goSammy

For one of my computer science courses this semester, I embarked on an info visualization project that required me to collect the times during the different parts of my commute by Calgary Transit. At first I was collecting all my times with the use of a stopwatch and notebook — but I was a computer science student for crying out loud! So I made an iPhone app to streamline my data collection process of these timings. In case anyone might find this code useful, I’ve open sourced it and made the code available on Github.

There’s a fan-made poster making its rounds on the internet that you might have seen. It incorporates elements from the posters of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, put together, to display the bat logo. Read more for a couple of downloadable wallpapers for your desktop and iPhone.

The last time I redesigned my portfolio was in June of 2007. A little over four years ago…that’s a long time. Since then, a lot has changed in the web sphere. There’s been a larger shift towards the mobile space, the browsers have changed, and my old portfolio was definitely showing its age.

In the past I’ve been mostly a Subversion guy when it came to version control, but recently I decided to try Git on a project. After going through an awesome intro guide to Git, I can definitely see the appeal of Git, especially when it comes to small personal projects. Inside are a few cases where I ended up scratching my head trying to clone and pull between a Mac and Windows because the support for Git on Windows isn’t as great on OSX or Linux.

For many months now, I’ve been working with the guys at Mediumrare on an iPhone app to help look up upcoming bus and train times. It’s been a long journey and we left Calgarians a little taste of what’s to come on our company blog, as well as a little demo at DemoCamp. However, last week we finally wrapped things up and submitted version 1.0 to Apple. While the app is waiting to be reviewed for approval, I thought I could give a peek into what it was like to develop my first iPhone app.

I came across an interesting presentation titled Rethinking the mobile web. It brings up points that we shouldn’t disregard other mobile devices just because the iPhone has taken North America by storm. The presentation states that globally the iPhone has <4% of market share. However, I was taken aback when I came across a map which laid out the distribution of different mobile operating systems per country when it was shown that the iPhone/iPod touch has an 86% market share in Canada.