Framed in an interview!

Recently I have been interviewing and it is eye opening to be the other side of the interview table/Zoom chat! Having been an iOS developer for 14+ years, I think there are things you learn very early on in your career that you never question or need to revisit it again and it can catch you a little off-guard. One of those areas that I got asked about recently was about the relationship between the frame, bounds and transforms in a `UIView`.

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Can software influence your emotions?

By the end of this article I want to convince you that your emotions can be influenced by software. To do that I’d like you to imagine a progress bar. Yes, the humble loading bar or progress-done indicator as it is also known. They have many variations. Some even have fancy animations so they feel like they finish sooner but its essence has been a mainstay of the user interface for 40 years or more. They are so ubiquitous, you can’t escape them.

So what actually is a progress bar for? At first glance, this seems easy to answer. Progress bars are designed to see the progress of a task… or are they?
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Time is an odd concept

Time is an odd concept. It’s suppose to be linear but sometimes you can watch the clock and 5 minutes seems like an hour. At other times you can look up from your desk after what barely seems like 5 minutes and find the night settling in.

It’s been 8 months since my last blog post and I hadn’t meant to leave it so long but I’ve been busy with a few things… I architected in-app subscriptions into my weather app for drones, released a brand new version with new features, joined a new startup, studied for a number of flying exams, lost a few hours to Starcraft Remastered, rebuilt Pac-Man from scratch, forked and heavily updated an open source project, started work on a prototype AI concept, watched a whole season of Game of Thrones, went to the gym a lot, learnt an old song on guitar, remembered to socialise oh and got quite into Rick and Morty again. Hence why I haven’t found the time to blog! However I should be posting again soon.

In the mean time, you should watch this interesting TED talk about a guy who thinks the brain hallucinates your reality which could have some interesting applications for AI.