I like the bank. One of the problems with direct deposit is I don’t get to go to the bank as often as I would like. Sure it saves time, but I miss interacting with the friendly tellers, and who can pass up a free lollipop or dog treat (if you are a dog of course, or you are into eating dog food, not that there’s anything wrong with that). I was enjoying one of my rare trips to the bank the other day and the teller, a sweet woman in her 50s who seems to love her job, was full of questions:

Bank Teller: “Hello Mr. Spedaliere, how are you today?”
Me: “I’m great, how are you?”
Bank Teller: “ I’m just wonderful. It’s a pleasant day isn’t it?”
Me: “It certainly is, but if you are stuck inside what better place to be stuck than in a bank with all of this money.”
Bank Teller: “So very true. What kind of work did you say that you do Mr. Spedaliere?”
Me: “ Huh?”
Bank Teller: “What kind of work did you say that you do?”
Me: “I am a web curator”
Bank Teller: (look of confusion followed by an awkward silence)
Me: “I am a website guy…”
Bank Teller:“Oh, oh yes. Would you like a lollypop?”

This isn’t the first time a perfectly good round of small talk was railroaded by an inquiry about my job, and I suspect it will not be the last.

As the internet grows and the websites on it grow as well, someone needs to be tasked with making sure they grow up right, like a website farmer, with digital overalls and a binary pitch fork… well you get the point. Large companies with large websites put their best communication teams to the task of wrangling in these digital heavyweights, but let’s face it: comm teams need to be busy communicating, not worrying about widgets, learning HTML or translating IT. In steps the Web Curator.

Who is this person of mystery? Able to leap massive portals in a single bound and save kittens from burning trees? Let’s take a look:

Strategist
A thorough knowledge of technology and how it is used makes the curator the ideal strategic partner. They are also fun at parties.

Project Manager
Sometimes initiatives require multiple teams and buy in from multiple stakeholders, in steps the curator with her project manager hat on.

Graphic Designer
What makes the curator/wed designer different from the traditional print designer is he must be able to design specifically with the technology in mind. Sure we can DESIGN our site to project holograms, but we still can’t BUILD our site to project holograms.

Translator
Have you spoken to the IT department lately? What the hell language are they speaking? Just let your curator handle them.

Fire Fighter
It’s 5:15 PM on a Friday and that “planned” communication really needs to be posted or else your director will be eating your liver for tomorrow’s lunch. Thank goodness we have a curator!

Digital Handy Man
Susan from marketing just called and that widget on the homepage seems to be displaying curse words instead of the Q3 marketing strategy. It’s a good thing we have a website curator to fix it up!

Happy Client Maker
The most important thing a website curator can do is make their client happy, and we commit ourselves to doing so everyday.

Dan Spedaliere
Lead Curator @ Local Wisdom

The post Dear Local Wisdom, What The Hell Is A Web Curator??? appeared first on Local Wisdom.

In the website’s example, this minified code:

if ('this_is'==/an_example/){of_beautifer();}else{var a=b?(c%d):e[f];}

Turns into this:

if ('this_is' == /an_example/) {
    of_beautifer();
} else {
    var a = b ? (c % d) : e[f];
}

We were able to turn a full jQuery plugin into legible code and make our necessary adjustments to customize it. Pretty cool, huh?

The post Turn Compressed Javascript into Readable Code appeared first on Local Wisdom.

With Arc singleton implementation:

@implementation Singleton

+ (Singleton*)sharedInstance{
     // Persistent instance.
     static Singleton *_instance = nil;
 
      // Small optimization to avoid wasting time after the
      // singleton being initialized.
      if (_instance != nil)
      {
           return _instance;
      }
 
      #if __IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= __IPHONE_4_0
      // Allocates once with Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) routine.
      // It's thread safe.
      static dispatch_once_t safer;
      dispatch_once(&safer, ^(void)
      {
           _instance = [[Singleton alloc] init];
           // private initialization goes here.
      });
      #else
      // Allocates once using the old approach, it's slower.
      // It's thread safe.
      @synchronized([Singleton class])
      {
           // The synchronized instruction will make sure,
           // that only one thread will access this point at a time.
           if (_instance == nil)
           {
               _instance = [[Singleton alloc] init];
                // private initialization goes here.
           }
      }
      #endif
      return _instance;
}

Without ARC implementation:
Notice that all memory management methods are overridden, this is because a singleton lives throughout an app's entire lifecycle and should never be deallocated.

static Singleton *sharedInstance = nil;
+ (id)sharedInstance {
    @synchronized(self) {
        if(sharedInstance == nil){
            sharedInstance = [[super allocWithZone:NULL] init];
        }
    }
    return sharedInstance;
}
+ (id)allocWithZone:(NSZone *)zone {
    return [[self sharedInstance] retain];
}
- (id)copyWithZone:(NSZone *)zone {
    return self;
}
- (id)retain {
    return self;
}
- (unsigned)retainCount {
    return UINT_MAX; //denotes an object that cannot be released
}
- (oneway void)release {
    // never release
}
- (id)autorelease {
    return self;
}

The post Singleton pattern in Objective-C (iOS) appeared first on Local Wisdom.

Leave a comment below telling us your thoughts on the overhaul.

