Sitting here staring at my blog. It really needs a makeover. It’s not horrible. It’s a fairly clean layout, which I like, but the pieces don’t quite fit together right. Anyone out there want to point me to some nice WordPress themes I can look at for inspiration? Better yet, someone want to redesign my site for me?!
“Some people have a way with words… others… not have way.” – Steve Martin
About six years ago I wrote a post that was a little about high school, and a little about celebrity and I recently re-read it after one of the subjects of said post stumbled upon it. In re-reading it, it doesn’t appear to cast anyone in a favorable light. I know that I intended it to be mostly humorous, and thought I’d written it in such a way as to make clear that I was poking fun, but it doesn’t come off that way at all. So, I have a blog, let me clear up a couple of things.
First, Mike is the guy that read the post and apologized if his actions in high school had affected me in any negative way. You see I’d written about how high school had “organized us into our proper social caste”. I don’t blame Mike, for this. After all I could have reached out myself, but high school being what is was, and probably always will be, kids just fell into certain groups. Peer pressure or what have you sort of reinforces those groups. That’s just what happens, especially when we’re younger. I’ve experienced it firsthand and now that I’m older seen it happen with my daughter and her friends. So, no Mike, you didn’t affect me negatively. But you were a pretty bad joke teller 🙂
The other part of that post was about Mike’s brother, Butch. You may have heard of him, or if not you’ve probably heard of his shows, especially if you have kids. The Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom, or T.U.F.F. Puppy ring a bell? He created all of those. How awesome is that? So I wrote this post and you can see bits and pieces of how impressed I am for Butch’s accomplishments and work ethics peeking through when I talk about his dedication to a dream. But then I ruined it with these silly pokes at him for not answering an email. I didn’t really expect a reply from Butch, though I will admit that would have been pretty cool. Anyway, let me go back and pick out the pieces that were important:
First off, I didn’t know the guy that well. He was the older brother of a good friend and so that was my relationship to him. But the thing is, it seemed like every time I was over to their house he was drawing. He was focused on what he wanted and he made it happen. And remember this was 1982 we’re talking about. And his dream probably started well before that. Butch had other accomplishments prior to The Fairly Oddparents, but you could argue that that show was what really put him on the map so to speak. Think about that for a minute. He dedicated himself to a goal for over 20 years! Yet another example that if you put you mind to something, and pay your dues, you can reach whatever goals you have for yourself provided that you’re truly dedicated to it. Six years ago I missed an opportunity to share that message because I was being pissy about an email and that’s a shame, because it was an opportunity to point to a real person who dreamed big and made it happen.
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.
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
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.
