A couple months ago, the thought of updating it crossed my mind and although I designed a few mockups in Photoshop, I never got around to sitting down and developing it. One of the earlier ideas I toyed around with was this one:

Please excuse the silly copy. It was a late night when I made this one.

Eventually I fell out of love with it and designed the following one which is the design that made it into the final product.

It's simple

The final design was very much influenced by two key frameworks/libraries which drive the site. For the layout and CSS, I used the 1140px Grid and for content management, I used Stacey.

The 1140px Grid is a fantastic CSS framework for creating a website that can adapt itself for different devices (as long as you keep this in mind during the design). If you visit the site and resize the window to a shorter width you can see the framework in action as the site adapts for the shorter width.

This allows for a more friendlier layout when viewing it on a mobile device. The CSS framework also allows for the use of higher resolution images for devices which have a high density display. (eg. the iPhone 4)

Screenshot of portfolio viewed on an iPhone 4

In regards to Stacey, the CMS I used, it’s really great for portfolio situations. As is described on its site, it’s also very lean since it does not require a database. However, it still supports RSS feeds and editing content is a pleasure as each project ended up being contained in its own folder with all the content contained in one text file. With no database involved, I’m able to make updates to my portfolio locally and when ready, push up all my changes with git with ease (using this method).

I went a bit experimental with some of the aesthetic implementations, like choosing to use CSS3 stylings for the About and Contact buttons. They look great in Firefox and Chrome but not as intended in IE 8, and definitely not IE 7. In IE 6 the site blows up. I made the decision not to support IE 6 like with most of the other recent sites I developed as the marketshare is no longer significant. Plus it’s 2011, if you’re still using IE 6, you’re three versions behind. Even Microsoft doesn’t want you using it anymore.

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The Rumors

When I first heard that RIM was going to release an SDK for their BBM platform, I got kind of excited. Within my group of friends, about half of them use Blackberries and they’re always “BBMing” each other. Apple fanblogs and alike also seemed to share the same sentiments, hopeful that the release of an SDK could at least mean that third-party developers could create cross-platform apps for BBM.

The SDK

The Blackberry Dev Environment. Uses the Eclipse IDE and a simulator of your choice.

A couple weeks ago, RIM released the SDK on its developers portal but cautioned that only an interface for Java was provided. Still, upon seeing this my initial thoughts went, “that’s no problem, I could probably run an instance of Java on my server and have my iPhone communicate through that.” Well, after downloading it and reading the documentation, the SDK they released is only intended for the creation of Blackberry apps to build upon the BBM platform (as you can see with their bundled simulator in the screenshot above). For example, you could create a chess game where moves are sent via BBM to get parsed by your app which would reflect the move in your game. Not exactly what a lot of us were thinking.

How About Reverse Engineering the Protocol?

Before rumors of an SDK surfaced, I pondered the idea of reverse engineering BBM. After some googling, some other people on random forums also have come across the idea but it’s quite unrealistic for the following reasons:

• It’s probably illegal
• Messages sent by BBM have to pass through RIM’s internal servers
• Each Blackberry has a unique PIN which identifies itself on RIM’s servers

I’d also guess that each message that gets packaged up to go through RIM’s servers gets encrypted in some way. Reverse engineering an encryption scheme alone could be a lifelong task.

It Doesn’t Make Sense for RIM to Open it Up

After coming to terms with the limitations of their SDK, it made me realize that it’s probably not in RIMs best interest to open up their BBM platform for other devices other than their own. BBM is a huge feature that draws a lot of people to use their products, and they even advertise the heck out of it.

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• iPhone Specific Favicon
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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.

A Functional Prototype Goes A Long Way

This summer, I decided to try my hand at iPhone app development. An opportunity arose when we were playing around with the idea to make a more friendlier website to look up bus times. Although creating a website could have been translated into a mobile version, I thought it would be fun to experiment and see if I could come up with a native iPhone app.

