This summer, I had the pleasure of working again with the great team at Square Design here in Brooklyn. For our last project, we built an LED Mirror for their annual holiday party. Our goal this time: build a giant robotic version of a Gogo Squeez snack pack – the Goodness Machine – for use at marketing events. The Idea […]
Read MoreHappy Spring! It’s been shamefully long since my last post, but I’ve been really busy. Among other things, I’m now serving as the Hacker in Residence at the Columbia Startup Lab! The Columbia Startup Lab, or CSL, fosters innovative new businesses founded by recent Columbia graduates by providing inexpensive co-working space and access to numerous shared resources. Although many founders […]
Read MoreBackground For a new project under development, I began playing with Polymer for programming web user interfaces. Polymer is a framework for building Web Components, a developing standard for the next iteration of HTML. Web Components and their associated technologies promise to fulfill some longstanding desires: they encapsulate HTML templates and JavaScript code together into reusable components, and they provide the ability to import […]
Read MoreThis past Fall I had the pleasure of working with the folks at Square Design, a custom design and fabrication business in lovely Gowanus, Brooklyn. In the course of that project, I programmed a series of NeoPixel strips to light in patterns evoking (as opposed to simulating) rainfall. That project was so much fun that they decided […]
Read MoreAs a coder who’s also a lawyer, I’m often asked by other programmers about free and open-source (“FOSS”) licenses. In particular, people want to know What do the various FOSS licenses mean? Is there a reason to use one license over another? In this post, I’ll cover the basics of FOSS licenses and provide some useful links for […]
Read MoreThis post continues my summary of lessons learned in implementing SwiftSquareCam, a Swift version of Apple’s SquareCam demo project. As described in my prior post, the original Objective-C code provided a number of core features: – taking input from either the front or back cameras, if both are present, and providing the user with a switch to toggle between the two; – displaying a live video preview […]
Read MoreRecently I set out to implement Apple’s SquareCam demo app for iOS in Swift. The experience proved interesting for a number of reasons, one of which I’ve already discussed: Swift’s apparent preference for optional chaining in lieu of other error detection and handling mechanisms. Here and in a forthcoming post I turn to the topic of how SwiftSquareCam implements some of its more interesting features. The entire […]
Read MoreMuch (virtual) ink has been spilled on the topics of learning Swift and transitioning from Objective-C to Apple’s new language, so I’ll keep this one light. While working on SwiftSquareCam (in progress), a number of Swift’s features (or idiosyncrasies) stood out, not merely for being different or new, but for forcing me to program using certain patterns and idioms. It then occurred to me to think […]
Read MoreRecently I pushed a development version of the enroute web service to heroku! Enroute is an idea born of several road trips: we wanted something that would tell us not what’s around us right now, or just near our destination, but what’s on the way. While the concept is quite simple, the execution was, as is typical, a […]
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Joe
September 28, 2015
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