Fernando Valente's weblog

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So, today is December 31 and tomorrow is already 2012. The world is going to end at December 22, so we don’t have much time left. lol

Seriously, Arnold Schwarzenegger used to write his plans for the next year on a piece of paper. Strangely, that used to work. Not that I believe in luck. Well, luck is something just ridiculous, but I think it’s nice to write my plans here.

Become famous internationally – I know you might be thinking about how a 17 YO guy is going to be famous. What some people who read my blog don’t know is that I used to be well know in Brazil because of my FireRocker. I believe most people forgot about me as I haven’t published many stuff recently. But I do have plans to become famous(not well known). It doesn’t matter where, it might just be between programmers or Mac users. But it’s fine to me.

Publish at least 3 Mac apps – If I could pick a job now, it would be as a Mac developer. I love  developing for the Mac. In fact, I develop for the iPhone and web because I have to, not because I want to. I’ve already started working on a Mac app recently, but I got a lot of work to do as a freelancer. I hope to publish at least 3 Mac apps in 2012.

Become big and lift at least 90 kg of weight - Some time ago I started to work out. I got plans to get very big in next year. I know it won’t be easy as I’m a half ectomorph. But I’m also a half mesomorph and that still gives me some hope. In fact, when I do a good training, I get muscle mass very quickly. And the good thing is that I’m still loosing a lot of fat. It may be good for now, but I will have to stop doing this in a few months…

I wanna be like this

Learn how to sing and play the guitar –  This is something I wanted to learn a long time ago. In fact, I still want to. I wanna buy a guitar as soon as I can and teach myself how to play it. I’m also willing to take some singing lessons. And who knows I find out I love it and start composing something.

Start my own company – I know I’ve started Chiaro Software over 2 years ago. When I say I wanna start my own company, I mean I wanna have a company that is registered with the government. I will do this in january and I hope to start making a lot of money from the customers I might get because of that.

Move to the US or Canada – I know I’ve said that last year, but it didn’t happen. Who knows I find a way to move in next year? Europe and Australia are also fine.

Travel to Europe – If I don’t end up moving to there, I really wanna travel to there as soon as I get a chance. Portugal, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy seem to be really interesting

When I got to know Rainer Brockerhoff, one of my first questions was about networking. One of his advices was to write some open source code. A few days ago I was working on my customer’s app. He needed something similar to Apple’s 360° demo. I did not want to do that on a UIWebView as the performance is not the best. After looking for a view that does that, I found there was no one available. So I decided to write my own. Now I’m releasing it as an open-source project. The first of many.

FVImageSequence is basically a subclass of NSImageView/UIImageView that allows you to create the 360° effect by using a sequence of images. To use this view, you will have to add a image sequence to your project. All images must have the same prefix(i.e. myimage0.png, myimage1.png, myimage2.png). You set the prefix of the images you want to use by setting the prefix property.

You must also set the number of images. Just set the numberOfImages property in order to do that.

Also, don’t forget to set the property extension with the extension of the files(i.e png, jpg, gif).

Optionally you might set the increment property. This property basically tells the view how many images it should increment. If instead of incrementing 1 image, you want to increment 5, just set it to 5.

If you’re using the iOS version, don’t forget to enable the user interaction on Interface Builder.

Download the source code and the sample project from this link.

15″ MacBook Pro

“True friends are like starts, you don’t see them, but you know they are there.”, unknown author

Rainer Brockerhoff used to tell that being clueless makes you get no answers for your questions. In the beggining, I didn’t understand why. Today I’ve finally figured out what a true clueless person is. And I’m talking about a person who has this word tattooed in her forehead.

I was trying to get some good reputation answering questions on Stack Overflow and a guy asked a question about getting information displayed in a custom way on a UITableViewCell. I told them to subclass it and add four UILabels to it. Problem solved, right? Wrong! The guy asked how they should do that. Well folks, I’m not sure if I’m talking about a guy who doesn’t know how to do that. What I know is that they wanted me to do the entire work for them, so they would just copy and paste the code and it would work like a magic. Yes, magic! No work at all. “Let me just get someone to do the work for me”.

Yeah guys, this is THE way to not get your questions answered. When asking something, try to learn from your question. Trying to get other people to do the work for you will not work. I recomend this great article by Matt Gemmell.

Rainer, you were right.

I still can remember when I first heard about Steve Jobs. That was in 2007 when I was reading a Wikipedia article about Apple. Rest in peace, Steven Paul Jobs.

Apple gave up Lion? Check it out before they fix it!