Dieter Komendera
Hi, I'm Dieter, and I work for abloom, a creative agency located in Vienna, Austria.
about
I enjoy working with things like Ruby, Rails, Cocoa and CocoaTouch.
From time to time I publish…
- articles here or on the abloom blog,
- photos on flickr,
- and code on GitHub.
On Twitter, IRC and other services I'm known as kommen.
Recent work
- nextjournal, an evolving platform for computer-aided research
- kaffemik, a place for Europe's independent roasters in Vienna
- Bold Poker, your personal poker dealer
- Bummerl, a Schnapsen Community (Rails, iPhone and iPad apps)
- Sauspiel, a Schafkopf Community (Rails, iPhone and iPad apps)
Introducing nextjournal
Together with friends I'm creating an open, web-based alternative for publishing scientific research.
nextjournal makes it easy to run simulations, collaborate with peers and simplify peer review through reproducible results, right in the browser.
More details on https://nextjournal.com and on @usenextjournal.
My favorite iOS photo apps
Just a small collection of photo apps I use on a regular basis :)
Pro HDR
Even with iOS having HDR built in now and making it even easier to use with Auto HDR since iOS 7, I still often turn to Pro HDR for more control of the details. It's also possible to manually select two images from the library and combine them to an HDR image.
By eyeapps.
Photoshop Express
Some nice effects and all the basic editing features. But the killer feature is "Noice Reduction", which is available as an In-App purchase and works really well.
By Adobe.
VSCOcam
Currently my go-to app for tuning exposure, tint, shadows and friends. Has some very nice presets as well, combined with an easy to use UI.
By VSCO.
AvgCamPro
Perfect for low-noise pictures in low-light situations and also for long exposure effects, by taking multiple pictures and a customizable interval and combining them.
By Dominik Seibolds.
SKRWT
Brand new app for correcting horizontal and vertical perspective distortion. I've only had it for a couple of days and it already has proven itself as a valueable tool for me.
Queue presentViewController and dismissViewControllerAnimated with dispatch semaphores
If for some reason there's a chance that multiple present/dismiss of UIViewControllers could occur at the same time (e.g. trigged by a server side event and user event) you can queue them with dispatch semaphores like this:
This prevents "Application tried to present modally an active controller" exceptions while eventually ending up in the desired state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.