Riding a Twitter trend: #firstdraftmovies - an adventure in three days
Posted by alex in Making stuff people want, Twitter on July 13th, 2009
I recently got caught in a small whirlwind, and came out the other end a few days later. Much like startup life, but on a much smaller scale.
Day 0: The initial excitement
On Thursday, I start noticing some amusing #1stdraftmovielines tweets - at first in @donttrythis’s feed, then a few others. The idea is simple: Famous movie lines rewritten to what might have been a much less effective, but much funnier first draft.
1stdraftmovielines
Posted by alex in Uncategorized on July 10th, 2009
I love the #1stdraftmovielines trend, many are just hilarious.
I put together http://www.1stdraftmovielines.net/ pretty quickly - let’s see if it takes off, I would love to see which ones bubble up to the top!
UIScrollView and UIDatePicker (or UIPickerView)
I ran into a very simple problem, but a quick Google search didn’t reveal any simple (or even functional) solutions.
Simply put, trying to use a date picker or picker control inside a scroll view leads to problems: trying to scroll the picker ends up scrolling the scroll view itself.
The solution is very simple: set the UIScrollView’s “canCancelContentTouches” property to NO.
Like a lot of Apple’s documentation, this part makes sense once you already know what it means…
If the value of this property is YES and a view in the content has begun tracking a finger touching it, and if the user drags the finger enough to initiate a scroll, the view receives a touchesCancelled:withEvent: message and the scroll view handles the touch as a scroll. If the value of this property is NO, the scroll view does not scroll regardless of finger movement once the content view starts tracking.
(from the docs).
I actually understood it a lot faster by just reading the comments in UIScrollView.h.
(tested in 3.0, haven’t tried 2.2.1 yet)
LyricFind Lite beats Shazam on iPhone!
At least in Canada. #1 in free music apps, #9 in overall top free apps, #17 paid music apps. In the US, #6 free music app and #16 paid. Is this thing unstoppable?
LyricFind iPhone app already at #9 in the free Music category!
I just talked to the LyricFind guys, and after only two days in the app store, it looks like the LyricFind apps are doing great!
The free version is already at #9 in the Music category, with great reviews so far. The paid version is no slouch either, currently sitting around #54.
It’s a great app, and I’m not just saying that because it was the first iPhone app I made 
It’s simple, easy to use, it does one job, and it does it well: finding lyrics for over one million songs. Works on both iPhone and iPod Touch.
Check out LyricFind Lite (link goes to iTunes), or the ad-free version.
Edit: #4 in Canada, #9 in the US, and still climbing! I couldn’t be happier with this!
Using the Google Analytics API - getting total number of page views
Posted by alex in Google API on April 22nd, 2009
At long last, Google released the Google Analytics API. The timing couldn’t be better, since I was just trying to get to some information through screen scraping… which is never fun.
The API is pretty easy to use, and other than a typo which slowed me down way too much, it didn’t take long to write a simple PHP script to get the total number of page views across all my Analytics profiles. This is a quick tutorial for using the API for this simple purpose. Also check out the official API documentation.
The basic steps involved are:
1. Authenticate the user and get a one-time token from Google
2. Exchange the one-time token for a session token, which does not expire
3. Retrieve and parse a list of the user’s Google Analytics accounts and profiles
4. Retrieve and parse the page view count for each profile
5. Done!
The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions
Posted by alex in Making stuff people want on April 19th, 2009
This is a great presentation I found on Hacker News:
http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/the-art-science-of-seductive-interactions?type=presentation
The presentation gives some pointers on how to seduce users to explore and maybe fall in love with your app. It echoes a lot of the lessons I picked up developing Facebook apps.
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