SGnTN | is a web site by Casey Fleser / Some Geek in TN

UI Candy

December 22, 2011

I enjoy beautiful design and UI (who doesn’t?) and, every so often, even like to try my hand at creating my own. Sometimes a little inspiration is in order. And sometimes I just want to admire the work of some of the talented designers out there. When that happens, these are some of the sites I tend to visit.

I didn’t scour the internet when creating this list, so it’s by no means exhaustive. Just stuff that I’ve stumbled across that impressed me enough to add to my RSS reader. Let me know if there are others that should be in my collection.

Jobs on Corporate Decline

October 26, 2011

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. – Steve Jobs

apple business quotations steve jobs

More on Localization

October 25, 2011

A couple weeks back I posted about using ibtool’s localize-incremental command to update your localized nibs. A very handy command.

In theory.

If it actually worked.

It sometimes works. And other times it seems to get confused and do nothing. In those cases something a little more brute force might be in order.

First let me say that this is only going to work if the only differences in your localized nibs is the actual text. If you’ve tweaked the positions of UI elements or call different methods in your localized nibs, then you’ll need to redo all those tweaks.

After you’ve made all of your changes in the native localization, we’ll say English, export the localized strings from all of your localized files.

ibtool --export-strings-file de.strings de.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --export-strings-file es.strings es.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --export-strings-file fr.strings fr.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --export-strings-file it.strings it.lproj/MyController.xib

Then copy the native xib over the localized versions.

cp en.lproj/MyController.xib de.lproj/MyController.xib
cp en.lproj/MyController.xib es.lproj/MyController.xib
cp en.lproj/MyController.xib fr.lproj/MyController.xib
cp en.lproj/MyController.xib it.lproj/MyController.xib

Then import the localized strings back into your nibs.

ibtool --import-strings-file de.strings de.lproj/MyController.xib --write de.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --import-strings-file es.strings es.lproj/MyController.xib --write es.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --import-strings-file fr.strings fr.lproj/MyController.xib --write fr.lproj/MyController.xib
ibtool --import-strings-file it.strings it.lproj/MyController.xib --write it.lproj/MyController.xib

It’s still a bit messy. But much easier than the manual alternative.

ibtool interface builder localization

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More App Store Statistics

October 20, 2011

Yesterday I wrote about some App Store statistics I compiled which compare the breakdown of app apps submitted by category to those that make up the top 500 paid apps. It turns out a lot of people found this pretty interesting, but many also wondered what it would look like if the comparison was between all apps and the top 500 grossing apps. Getting on the top paid list is nice and all, but doesn’t necessarily mean those are the apps making the most money, and it turns out that developers are quite interested in where the money is going. That information is in the top grossing list. Well, I aim to please, so here goes.

Continue reading →

app store ios iPhone metrics statistics

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

October 19, 2011

I was looking over some app store metrics tonight, in particular the breakdown of apps by category, and wondered if you could look at the breakdown of the top 500 paid apps by category and determine which categories were over or under served. The results were pretty interesting.