The post First Look at iOS 7 appeared first on Local Wisdom.

The post Am I Responsive? Testing through 1 website appeared first on Local Wisdom.

Content is having good useful, relevant, and important things to say for each of the different audiences that your company is trying to reach. It’s also not a 1-time thing, it’s an ongoing flow or cadence of content that you will have to create and put out there. Distribution methods (or whatever you want to call it) are the various channels in which you distribute the content: websites, blogs, marketing materials, newsletters, social media, the list goes on.

In content marketing, you must first figure out how you are going to create content for your audiences over and over again. There are multiple ways to do this, which is probably another post at another time. Nonetheless, you must do this planning before launching the distribution methods. Too many times companies setup blogs and social sites, without having a steady flow of content to fill it. This just looks unprofessional and unplanned (present company included).

So the next time someone wants to talk to you about setting up a blog, Twitter, or Facebook page, ask about or think about how you will create an ongoing stream of content that will be useful and relevant for your audiences. Otherwise, be ready to play catch up or explain to someone why your last blog post was from 2009.

Thank you, let me know what you think or are interested in hearing more about how we do it in the comments below.

The post Content marketing: planning content creation first appeared first on Local Wisdom.

CSS-powered gradients are a very popular way to avoid using images in order to make gradient backgrounds on your website. Many people do not realize that you can get gradients to work across all modern browsers without having to do the leg work. Simply add the color values of your gradient into Colorzilla’s Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, copy and paste your code.

The gradient generator creates code that looks similar to this:

background: #ffffff; /* Old browsers */
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%, #e5e5e5 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#ffffff), color-stop(100%,#e5e5e5)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* Opera 11.10+ */
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* IE10+ */
background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #ffffff 0%,#e5e5e5 100%); /* W3C */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#ffffff', endColorstr='#e5e5e5',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */

You can create gradients with multiple stop points and also reverse your gradient, adjust the hue/saturation of a completed gradient and remove the comments with one easy click.

The post CSS Gradient Generator appeared first on Local Wisdom.

I recently found myself needing to style html I had little control over, requiring me to style a select that could not be given a container div. All styles needed to be applied to the select directly.

select {
    -webkit-appearance: none; -moz-appearance: none; appearance: none;
    -webkit-border-radius: 6px; -moz-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px;
    padding: 5px 20px;
    background: #eaeaea url(arrow.png) no-repeat right center;
    border: none;
    -webkit-box-shadow: inset 3px 3px 5px #cacaca; -moz-box-shadow: inset 3px 3px 5px #cacaca; box-shadow: inset 3px 3px 5px #cacaca;
    color: #555;
    font-size: 18px;
}

Looks like this in Chrome.

Not bad.

But for IE and Firefox you’ll be left with something like this.

Bad.

If you can’t get the built in arrow to go it would at least look s little better to hide your background image, right? (Maybe.)

The current Aurora build of Firefox (23) will fix this, but for now one way around this is with a conditional comment like <!--[if IE]> <![endif]-->. Turns out for Firefox you can even do something similar with your CSS…

<style type="text/css">
    @-moz-document url-prefix() {
        select {
          background-image: none;
        }
    }
</style>

That will cover you in most cases. However, IE10 no longer supports conditional comments and doesn’t have a browser selector for CSS like Firefox does. One solution is to search for other IE specific media features, and use that as your selector.

<style type="text/css">
    @media screen and (-ms-high-contrast: active), (-ms-high-contrast: none) {
        select { background-image: none; }
    }
</style>

All that should ensure you only have one arrow in your select box.

The post Cross-Browser Select Styles appeared first on Local Wisdom.

Cocos initially started as a 2d game engine for iPhone, but was then ported to C++.  You may or may not have not known, but C++ can run on iOS and Android devices fairly painlessly. Objective C++ allows iOS’s Cocoa Touch framework to interface with Cocos2d-x’s C++ code.  Android also allows C/C++ code to run on devices through it’s NDK.

Getting started with Cocos2d-x was fairly confusing, as I had never dealt with the NDK or any Objective C++ in my previous work.  There were some good tutorials that really held your hand to get your first project set up.  The most helpful was a two part series from Ray Wenderlich.  The first part can be found here, which helps you get set up with your first project.  The second part be found here, which walks you through getting an actual cross platform game working on both iOS and Android.

I’m still fairly new with this Cocos2d-x engine, but within the last week or so I’ve managed to get a pretty good grasp on the flow of the engine.  I would definitely suggest trying out Cocos2d-x if cross platform was on your mind.

The post Cocos2d-x for Mobile appeared first on Local Wisdom.

Here are a few benefits of having early adopters on your project team.

• Early adopters will take your new technology through its paces, probably in a testing process that most software development projects go through involving pre-alpha, alpha, and beta testing.
• You may also be able to uncover costly mistakes early as its better to discover something that is not working with a small group than it is to discover it later with a larger production release.
• Early adopters can also be advocates of a new software or platform. Change management is challenging to any organization. Having advocates to help overcome objections can make a product rollout go that much smoother.

Please click the link to read the full article on The Necessity of Early Adopters.

The post The Value of Having Early Adopters on Your Team appeared first on Local Wisdom.