brandontreb.com

I used to be an Emacs guy and would battle to the death on the war between Vim and Emacs. It wasn't until a coworker of mine sat down and really showed me just how cool/simple/powerful Vim can be. Just using Vim is a new adventure every day and has really improved my productivity. I now use it to code, blog, and even jot down quick notes. Last week, I saw on Hacker News a...

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As of OSX Lion, I have started to seriously loathe some of the build-it Mac apps (such as Mail, and iCal). While I previously had no issues with them, they now seem to be very clunky and crash quite often. Being a developer, I thought "why don't I write an app that wraps web apps for you so you basically get "native web apps" that have icons and are launchable?". After a quick Google search,...

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tl;dr; Don't buy a Kindle Fire for your kid until they resolve the parental control issues. Wifi password protection is their current solution, and it sucks. Like many parents, I thought it would be a good idea to get a tablet device for my son so that he could play some educational games and watch some Netflix (in moderation of course). After doing quite a bit of research, I settled on the Kindle Fire. Before...

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Recently, I was pretty humbled when a post of mine titled WordPress To Jekyll And Back Again made it to the front page of Hacker News. I was a little down on Jekyll for the reasons listed in that post and was feeling pretty good about my Wordpress install. At the time, I was running my own virtual instance on Rackspace cloud hosting (we'll get to this momentarily). I also had all of the caching...

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As you may have noticed, my blog has a new (much cleaner) theme. For 2012, my blogging goals are to focus much more on content rather than flashy visuals. I have also minimized my set up to save blogging costs (I now blog for FREE) and to simplify things greatly. Here is my new setup: Jekyll as my "blog engine" The WPTypo Wordpress Theme I ported this to Jekyll GitHub for hosting (it's free). Vim...

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From the first time I saw this effect in the Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone), I was crazy about it. I had written my own hacks to make something close, but it was always terrible. Within the past few months, I have been using a perfect/elegant solution to this problem called SVProgressHUD. Using this in your project is as easy as calling: // showing [SVProgressHUD showWithStatus:@"Logging in..."]; // hiding [SVProgressHUD dismiss]; Clone SVProgressHUD On Github...

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With all of the buzz around the iTether App, I figured I’d offer a more permanent solution since Apple will surely yank this soon Last year, a developer published his code for an http SOCKS proxy called iProxy. This will give your iPhone the ability to create a SOCKS server in which your laptop can connect to via the Bonjur protocol. Once connect, all of your computer’s http traffic will be routed through the server...

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I have just released the update to my Centipede clone called Caterpillar. For those of you who don’t know, I am doing a 6 part series on how to create this game over at MobileTuts+. This update adds some interesting functionality on which I will be blogging about in the near future. I have added iAds to my cocos2D project and when the iAds fail to serve (which is about 75% of the time), I...

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This plugin looks to be super useful for people wanting to blog about iOS apps. It even supports the affiliate urls. In any post or page, insert the following shortcode: [ios-app id="1234"] (where “1234″ is your application’s App Store ID). You can also specify a download link like this: [ios-app id="1234" download_url="http://www.yourlinktrackerurl.com"] Download The Plugin Here

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This past weekend, I attended the voices that matter conference as a sponsor for a new product my team is working called MaaSive. We had an absolute blast at the conference and I learned quite a bit from all of the speakers. Here were a few of my favorite parts: Keynote by Graeme Devine For those of you who don’t know Graeme is a legend in the game development industry. He was responsible for titles...

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