How can this possibly be permitted in the App Store? iTabla is free from the app store, but you must purchase a license from their site for 119 Euros (about US $155) to activate it. I’m pretty sure that’s a direct violation of Apple’s terms of service.
Mike Cohen
Live RickRoll
This was one of those awesome moments when an internet meme and the real world come crashing together.
Photographing holiday lights
I haven’t had much of a chance to blog in the last week, since life & work got in the way. I had an awesome time Monday night when my friends took me out to dinner at 101 Ocean for my birthday.
People are already starting to put up their Christmas decorations – they don’t even wait for Thanksgiving any more. One of my neighbors put up blue lights & butterflies, as you can see from this photo.
Shooting holiday lights can be a challenge, since the camera will try to adjust the exposure for the background, which will make the lights disappear. Instead, you want to underexpose the picture enough to darken the background and make the lights stand out.
You might be able to get good results using exposure compensation, but to really get it right, you need to use manual exposure. It’s difficult to apply any standard exposure rules, since the ideal exposure depends on how dark it is and the color, size, and brightness of the lights, so you’ll probably need to experiment to get the best results. I took these pictures shortly before sunset tonight and I found that I got the best results using shutter speed 1/30 at f5.6 with ISO 1600. A good way to start is by using one of the semi-automatic modes and noting the shutter speed or aperture it chooses, and adjusting it from there.
The D90’s excellent high ISO performance makes it a lot easier to get good results in these conditions. With a lot of cameras you wouldn’t want to go above ISO 800, so you’ll need to adjust the shutter speed & aperture accordingly.
MacMegasite updated to WordPress 2.7
I’ve upgraded MacMegasite to WordPress 2.7. As always, the upgrade was quick and painless: I simply uploaded the files (after backing up the old version) and updated the database through the admin screen. In less than 10 minutes it was back up.
Handling multi-touch in an iPhone application
One of the changes I’m making in the next version of ICanHasCheezburger is improved multi-touch handling. In the current version, I’m only handling left & right swipes to switch to the previous or next images. For the update, I’d like to handle the same gestures as the photo app:
- Pinch to zoom in & out
- When zoomed in, drag the image to see different portions
- When zoomed or moved, double-tap to return to the standard zoom
- Swipe left & right to move to the next image – but NOT when zoomed in
- Single tap to toggle toolbar & menu bar
In many cases you can use a UIScrollView, which implements most of those behaviors. For ICHC, I decided to subclass UIImageView to handle touch gestures.
The best Apple support thread EVER
This has to be the best thread ever in Apple’s support discussions. “Susan” writes:
Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!
Hilarity ensues, including two posts by her husband under fake names.
