Cezary Wojcik's Blog

No Sleep, No Problem - A Word Game In 30 Days

Cezary Wojcik — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 05:00:00 GMT

Almost every developer has looked at a piece of software at some point and thought, "I could do better, and it wouldn't even be that hard." I tend to think that several times a day. It's nagging, annoying feeling, because no task is as simple as it sounds. Developers, especially, should know better - but we don't.

Apple Music is a Usability Nightmare

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 04:00:00 GMT

I was really hoping that I could switch to Apple Music from Spotify. I really wanted this to work. Not because Spotify is bad, but because change can be fun (and because searching any song with Siri on my watch sounds pretty cool). I'm running the iOS 9 beta on my phone, so I downloaded the iOS 8.4 update on my iPad to check out Apple Music. Unfortunately, I don't see myself switching from Spotify anytime soon. I really tried to convince myself to give it a chance, but Apple Music is just simply awful to use. Everything I would want to do would either take forever or is simply not possible.

Two Weeks Later With the Apple Watch

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 12 May 2015 04:00:00 GMT

After 2 weeks with my Apple Watch, I've been making some notes about what life with it is like. Overall, I definitely like it, but there is, as there tends to be, room for improvement.

Pebble Steel Present, Apple Watch Future

Cezary Wojcik — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 05:00:00 GMT

I've been using a Pebble Steel for over 5 months now, and though it is a nice device, I find myself very much looking forward to replacing it with an Apple Watch instead. Though the Pebble Steel offers many benefits of a smartwatch, I've also found that it comes with its own set of annoyances, many of which stem from not having access to any Apple APIs aside from getting Bluetooth notifications.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Cezary Wojcik — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 05:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me a curious message. He said, "I am amazed at how short you can make a rock-paper-scissors game in code." He then posted what, to me, seemed like a lot of code for what it was trying to do. I figured that there must be a better way.

CorBus 2.0

Cezary Wojcik — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 04:00:00 GMT

The first iteration of CorBus was made at a hackathon over the course of around 8 hours. After it was chosen "Best Overall" by the judges, the app was improved upon before being submitted to the OSU App Challenge, where it was chosen for "Best Usability". Though the various judges might have liked the app, I was never truly happy with it. Even though it got many compliments, it had some performance issues and an interface that wasn't as intuitive as I would like. Because of how much custom view animation code was in the app, when the new iPhone screen sizes were announced, I knew that trying to make the app work on the new screen sizes was probably more trouble than it was worth. Since I also wanted to give myself a project to play around with Swift and new iOS 8 APIs, I decided to rewrite the app in Swift from scratch.

One Week Later With iPhone 6 Plus

Cezary Wojcik — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:00:00 GMT

As soon as I saw the iPhone 6 Plus in Apple's September 9th keynote, I knew that I wanted that phone. I wanted to know what it's like to have a ~~big~~ ~~large~~ ~~huge~~ enormous phone. I'm farily tall (6'3"), and I have fairly large hands, so the size itself wasn't as big of a concern to me as it probably was/is to shorter folk. One of my many internal rationalizations for getting the Plus (none of which are actually very rational) was that if there are smaller people who are fine with larger phones, I should be even more fine. So I preordered a gold 6 Plus after a tiring battle against Apple's servers and got it delivered on release day. And now here I am, a week later. My old iPhone 5s looks like a tiny toy, and my hands seem to have established somewhat of a rough standard for large phone usage.

How smart is smart enough for a smartwatch?

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 04:00:00 GMT

Most people, especially those in the "tech crowd," tend not to wear watches. A phone seems to be a sufficient time-telling device. Most of the articles that I've read about the Apple Watch seem to be written from that perspective. To me, the decision as to whether to wear a smartwatch or nothing seems fairly simple if those are the only two choices. I wear an analog watch already, however, so my decision instead will be an arguably more difficult one - whether I want to give up my analog watch for an Apple Watch or keep my current watch. It's an issue that I'm currently debating, so I decided to write out my thoughts to help piece various arguments together.

Swift - From Beta 1 to 1.0

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:00:00 GMT

I've had a busy summer, so since the initial release of Swift, I haven't had very much time to keep up with the updates the language has undergone over time. Since the 1.0 release is now finalized and I also finally have some additional time, I figured I'd spend it adjusting something I had made in beta 1 to see how much has changed.

My New Website

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:00:00 GMT

I decided that it was finally time to abandon the dark ages. Prior to a couple of days ago, my website was hosted on a shared hosting service and was built using PHP and MySQL. I built this new version from scratch using Node.js.

Swift - Understanding Reference Types

Cezary Wojcik — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 04:00:00 GMT

There are three different kinds of references in Swift that are based on the ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) model that we have come to know in Objective-C: strong, weak, and unowned. The difference between these as well as the proper implementation can be somewhat confusing, so I'm writing up a description of each for my own and others' benefit.

CWStatusBarNotification in Swift

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 04:00:00 GMT

I just got done porting my library, CWStatusBarNotification to a new Swift version. It was a good opportunity to play around with closures, optionals, and other Swifty features.