I spent a couple many hours delving into Objective-C. I had some basic experience working with C++ in a 1st year computer science course at the U of C, but coming from that and mostly working with Java in other courses, I have to say that the syntax initially comes off as quirky. Eventually though, it was just another language that you get used to (although it helps if you have a background in working with C++).

After a little over a month, I had a functioning prototype. Although it had some rough spots, the prototype did what it was supposed to do by essentially doing the equivalent of filling out the Next Bus/CTrain form on the front page of the Calgary Transit website, grabbing the responding web page’s HTML, parsing it to grab the needed data and displaying it to you.

After getting in touch with the right people, I was able to demo the prototype to some employees of Calgary Transit and the City of Calgary. At the time, a public feed of Calgary Transit’s bus times data was not available and the methods in which I got the data for the prototype went against the terms of service on Calgary Transit’s website. Thankfully after meeting with them and waiting it out, Calgary Transit finally exported their data in the Google Transit Feed Specification which we were able to use legitimately in an iPhone application.

A Re-do

Although we could have easily just changed the methods in the application on how it grabbed the data to the new stuff, Leigh and Bryan proposed some fantastic redesigns which made the app look much more polished.

I too decided to re-do things by rewriting the entire application. The prototype was mostly mashed up pieces of sample code I found from Apple’s developer resources and other various iPhone tutorial sites. I started with a new direction, leveraging the Three20 framework — the same framework which powers Facebook’s iPhone app.

By basing the app on the Three20 framework, I was able to utilize some neat features such as:

• An inline browser (so that clicking on a link in the twitter feed wouldn’t kick you out of the app)
• URL based navigation (this feature made transitioning between controllers feel more like a webapp — even allowing you to pass parameters in the URL)
• A global stylesheet (you’re able to define styles such as colours and fonts in one file, much like the way CSS works)
• A JSON library (parsing JSON for the twitter feed and bus times was made easier because of this)

Current Status

As of this post, the app has already been submitted and is going through Apple’s app review process. In the version which we submitted, you will be able to:

• Look up upcoming bus/train times using the 4-digit stop number
• See the last 5 recent tweets from Calgary Transit’s twitter account (makes it easy to see delays, especially in the recent snowy weather we’ve gotten these past two days)
• Add a stop to your favourites
• Rename a favourited stop
• Reorder your list of favourite stops

Based on other developer’s experiences, our app should be hitting the app store in about a week now. If you’d like to be notified via email as soon as it shows up, sign up on our mailing list at http://calgarytransitschedule.com.

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• iPhone Specific Favicon
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Besides the new theme, I’ve been working a new job at Mediumrare as a web developer. Mediumrare is a new startup in Calgary that provides web design and development services as well as some print work on the side. It was partially started up by some of my friends I met through Critical Mass and when I was out looking for some full time work over the summer, I was glad to join a company with old friends.

Since joining, I have taken on a lot more responsibilities than just a web developer. It wasn’t too hard to adjust working with such a small team since I had my roots in freelancing. Besides filling a web developer role, I’ve done quite a few tasks in regards to server administration which was a welcome challenge.

Beyond that, I’ve also gotten involved in some other interesting application development projects — namely iPhone app development which I hope to blog about later on when production nears finalization.

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One fond memory I had when I was using dial-up many years ago was when I tried to download the brand new demo of Mortal Kombat II. It was 30mb and Netscape calculated that it would take about 2 hours to download. I was real hyped to try it out for some reason so I sat there waiting. I even intervened when I saw that my mom was going to pick up the phone with the worry that it might ruin the connection. Alas, the download died 45 minutes in. I still wanted to try out that demo so I proceeded to download it again and was successful the second time after letting it download overnight.

What memories do you have of using dial-up?

