tigerbears!

OK, I finally got around to updating tigerbears.com so that it reflects my iOS consulting business rather than a particular app. I certainly wouldn’t call it ‘done’ (what site is?) but at least it’s more accurate now. Frankly, between client projects and getting married I’ve just been far too busy over the last 18 months to have given it the attention it deserves! Ah, the life of a hired gun …

There’ll probably be some noticeable design discrepancies between the blog and the main site until I can spend the cycles on tidying things up around here.

I’m still evaluating whether to make this blog visible from the main site; the ol’ calendar for the next six months or so is shaping up to be quite busy as well, so I won’t yet commit to keeping this blog updated in the near term. I’m leaning towards not doing so because almost all of what I’m working on at any given point is covered under one NDA or another, and I’d rather err on the side of staying silent rather than accidentally telegraph what a client may have in store for future releases.

Hey everyone,

tigerbears.com is rising from the dead! Is it the Solanum virus? Did an asteroid pass too close to Earth? Are we in the Matrix with George Romero and Max Brooks at the helm?

No. But after working on Tallies for iPhone (and iPod Touch, natch) for the last several months, and with its imminent release, I wanted to update things here. I also have a few things to share about that development experience that I hope will be helpful to other developers.

I’ve taken the opportunity to update the About page. Just to save you a click, here’s the contents:

After a brief burst of activity in 2007, this blog fell into disuse. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” 

Once upon a time, I was a primarily a front-end web developer. Javascript and Java, all day long. I spent about nine years as senior UI engineer at Netflix and quit in late 2006 to do the indie consultant thing. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, I ran into a few medical snafus that slowed me down for over a year. (Don’t let your neck get screwed up, kids, because collecting MRIs sucks.) 

Now, nobody *really* likes the old lemons-into-lemonade spiel, but this is one case where it came true. It was a great opportunity to put things into perspective and look for a new path.

Apple provided that path by releasing the iPhone SDK in 2008. 

Not having a C or Objective-C background meant that I had some catching-up to do, but I have to say I haven’t been this excited about slinging code since my first forays into Java back in the day. (That was using the Cocoa-Java bridge, even … maybe on OSX 10.0 DR3? Later?) Learning Cocoa was something that has called to me for a long time (when it was NeXTStep, even) and I’m stoked to have finally taken the plunge.

Now that Tallies, my first public iPhone app, has been submitted to Apple, I hope to have a little more time to share some of these experiences. *cough*

Besides code, I’m into film, zombie fiction, and motorcycles. My bikes may be trapped in the garage for now, but your spirit never really leaves the racetrack.

Cheers,

Bill

Day One at Laguna is done; I won’t be back until Sunday for the main event, but thanks for putting up with a few fairly sorry photos, a sketchy post format and a lot of noise if you’re not into the bike thing. I wanted to get some practice with my mobile-fu before TAE next week, when the pendulum will swing towards geeks with stars in their eyes, closures on their minds and drinks in their hands.

Mobile posting with my iPhone via Postie worked out pretty well for quick ‘n dirty stuff, though I made a few mistakes while trying to post to multiple categories. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly a swanky Nikon, so it took a lot of practice to time my shots to compensate for shutter lag. Not easy when your target’s only visible for a couple of seconds before your shot, and is often at a very different speed from the last time you saw them!

With the crowd at Laguna, I think the cell towers were pretty overwhelmed, at least from an data standpoint. I talked to the guys at SanDisk, who were having trouble with their broadband cards, so I wasn’t alone. I had plenty of signal, but it took a while before I could get the messages sent. Fortunately, I was able to grab a seat in the shade at the Ducati Island hospitality booth so I could geek out for a few minutes in comfort. Bonus: I can type much better while I’m sitting; walking just sends my fat fingers everywhere on that keyboard. Don’t even mention the jostling or risk of knocking over a $20,000 custom bike. OK, so I missed the fashion show, but I’ve seen bored two-bit models prance around awkwardly on a makeshift stage before. I’ve even done that myself, once, so call it professional courtesy.

One frustration was that it took the iPhone a while to decide that it couldn’t send an email, and couldn’t try to send another one while it was making that decision. After iPhone realizes it can’t send, the first outgoing message would be placed in a queue for later transmission. It’s only at that point that you can try to send your second message. It’s easy to understand why actually trying to send that second message while the first is still outbound wouldn’t work. It would be much nicer to at least be able to add that message to the outbound queue and, thus, save your work.

