Important note: This app and concept is not affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by ikea. But since it’s non-commercial I hope they won’t shøøt me.

iPad fluid app layout concept from Moritz Haarmann on Vimeo.

So, what’s wrong with the classic view controllers on the iPad? Nothing, absolutely nothing. They are fine. I just wanted to try out this idea, and the video is the result. If you want to test it, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you ( or not ). I guess it is obvious that I’ve been inspired by the Twitter-iPad UI to some extent.

Maybe the most important lesson I learned programming this demo was that it’s really hard to create an interface that acts in accordance with the direct manipulation paradigm.. when there is no real counterpart. I thought about a stack of cards or some other stack model, but none of those resize their content or just “move out” if there is not enough room. I am still not fully convinced that every interaction is right, but at least it feels right most of the time now. If you are curious, there can be an arbitrary number of panels around, of course only limited by memory consumption, without affecting the UI or overall perfomance.

Since I don’t have a phone capable of recording videos right now, you have to believe me that the UI is really snappy on an iPad 2 and yes, it’s even fun to use it.

If you are interested in how I got the data you might want to read a previous post that explained how to retrieve the data from IKEA. Was fun

What do you think? Too confusing? Interesting? Let me know!

Update: If you want to test it locally, please enter your UUID here. No guarantee whatsoever, first come, first serve.

I am currently developing a Proxy app that visualizes requests and gives you the ability to plug-and-play like filter and modify requests, which makes it a quite powerful tool for debugging web applications, mobile apps and so on.

Of course, this tool is built using Cocoa and Core Foundation. Interesting enough, Core Foundation brings a Type called “CFHTTPMessage”, which handles a lot of low-level message parsing and processing, and is really handy and quite easy to use.

There is one drawback: CFHTTPMessage is not designed to handle both the order in which the headers arrived in a message and duplicate header fields. The first point is somewhat irrelevant, as the HTTP1.1 standard points out that servers are not supposed to depend on any order in the clients – it’s really only a minor issue. The latter point is complicated. HTTP relies on duplicate headers a lot, consider this HTTP request ( Real life!! )


POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1
Accept-Charset: utf-8;q=0.7
Accept-Charset: *;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Origin: http://momo.brauchtman.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1
Cookie: word
Cookie: wordpress_xxxxxxxx
Cookie: wordpress_logged_in_xxxxxx; httponly; expires=Tue
Referer: http://momo.brauchtman.net/wp-admin/post-new.php
Host: momo.brauchtman.net
Accept-Language: de-DE
Accept-Language: de;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US;q=0.6
Accept-Language: en;q=0.4
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 1160


There are quite some duplicates here. So the clever guys at Cupertino just forgot to handle duplicate headers at all? No, not really. But they just didn’t document what they are doing with it, which isn’t that clever at all, but fortunately, the sources are available here. So after a bit of digging, I found out that duplicates are simply appended to a former header with same key, which sucks – the delimiter used is a simple comma, which is quite regularly found in header values, which makes splitting an art for itself.

Apple-like, it looks great and … doesn’t work ( which is not that Apple-like at all ). At least on my brand-new Early 2011 MBP, it just crashes. So I got curious and ask some friends to double-check it, and bingo, they had similar issues on the comparable i7-equipped machines.

Back at home, I fired the tool on my ancient 2009 iMac, and voila, it works just fine. So.. what the hell is going on there?

[update] I tested the network link conditioner on my new i5-iMac, not a problem there.

The first presentation was built using Keynote, which is part of iWork, Apple’s Office counterpart. Creation was really simple, the look is just amazing ( especially the transitions ), but there is one problem: I don’t have a mobile Mac at the moment, so I needed to use a friend’s MacBook to do the presentation. This is definitely a bit of a pain, considering the fact that he’s most likely not always around, and exporting to PowerPoint kills all the USPs. There is a workaround though, you can export presentations as .mov files, movies that halt on every transition and continue only after you press a key.

Second presentation, Latex Beamer producing PDFs. The ugly part is the creation, certainly. Unless you are fluid in a text editor, command line and the reading of technical documentation, this might not be your premier choice. After you’ve gracefully managed to create some slides, the output looks great and the best point about it is that any netbook will do just fine for the presentation. I used my Ubuntu-equipped machine and it worked well using the default PDF-Viewer.

