things like this)
OMGWTFBBQ…
http://uk.ign.com/videos/2013/03/28/activision-reveals-next-gen-tech
IMHO this is one of those watersheds: for the people who still believe “I could tell” if video is fake … no, you can’t. Done properly, you really can’t.
UPDATE: and the blog from one of the guys who did it
