News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

vpdn

Thanks for creating it! As for me it was certainly the "people don't have confidence in their success rate". Also was always a bit afraid of recruiter spam.

Here's the link of this month's edition, if anyone wants to give it a go (I finally did!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325923

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @04:11AM (#20333166)
I'm an iOS developer with close to ten years experience building apps, some of which have multiple million downloads and are used daily by hundreds of thousands of people. I've worked for large corporations such as BMW and Daimler (Mercedes Benz) as well as digital agencies and early startups. Recently, I was head of product for a sales enablement startup and worked on user interface, architecture and mobile strategy.

I also love designing things and spend a lot of time thinking about UX. Some ideas I posted up:

App Switcher for iOS: https://twitter.com/marcedwards/status/422287961778970624

Convert a screenshot to a PSD: https://github.com/vpdn/MMLayershots

Clickwheel for iOS: https://dribbble.com/shots/1814927-Click-Wheel-iOS

I’ve been working on mobile apps since the dark days of j2me: When SMS were still expensive, a friend and myself developed and sold a mobile app, that would allow people to squash up to 400 characters into a single SMS, instead of the usual 160 characters.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

I'm looking for a company that welcomes remote work and has a mission I can relate to (latter is really important to me, the best ideas come in the shower). Companies that I admire from the outside include Stripe, Plangrid and YNAB. If you're also a fan, I think I'd fit right in.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Location: 🇩🇪Offenburg, Germany

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Unlikely (my wife also has a career and we both love the Black Forrest )

Technologies: iOS

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5d5znls0jq71rdl/resume.pdf?dl=1 Email: vp at dinhmail·de

Tags for the CMD+F folks: [iOS, Swift, Objective-C, mobile, product, designer, UI, UX]

Generally companies do not decide against a product due to the price tag. There's always another, stronger reason.
Re:The new land of opportunity for immigrants is Germany on Monday August 18, 2014 @04:41PM (#8194547)
As far as I can tell, you need to have a degree.

"Who can apply for the EU Blue Card: ...he or she has a German or an accredited foreign or a university degree that is comparable to a German one"

http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/

http://www.apply.eu/BlueCard/

Fyi, on iOS you can also just press the power button to snooze.
Re: on Thursday July 03, 2014 @06:22AM (#7982283)
I am thinking of renting a larger flat that can fit 10-12 people for the weekend. Anyone interested in sharing the flat with me?

We could also run small sessions with flatmates presenting a topic or whatever they're currently working on.

Awesome hack! If anyone wants try it out and play around, here's a demo project: https://github.com/vpdn/SilentPhotoCaptureDemo
Re:Convert your iOS App into a PSD file on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @02:09PM (#7774157)
Thanks! I think I screwed up the source_files regex in the Podfile. Have pushed a new pull request to the Cocoapods repo, hopefully will be fixed soon.

Update: There's a transitioning period currently ongoing at Cocoapods (migration to Cocoapods Trunk). For now please use the updated podspec in the github repo directly:

pod 'MMLayershots', :podspec => 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vpdn/MMLayershots/master/M...

Re:Convert your iOS App into a PSD file on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @11:26AM (#7773058)
It's still early work in progress and I've only tested with a few apps so far. Also test coverage could certainly be better. If you find any issues, feel free to ping me up (@vpdn).
Re:Convert your iOS App into a PSD file on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @08:59AM (#7772285)
And one of the reasons why I built the library in the first place. Thanks Koen for Framer.js, it's awesome!
Re:Customize iOS7 App Switcher with custom card view on Friday January 17, 2014 @01:11PM (#7077374)
The cards are already showing stale information, including Apple's own apps: http://d.pr/v/NuY5. As for background updates, there are some ways around through iOS7 background modes, but the situation could certainly be improved. I agree there should be an Apple provided "AppSwitcher Kit" framework.
Re:A closer look at the iOS 7 App Switcher on Sunday January 12, 2014 @05:10PM (#7047661)
Adam Bell (@b3ll) just hacked together a working, interactive prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub3OuEREu2c
Re:How I thought I wanted to become a digital nomad on Sunday September 15, 2013 @12:28PM (#6389490)
Wish more companies are like that. Scott Berkun maintains a list of companies with distributed teams, if anyone looks for a new job :-)

http://scottberkun.com/2013/how-many-companies-are-100-distr...

Re:How blind people use Instagram [video] on Saturday January 05, 2013 @04:27AM (#5012160)
The integrated iPhone camera app even tells you about the objects within the picture.

"I simply gawped when one blind woman pulled out an iPhone then snapped a perfect shot, guided by the built-in Camera app [..] One face. Small face. Face near right edge. Autofocussed."

http://svan.ca/blog/2012/blind/

Re:Hacker News Google+ Community on Friday December 07, 2012 @11:21AM (#4887596)
You should add the intend of the g+ community somewhere. Also I wouldn't name it "The Official Hacker Community" unless it's started by pg.
Re:As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living on Sunday November 18, 2012 @02:57PM (#4801434)
Found a good interview with the founders: http://outsourcedvideomarketing.com/fiplab/
Re:As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living on Sunday November 18, 2012 @12:34PM (#4800987)
To put another data point out there: I recently released a little kids puzzle game[1]. I payed a friend to help out with the coding, contracted out illustrations and purchased the sounds from stock sound services. I've put in around 10k$ to develop the app and it's generating around 2$/day. It will take me roughly 13-14years to break even :)

However I also see the app as a advertising for my consultation business and plan to use it to cross promote my next kids app[2], so it's hard to figure out the real cost/benefit structure.

[1] Animal Puzzle - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kids-animal-puzzle/id54051213...

[2] ToddlerTube - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504690

Re:As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living on Sunday November 18, 2012 @07:52AM (#4800493)
"Having a budget to spend tens of thousands EACH DAY on generating downloads" implies that you are probably generating more than that from your apps.

Do you have tips on each of the mentioned points? Details would be very interesting. Also how do you evaluate app ideas for example to come to apps like "Ghost for G+", the "Menu Tab" series and "Ask A Girl"?

Re:As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living on Sunday November 18, 2012 @04:31AM (#4800283)
Selling the car and cashing in 401K is generating cash flow. The hardware they bought would be around 8k-10k$ expenses (4k-5k$ per person). I don't consider this as a lot. Or is your point that they should have put that money into marketing instead?
Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @02:23PM (#4661144)
The unique identifier was really just the technically simplest way to do it. I might eventually deduplicate the data and aggregate profiles with identical settings into a "canonical profile" if I can find the time.
Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @01:01PM (#4660729)
"Mocava has done a decent job of streamlining the setup and installation."

Thanks :) Usability wise, the hardest part was to explain that you have to install a profile to deactivate an existing profile. Also people associated the word "profile" with a facebook profile and thought it contains their personal data like name & address. To prevent confusion, the page I removed (almost) all instances of the word profile from the page.

Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @12:55PM (#4660692)
rada got it right, that's exactly how it works. It installs a configuration profile with restrictions on when you want to lock the device and a configuration profile without restrictions (an empty restrictions set) when you want to unlock the device.
Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @12:53PM (#4660678)
That would be awesome of course, thanks!
Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @10:43AM (#4660023)
Didn't know about the group, thanks for the pointer.

Seems like the group is invite only (my signup is pending for approval). If you have a minute, would be great if you could help me post the link there, otherwise I'll wait for the approval and do it later.

Re:Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project) on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @10:20AM (#4659922)
good points, thanks for the feedback! I'll look into how I can reword the text to make it clearer.

Older »