Public Directory

On the application’s discussion boards, there were threads upon threads of people sharing their friend codes for different games. These threads extended to multiple pages and it was clear that some sort of area on the site should host your numbers publicly beyond your friends on Facebook. I also paired this up with Facebook’s messaging system to make it easier to share numbers. I recorded a screencast which outlines how the Public Directory works and it’s the best way to grasp how it works:

Searching the Public Directory

Shortly after releasing the Public Directory, the listings became crowded and I made it possible to search up random people based on a game they own.

What’s Next?

The Public Directory is gaining more and more entries and I’m thinking of setting up a top 10 list of sorts to show what games are popular and find people based on that game. Just a few days ago I also emailed Nintendo asking if there were any APIs I could use for my application such as online statuses, etc. but it turns out they do not endorse these sort of “sharing sites” and did not wish to help me.

Anyways, if you’d like to keep up with the progress and updates for the app, subscribe to the blog I set up just for it: http://wiifacebookapp.wordpress.com/

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Taking a page out of Kevin Rose’s samples, I made my own and have gotten some funny results just messing around with it: Listen to the multiple ways you can leave me a message (.wav).

I’m planning on building a “carputer“. The interior of the Scion tC makes this easy as the head unit is a double din which will probably hopefully allow a 7″ touchscreen LCD along with computer parts behind it to fit:

Over the weekend I did some research into what building such a thing would require and I’ve already got most of it laid down. I want it to be running Linux rather than Windows as I’ve seen in some people’s setups as Windows is a little too bloaty for me. I’ve actually already settled on a “distro” if you will and that is LinuxICE (Linux In Car Entertainment). Although it’s still in its very early stages, I feel I can contribute to this project and hopefully inject some more life into it. The other distro I came across was Moblin, and although it’s backed by Intel, I didn’t see it as something I could easily jump into like LinuxICE.

Project Goals

My immediate goals for my carputer is that it should hopefully be able to perform the following:

• Play music from hard drive, CD, and possibly iPod via proprietary iPod cable or aux cable
• Play video from hard drive, possibly DVD
• Share music folder on home network so songs could be transferred while car is in garage via wi-fi

I also have some other goals which are pretty ambitious and difficult — but if I were able to pull these off, I might as well paint my car black and get a vanity plate that says KITT.

• Connect to my cellphone when in range via bluetooth and intercept calls so that I could enjoy handsfree calling while in the car
• GPS
• Car monitoring via Carman
• Backup camera which will activate when transmission changes to reverse
• Be able to utilize steering wheel controls for music selection

Progress

I’ve already jumped into skinning LinuxICE to better fit my car. Personally I wasn’t a big fan of the default skin:

So I tried borrowing design elements from the official Scion website and incorporate it into my skin:

Obviously I’m still early on in this project and I have plenty of elements left to skin and custom scripts/programs to develop. If you have done any similar projects or can input on stuff that’s already been developed to help my cause, please let me know by commenting

There were positive and negative experiences I had during my vacation though so here are a few things you can expect on the off-chance you’re a Calgarian looking to vacation somewhere in California.

Here are the positives:

• Nice weather all year round: The constantly warm weather is something to savour during your stay. Seldomly do we have strings of days with such nice weather in Calgary without random rain, hail or snow popping out of nowhere.
  
  A beautiful sunset at the bay of Newport Beach
• With warm weather comes great benefits:
  • Better roads
  • Lower chance of rusting on cars.
  • Higher speed limits since roads will rarely be slippery due to snow/ice
  • No potholes/road construction is very rare
  • Not worrying about what you should wear today
  • Not having to shovel the walk because there are no snowfalls
• Refreshing landscape: While in California, I attended my cousin’s wedding reception on a yacht at Newport Beach. It was a very refreshing experience as I’ve been used to seeing plains, mountains and city landscape within Calgary and rural Alberta.
  
