Phodder

Jun 14

We’ve been silent a little while, but we have good reason. Expect more details soon…

May 5

Today’s post brought to you by @nod’s ugly pants. Actually, this is just a quick word to mention that we’re trying to hire some summer interns at Phodder so please pass the word. Experience in C is mandatory. Experience in Objective C and Python is even better.

Apr 27

Malware for iPad users... sigh.

Seems some “enterprising” miscreants have decided to target iPad users on Windows with a software update. Don’t be fooled. It’s fake and not from Apple.

Apr 21

Great! College Station named #5 in Forbe’s Best Small Places for Business and Careers list for Job Growth! Phodder is proud to be a College Station, TX based company!

Apr 14

Well lookie lookie what finally came in the mail :-)

Apr 12

Kingpin kill helps foster young love

That’s right, this young gent (one of the phoddlers) took out this lovely lady with a driveby. They were on a date, he was explaining Kingpin to her, and as they were walking around the park they checked in. Later, he mentioned “you know, you can kill me now if you want”. She said “OK!” but had no wifi signal for her iPod Touch. He looked down, “oops, I have no signal either”. This began their race for life towards a wifi hotspot. Arriving first, he did a driveby and Got Her! They weren’t even friended on foursquare, but he got her. The anguish of death was just too much, so she lashed out. Rumor has it, they’re now “officially dating”!

So what have we learned from this? Not only is Kingpin good for a first date, but apparently, death can help foster young love. Ahhhh spring.. I love the way the bullets fly through blooming flowers.

Happy shooting, everyone!

-@nod

Apr 8

Foursquare meetup at Red Mango in College Station, TX

Apr 3

iPad, 8 hours later (and 4 months from now)

So I got up early this morning and went to Best Buy to buy an iPad. I was one of the weird ones that didn’t pre-order but ended up deciding that we needed a couple for Phodder because of all the client requests coming in. I’ve been playing with it off and on all day long and I have a couple of thoughts about the wunder-device.

First, some minor complaints. The calendar and contacts apps look excellent. I love the book feel. Why can’t I turn pages to navigate content? It’s so well done graphically that it’s immersive enough (especially the Calendar) and I constantly found myself swiping at the screen and wondering why it wasn’t responding. ~~Another issue I’m having with Calendar is that only my main calendar seems to be syncing from Google, yet on other devices (Macbook, iPhone), I get all my calendars~~. [Update, this was an odd Google issue with their m.google.com/sync settings and it’s resolved. Yay calendars!] Here’s another question - Why don’t swipes work for navigation in Safari?

I have a dozen small issues like the above but all of them, even what I’ve mentioned already, leads me to think that we haven’t seen the real iPad yet.

Here’s what I’m thinking - the device feels bridled. The hardware is typical Apple. Gorgeous, well built, solid. The user experience, though, is constrained. Not in your typical “we know better, just trust us” type constrained. It’s more like a “We wanted to get this to market but whoops… we can’t really show you the real OS, so we’ll just give you that as an upgrade in two months”. Here’s the thing. You have this incredible device, but it really is bound to the same paradigm that works for the iPhone, but it’s not an iPhone. There’s a gorgeous, multitouch display, but it’s not being used. This isn’t typical Apple. There’s NOTHING that’s really showing it off, yet. Here’s a simple example that I love. Resize columns in Mail.app on OS X. The date format will change depending on the width. Now, look for the same attention to detail on the iPad. iBooks have that? .. Not really. There’s something else coming. Call it a hunch…

So what’s coming?

Here’s my guess for application launching. The grid based springboard will be replaced with a true physics based model incorporating stacks. We’ve got multitouch, Apple wants to use it. They have the patents to use it. They’ll use it.

How about putting in awesome hardware but then not using it? Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about multi-tasking. The iPad wants it. I’ve heard rumors of an Expose like interface to allow that. I think that’s a great idea.

Let’s talk about inconsistency in user experience. Safari got a new toolbar… Calendar is completely redone, but doesn’t feel finished. Contacts has the same treatment. Mail seems like it’s almost finished too. I think we’re seeing just a preview. ”Hey Kids! Love the hardware!” then the hype dies down, then out comes the real iPad OS and the hype will build again.

In summary, I love the iPad. I just want to love it more and I think this summer, I’m going to get a chance to with 4.0 of the OS.

- @nod

Apr 2

I wrote the game, and I’m giddy about making it to the Hitman rank! —@nod

Mar 30

Switching things up

We’ve run our blog on Wordpress since we launched our site a little over a year ago. We’ve also had a Twitter account (@phodder) for about the same length of time. What we’ve found is that we tend to post things much more frequently to twitter than the blog and I think there’s a few good reasons why.

First, with a blog, there’s this sense of foreboding that if you post something short or trivial, that it’s just not worth the time. It also seems that having to login to the wp admin was just way thicker of something than was worth dealing with for a lot of posts. I know there are plugins that can automate things a bit, but those just become one more thing to install and maintain.

Being a small shop like we are, we want to spend our time on the important things and not maintaining a blog plugin or eight. So, for that reason, we’ve moved our blogging platform to tumblr. I we hope it provides us with a streamlined channel of communication. Sorry if it’s a bit of a disruption while we migrate. Thanks for sticking with us.