At Kisko Labs we were lucky enough to receive an Apple TV developer kit from Apple (two actually, because I got one for my personal Apple developer account too). Motivated by the free hardware, I took some time to learn how to develop for the new Apple TV (one TVML app and one “native” app). In this post I’ll walkthrough creating a TVML app with Middleman.
Piranhas for iOS version 1.1 is now available on the App Store.
In addition to native book cover previews this release also contains some minor bug fixes.
Piranhas helps you save money by comparing prices between Amazon stores, the Book Depository, and Wordery. It’s super easy because we calculate the shipping costs and currency conversions for you.
Or, alternatively, go to www.piranhas.co to use Piranhas in your browser.
Last weekend I took a trip to nostalgia land and cracked open a bottle of one of the first beers I ever made: Saukko Stout.
Saukko Stout was my third beer, brewed all the way back in February 2014 (bottled on March 2014). This means that it had been bottle conditioning for about 18 months at this point (and not in any particularly optimal setting).
Considering its age and storage conditions (and the fact that it was one of my first beers), it was actually pretty decent. I’m not sure I’ll be rushing off to brew another gyle of it, but it was eminently drinkable and enjoyable. Definitely far better than the bottle of Ilves IPA I had back in January at any rate…
PS. Check out my free iOS apps Beer Styles 2 and Piranhas for iOS
Beer Styles 2 has been available in the App Store for a few days now. Beer Styles 2 is a big update and has several swell improvements, especially for iOS 9 devices.
Just like the previous version this includes both the 2008 and 2015 guidelines (and quite a few small formatting and typo corrections).
On iOS 9 you can use Slide Over and Split View on iPads to multitask while browsing style guidelines. Very handy if you’re trying to build a recipe in one app while referring to the style guideline!
Beer Styles now has Spotlight integration so you can search for style guidelines without having to first launch the app. Just swipe down on the home screen…
Sharing individual styles is now nicer because your friends can now see the same view as you do, even if they don’t have Beer Styles installed or if they don’t even have an iOS device.
There’s still one thing that hasn’t changed: Beer Styles is still completely free!
PS. If you like Beer Styles (or even if you don’t), you might like to try my latest iOS app: Piranhas for iOS. Piranhas is a free book price comparison tool for the web and iOS.
Oh, and if you like using Beer Styles, a review on the App Store would be highly appreciated…
I’m very excited to announce that there’s now a native iOS app for Piranhas and it’s available on the App Store for free! It has all the features of the web version plus barcode scanning.
Features:
Supported stores:
Version 1.1.0 of Beer Styles just hit the iOS App Store. The biggest new feature is that the BJCP 2015 Style Guidelines are now included!
The 2015 and 2008 beer, cider, and mead style guidelines from the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP).
The style guidelines describe what each style of beer, cider, and mead should taste, look, and smell like.
The guidelines include vital stats such as OG (original gravity), FG (final gravity), IBU (bitterness), SRM (colour), and ABV readings as well as descriptions for aroma, appearance, flavour, and mouth feel.
In Beer Styles all the vital stats have been given a visual representation to make it easier to fathom how differences in styles.
Bad Tidings is a beer made from a bunch of leftover malts I had accumulated. I decided to try for a Belgian style beer largely because the Belgians seem to have a pretty relaxed attitude about what adjuncts they use, plus it gave me a chance to try out the Fermentis T-58 yeast.
I chose the name Bad Tidings because I wanted to invoke a certain sense of dread or foreboding with the name (as it was unsure whether the beer would turn out to be any good at all).
For this label I went with a bit of a literary theme because Bad Tidings sounds like the title of an 18th or 19th century novel in my head. The sole typeface is Adobe Caslon Pro, chosen mostly of how it looks but also because Caslon seemed to be historically accurate for the 18th century.
“Practically all American and English printing from 1735 to 1800 was done using the Caslon font.” (source)
As for the beer itself, the small sample I tasted while bottling seemed pretty good but I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for it to bottle condition before rendering a final verdict.
The Summoning Dark is my first Black IPA, it’s named after a character in Thud!, a book by Terry Pratchett (if you can call a pan-dimensional creature and spirit of vengeance a character).
For the main graphic of the label I used the mine sign rune for the Summoning Dark (described in the book as “a floating eyeball with a curly tail”). The beer name itself is in a rune-like typeface. The labels are stamped with my brewery stamp.
The beer itself came out quite well, though on the brew day I worried about the colour coming out too light, but that turned out to be a false alarm in the end.
As an attempt to minimise the “roasty” flavours from the Carafa Special II, instead of mashing it with the rest of the grains, I cold steeped it overnight in about two litres of water. I filtered out the malt from the water and added it to the wort before beginning my boil.
In the end I think the beer got approximately the right about of the roasted flavours, but I it could have been more heavily hopped (especially in terms of aroma).
For the last couple of years we’ve mostly used Devise’s extremely simple email address regex to validate email addresses. After all, the real proof of whether an address is correct is if the confirmation email gets through to the end user…
# Email regex used to validate email formats. It simply asserts that
# one (and only one) @ exists in the given string. This is mainly
# to give user feedback and not to assert the e-mail validity.
config.email_regexp = /\A[^@]+@[^@]+\z/
If you haven’t read it already, you should read David Celis’s Stop Validating Email Addresses With Regex blog post for a more detailed explanation of why you shouldn’t validate email addresses with regexes.
The downside of this regex is that it can and will let through email addresses that raise Mail::Field::ParseError exceptions once Mail actually tries to parse them.
My latest beer making toy was delivered today: a Milwaukee MA871 digital refractometer.
I briefly tested it on a couple of samples of water and sugar water and the experience was definitely nicer than trying to peer at the scale through my (admitedly cheap) optical refractometer.
While perhaps not exactly a necessity over hydrometers or optical refractometers, I’m still really excited to get to use this in anger.