  A panorama of the bay at Newport Beach

  
  Alberta Plains

  
  (View from Banff, Alberta) Rocky Mountains (ok, I’ll admit the mountains are nice)

• Abundance of arcades: If you’re from Calgary and enjoy spending time at arcades, you probably shared in the sorrow of the closing of the Eau Claire arcade (the last dedicated arcade in the city). There are plenty to be found in California and you can find some pretty awesome deals like the one at Speedzone:
  
  $20 for unlimited go-kart racing at one track and unlimited gaming at the arcade for 4 hours
• Awesome places to shop: There are many good shops and malls to be found in California. A lot of them are also quite massive (one outlet mall I went to claimed to have 150 stores!). Take this panorama of the food court I shot at Ontario Mills Mall for example…it’s one of the biggest food courts I’ve seen!
  
  You should’ve seen the 150 store outlet mall
• Plenty of attactions: In Calgary, we get the Stampede once a year. In Southern California, you can choose from popular attractions like Disneyland and Universal Studios all year round:
  
  Universal Studios Red Carpet

  
  Some of the neat effects displayed on the Universal Studios tour

And now for some of the negative things…

• Smog: I never realized how clean Calgary’s air was until I made an observation one afternoon while trying to look for a skyline from my cousin’s backyard. The air is smoggy and distant landscape unfortunately fades away in the smog.
• Earthquakes: I stayed with my relatives in Chino Hills and on July 29th a 5.4 magnitude earthquake occurred with Chino Hills being the epicentre. I was at Universal Studios at the time and did not feel anything, but according to everyone at the house, it was shaky and a little bit terrifying. Apparently it was a long time coming so seldom earthquakes aren’t enough to turn me off from moving there
• Free luggage carts: When departing, the use of luggage carts at the Calgary airport were free to use. If you land in LAX, you’ll have to fork out $3.00 to use one:
  
• The Airport: Despite mentioning the pay-for luggage carts in the previous point, the airport (LAX) deserved a section for itself. First and foremost, that airport is poorly designed. For example, when we were going through the departure process, we had to get our luggage x-rayed — this was not a problem. However, when it came time to put our luggage through the x-ray machine, it was located right in front of an entrance. I did not take a picture of how badly this was laid out, but you will see the frustrations experienced by both travellers and staff with my illustration below:
  
  The party coming from the entrance was much larger than illustrated, and yes, our paths did cross.
  People also walked up to the staff member trying to immediately get their luggage x-rayed without realizing there was a lineup.

  Once we got our luggage x-rayed, we then had to travel to our gate. But first, were the lineups to the screening process. I think this would be best depicted in a comic strip:

  
  Believe it or not this is not exaggerated. Click above to view full size.

Although I could say some things about the screening process, it wasn’t very much different than what you’d experience at the Calgary airport so I can’t nitpick much about it.

What interesting travel experiences have you had?

Along with recent events, I thought it would be fun to reminisce what it was like to make the jump from an amateur freelance developer and work for a leading company in the industry.

The Interview

Last summer, I was forced to take a break from school due to some poor grades. It was a bit of a depressing time for me, but I thought I would try finding a job for the summer. I browsed through some job listings online and saw an opening for a web developer at Critical Mass. I heard of this company before through Bram and decided to go for it. I felt I stood a chance and was later called up and had a mini-interview…which actually didn’t go so well. I was asked questions such as, “Do you know javascript?” and I responded with a shameful “No.”

Despite the mini-interview over the phone, I was granted a formal interview from Jonathan and Geoff. It was an interesting interview where I was put on the spotlight with some very technical questions but apparently I managed to push through and was granted the job. It was a very satisfying feeling being granted a job with this company that had such high profile clients, but that was only the beginning.

Learning the Ropes

The first few days, I went through an orientation process and went on a tour through the Calgary office. It was beyond my expectations; I can’t believe I got to work in an office which had it’s own massage parlor, hair salon, games room (technically there are two), and bistro!

Once the orientation was over, it took a while to get started on working on stuff for a client, but once it did, it got intense.

