Thoughtback, get your thoughts back.

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Randall


This past weekend I went to an event called Startup Weekend Lansing. Basically, you take a bunch of people with ideas and a bunch of people with the skills to build those ideas and put them all in a room for a weekend. The result of that was several startups.

The result of my weekend? Thoughtback.

Thoughtback is a personal idea saving/reminding service. Basically, we built an app around the idea that lots of people try to keep track of their thoughts and ideas, but very few ever get to revisit them. So what thoughtback will do is take your thoughts, then at some later time, send you an email with one of those thoughts so you can revisit the idea.

The service is a webapp, iPhone app, and Mac OSX app. How did we do it in just one weekend?

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How to use a high res application icon on the iPhone 4

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Randall

One of the iPhone 4’s coolest feature is the retina display. It is just so much more clear and crisp than any other screen I’ve ever seen. The clarity of the screen makes it extra important for you to use a high res icon for your app. Doing that is a little trickier than I expected.

If you saw my earlier post on how to use high res images in your app, you might expect the app icon to be the same. Unfortunately it isn’t, at least not exactly. At first, I just put in the high res icon. That seemed fine. Everything looked good and all was well. Until I submitted it to the app store. Upon submission, I got an error saying that I needed to provide an icon that was 57×57 pixels. That low resolution doesn’t look so great on the iPhone 4.

So I did what I did for my other images. I created a 57×57 icon file called appicon.png and a 114×114 icon file called appicon@2x.png thinking that it would automatically load the high res icon on the iPhone 4. This was not the case, it only loaded the low res version.

Here’s how I got it working.

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How to take advantage of the iPhone 4 retina display

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Randall

The “retina display” on the iPhone 4 is really awesome. Icons and photos are sharper than any screen I’ve ever seen. Obviously, I would want to take advantage of this in my own app. How did I go about doing that you ask?

On the iPhone, one way to create UIImages is like this:


[UIImage imageNamed:@"compassGreen.png"];

It’s very simple and easy. Now how do you take advantage of the retina display?

Just make your image twice as big as the control.

Thats it? Yes, that is it, sort of. What if your designer doesn’t trust the cocoa touch scaling algorithm? How do you load a different icon for the older iPhones?

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Why is my iPhone app still showing the location services arrow?

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Randall

I’m working on an app that tracks your location. Thanks to Apple and the new APIs in the iOS 4 SDK its actually pretty easy. You fiddle with some accuracy settings, set a delegate and BLAM, you start getting update callbacks with your current location. To get it to work in the background, all you need to do is put a key in your app’s plist.

The class that does the monitoring is CLLocationManager. CLLocationManager has 2 main ways to monitor your location. You can tell it to startUpdatingLocation and the more battery friendly startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges. Me being the curious guy I am, I decide to give both a try. After not seeing results, and reading the documentation (significant changes means it happens when you change cell towers), I decided to go with the first option.

Things went great after that, my app development went along smoothly except for one thing. The arrow that tells you location services are enabled would NOT go away. The only way I could get it to go away was to disable location services for the app. How did I get rid of the arrow you ask? Here’s how.

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Minecraft World Syncing With Dropbox

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Randall

Recently I’ve been dabbling in the wondrous world of Minecraft. If you haven’t heard of it, it is the awesome game created by Markus “Notch” Persson. Its really incredible what this one guy did in a pretty short amount of time. The game is fun and incredibly deep and complicated. I have also read that he makes something like 300,000 dollars a day off of it.

Anyway, what is cool about Minecraft is that you can build up your own virtual world. What stinks is, building that world takes a long time. I’ve been playing the game at home a lot but also play it at work during lunch sometimes. Starting off a new world wasn’t a prospect I was looking forward to. So what did I do? I set up my games to sync my world with Dropbox. This lets me build up my awesome pyramid at home as well as at work.

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How Did I Get Here?: The Ascent of an Unlikely CEO – A Review

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Randall

I just finished How Did I Get Here?: The Ascent of an Unlikely CEO which is Tony Hawk’s story about how his skateboarding career turned into him leading a multimillion dollar company.

The book is an easy read and very short. (The book finished when my Kindle iPad app said it was only 67% done) I cranked through it in a few days reading a little bit each night.  It is an interesting mix of stories, stream of consciousness, and even raw tweets from @tonyhawk.

What I liked best about the book was Tony’s attitude. Not only did he start a bunch of companies and make a bunch of money, but he did it while helping people on the way and staying pretty true to his roots. I was surprised at how many times he started a company, event, or film just to have it lose money, but he kept it alive out of his own pocket because he believed in it. Those decisions may have come back to bite him a few times, but he had so many great successes that all the failures seem worth it.

I was also surprised about how humble he is. (The last 30% of the book was giving credit to other people). He always made it seem like it was luck and the help of other people that got him where he is, not his own skill and instincts.

If you’re at all interested in the life of Tony Hawk, or even how people can make so much money in the action sports industry, I suggest giving it a read.

Amazon Link

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Natural Time Conversion

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Randall

Its Saturday, 2:00 PM and my Michigan Wolverines are have a football game at 3:30PM. I’m rushing to get out of the house and on my way to Ann Arbor. My girlfriend asks me, “how long before the game starts?”

There are lots of answers to that question. 90 minutes, 1 hour and 30 minutes, an hour and a half, etc. The last one is probably the most natural for a human to say.

So how do you convert a time you get from a computer into a natural spoken amount of time?
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QDoba vs. Chipotle vs. Panchero’s

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Randall


A recent trend in fast food is to make things fresher, bigger, and better. These three restaurants are leading the way in the fast casual burrito market. So which one is the best?

Chipotle: Excellent burritos.

QDoba: Queso sauce.

Panchero’s: Fresh tortillas.

See who wins, after the break.

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Best use for Vibram FiveFingers

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Randall

A few months ago, I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers. They’re these cool (well I think so) shoes that are meant to make it seem like you’re walking around barefoot. According to Wikipedia they were originally made for sailing and climbing. They’ve since become pretty popular with runners and, where I work, computer programmers.

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What is FARP?

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Randall

What does Google think FARP is?

The Fantasy Art Resource Project: Its a bunch of tutorials on how to draw elves. Awesome?

Forward Arming Refueling Point: a space on the battlefield designated for the re-arming and re-fueling of aircraft.

Fred and Randall Productions (thats me!)

Farp’s Noodle Hut: Looks like an inactive blog.

Urban Dictionary has some interesting definitions. The most popular seems to be “when someone burps and farts at the same time.”

A javascript function arguments processor: so that’s why I couldn’t get the FARP project name on sourceforge.

The mascot for a sci-fi convention in the Baltimore area.

And an Italian computer store. I’m surprised this is so low since its www.farp.com

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