Color Uncovered

Hey you with the iPad! Do you like science? Do you have a kid who likes seeing cool optical illusions? If any of these are true you should check out Color Uncovered by the Exploratorium. It's a free app and it's pretty cool. There's stuff about color temperature, a fascinating article about how Monet paint's water lilies as blue because cataract surgery let him see ultraviolet light that most of us don't, and that sort of thing. There are little videos that you can watch and simple animations to explore topics like afterimages and those sorts of illusions that reveal the weird shortcuts our optical processing uses.

It's aimed at a younger audience and it's not something that takes more than an hour or so to flip through but it is well done and there were several articles that taught me things I didn't know before. And like I said, it's free so it only costs that hour of your time. Check it out!

FILDI!

Everyone knows that zeFrank is back right? It's not The Show but it's certainly A Show.

This is probably old news but if you haven't seen it yet you should certainly go watch An Invocation for Beginnings. Heck even if you have watched it's worth watching again. If you're stuck on something don't spin your wheels beating yourself up. Just watch that and I bet you'll come unstuck before the video is done …

UITableViews do not properly animate on an Airplay secondary screen

A few weeks back I ran into an interesting UITableView bug and I finally got around to writing up a test case and submitted a Radar to Apple. The test application source is on my GitHub and I've copied the radar to Open Radar.

I'm working on an app right now that has the option of driving a second screen. There are two methods of connecting such a screen: using a special dock cable to physically connect a monitor; and using Airplay to connect to an Apple TV device and using that screen.

Note that I'm not talking about mirroring the iPad display to the second display, I'm talking about having a completely different UIView on the second display. (This is confusing because iOS calls turning that on "Airplay Mirroring" although it's entirely up to the application whether it actually mirrors the main view or not.)

This second display is primarily a UITableView and it can potentially have quite a few rows to display. Also the intent is to have a screen that can be read at a distance so I use quite a large font (the current "large" size font is 36 point.) Since there's no touch UI there's no way for the user to directly scroll the secondary display but the app scrolls the second display to match a similar table on the iPad display. As the user manipulates the main display the secondary screen scrolls in unison. Well, at least it should and that right there is the bug. In my experience any UITableView method call that takes an animated: parameter does not animate on the Airplay secondary screen if animated: is set to YES. This works fine on the physical secondary screen, but not the Airplay. For example scrollToRowAtIndexPath:atScrollPosition:animated: will silently fail if you try to animate it.

There's also a workaround I have, and you can see it in the code on GitHub. Short form is this: animating the contentOffset value of the table in a GCD block via [UIView animateWithDuration:delay:options:animations:completion] works. So instead of simply scrolling to a row, I calculate a contentOffset for that row and scroll the underlying UIScrollView.

I was not able to find any references to this bug anywhere via Google so I'm not sure it's been reported before. If you want to animate a UITableView on an Airplay secondary screen you probably want to take a look at the GitHub repository.

Podcast Recommendation: Polygon's The Besties

Hey you! Do you like video games? Do you like jokes? Then you might well like The Besties podcast from Polygon. It's weekly and runs about 45 minutes or so for each episode. It sort of snuck up on me in that I enjoyed it at first but I realized this week that it's really become one of my favorite podcasts.

Here's the idea: four guys from Polygon each bring a game they want to be Game of the Week and they pitch the games to each other. After picking a winner for the week they compare it to the current "Bestie" to see if it dethrones the previous winner.

So far so good, and they do genuinely bring games that I've bought and enjoyed, but the the part that really elevates it is that the whole thing is done tongue–in–cheek. For example one of the early winners was the new SSX game and the reason they gave it the prize was that it supported racing against a previously saved ghost and therefore if your Dad had raced a game and then died you could play SSX with your dead Dad, thus keeping him alive. SSX was dethroned by Journey because Journey lets you play cooperatively online with somebody you don't know and has no voice chat so it was possible that somebody from Israel could play with somebody from Palestine and thus bring peace to the Middle East. (Journey was recently dethroned because it had two months on top and failed to deliver the promised world peace.)

So yeah, I like it. It's a good blend of game reviews and jokes. Check it out!

Tonx Coffee

My relationship with coffee has evolved over the years. Most blog readers probably associate me with carrying a big-ass vacuum thermos of coffee into work and drinking it over the course of a day. And almost never washing out my coffee mug. If that's your impression it might astonish you to hear that many days now I only have a single cup (not mug, single cup) of coffee and at most I have two cups in a day. For a while I had a Senseo (there was a post about that back on Pic-A-Day when I ran that) and nowadays I use plain old French press which just generates a cup or so. I ultimately bought a larger French press that can make three cups at once for when I have guests who want coffee but now I just make one cup, then drink one cup. Simple.

Reasons? Well the reasons are legion. I'm more caffeine sensitive now. I suspect that's a mix of drinking less coffee and getting older but it's tough to separate the two there. If you know me as that "drinking a pot from a thermos" guy you also know me as a the guy who pops Tums all days. Guess what? Less black coffee means less stomach acid. Science! Also as I wrote on the defunct photo-blog I got weirdly OCD about "if I brew a pot of coffee I drink the whole thing". Switching to the Senseo meant I brewed coffee one cup at at time so drinking the "whole thing" was no longer a deal, but it also meant I was drinking mediocre coffee. Switching to the French press meant I could make good coffee and still only make one cup at a time.

OK, swell. Now I just need coffee beans. For a while I was trekking up to Orchard Valley Coffee to buy beans but that's a whole drive and crosses the 17 traffic and can be icky at the wrong time of day. Then for quite a long time I went to the local coffee shop (Lime Tree Espresso) that sources beans from Barefoot Coffee. This was a Good System™. Problem is that the local store is pretty much a one–man shop and sometimes he is just closed unexpectedly. About three weeks ago I went one day and found out he had started closing Tuesdays at noon. I went Wednesday at 2 PM and he was just "out until 2:30". At which point I had to go buy Cthulhu–knows–how–old Peet's beans from the Safeway. Enough. It's 2012, can't I just buy good coffee beans from Amazon and have somebody ship them to my hermetically sealed house of Board Games 'n Code Development™?

Well I didn't actually check on Amazon but the answer is yes! You can get 12 ounces of quality fresh-roasted beans shipped to you every two weeks from Tonx. But don't use that link use my pyramid scheme link a bit later. It will save you $10!

I just got my second shipment from Tonx this week and opened it up today. I have to say, I'm really pleased. 12 ounces/2 weeks is at least really close to my coffee bean consumption and I like the coffee just fine. It's within a buck or so of what I was paying at the local shop and I don't have to drive out and there and hope he's open.

So there you are. If you like quality coffee I'd recommend checking out Tonx. If you want to give it a try use this link. You get $10 off your first month and I think if three people use that link I get a free T-shirt. Or something like that. Anyway it's good coffee. Check it out.