Fernando Valente's weblog

Well, after a lot of work I finally finished Metropolis. Now that it’s released I can start focusing on other stuff. Believe or not, I started working on it on December 2011. I was working on it on my free time, so I didn’t have much time to work on it. Well, now it’s released. I hope for god I will get some nice money from it. Even if I don’t get, Metropolis is too fucking cool. So far I’m proud of it.

BTW, I’m writing this post from Metropolis and I must say it’s WAY better than the WordPress admin. Seriously, I have no idea why I never tried using a blogging app before. It’s very good to write a post on it. And I really really hope Metropolis will be successful. Yeah, I’m paranoid.

Currently I’m busy as hell. I’m working on a new Mac app and I hope to finish it soon. Working 10˜12 hours a day is painful!

Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

Developing for Android is not a choice anymore. A lot of my customers are asking for Android apps, so I bought this nice piece of gadget. I need a real device because Android simulator is just too slow and doesn’t seem to work very well. Time to learn how to program for Android!

Hey folks, I’m proud to announce my new open source project for iPhone. It’s called FVGravityView. It’s basically an UIView that has the ability to fall. Yes, fall. It uses the accelerometer to detect the device position and the view will fall depending on it. It’s basically an UIView that recognizes gravity.

A few thing:
-The default velocity is 20, but you may change this value by changing the velocity property.
-FVGravityView supports dragging. To enable it, set the property isDragable to YES.
-Say you want to invert the gravity. Just set the isInverse to YES.
-It’s basically an UIView, so you may add subviews to it. It also has every drawing capabilities that an ordinary UIView has.

To download the sample project, click here.

PS: I didn’t try it on an iPad, but it should work with no problems at all.

Hey folks, unfortunately, my blog Sensitive Code is dead. I had no time to update it and ended up not renewing the domain registration. It had a great page rank. For example, if you type UIFileSharing on Google, a post from Sensitive Code it is the first result(not sure for how long). I moved every post from there to this blog, so everything is still available. I hope to write about programming on this blog in the future.

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). 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.

Great post I found on Kenneth Ballenegger’s blog. I totally agree with him.

I do not pride myself in my skills as a programmer. Complex algorithms scare me, and I stay away from them as much as I can. Rather, what I am good at is creating elegant solutions to problems. I’m good at imagining how things could work together, how something could be improved through programming. I’m good at building real-life products and streamlining processes. Breadth, rather than depth.

I also do not pride myself in knowing a language fully. I am good at understanding concepts, code and documentation, and when asked a specific question in a job interview I am not afraid to say that I don’t know, but could easily figure it out with 5min and access to the internet.

What I’m getting at is that I value resourcefulness, scrappiness and creativity more than knowledge and intelligence. This is why I’m not taking a computer science course, but rather am instead studying alternate approaches to problem-solving in the world of design. I think it will be a lot more valuable in my life in building an intellectually well-rounded personality, and an ability to pick up new skills quickly and bend them to suit my purposes. In the end, what truly matters is what I’m able to create, not how intelligent I may be.

No, it’s not in another country. I got a job here in Brazil, but I must say I’m happy as hell. I went to the interview yesterday and they said I’d get an e-mail in a few hours. I didn’t get it and I thought “Oh crap, I didn’t get the job”. Today I got an e-mail saying I was hired. I will work as an iOS developer in a magazine publisher. I will be developing magazines for the iPad. I’m just SOOOO HAPPY!  Wish me luck

It’s not only serious business, but also a VERY HARD business. I miss a good networking everyday. From trying to get a job, to working on a new project. Every time I tried to be a friend of a successful person, I failed miserable. And successful doesn’t mean millionaire or rich. By successful, I mean someone who is self-employed and/or has some good visibility and who also can pay her bills doing X. I believe I’m not that sociable, that may be the why I can’t get some stuff to work. It’s literally very easy to find successful Mac developers.

Every time I fail on doing something, I say I didn’t have something else like a good design or the functionality X. Networking is something I don’t have. And in this case, it’s different. Why? Successful people know the recipe for the success. They know how stuff works and most important: they can teach you that. They also can help you to promote your stuff.

For some dumb reason, there are people who can get a great networking naturally, but there are others who can’t. I’m in the second group. Getting good contacts is such a painful task to me. I don’t know the secret for that, but I really need to find it. One thing that screws me up is the fact I live in Brazil. It’s very easy to make contacts in meat-ups. There are many of them around the world. However, there are 3 shareware publishers in Brazil who work with the Mac platform.

The most noticeable is Brainjuice. It’s the first company to publish Mac shareware located in Brazil. I believe they are about to close their doors. Their programmer is American and now he works for The New York Times. I mean, they haven’t published anything in the past years. What makes you think they are not about to close their doors?

The other Mac shareware publisher is called Rainer Brockerhoff. He’s German and is not very active. He just creates stuff to tune your system. He was the first Mac programmer in Brazil.

And finally, there’s me. The less noticeable of them. I’m the first Brazilian programmer, who lives in Brazil, to publish Mac shareware. Yes, believe in me, I’m the only one!

In my area networking is very important. I could be employed right now. Why? Most Mac developers are self-employed. There are many jobs for Mac developers out there, but you won’t find much on Monsters for example. Mix those 2 things and you will see an amazing opportunity. Many jobs + element X + most people in that field are self employed = easy to get a job. However, there’s still the X element. And the X element is called networking.

Hello friends, I’m here to tell you about my newest project. It’s called Sensitive Code, and is a blog about programming. I thought it would be a great way to get some visibility, so I started this blog. The next steps are to write a lot of posts and get some people to write with me. Go check it out!