The messages managed to arrive at their destinations out of order, which was a little unusual. Otherwise, the process was fairly smooth, and I like that it’s simple to send a picture via email.

To get the iPhone to sync its onboard Camera Roll with iPhoto, I had to connect the iPhone while iTunes wasn’t running. (iPhoto was, but I didn’t check to see if that was a requirement.) I don’t understand the reasons for it, but that seems like a good candidate for streamlining the user experience.

Since ditching my Pearl for an iPhone, I wanted to try out the whole blog-by-mail thing. I wasn’t really happy with the configuration options of WordPress’s built-in by-mail feature, so I tried out Postie. It’s been fun to play with and works well, but I ran into a snag and wanted to share the solution.When you post via Postie, you send mail with attachments (images, video, whatever) to a special account. Postie will fetch this mail on demand by POP3, format the post content, and submit it via WordPress’s post submission routines. Postie will do neat things like create thumbnails for your images and link these thumbnails to full-sized copies. These images and other content are given CSS classes so you can tweak their display as you wish. Very nice!The trick is that you need to hit a URL (get_mail.php) for your mail to be processed and posted. You can request it manually in any old web browser, use cron (for example) to hit it automatically, or use a “Cronless Postie” feature that the current author provides. I chose the cron approach since it could give me a bit of a sense of server downtime by its failure messages.What I didn’t notice until I applied some styles to these generated CSS classes was that if you request get_mail.php with a client that isn’t cookied (including my use of wget via cron), WordPress will filter out all HTML tags’ attributes in the post’s content. You’re left with no CSS classes, no Javascript for spiffy thumbnailing, no nothing … just some extremely simple markup that will get you by, but probably isn’t what you want.After some experimenting, I found that the client that requests get_mail.php must be recognized as a blog user with either Editor or Administrator access if you want this extra markup to come through. This doesn’t appear to be Postie’s fault, unless this is a bug in its “Roles that can Post” option, but may be a result of some inner WordPress authentication magic. Note: I have comments turned off on tigerbears.com, so it’s possible that you might have less stringent requirements. Good luck!

Welcome to tigerbears!

I’m Bill Kunz, and I’ve been working the web full-time since 1997, though I’ve been tinkering online since ’91. I’m currently a consultant wearing several web-centric hats: developer, UX architect, project manager, product manager and others. Before striking it out on my own (again), I was a the senior front-end engineer at Netflix for just shy of nine years. When I left, I was one of three employees remaining from the days when we were a stealth mode startup scrambling to release our beta site to the world. Some of my favorite professional memories are from those days … what a ride!

My last position at Netflix was with my buddies on the Community team, responsible for the Friends section of the site. The challenges we faced are shared by plenty of new ventures these days, so you can expect some commentary on that from time to time.

Most of my recent development experience has been front-end development, writing custom Javascript libraries for Ajax-based and other client-side logic / rendering, and server-side page generation with Java / JSP. One of my upcoming projects is a good candidate for Ruby on Rails, so I’m especially excited about that opportunity.

Process-wise, I’m a strong advocate for an agile development approach (when appropriate!) and have led teams of engineers and designers under this banner (whether by that name, others, or none) for over ten years.

When I’m not typing away for one reason or another, the hobby I’m most passionate about is motorcycle racing. I’m a backmarker with the AFM in California and am big fan of the guys playing in the MotoGP series. I race an ’02 Honda F4i and take to the streets on an ’04 Ducati 749s.

Thanks a lot for stopping by. I can be contacted by email and other means. I’ll usually keep comments disabled here, but I’d like to hear from you, so don’t be shy. I also welcome opportunities to work with teams or individuals on solutions large and small, on a formal or informal basis. I’ll soon have a more thorough bio and resume available for those who are interested.

meta: tigerbears runs on WordPress. Its theme is based on Barthelme by Scott Wallick, whose clean approach to blog design is a breath of fresh air in a MySpace world. I had to destroy a lot of his work by slapping on a quick color scheme of my own, among other tweaks, which is based on the livery of a series of US Navy fighter squadrons and my beloved yellow bikes. As a scheme, it needs work, but it’s been good for learning more about this system. Please pardon the dust and clashing colors while I play. ;)