Beamz by Flo Rida

Check out the new Beamz by Flo Rida that just launched on the Mac App Store. Just a great Mac app that integrates with the Beamz by Flo Rida instrument. It's our first Mac app that integrates with a USB device (as well as Bluetooth Low Energy forthcoming). Tremendous team effort to get it launched!

It's a very addictive experience and is a lot of fun to use! It just sucked me in to keep playing and experimenting with it. I was using a prototype, but can't wait for the production versions! Awesome gift for the Holidays coming up!

The app can be used without the device to get a feel for what it would be like without the instrument, and there's also a version for iOS devices that uses Bluetooth Low Energy on the iOS App Store (launched in August).

Slicy Photoshop Export Better Than Cake

For iOS and Android projects we're constantly having to export Photoshop designs to the individual assets. It gets very tedious to use the Slice Tool in Photoshop to manually draw boxes around all the assets you want exported and to hide/show groups to get the right transparency and backgrounds.
Well, if you're still doing it this way I have a recommendation! Slicy which is just plain awesome. It's the best $29 I've ever spent.

Take a look at the "How it works" video on that page, but in a nutshell you name your Groups or Assets in a Photoshop file as Foo@2x.png and Slicy will perfectly slice these from the layers and export both the 2x and 1x image sizes. You still have to make sure that the designs use even pixels, but otherwise it works great. That's it. Done. It can even export automatically every time a change is made to the Photoshop file.

We even use it on Android even though it's originally built for iOS. We will use Foo.png instead of the iOS naming of @2x.png (with the designs made for xxhdpi with a resolution of 1080x1920). We then take the directory we had Slicy to export to and use a our android shell script (droidsize.py) to export these to all the other dpi's.

2011 11" MacBook Air vs. 2011 15" MacBook Pro Xcode Performance

I just picked up the just released 2011 11" MacBook Air in the hopes of using that to replace my 2011 15" MacBook Pro. In the event it didn't perform well enough it would be given to the wife (actually, this was the original plan anyways, so if it can be a decent development machine, all the better)...

Here are the specs (Both with Lion and Xcode 4.2 and iOS 5 Beta 4).

1. Decked out 2011 11" MacBook Air
1. 1.8Ghz Core i7
2. 256GB SSD (The faster Samsung one)
3. 4GB Memory
2. Decked out 2011 15" MacBook Pro
1. 2.3GHz Core i7
2. 400GB SSD (OWC w/SandForce, not OEM)
3. 8GB Memory

For me the only thing that matters is Xcode performance. I just a project with the following characteristics, and measured a build from the time of pushing play to the time of the simulator launching with the login on the build displayed.

1. 224 Source Files
2. 63 XIB's
3. 419 Resources

Here are the results:

1. Clean Build
1. MacBook Air: 38 seconds
2. MacBook Pro: 16 seconds
2. Repeat Build (No Clean, Simulator Left Running)
1. MacBook Air: 8 seconds
2. MacBook Pro: 8 seconds

It was expected the MacBook Pro would be faster. From a clean build it's significantly faster. From an existing build where you're touching a few files Xcode indexing to know what's changed or not makes it a wash. As most of the time we're just changing a couple files at a time the MacBook Air seems fast enough for development, just knowing that the clean build will take almost twice as long.

Also, to explain the difference, the actual copying of resources, launching the simulator, etc. took about the same time. There was a moderate difference in the compilation time, but the static analysis is where the MacBook Air lost out. The MacBook Pro killed it with the extra two cores and processor speed.

Now, the debate... I think I'm going to try out the MacBook Air and see how it goes...

UPDATE: After using the MacBook Air I decided to stick with the MacBook Pro. That extra speed really matters when someone is looking over your shoulder. Particularly, at a client. Although, if you are used to a non-SSD MacBook Pro (particularly, the 2010 variety) you'll be happy with the performance of the Air.