Author: Chris

Louie Mantia on Making Opinionated Software

“Making software isn’t easy. You have to make a lot of decisions and have good strong reasoning for doing so. A lot of the decisions I make are with my gut, and revolve around my personal taste. But there’s another way to design things, and that’s “safely.”

It’s not easy either, but designing safely means designing for everyone (80%+ of the population). Often, designing safely means making decisions that don’t make you happy personally. You include a feature so that someone else will like it.”

I think Louie should take it one step further. Write Opinionated Software. Don’t write mushy middle-of-the-road swiss army knife software. Write something with a voice.

Children Should Not Be Shackled

“D.C. Public Defender Andrew Crespo remembers a 2011 case where his client, who was 8 at the time, was led into the courtroom in 2-pound restraints. The boy, who weighed about 60 pounds, sat in a chair with his feet dangling. Prosecutors said the boy allegedly touched a little girl inappropriately at his birthday party hours earlier and he was arrested for sexual assault. Before the hearing, Crespo said, his client kept whispering: “My mommy said I can still have my birthday cake. I can still have my cake, right?” Crespo recalled. The charges were later dropped.”

Jesus. This hit really close to home. My daughter is 8 and I could see her acting very similar. Haunting to imagine your own child in that situation. Maybe I should become a public defender.

The groups working to correct this overreaching and repugnant behavior are the National Juvenile Defender Center, D.C. Lawyers for Youth and the D.C. Public Defender Service.

Smart Albums for iPad Air Screenshots

A few years ago I wrote this tip on creating Smart Albums for your iPhone or iPad screenshots. I’m a big screenshot taker. I use them for keeping track of UI problems with projects I’m working on and even as a quick “note” to look into something later.

The problem is sorting the screenshots out from the rest of my 80 billion photos in my library. I use Aperture (yes, me and two other people) and created this Smart Album to sort out my screenshots from my iPad Air. You can probably adopt the logic for other devices as well.

Screen Shot 2014-08-22 at 4.04.59 PM

Basically it looks for files that match all of the following:

  • Text starts with “IMG_” – standard filename prefix for iOS device screenshots.
  • Pixel height and width is between 1,536 and 2,048 – this allows for both portrait and landscape screenshots to be returned
  • Camera Model is empty – pretty much all of my other images are photos from cameras that record their model. iOS devices do not store a value for “Camera Model” in their EXIF data.
  • File Type is other – no RAW or jpegs showing up here!

If you have suggestions or modifications, please let me know in the comments below.