Articles

If you're a freelance web worker, then you may have run into this scenario before:

Prospective Client: I think I'd like to work with you! What's your hourly rate?
You: Great! My hourly rate is $X.
Prospective Client: Oh, that's a bit more than we can afford. Would you consider doing the project for a flat fee?
You: ...

If you've ever seen a PHP error like "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted..." on one of your websites, then you might need to increase the memory limit for PHP on your web server. Depending on your web host, this may or may not be possible. If you have a Dreamhost VPS, then luckily it is! Here's how you do it.

Recently I added Facebook image sharing to Glory Math 1, and it was my first experience with the Facebook iOS SDK. I used the newer Sign Sign-On feature, which briefly takes the user to the Facebook app to ask them whether your app can access their Facebook profile. The docs are good, and the whole process was pretty straightforward, but one aspect of the authentication process really annoys me: Every time my app launches again, the user must go through the authentication process with Facebook. The first time the user authenticates, it'll ask for access, but every time after that, it just tells the user that they already approved the application for access, and they just have to tap "Okay". This process seems pointless to me. So, I tried to find a way around it.

This one's for the developers out there, and maybe the designers too. What music do you like to listen to when you're programming or making things? The primary characteristic of music that is good for programming seems to be a lack of words. Any kind of vocals in a track distracts me very quickly (although this might have to do with my childhood as a choir singer). I prefer something that puts me into a steady mental state, and kind of stays out of the way. So, I find myself mostly listening to dance music, or more specifically, IDM (a useful but annoying term). Read more about Music for Programming

ASIHTTPRequest is a wonderful Objective-C library for simplifying web request programming in your iOS (and OS X) apps. It's my go-to library for web server communication in iPhone apps. But, it's taken me awhile to get my own system for using it within apps that communicate with a server that needs authentication. In this article, I'll show you how to create your own subclass of ASIHTTPRequest to further simplify constructing requests to your API, including logging in and out. Read more about iPhone: Subclass ASIHTTPRequest for Your App's Login System

Sometimes you just want to break up your Drupal menus into sub-menus, but with headers that aren't links themselves. For example, say you want a menu like the one pictured here, and you'd like to implement it as one menu tree within Drupal. "Looking & Telling" and "Making" need to be menu items, but they aren't actually links to pages; they're just there to group menu items in a nice way. There is the Special Menu Items module to do it, but it does currently have some bugs, and there is actually a simple, theme-based way to achieve the same thing. Here's how.

A couple of days ago, an HourPatch customer emailed me with a bug he'd found. When he created a time entry on a Saturday night, that entry would "jump" a week ahead on the schedule. I was able to fix it pretty quickly, and it turned out the problem related to time zone conversions, so I thought I'd share a little of what I learned when fixing that bug. Read more about Handling Time Zone Conversions in Rails

Have you seen this new site Interhoods? It uses Dribbble and GitHub profiles and mashes them up with a map to give you an idea of who the web designers and developers are in your neighborhood, and city. Right now they only offer the service for people in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. I think they should add Austin next. Read more about How to Get to Know the Austin Web / Tech Creative Community

When I first started making iPhone apps, I wrote a lot of repetitive code to style interface elements. Certainly, getting comfortable with Interface Builder eases that pain to some degree, but IB won't allow you to take advantage of a lot of available built-in styling features for your interface elements, such as curved corners, drop shadows, and stroked borders. Additionally, you can create beautiful gradient backgrounds in code pretty easily, but the code is somewhat verbose, so it really pays off to find good ways of re-using that kind of code. Also, using a programmatic approach to your app styling can eliminate the production time associated with image-based styles (e.g. custom background images). A lot of common effects used in UIs can be realized without any images whatsoever. Read more about UIView: How to Make Shiny Backgrounds and Other Reusable Styles

In my recent work on Sphericle, there were a few instances where I wanted to use the same image over and over, but colored differently each time. For example, I want to show spheres of different colors on a map; there are 360,000 spheres, each having its own color. I didn't want to draw the sphere algorithmically; I wanted the picture of a sphere to be based on an image, but then colored appropriately. The solution: use a grayscale image of a sphere, then draw a color over it using a color burn blend mode. That's what I want to show you today. Read more about iPhone: How to Dynamically Color a UIImage