Sven showed impressive to me today, a great way of tuning your PDF-only presentations by adding transitions, overview pages and other handy accessoires to finished PDF-Presentations. It’s written in python, has some dependencies ( nothing that easy_install couldn’t fix ) and works really well.

The third presentation kicked off using Google Docs. The presentation ( about Google Go ) had no style, no transitions, was built in about 10 minutes and.. worked. Nothing more, nothing less. It clearly did it’s job, yet there are, at least by now, a bunch of more pleasing ways to get the job done available.

Because a lot of people are really excited about Prezi at the moment, I decided to give it a shot. The presentations created are really different from what presentations have been in the past, it looks.. amazing, is easy to use, features a free plan. It depends on flash, which is somewhat a drawback and is, at least for me not a choice at the moment. Why? Well, first of all, there is no way to create custom styles, you are basically limited to what Prezi offers. The next problem is the lack of a free offline editor ( Google Docs is able to do that ). And of course, what you create looks create, but either I missed the feature that says “copy region from one Prezi to another” or it’s not there. Either way, without it, reuse seems impossible. Still, if you have only 3 minutes and need to deliver a stunning performance, you should go with Prezi. ( Edit: Benny just posted something about Prezi a few days ago, too )

I think it’s a bit nasty that Apple enrolls the AppleCare subscription just after completing the order process, without being able to use this machine. This means I’m paying for 5 days more than I can actually use this service. Sucks.

Next I’m quite impressed by Rails ( again ). It just works like a charm, really, although I couldn’t get passenger on Debian etch to work, but I think that’s something quite fixable. We’ll see.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about the project I’m working on, but I’m very excited to be part of it and hopefully I’ll show you what I’m doing here. I also wrote an acts_as_localized plugin, enabling localized database models that are used just as normal models. The code is not the best, but if someone wants to have it, just ask.

So long

And there was this one thing. Imagine a system-wide menu bar featuring all your current apps, plus the one you are using most often. Of course, it’s up to you to decide what you want to place in that amazing menu-bar. You can even use a very, very hot ability to place items using the mouse called “drag and drop”. Finally, after using an application and closing it, the corresponding icon will just disappear. Unbelievable, I know. There is one other amazing ability this dreambar, as I call it, offers. The grouping of windows belonging to the same application. This is indeed something total new, something I have dreamed about for years, and now it’s finally happening. 

Well, in case you thought it sounds like the Mac OS Dock. It’s not. It’s the new taskbar in Windows 7, called “superbar”. It seems people at Redmond are a bit desperate these days, instead of being creative.. 

But let’s be serious, just for a moment. I’m really wondering where the innovation is. Even searching for “Windows 7 Innovation” doesn’t return much. There is the mentioned superbar ( wuhhzza ), some eye-candy and a multi-touch interface ( if I got that rumor right ). The multi-touch interface is a gift for hardware manufacturers, but not for people with ordinary PCs eating French Fries while surfing the web, the superbar is pretty much a bad copy of several already existing concepts and the rest? Is there still this ridiculous Flip-3D thingy that is so not boosting productivity? Oh it’s so spacy I can’t see the contents of the other windows..

Windows definitely has some fields where no one is at the moment able to compete with it, but not because of the superior technology but rather because of hardware manufacturers still keeping that platform up, and game vendors still building mainly for it, too.  

But actually, this hasn’t necessarily to be something bad. Mac OS simply is the best system when it comes to usability, consistency of an interface etc.. And Windows can only profit from … reinventing some stuff already present there. Calling it Superbar seems a bit exaggerated, but after the Zune disaster I guess it’s to polish some Egos.

Already bought songs can be updated for something around 30 cents, which certainly sucks hard, and the price for new songs can be anything between 69 and 129 cents, a long-time demand of the music industry. 

I guess not the action itself is the big important here, but rather the perception of some guys over at Universal or wherever that DRM just doesn’t work. No it’s finally there: legal, unprotected music ( like in the old days ) at a reasonable price ( not like in the old days ). Welcome.