Hello. My name is Harry Wolff.

I am a web developer working at GetGlue.

I enjoy tweeting, taking pictures, and making movies.

This is where I write.

Review: iA Writer for the Mac and for the iPhone and for the iPad

Posted on 03/09/2012 by Harry

They say the clothes don’t make the man. I’m inclined to disagree.

At least in this case.

I just purchased, downloaded, and installed iA Writer from the Mac App store. It’s what I’m writing this blog post on.

If I had to put into one word my reaction to this program it would be: awesome.

Well, I feel that kind of undersells how much I’m loving this application right now.

The type face is clear. The background is comforting. And the cursor icon, that beautiful little blue bar makes me just want to type, type, type!

The more I type the more I push the blue bar forward. And it’s dizzying just watching it jump across my screen. It makes me forget that I’m writing a blog post, letting my ideas flow, and preventing me from worrying if I’m making sense.

Stop. I am making sense right?

Yes? Moving on then.

I first installed iA Writer on my iPad. It shortly became my default writing app. It opened quickly which is always a top priority for me. When I want to write, I want to write. (omigod – aside: the auto-markdown feature on the mac is awesome. Just used it for the first time.) If it takes more than 3 seconds, hell, 1 second for the app to open then I’m annoyed. I can feel the thoughts slipping out of my head while I stare at a stalled screen. iA Writer nailed that out of the park from day 1.

When I’m writing I want to focus on my words. I want to focus on my words and the sentences they construct. Sometimes I want to focus on the paragraphs that my sentences have created but that should only be done when I revise. I need to be stricter about that, but ah well. iA Writer let’s me focus on my words. It blurs its edges, and the surrounding sentences, letting all my attention bleed into the line I’m currently writing. From my mind, through my fingertips, to iA Writer. It’s beautiful.

Yesterday I was getting near fed up with my writing app of choice on my iPhone. I was preparing myself to look through the App Store to find a suitable alternative. Wouldn’t you know it…yesterday iA writer released an update to their iPad app, making it Universal. Universally awesome is more like it.

Now I have iA Writer on my iPhone and my iPad. And it uses iCloud.

Last night I played around with the iCloud feature of iA Writer. It was delightful. I’d edit a line on my iPad and stare at my iPhone. Soon enough the changes just appeared there. No effort, no buttons pressed, just pure syncing joy.

It was at that point that I knew I needed to enjoy the benefits of iCloud on my Mac. And hence my purchase of iA Writer for the Mac today.

It’s on sale right now as well. Only $8.99 instead of its usual $18.99. If you like to write at all I strongly encourage you to pick up this app.

It’s also on sale for the iPhone and iPad (universal app, remember?). It’s only a measly $0.99 instead of its usual $4.99 for the iPad and $0.99 for the iPhone? That’s what it says on iA Writer’s website. I’m not really sure what that means. Long story short: it’s cheap.

I give iA Writer the Harry Wolff 5 stars out of 5. And I don’t usually give out 5 stars willy nilly. In fact, this is the first time I’ve given anything any stars.

iA Writer. It’s that good.

Initial Reactions to OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on 02/16/2012 by Harry

Well I can’t say I’m not surprised. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we’d be hearing about an OS X update in February, nor that it would come with the oh so obvious title of Mountain Lion.

But here we are, just two days after Valentines Day. A brand new version of OS X ready for developers to start munching on, learning its new capabilities and how to include it in their apps.

Everything about Mountain Lion seems obvious. There isn’t one curve-ball that has left me scratching my hand. It is the obvious evolution of OS X as it grows alongside iOS.

It’s wonderful that Apple has gotten around to removing a lot of OS X’s cruft. This cruft was not only outdated but also a source of confusion for new OS X users – especially when coming from iOS.
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The Best Mac Git Gui

Posted on 01/30/2012 by Harry

Git is one of the most powerful and effective revision control systems available. It’s lightweight and highly configurable, complimenting almost anyone’s programming workflow. Predominately you interact with git from the command line, inputting commands such as `git status` or `git commit` to manipulate your repository.

When you first learn git the CLI can be daunting and confusing. Browsing through your history of commits with `git log` is not efficient. Even after you learn a few tricks such as `git log –graph –oneline –all` it remains difficult to really explore your history.

This is why a git GUI can put the joy back into using git.

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iPhone App Store Weekend Deals

Posted on 11/12/2011 by Harry

I’m a glutton for a good deal. That’s why I always welcome holiday weekends as there is often a sale going on in the iPhone App Store. This weekend is no exception. Actually, this weekend kind of is an exception because the deals are so damn good.

TUAW has the full list of the deals nicely summarized but to highlight the games that I pounced on:

Scribblenauts – was $4.99 when it first came out and hasn’t dipped in price until today. It’s only 99 cents and I must say it’s quite amazing. You type in a word and the object appears. So much fun.

Spirits – I would have pounced on this as well but I’ve added this to my iPhone game library a while ago at some other sale. Awesome music and an amazingly relaxing game. If you were a fan of Lemmings growing up pick this game up.

