After writing that last post, I knew it was only a matter of time until the day came. I didn’t expect it to come this quickly though.

Sadly, the day has come. Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56. Too young. Way too young.

It’s hard to actually fathom how much of an impact Steve actually had on the technology world. It probably wouldn’t be a far stretch saying that damn near everything we take for granted in personal computing could be attributed to him in some shape or form. He is truly one of the few people who actually managed to drastically shape the world.

I hold Steve as one of my main role models in pretty much everything that I do. He started Apple in his garage, and managed to take it all the way to being one of the most (if not THE) successful companies in history. He’s shown countless times that nothing is impossible. All you need do is believe in your endeavours and persevere them with a fiery passion.

There’s going to be a pretty sad air around our house for a little while. My family’s been devout Apple users since the very beginning (I’m the black sheep for owning a Windows PC), and it’s probably going to take a little while for it to sink in. At the moment, I’m regretting never going to a MacWorld or WWDC conference and seeing the man in person.

As far as Apple is concerned, I think they’re going to be alright. If there’s one thing product Steve managed to create over the past decade, it’s a company that is able to continue on, up to his level of expectations, even when the time came for him to leave. I still expect great things from Apple.

In the meantime, I’m very much looking forward to the release of his biography on the 24th. It’s going to be very interesting to read about what he was up to in these final years.

Thanks for everything Steve. There’ll never be another one like  you.

For the majority of my blog posts in the previous couple of days, my good pal Dean keeps point out to me that the SteamerCard entry (on the right of the page) is currently down. 😛

While I’m actively fixing it now, since I don’t think I’ve actually done this before, I thought I’d explain what SteamerCard is. 😀

Back in the summer of 2008, before I succumbed to buying an Xbox, I was really jealous of all of my friends who had Xbox Live! GamerCards. The whole concept of being able to embed your current gamer status as a discrete, interactive card really appealed to me for some real reason, and I was feeling sad there wasn’t much of an equivalent on the PC. That being said, considering how much I loved Steam, I thought that would be an excellent platform to have one on. 😀

So I decided to build SteamerCard as another service under the UberGames banner. 🙂 Unlike most other third party GamerCard services though, I wanted it to be a fully interactive HTML <iframe> element, and given the design considerations, completely ad-free.

The SteamerCard webapp is written entirely in a PHP/MySQL solution and works on a system of parsing the information from the Steam website with regular expressions. In the interests of reducing the number of requests made to the Steam site, the system caches the user’s information in its own local store, and updates itself on an hourly basis.

Unfortunately as of last month when the UberGames system was updated to PHP 5.3, the combination of deprecated code in its base classes caused the entire system to die. Given how heavily the base classes were integrated with the upper-level code, unfortunately it turned out that I couldn’t really resurrect the code without doing a near-complete rewrite.

So at the moment, I’ve pretty much decided to rewrite the majority of SteamerCard from scratch, whilst revamping as much of the old code in the process.

Looking back on the old design above, I’ve also decided to redo the visual look of SteamerCard while I’m at it:

This time around, I’m building the whole thing in as much of an OOP fashion as possible, and I’m hoping to set up a system where other themes can be added as well. 🙂

Also, in a follow up to the blog I wrote last night, once it’s done, I’m considering open-sourcing SteamerCard when it’s finished. 😀

Oh wait. Or was that the other 'open sauce'...

With a few websites, a few game mods, and even a few iOS apps under my belt, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve written a fair amount of programming code at this point. XD

As a result of being extremely lazy and hating having to reinvent the wheel, once I got the hang of OOP principles, I decided to always try and make my classes as low-level and as abstracted as possible, so I could always re-use them in later projects. 😛

Over a period of developing, testing and refining, I’ve started coming up with a few common classes that I seem to be using a heck of a lot. For example, in PHP, I’ve ended up with a pretty decent MySQL manager class (which I then extended into SQLite), and in Objective-C, I’ve got a UITableViewController that automates loading content on separate threads. ^_^

Since I’ve been finding them so useful in my projects, and wondering if other people might find them useful too, I’ve been considering open-sourcing them.

