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Designing the Apple Watch UI – a quick guide
The Apple Watch is releasing in a month! Here’s a list of important things you need to know, if you’re interested in designing or developing an Apple Watch App: 1. Layout and Screen Sizes 38mm: 340 pixels x 272 pixels 42mm: 390 pixels x 312 pixels That’s an aspect ratio of 4:5. 2. Icon…
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Php’s performance improvements — HHVM, JIT, and ‘Hack’
Facebook deprecated HipHop for PHP, a PHP to C++ translator (trans-compiler) which they had been using since Feb 2010 in favour of HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), in 2013. HHVM is a PHP interpreter that uses just-in-time(JIT) compilation techniques. Or to put it another way, HHVM is a virtual machine that compiles PHP bytecode to native instructions at runtime. HHVM now…
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Native Vs Hybrid Mobile Apps
I was recently checking how the Hybrid App frameworks compare to Native iOS or Android Apps. Here are my observations on few Phonegap Apps that I tried on my phone: The size of Phonegap Apps is big: an app that should have been less than 10MB has a 40-50MB installer. The Apps take longer to…
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github is not git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system that can handle small to very large projects. It’s mostly used to keep the history of your source code. Github is a company that provides an online git hosting service, used by some projects to keep their source code. There are several companies like…
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Product Analytics for growing Startups
For any product company, understanding how their product performs is crucial in achieving growth. And data-driven decision-making can uncover hidden patterns and help align the products with its long-term vision. The Amazons and Googles of the world are successful because they have successfully used analytics at key stages of their product lifecycles. Now of course…
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Navigating large codebases and contributing to Open Source
(I wrote the following as an email to a someone who asked me for advice. So it’s verbose and written with a personal tone.) I. Setup your system and build the project code Pick any good Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I like VS Code. You can work on any langauge in VSCode be it C++,…
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What’s inside Google Glass?
It’s impressive to see how much punch “Google Glass” packs in an elegant and light-weight construction. (Image: iFixit) I’ve long believed that the ability to create new materials is a good indicator of a country’s production and economic ability. Just look at what Britain, US and Germany did with materials during the industrial revolution and…
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Python for beginners
Getting functional in Python programming took me about a month and I’ve several years of C++ programming experience. I feel this is ok time for experienced programmers to get started, given you have something else going on in life as well. For beginners though, learning a new programming language in a useful manner is not…
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Visualizing data using graphs and charts
There’s been a surge in reporting data using charts on the web. This has brought in the trend of infographics and several tools (JS libraries) that simplify the task of drawing charts. Many people get too occupied in visual design and overlook whether the chart actually fits their use case though. Software charting libraries/plugins ought to…