Now this was a pretty cool thing. 🙂

It’s fair to say that over the past years, myself and my family have managed to amass a fair amount of computer… crap. XD Headphones have broken, computers have been upgraded, LCD monitors have died, somehow we ended up with 7 keyboards, a printer older than me; the list goes on. XD

It’s really hard to just throw this stuff out though. We’re a pretty environmental bunch in my house (at least, I like to think we are) and we’re all well aware of what happens if this stuff hits landfill. So we’ve been hanging onto this stuff, and while sometimes Perth does have eWaste drives, I haven’t seen one in over year.

Not wanting to REALLY have to pay to have this stuff recycled, I checked out Apple’s recycling program to see if there was anything they’d be able to do. And ‘lo and behold, they did. 😀

Turns out Apple’s policy towards recycling changes on a per-region basis, but here’s how it goes down in Australia. If you purchase a new Mac from Apple, within 3 months of that purchase, you are eligible to have any of your old computer hardware recycled for absolutely free! And funnily enough, I recently made such a purchase. XD

Anyway, the process was really simple. After providing my new Mac’s serial number (just to prove I really do have one XD), all I had to do is fill out a form on the Recycling Program page that outlined all of the hardware that I wanted to dispose of.

About a day later, I was contacted by telephone by an Apple employee to confirm the best pickup time. After agreeing to Wednesday, all I had to do was place all of the hardware on my front porch and that was it! When I got home tonight, the hardware had been picked up; no fuss no muss!

Either way, I’m really happy about this. Proper eWaste disposal facilities are still near and far in Australia, and Apple is doing an amazing service with this program. 😀

But yeah. If you just bought a Mac, and happen to have a pile of broken technology lying around, send it to Apple! 😀

(Updated March 2015) I’ve rewritten the code for zooming to a CGPoint in a UIScrollView to be even better in a new blog post. Go check it out!

If there’s one piece of functionality that has become basically boilerplate on iOS, it’s the concept of double-tapping a zoomable UIScrollView to quickly zoom in on a given point. When I was writing the code for displaying pages in iComics, I assumed that this would be a really simple thing to do. I mean, surely all you’d need is a UITapGestureRecognizer attached to a UIScrollView that passes the location of any double-taps to the scroll view… right?

Nope. XD

Turns out that although there is a UIScrollView method called ‘zoomToRect‘ (which lets you zoom to a specific CGRect region of a UIScrollView), out-of-the-box, there is no official way to procedurally zoom into a specific CGPoint. This actually surprised me greatly since I would have thought it would be a standard part of UIKit.

In any case, I did a bit of searching around on Google, looking for some code that would let me do this easily. I found a few bits of code here and there, however they were written in such a way that unless the minimum and maximum scales of the scroll view were set up in a specific way (Uh, which in iComics’ case, they weren’t), the zooming wouldn’t work properly at all.

So, cutting to the chase, I decided to just roll my own category for UIScrollView to add that functionality to it. All it does is take a CGPoint (relative to the bounds of the scroll view itself) and a scale, and translates those to a CGRect that can then be passed to UIScrollView’s drawToRect method. 🙂

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 It’s the final day of my holidays today, and I’ve been silently beavering away on a little project of mine. As with all of my projects, I usually keep them absolutely off the internet until I’ve proven that they actually are viable, and I’m not just blowing smoke. XD

One of my reasons (if not, the main reason) for me buying an iPad was so that I would be able to read digital copies of my books, without needing to lug around their paper counterparts. In terms of being able to read eBooks as ePubs or PDFs, my iPad experience has been perfected thanks to the collective efforts of iBooks and GoodReader.

Unfortunately, up until now, when it comes to reading digital comic books on iPad, while there’s a nice selection of third-party comic readers available, for many varying reasons, I haven’t found one that I’ve been truly content with. Whether it be the way page turning is handled, or even getting the comics onto the device, I haven’t found one I’m happy to stick with.

So with that in mind, I would like to announce my next iOS app project, and I’m calling it iComics. 😀

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Whew. Sorry for the lack of no new blogs. Things have been so crazy lately. ^_^;

Anyway, it’s the last day of 2011 today!

Blimey, that was fast. I’m not kidding. Where the hell did the year go? O_o

Anyway, I think I’ve started a bit of a personal tradition here. Every New Year’s Eve, I like to make a list of all of of my personal achievements this year. Not only is this mainly so I don’t forget half of the crazy crap I’ve subjected myself to this year, but it’s also a nice way to set the benchmark on what I must do better at next year. 🙂

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So, in my last post, I added a rather cryptic photo of an Apple product I received for my birthday. Now that I’ve spent a week breaking it in,  I can write a blog about it!

It’s a shiny new MacBook Air. Core i7. 😀

Up until now, the 13″ MacBook Pro I’ve been using has been a loaner from work. And while that laptop has been absolutely fantastic, being absolutely invaluable in at work, not to mention being a great help with some of my side projects in helping further my knowledge of iOS dev, I figured that now that I’m actually starting to get requests for paid commissions, I’d be in a much better position if I bought my own hardware dedicated for that. It also means ensuring I have the proper licenses for all of the software I use is a lot easier too. ^_^;

So, after much research, and coming very close to buying a 15″ MacBook Pro, I decided to go with an Air.

Ultimately, when it came down to the tradeoff between power and physical weight, I decided that I’d rather go with a lighter laptop than a more powerful (but more heavy one) one. While the 15″ Pro is amazing, and from what I’ve seen, even runs rings around my desktop PC, I decided it was too big and too heavy for my liking. And going off the assumption that the Air would be at least as powerful as my 13″ Pro at that point, I figured it should handle everything perfectly.

And boy does it ever! 😀

If you’ve had any doubts that the MacBook Air doesn’t really stand up to the Pro series (at least the lower end), you can put them to rest. This thing is extremely snappy in pretty much every case I tried, and the graphics processor can handle running at 2560×1600 at no trouble at all.

Obviously, it isn’t as powerful as most of the Pros can potentially be (eg 8GB RAM, truly quad core CPU etc), so if you’re looking to do really intense things like edit video or play games, I might recommend the Pro. But for my kind of daily usage, which consists mainly of Photoshop design, web code,  and/or iPhone app design, this thing is perfect on all counts.

I’m still wrapping my head around Lion here. There are quite a few new features to get used to. Also, I’m still trying to figure out what other apps I need to fully deck it out. I might write another blog later… XD

Alright. Here endeth the Apple fanboy post. XD

Hahahaha… I was sort of dreading this day… in a way. But since you can’t really stop time. It’s finally here.

I’m officially a quarter of a century old. ^_^;

As I always say when I write these blogs, I feel a bit weird. I’m mid-freaking-twenties now. O_o

Anyway… as far as birthday celebrations go, this weekend could not have been more epic. It started off at an izakaya on Friday night, followed by karaoke afterwards.

Saturday was a trip to a Microsoft-sponsored Windows Phone development workshop (so… nothing but food and code for a day XD), which was epic. And Sunday (birth day actual) culminated in a JET Alumni-sponsored Aussie hanami event followed by a quiet dinner with the family at a Japanese restaurant. ^_^

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