Month: May 2018

Categories
Projects

Keynote countdown timer ⏲

countdown <a href="#">timer keynote deck</a>

I made a thing!

I was helping a friend with a Keynote presentation deck. One of the tricker parts was that it needed an automatic 30 min on-screen timer to tick down. I’m something of a Keynote wizard, but I hadn’t made a timer before, but I happened upon this great tutorial on how to create one. Timers can be useful for all sorts of presentation types, particularly in classrooms and workshop situations. As easy as the process is to create one, it is quite time-consuming. So rather than do it once and be done with it, I thought I may as well share it.

To that end, here’s my Keynote countdown GitHub repo or you can download it direct.

The countdown timer is provided free of charge, so if you like it, do me a favour and share it on your social platform of choice.

Categories
Dev Process

Github Learning Lab🔬

GitHub Learning Lab

I’ve been using GitHub for a while now as part of my spelunking into the world of VR and Mobile development. I think it’s fair to say it’s done a great job of protecting me from the inevitable mistakes of learning something new. Having said that, it does take a while to get your head around anything other than the basics.

Thankfully there are a large number of resources available to help you along the way. Most recently I discovered GitHub Learning Lab, a fantastic resource for learning how to use the platform for your own projects or contributing to others.

I think the thing I enjoy most about this particular option for learning is that it’s actually using the tools themselves. Yes, there is text and video to consume, but you actually use GitHub itself to work with the course material. I’m a real learn by doing sort of person so this sits particularly well with me.

So if you’re new to GitHub, or just want to solidify your knowledge of it, I suggest you take a look.

 

Categories
Dev iOS

How to: Setup CocoaPods in Xcode

Xcode screenshot showing an open pod file

Hey, guess what? I’m learning iOS development and have been for months! Thought I might increase my rate of publishing to my blog if I did what I did for my VR course and posted study related stuff here. So to that end…

Here’s a simple step by step guide for adding CocoaPods to your iOS projects. There are quite a few steps involved and I suspect this is something that is done relatively infrequently in a single project. It’s always nice to have a reference for this sort of thing.

Steps

  1. Inside Terminal, change directory to the folder containing the Xcode project
  2. Initialise a new Podfile. You do this by using the “pod init” command. If you need more details read about it in the CocoaPod’s guide for pod init
  3. Open the Podfile in Xcode. Just drag it to the Xcode icon in the dock
  4. Add the library to the pod file. Here’s an example Podfile with SwiftyJSON and Alamofire libraries added
  5. Install the pods using the “pod install” command in Terminal. Here are more details on pod install should you need them
  6. Now open your Xcode project via the new .xcworkspace file

Easy as pie.

Categories
XR (AR/VR/MR)

Time to go VR?

Well the Oculus Go is out. I’ll likely be picking one up later this year just to give it a go (see what I did there), but being a 3DOF system it isn’t the VR system I’ve been waiting for.

Having said that, the Go looks like an important step forward for VR and even  3DOF systems like this have plenty of interesting applications.

If you’re interested to know more, take a look at this detailed review from the team at Tested.