Although I often got lost in the beginning (both around the office and in my work), the great thing about working at Critical Mass was that everyone around you was knowledgeable and willing to lend a helping hand. It became really important to ask around for help because I was thrown into a process which was very foreign to me. I was fortunate to sit near Ryan who acted as a very good mentor for the process which I had to follow.

The Days of FTP Upon Completion of Work Is Over

Back in the day when I finished updates to a page, I’d upload the changes to the server and be done with it. Not so in a big company where multiple developers can be working on different updates at any given time. It was here, I was introduced to Code Management and Quality Assurance.

Based on what I’ve heard, most other web developers at the company follow a similar process where there are three levels we must pass before our code changes are actually reflected on live. In ideal situation, it would work like so:

1. Developer performs requested change, tests it and ensures that it works, commits change to code repository, prepares a bill of materials to submit to a release engineer who will send it to the next level (LEVEL 1 complete)
2. Release engineer, sends it to a local testing environment where a quality assurance specialist will test the developer’s new code and ensures that the changes work as expected (LEVEL 2 complete)
3. Once LEVEL 2 passes, the release engineer sends it to another testing environment which is supposed to mimic the live server as best as possible. The quality assurance specialist will test it once again (LEVEL 3 complete)
4. The final step will be for the release engineer to publish the changes on the live server and have the quality assurance specialist test it one last time to verify the changes are working as expected (PROCESS COMPLETE)

If you’re used to just publishing your changes right away to the live server once you’re finished, you can see how a process like the one outlined above can add complexity. However, it makes a lot of sense when working on a development team and is supposed to catch any mistakes resulting in the best quality possible. This process, although meticulous, is something that will stick with me for as long as I develop and I appreciate that I worked at a large company to learn it.

Performing To Your Potential And Pushing The Envelope

I’ve been known primarily as a front-end developer prior to working at Critical Mass, but I soon learned that it wasn’t enough. On the particular account (refers to a client-based team) that I worked for, the only developers assigned on it ended up being me with another web developer. Fortunately the other web developer, Michael, had a lot of experience with programming so it was only a matter of weeks before I started working to expectations where some back-end stuff needed to be programmed.

Looking back, it’s pretty amazing how much I’ve learned in the span of a year while working there:

• Javascript
• ASP / VBScript
• SQL
• OO Programming
• XSL
• How keep your web applications secure

I was just a tiny bit familiar in javascript and OO programming before working at Critical Mass, but the great thing about working there was that now I had the ability to apply it in real world applications. Especially with OO programming, it’s not necessary…but it’s good practice and you learn that it’s benefits (especially with code management) end up making your life easier.

The workplace is also a thriving development environment. When a lot of brilliant minds are working together, I got to see a lot of innovation up close (both for work and non-work related projects) and along with the Beercamps run every first Friday, Critical Mass has been one of the best learning environments I’ve had the privilege of working in.

The Work Can Be Difficult But…

It’s a fact that in this industry that “emergency” deadlines can suddenly be imposed and then you find yourself working a string of late nights any given week. Usually I’ve found that the project managers I’ve been with were pretty good at preventing that stuff from happening…but it does happen. Fortunately, Critical Mass throws some of the most insane parties I’ve ever experienced. Take a look at the photos below from the last Summer Event – I went to this party during the first week of the job. I didn’t realize that a strong liver was a job requirement

I’m A Freelancer, Should I Try Working For A Company?

If you’re a freelancer and haven’t experienced working at a large company, I highly recommend that you give it a try. The biggest thing you can gain is the amount of knowledge you learn from such an environment. As I’ve mentioned, it’s pretty amazing looking back on all I’ve learnt since working there since you’re placed in a slew of different types of projects and situations. It also goes hand in hand that when you work with talented co-workers, you’re going to add some awesome people to your network

Related Post

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• Next Stop: An iPhone App for Calgary Transit
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