JobControl is six years old
661 wordsI absolutely love open source software. I use all kinds of third party libraries for iOS for example (installed via the open source CocoaPods project of course), which makes my life as a developer a whole lot easier. And in return I open source some of ...
Apple's worst iOS framework: MediaPlayer
1802 wordsWhen I started to work on Last.fm's Scrobbler for iOS, I though it would be quite an easy app to create. After all, it's basically a couple of lists of artists, albums and tracks, and all actual music playback will be done using the MediaPlayer ...
The software I used in 2012
1362 wordsAs a software developer, I use a lot of software and tools to help me in my job. In this post I'd like to list some of my most used software of the last year. Hopefully there are some gems that can help you as well! Xcode As an iOS developer, this ...
A new (static) website
361 wordsMore then a year ago I was playing around with static site generators because I wanted to simplify my code and ultimately get rid of my server. My reasons back then were performance, version control and integration with GitHub. I tried a few generators, ...
Looking back at 2012
1365 wordsOn January 2 I moved to Iceland with two suitcases and a job contract. My new title: iOS developer at Gangverk, a small company creating iPhone- and Android apps for CBS in the United States. This was the beginning of an amazing year for me, both ...
MPVolumeView (Airplay button) on an UIBarButtonItem
638 wordsIn an app I'm currently building, the client wants an Airplay button in the navigation bar, with a nice background like so: After trying some things, the solution seems to be to loop over the subviews. It feels a bit hacky, but works perfectly: ...
Why is there no perfect browser?
640 wordsI've used Firefox for a long, long time, back when I still used Windows pc's, until the summer 2007. Chrome didn't exist yet, Internet Explorer sucked and Safari was still Mac-only. Since then, I've switched browsers many times: from Firefox to Safari, ...
Looking for a job in the Arctic Circle
466 wordsFor more then ten years I've been telling friends and family that I'd like to emigrate to another country. I have long thought that this other country would be Scotland, but about six months ago I've changed my mind: I want to move to the Arctic Circle ...
Playing around with static site generators
1174 wordsEven though I'm quite happy with this website and its code, I want to rebuild it using a static site generator: you write your posts and pages with Markdown, write a couple of page html templates, and simply by pushing a new file to Git, your new article ...
"How not to license your app"; an open letter to JetBrains
680 wordsI love JetBrains's PyCharm, a great IDE for Python, and for Django in particular. I would even say it's the best tool for Django programmers. It's got great features, good syntax highlighting, excellent support for debugging, and very very good code ...
Designing my very own ideal programming language
1994 wordsIn 2009 I made the switch to Python, after having worked exclusively with PHP and Javascript for almost a decade. I really like the language, much more then I ever liked PHP. Of course it's not perfect (see one of my first posts called Things I hate ...
The search for the perfect Python IDE (for Django)
2194 wordsWhen I first started working with Python in September 2009, I needed a good IDE. I quickly settled for Netbeans and I've been using it ever since, even though there are some things that really irritate me. But at least it works, and fits well in my ...
My wishes for iOS 5
850 wordsIn June 2010 Apple finally added multitasking to the iPhone (the iPad had to wait 'til November to get iOS version 4) and with this resolved one of my biggest complaints about the operating system. And while I really enjoy iOS on the iPhone and the iPad, ...
Django-CMS backend usability
615 wordsYesterday I wrote an article comparing Django-CMS, FeinCMS and Mezzanine. One of the conclusions was that while Django-CMS is the best CMS on paper, I don't like its backend interface that much. I thought it would be a good idea to properly explain what ...
Django-CMS vs. FeinCMS vs. Mezzanine
1397 wordsWhen you need a content management system for Django, there is enough choice. Maybe even too much: the very helpful site djangopackages.com lists 13. Some are mature and very feature-complete, while others are barely more then a basic model and a ...
Looking for a Django CMS which suits my needs
635 wordsI need to build a content-based website for a client, in Django. Well, that's easy right? Pick one of the content management systems available, build some templates and css, and ta-da, done. Since I have used Django-CMS in previous projects, that would ...
My thoughts after having completed my first Appcelerator projects
733 wordsA while ago I set out to build my third mobile application. Only this time the client wanted not only an iPhone app, but one for Android too. So that's why I turned to Appcelerator once again, after my failed first attempt. In case you don't know what ...
Serving 5000 pages per second with Django
1560 wordsOkay, this website wasn't slow and will never need to serve 5000 pages per second, but hey, it's possible now! Oh right, and it was fun to play around with a nice caching system. Almost everything on mixedCase.nl needs to come from the database: the list ...
Source code of mixedcase.nl now available
112 wordsThis website uses quite some Django packages, like Django-CMS and Zinnia. A lot of effort has been put into integrating everything nicely into the design and templates, like comments, sitemaps, archives, Pygments, Markdown, etc. I understand that for ...