Swift - Understanding Optionals

Cezary Wojcik — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:00:00 GMT

Largely because I had some trouble understanding the concept of optional types in Swift, I wanted to make a writeup to gather my ideas and make a reference for my future self that might not be in the same enlightened state of optional type understanding that possesses me now.

CorBus is released!

Cezary Wojcik — Mon, 26 May 2014 04:00:00 GMT

It took a little while, but CorBus is finally released. You can download it here!

CorBus - Coming Soon

Cezary Wojcik — Thu, 15 May 2014 04:00:00 GMT

This app was first created as a submission for the OSU Corvallis Bus Hackathon by myself and Russell Barnes. The hackathon consisted of around 8 hours of coding. We started out with using the iOS Google Maps SDK because the format of the bus route lines was made using Google's Polyline Encoding Algorithm. Our initial idea involved using a blurred street view in the background of each stop in a list of table view cells, but this ended up looking awful (not to mention the blurring obscured Google's logo/legal links, which is not allowed). Instead, we ended up using solid backgrounds based on the various bus lines' bus colors, and it turned out fairly well. We ended up winning Best Overall App at the hackathon.

Google Maps Hackathon - Parcel App

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 05:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, I got to participate in the Google Maps Hackathon held at Oregon State University, and I had a great deal of fun. My team won the prize for Best Overall App by implementing my idea called Parcel.

CWStatusBarNotification v2.0

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 05:00:00 GMT

I just updated my CWStatusBarNotification library to version 2.0. The changes are fairly substantial as I refactored the entire library.

Retina MacBook Pro 15 Review

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Even though I had seen the gaping difference between non-retina and retina iPhones and iPads, I had always been skeptical of a retina display on a laptop (or any computer for that matter). "This screen is perfectly sharp and crisp," I once thought. I had even taken a look at the retina screens at the Apple store once or twice. "It's not that big of a difference," I thought. I was wrong.

StepChart

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 04:00:00 GMT

I couldn't find any apps that displayed the data from the iPhone 5s M7 chip's step counter the way I wanted to see the data, so I made my own app. It's called StepChart.

CMStepsCounter is Awesome

Cezary Wojcik — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Judging by the number of pedometer apps to hit the App Store recently, I figured that implementing the pedometer must be fairly easy. I had no idea, however, how easy it actually is. One of the new APIs built into iOS 7 is CMStepCounter. It's made specifically for... counting steps.

SC2News 2.0 is out!

Cezary Wojcik — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:00:00 GMT

On the same day that I got my new iPhone, the new version of my SC2News app was approved for the App Store. It was a good day. I did notice one bug that I did not, unfortunately, foresee - since the settings plist is different, the app has a chance to crash if the new settings are not refreshed. I'll have to figure out how to fix that.

iPhone 5s First Impressions

Cezary Wojcik — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

After using a 4s for the past 2 years, I find the speed of the 5s to be amazing. It's amazing how much of a delay I now notice when I try to use my iPhone 4s again that I didn't see before. After just a couple of hours of use of the 5s, the 4s screen seems so tiny. How did I ever use that?

SC2News 2.0 - Waiting for Review

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

My SC2News app has been in need of an update. I've finally submitted the 2.0 version to the App Store.

Pleasant Surprise

Cezary Wojcik — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

I was already prepared to be waiting until October 21st to get my iPhone 5s gold. I was very pleasantly surprised when I got this message in my email today:

I waited for a gold iPhone today

Cezary Wojcik — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

... and I didn't get one. I arrived at the Apple Store in Bridgeport Village at a little before 3 a.m. Already, the line was at least 100 people long. Maybe 200. I'm not sure. Especially with reports of low iPhone 5s gold stock in particular, I knew my chances were low from the start. But, I was there, so I gave it a shot.

iOS - CWStatusBarNotification

Cezary Wojcik — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Several applications I've seen have notifications that move most of the content down and extend the navigation toolbar. I've always found that to be slightly annoying. So I decided to make a quick library to create notifications in the status bar. It makes a lot more sense to put notifications of this sort in the status bar, as it does not disrupt the main content view.

iOS - CWPopup Updates

Cezary Wojcik — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

For the release of iOS 7, I added 3 main features to my CWPopup iOS library.

iPhone 5s Surprises

Cezary Wojcik — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Most everything that was presented on the September 10th Apple Keynote was leaked on the internet beforehand. There were, however, two key surprises.

What's really going on in Syria?

Cezary Wojcik — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 04:00:00 GMT

I had always intended for my blog to stay focused on technology. However, recently, I can't help but feel the need to express my views on the crisis in Syria. I'm writing this, to a large extent, for my own benefit. I don't like to have strong opinions on matters that I don't know much about, so I've decided to do a bit of research and writing to better inform myself and hopefully, answer some questions.

iOS - CWPopup

Cezary Wojcik — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Recently, I've gotten back into iOS Development. One of the UI elements that I've thought about adding a good few times is a popup view controller, so I went ahead and made it.