Dieter Komendera

iOS 5.1 usage surges, overtaking 5.0.1

I was pleasantly surprised today to see iOS 5.1 usage soar in our apps' active user base, overtaking 5.0.1 already.

(See updates from March 22 below)

Schafkopf App:
blue: iOS 5.0.1
orange: iOS 5.1

Doppelkopf App:
green: iOS 5.0.1
red: iOS 5.1

On the y-axis in the graphs is games played per minute, so it's not unique users, and probably also not representative, though it shows users rapidly pick up the new OS version.

[Update March 22]

Sauspiel App iOS version distribution
orange: iOS 5.0.1
green: iOS 5.1

Fuchstreff App iOS version distribution
blue: iOS 5.0.1
red: iOS 5.1

Staying with Instapaper

Regarding all that Readability vs. Instapaper buzz, 2 reasons why I won't switch to Readability:

• Instapaper works great for me
• I like Instapaper's business model a lot more

Textmate to VIM

Comprehensive list of tips for users who're switching from Textmate to VIM on OS X.

Switching to ZSH

I know I'm late to the party, but I finally made the switch over to ZSH. With oh-my-zsh it was just a matter of minutes, including creating a customized theme.

Counterfeit Apple Stores in China

They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.

Also, check out Samsung's certified Smart-Cover rip-offs.

No wonder Apple turns to litigation more and more.

FrozenRails 2011

Speakers include Geoffrey Grosenbach and Jarkko Laine. Great stuff — I'll be there.

GoDaddy SSL Cert Scam

GoDaddy performs tracking so their site will report to you that their $13.99 certs cost $49.99. I was able to verify this by switching browsers to one that didn’t have their cookie and looking at the same page.

iCostYou time tracking app

A little and fun time tracking app we built together with Samo. It's free, so check it out.

Considering

When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

— John Ruskin

Which Bubble?

Airbnb, which helps people rent rooms in their homes, is raising venture capital that would value it at a billion dollars. Scoopon, a kind of Groupon for Australians, raised $80 million; Juice in the City, a Groupon for mothers, raised $6 million; and Scvngr, which started a Groupon for gamers, raised $15 million. These could, of course, turn out to be successful businesses. The worry, investors say, is the prices.

Color: 41 million Dollars

The Melt: 15 million Dollars

Anybody seeing a bubble here?

About Google Chrome's Prerendering

Nice overview and what implications it has for web apps and developers.

Embed Images and Fonts Into CSS with the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline

We're using documentcloud's Jammit for managing CSS and Javascript dependencies, concatenation and as a bonus, also embedding certain images and fonds directly into the CSS file to improve page load times.

Now that Rails 3.1 is on the horizon with it's brand new asset pipeline, based on sprockets, we chose it as our new solution to manage assets. The only drawback: Sprockets doesn't have built-in support for embedding assets like we did with Jammit.

Enter the embed-assets-rails gem.

Fortunately, it's straight-forward to extend the asset pipeline and add features to it. And this is what the gem is about. We've integrated Jammit's embed assets feature to work nicely with Rails 3.1!

Source is on Github, of course. Thoughts and contribution are welcome.

How Hackers Stole 200,000+ Citi Accounts

All they had to do was log in as a customer and change around a few numbers into the browser's URL bar, NYT reports.

Unbelievable.

Ramen Music Issue #5

Best Ramen issue so far.

Silver Needle in the Skype (PDF)

Insights on how Skype works.

Logo Swap

Obviously, marketing works. These look so wrong.

(also check out this post)

Prevent Asset Concatenation in Rails 3.1

To prevent assets (javascripts and stylesheets) to be concatenated by the asset pipeline, either append ?debug_assets=1 to the request URL, or pass
:debug => true to the asset helper, e.g.

javascript_include_tag "application", :debug => true

Facebook Aquires Sofa

Great move from Facebook. Hope it works out for the Sofa guys, moving the whole team over to the other side of the pond seems to be some effort, and the cultural differences don't seem to be insignificant.

Recent work

• A Schnapsen-App for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
• Rails work on Fuchstreff.de, a Doppelkopf Site
• Passport-Checker, a Ruby library to verify european passport numbers
• Work on ipayment-rails, a Rails library to simplify the integration of the www.ipayment.de credit card gateway into a Ruby on Rails app.

Photos from Upper Austria

Superb photos from Upper Austria (by Andrey)

Schafkopf iPhone and iPad App

We've submitted our Sauspiel iPhone and iPad App to Apple. see here for more.