Once again I turn to Appcelerator
239 wordsAfter I decided to create iPhone apps using just the iPhone SDK and the Objective-C language, I've created two iPhone apps that are available in the Dutch App Store. Development for app number three has started today, but no longer will I be using Xcode. ...
A new website! What, again?
754 wordsIt's been 13 months since the first version of Bolhoed.net went online, complete with a blog. Only 9 months since the brand new design. And now not only got the site yet another design, it even got a new domain name. The problem While I like the iPad ...
Book review: Beginning iPhone 3 Development
455 wordsBeginning iPhone 3 Development - Exploring the iPhone SDK Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche Apress My sixth book review, and the second one about iPhone development. The previous book, Head First iPhone Development was a great read, but since it only talked ...
Book review: Head First iPhone Development
734 wordsHead First iPhone Development Dan Pilone & Tracey Pilone O'Reilly In a previous blogentry I wrote about some great online resources I found to get started with iPhone development. I read the C and Objective-C introductions, watched the first 12 or so ...
Getting started with iPhone app development
820 wordsFor a pretty long time I wanted to make an iPhone app, ever since the App Store opened really. But, I've never programmed for Mac OS, never done any C or C++ (let alone Objective-C). In fact, I've never created a desktop application, only working on web ...
Book review: The Elements of User Experience
165 wordsThe Elements of User Experience: user-centered design for the web Jesse James Garrett New Riders Have you ever wondered what the differences between Interface Design, Navigation Design, Interaction Design, Information Architecture and Visual Design are? ...
Book review: Don't Make Me Think
221 wordsDon't make me think! A common sense approach to web usability (2nd edition) Steve Krug New Riders Buy this book. Okay, maybe that's too short of a review. Steve Krug's book about usability is short (less then 200 pages), quick to read, funny, insightful ...
Book review: Effective UI
259 wordsEffective UI: The art of building a great user experience in software Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, Robb Wilson & the EffectiveUI team O'Reilly I bought this book, hoping it would give tips and hints on making effective user interfaces, what works best, ...
Django 1.2, a great release
607 wordsI've been playing with the Beta release of Django 1.2 (get it here) and I love many of the new improvements. I'd like to list the best and biggest new features, and also some problems I encountered while using it. Smarter if tag I was already using this ...
My quest for a mockup tool
1021 wordsA while ago I wrote that Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe is going start a new usability department. At the moment I am busy writing marketing texts and thinking about a new website for ourself. Last week I also looked for a nice tool for making ...
Going to start GW20e's usability department
199 wordsGood news! I've had my permanent-contract negotiation at Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe (or GW20e for short) last week, and one of the things we talked about was my desire to start a new usability department. The bosses liked the idea and gave me the ...
Brand new design, comments reenabled
85 wordsI've worked hard on a brand new design for Bolhoed.net, and I must say: I am quite happy and proud of it. It took 4 nights of work to redesign everything. There are 3 versions: for big and small resolutions, and a mobile version for really small ...
Comments closed
134 wordsBecause I was getting a lot of spam in my comments, I've closed it down entirely for now, until I can come up with a solution (and find time to build it). I am thinking about requiring the visitor to authenticate using an OpenID provider, or using a ...
Making Django suck less
602 wordsOr, “How to make Django even better then it already is”. Because it really isn't as bad as the title implies :) In my previous post Things I hate about Python and Django, I said that one of the things I “hate” about Django is its template language. While ...
Things I hate about Python and Django
710 wordsI have been a PHP programmer for the last 9 years, and only in September of 2009 I switched to Python and the Django framework. While I really love the Python language and the Django framework (especially compared to something like the Zend PHP ...
Using the Google Visualization API in Django
1448 wordsIn a project I am working on, I need to show a lot of graphs and charts. Together with the client we chose to use the Visualization API by Google, which provides a Python library, offers many different kinds of charts and very important: the data is not ...
How to dynamically add fields to a Django model
348 wordsFor a project I needed to create a Django model from a list of fields that were defined somewhere else. It took me hours to get this to work, so to save you the time, here is the solution: bc.. fields = ['field_a', 'field_b', 'field_c'] # the base model ...
Switching from MobileMe & my short adventure with Google App Engine
1051 wordsI can't remember how long ago it's been that I've used a free email address like hotmail, yahoo or gmail. For more then 8 years I've used my own domain names to host my email. In the very beginning on my own little server at home, later on a “real” ...
New site, new Django / Plone blog!
969 wordsHooray! A new site! One that actually has content! The bolhoed.net domain was a gift from a friend, about 2 years ago. I really only used it for email, but once you have a domain, you gotta have a site, right? Problem was, what to put on it? So that's ...