May 2011
1 post
Progressive pricing strategy for iOS apps
I’m working on an iOS app which, while very immature, has caused me to think about app pricing. I have these constraints:
I believe in the “release early, release often” maxim, and that software is never finished
I believe that rewarding early-adopters, and settings realistic expectations from the start, would be a good strategy for getting early positive reviews
I believe...
April 2011
1 post
Selectively running tests with IUSpec in iOS
UISpec is a great tool for unit-testing the UI of your iOS app, but (unless you use something like Frank) you’ll be running all tests every time, and watching your console for failures.
Frank allows you to selectively run tests, but it’s driven from outside the app using Cucumber, and I needed something which runs from inside (so I can set expectations on mocks).
Announcing...
February 2011
2 posts
Dynamic window titles for GNU Screen with Bash
This is my method of enhancing the GNU Screen window titles… it relies on my interactive shell being /bin/bash.
These scripts will:
show a plain $ or # when just the shell (or root shell) is running in that window
show the name of a running command (so if you run “nice top -d 10” it will show “top”)
prepend the title with # if the user is root, or the command is...
Migrated from Wordpress to Tumblr
Hope this is more reliable.
November 2010
1 post
“Never trust a test you haven’t seen fail”
– Martin Fowler, 10th November 2010
October 2009
1 post
Useful bookmarklets for iPhone
Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a few useful bookmarklets which work great in Mobile Safari on the iPhone. I can’t take any credit for writing these, but hope to be helpful by listing them in one place.
How to install
Open this page with mobile Safari and tap-and-hold on the bookmarklet hyperlinks below. Select “Copy” when the menu appears. Then bookmark a page...
May 2009
1 post
A simple UI for ‘vpnc’
I’ve been using the Nortel branch of vpnc for a while with great success, but it’s a command-line tool, and a drag to use now that Ubuntu 9.04 is so swish. So here’s a 30-minute Python/Tkinter UI hack which wraps the vpnc and vpnc-disconnect tools. Notes:
you’ll need to edit the CONNECT and DISCONNECT command paths at the top of the file
this assumes that you, like me, use a private PIN and a...
March 2008
1 post
Fortnightly cron jobs
I’m doing regular nightly backups to rsync.net, and recently made changes to the way that backups are done. I now keep the last seven daily snapshots (labelled “d-1″ to “d-7″) and another snapshot every fortnight. But that fortnightly snapshot needed a fortnightly cron job.
Here’s the entry in my crontab:
#Mins Hours Days Months Day of the week
30 02 * * 0 ...