In any case, I took the plunge this week. 😀 I’ve uploaded a pile of the PHP classes I use for client work and UberGames projects to my GitHub account.

That account’s been collecting digital dust for a while now, so I thought this would also be a good opportunity to start using it, as well as figuring out a bit more on how git actually works. ^_^;

I’ll be putting as much of my code up there as possible and improving it as I go. As I want to make sure it’s easy to use and understand, I’m also going to try and refine all of the formatting and internal documentation so they’re standard across the board (which it isn’t right now ^_^;).

All of the code is released under the MIT license, so go nuts with it. 😀

.EDIT: Feel free to contribute to the classes as well! (Thanks @nekodex lol)

Wow. Now I know this was probably to be expected, but now that it’s come, it feels pretty sudden. Today Steve Jobs stepped down as the CEO of Apple for the second time, and most likely, for the last time. 🙁 It’s probably safe to say that the whole internet (more or less XD) is abuzz with the news and most people aren’t taking it too well (eg Wall Street lol).

I dunno if I’ve said it much before, but we are complete Apple nuts in my household. My father has been with Apple since the beginning; since the original Macintosh computer and has NEVER deviated since then (currently rocking a MacBook Air XD). When I bought a Windows PC for my university studies, I almost got evicted from the family. ^_^;

It’s really hard to put in perspective how much Steve has personally contributed to the sheer ‘concept’ of personal computing (and by extension now, the concept of post-PC computing), but it’s probably safe to say that he is without a doubt one of the pioneers and forefathers of most of the technological customs we take for granted today.

Now, it’s been said he’s not leaving entirely and he will be remaining as Chairman of the Board, so it’s quite possible that this isn’t going to be as bad as everyone is making out. Odds are he’ll still be making sure all of the products leaving Apple are still up to his level of standards, and that the rest of the responsibilities of managing the company will now rely on Tim Cook. So all in all, I really don’t think Apple is going to rapidly change much at all now, or in the perceivable future.

In any case, since now is as good a time as any, I would personally like to thank Steve for everything he’s done, and I wish him the very best from here on. 🙂

Yeah this is old news. REALLY old news, but I can’t believe I didn’t write a blog post on it at the time. ^_^;

Even still, up to this point, this is blowing my freaking mind. iPokédex managed to get app of the day on Kotaku!!!! ^_^

I’ve been an avid reader of Kotaku for 5 years now and their Twitter account holds a special section in my list of feeds. Never did I imagine that some of my work would actually get so much as a whisper.

In hindsight though, it makes it a bit sader that I eventually had to remove iPokédex. ^_^;

Either way, like before, mad props to Luke Plunkett for reviewing my app. Hopefully there will be more to come in future. 😀

Bahaha. Alright. This is what I get for opening my trap on Twitter. Moar work. XD

Lately, I’ve been thinking that I really do need to start doing more blogging in a more timely/regular fashion; there’s lots of stuff I want to write about that just won’t fit in a tweet, no matter how hard I try. XD
My good pal Dean was thinking the same thing, and so based off the conversation above, the idea of a mutual blogging challenge came along. 😀

This is a really cool idea. It’ll hopefully motivate the both of us to try and put more content out online on a more regular basis, hopefully without quality suffering too badly. XD
I can say it right now though; doing a blog post per day is a pretty hard thing to do. But as long as they’re longer than a tweet, and get the message across, that’s all you really need. In fact, I might set another personal challenge to make posts as lean as possible. 😀

On a lesser note, I think it’s also become a test of platform scalability. I’m on a self-hosted WordPress implementation and Dean is running entirely off a standard tumblr account. Personally, I always thought self-hosted would be better purely because of the degree of control I thought I needed (eg, custom skins and plugins etc), but a quick glance at Dean’s tumblr shows you might just be able to get away without it. XD

In any case, let the challenge commence! Let’s see how long this lasts! XD