Street Fighter IV Volt – Usually $6.99 (IIRC) this game is now 99 cents this weekend as well. I’m not sure if I’ll play it a lot but I enjoyed the first Street Fighter iPhone game and I can’t pass up on this deal. The percentage of savings here short-curcuits my self-control and forced my hand to purchase it instantly.

Contre Jour HD – Picked this up last night for 99 cents and it’s also another very relaxing and fun game to play. Great music that encourages you to play the game with your headphones on, it’s a clever puzzler that is great to play late at night.

World of Goo – I’ve picked this one up a while ago as well and it’s a terrific game. Every pixel of this game has been cleverly thought out. Pick this up if you haven’t already.

So I don’t know why you’re still reading. Go buy and download these games and get playing. Get off your computer and go back to staring at your iPhone. It’ll be fun – I promise.

My Experience with PHP Frameworks – Yii, CodeIgnitor, and Symfony

Posted on 09/26/2011 by Harry

Overview

A week ago I started work on a personal web project using PHP as my programming language of choice. This wasn’t a hard decision as I use PHP daily for work and have a great deal of strength in the language.

As I set forward to create my web app I knew I wanted to use a prebuilt PHP web framework. My reasons included not wanting to reinvent the wheel and the belief that the benefit of open source software is its great community of support.

Another reason I wanted to use an open source PHP framework was that it provides a tried and true framework complete with features that I otherwise would not have time to code myself. Although this project is being done during my free time I don’t want its quality to suffer. So by using a framework that already provides proper request/response, and routing support it would allow me to focus on designing and developing the app and not worry about the architecture that it would be built on.

From my research (lots of Google searches and crawling through and around websites) I found the current top PHP frameworks are:

1. Yii
2. CodeIgnitor
3. Symfony

Here’s my interactions with them.

Continue reading →

Quick Picture Posting

Posted on 05/22/2011 by Harry

The first picture app I started using was Picplz on my Android phone. There wasn’t any other options for me to go to. At the time the app that had all the media in a tizzy was Instagram – and they were iPhone only.

But I wanted to post my pictures – easily and quickly too! And starting out picplz handled that quite handsomely. So I went on my merry way, snapping pictures on my Droid and using picplz to get them online quickly.

And then the Verizon iPhone came out and I gobbled one up as fast as I could. I installed both picplz and Instagram on my phone right away – Instagram to try out and picplz to resume my account.

I tried out Instagram quickly and swiftly After running through its basic feature set I deleted it out of a sense of loyalty to picplz.

I should let it be known that when I first started using Picplz its quite affable and friendly founder – Dalton – quickly followed my account and liked a picture of mine. I further went on to write an unofficial WordPress Picplz widget that was again liked by Dalton and praised by other Picplz users. All of this instilled in me a relatively strong sense of loyalty to Picplz that I find kind of hard to break.

So today I’m on my second day of vacation in Miami and ready and willing to share my experiences through pictures. I would normally turn to Picplz to help me accomplish this task however recently two points of friction have caused me to not use Picplz as frequently.
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Web Application Development Frameworks – Part 1

Posted on 01/17/2011 by Harry

For a long time Ruby on Rails has been the ‘cool kid on the block’ when it comes to contemporary web application development. A good way to understand what a ‘contemporary web application’ is to view the >list of applications that have already been built on Ruby on Rails (RoR). Some notables in the list are Twitter, Groupon, Funny or Die, and Hulu. That’s some good company.

And in case it wasn’t clear, Ruby on Rails is a development tool that allows a programmer to create the type of sites listed above easily. With RoR a website becomes fast and easy to create, maintain, and improve. A lot of ‘magic’ is found within Rails that lets the programmer focus on the practicalities of website development, such as what is the final product and does it work as expected. This is unlike other development tools that force the programmer to worry about idiosyncratic behaviors of certain technologies which cause the completion of the project to drag on and on.
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We Live in Public

Posted on 04/27/2010 by Harry

This is the first movie review I’ve written for my site. The format and structure of these reviews are bound to change like me – and hopefully for the better.

This past week I watched the documentary We Live in Public. Described (as of this writing) on Wikipedia as, “a 2009 documentary by Ondi Timoner about the loss of privacy in the Internet age, which focuses on Internet pioneer Josh Harris.”

This description is incredibly understated.

Josh Harris was one of the early dot-com pioneers, profiteers, and failures. His company Pseudo.com was one of the first video podcasts on the Internet. It hosted a variety of internet shows with lively hosts and information, streamed for the enjoyment of anyone who logged on.

Did I mention this took place in 1994?

Harris’ grand vision of everyone filming and wanting to film themselves has proven to be far ahead of its time. Today we have YouTube and a variety of other sites dedicated and thriving off of user-created content. To be so prescient with this business plan was both Harris’ blessing and curse.

This film took me on a roller-coaster ride around and through emotions that I had never experienced sequentially. The debate surrounding privacy is thoroughly investigated and the details of Harris’ exploits are boggling.

Clocking in at 90-minutes the film is direct and to the point. There is no excess and Timoner lets the archived video speak for itself.

I’m extremely amazed and surprised that I did not know anything that was presented in this film, but I’m extremely grateful to have seen it.

Watch the trailer embedded below.

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