HN user

vpdn

357 karma

Mobile developer with a UX fetish.

http://twitter.com/vpdn http://github.com/vpdn

Posts26
Comments66
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news.ufl.edu 7y ago

Android phones can be remotely controlled when plugged into USB

vpdn
1pts0
www.youtube.com 11y ago

Sound reconstructed from vibrations of a potato-chip bag

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1pts0
www.youtube.com 12y ago

The One Square Meter House

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1pts0
lindastone.net 12y ago

Continuous Partial Attention

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1pts0
www.indiegogo.com 13y ago

Muse: The Brain-Sensing Headband

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7pts2
mocava.de 13y ago

Parental Control for iOS (my weekend project)

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10pts16
convergemagazine.com 14y ago

Why you should travel

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3pts0
m.theatlantic.com 14y ago

As We May Think (predictions from 1945)

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2pts1
blog.milowerx.com 14y ago

How much does animation cost?

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2pts0
youarenotsosmart.com 14y ago

There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love?

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1pts1
www.youtube.com 14y ago

Guy creates lightbulbs out of water bottles

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3pts0
mobileorchard.com 14y ago

IPad App Marketing Case Study: Flickpad

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: How do you read/parse HN comments?

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4pts1
www.youtube.com 15y ago

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

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2pts0
catb.org 15y ago

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

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3pts0
crowdflow.net 15y ago

Donate your locations to create an open database of wifi and cell networks

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1pts0
www.scottberkun.com 15y ago

The attack of the design weenie

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2pts0
www.engadget.com 15y ago

The Continuous Client

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1pts0
userguide.icu-project.org 16y ago

When is a list considered 'sorted'

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2pts0
www.robgalbraith.com 16y ago

Open letter on why Camera Bits doesn't release an iPad version of Photo Mechanic

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8pts4
www.kk.org 16y ago

All you need are 1,000 true fans

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35pts10
recombu.com 16y ago

Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

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81pts40
www.joelonsoftware.com 16y ago

Evidence Based Scheduling

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1pts1
www.fastcompany.com 16y ago

What should I do with my life?

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88pts57
techdirt.com 16y ago

Ideas Into Execution: Giving Away An Idea To Make It Happen

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2pts0
www.taptaptap.com 16y ago

iPhone UI design process

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16pts3

I'm an iOS developer with close to ten years experience building apps, some of which have multiple million downloads and are used daily by hundreds of thousands of people. I've worked for large corporations such as BMW and Daimler (Mercedes Benz) as well as digital agencies and early startups. Recently, I was head of product for a sales enablement startup and worked on user interface, architecture and mobile strategy.

I also love designing things and spend a lot of time thinking about UX. Some ideas I posted up:

App Switcher for iOS: https://twitter.com/marcedwards/status/422287961778970624

Convert a screenshot to a PSD: https://github.com/vpdn/MMLayershots

Clickwheel for iOS: https://dribbble.com/shots/1814927-Click-Wheel-iOS

I’ve been working on mobile apps since the dark days of j2me: When SMS were still expensive, a friend and myself developed and sold a mobile app, that would allow people to squash up to 400 characters into a single SMS, instead of the usual 160 characters.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

I'm looking for a company that welcomes remote work and has a mission I can relate to (latter is really important to me, the best ideas come in the shower). Companies that I admire from the outside include Stripe, Plangrid and YNAB. If you're also a fan, I think I'd fit right in.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Location: 🇩🇪Offenburg, Germany

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Unlikely (my wife also has a career and we both love the Black Forrest )

Technologies: iOS

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5d5znls0jq71rdl/resume.pdf?dl=1 Email: vp at dinhmail·de

Tags for the CMD+F folks: [iOS, Swift, Objective-C, mobile, product, designer, UI, UX]

[dead] 12 years ago

I am thinking of renting a larger flat that can fit 10-12 people for the weekend. Anyone interested in sharing the flat with me?

We could also run small sessions with flatmates presenting a topic or whatever they're currently working on.

It's still early work in progress and I've only tested with a few apps so far. Also test coverage could certainly be better. If you find any issues, feel free to ping me up (@vpdn).

You should add the intend of the g+ community somewhere. Also I wouldn't name it "The Official Hacker Community" unless it's started by pg.

To put another data point out there: I recently released a little kids puzzle game[1]. I payed a friend to help out with the coding, contracted out illustrations and purchased the sounds from stock sound services. I've put in around 10k$ to develop the app and it's generating around 2$/day. It will take me roughly 13-14years to break even :)

However I also see the app as a advertising for my consultation business and plan to use it to cross promote my next kids app[2], so it's hard to figure out the real cost/benefit structure.

[1] Animal Puzzle - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kids-animal-puzzle/id54051213...

[2] ToddlerTube - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504690

"Having a budget to spend tens of thousands EACH DAY on generating downloads" implies that you are probably generating more than that from your apps.

Do you have tips on each of the mentioned points? Details would be very interesting. Also how do you evaluate app ideas for example to come to apps like "Ghost for G+", the "Menu Tab" series and "Ask A Girl"?

Selling the car and cashing in 401K is generating cash flow. The hardware they bought would be around 8k-10k$ expenses (4k-5k$ per person). I don't consider this as a lot. Or is your point that they should have put that money into marketing instead?

The unique identifier was really just the technically simplest way to do it. I might eventually deduplicate the data and aggregate profiles with identical settings into a "canonical profile" if I can find the time.

"Mocava has done a decent job of streamlining the setup and installation."

Thanks :) Usability wise, the hardest part was to explain that you have to install a profile to deactivate an existing profile. Also people associated the word "profile" with a facebook profile and thought it contains their personal data like name & address. To prevent confusion, the page I removed (almost) all instances of the word profile from the page.

rada got it right, that's exactly how it works. It installs a configuration profile with restrictions on when you want to lock the device and a configuration profile without restrictions (an empty restrictions set) when you want to unlock the device.

Didn't know about the group, thanks for the pointer.

Seems like the group is invite only (my signup is pending for approval). If you have a minute, would be great if you could help me post the link there, otherwise I'll wait for the approval and do it later.

For github, I would add advertising as a source of revenue. From looking at the september data, github jobs seems to add around $1.2m per year to the bottom line.

"The kind of typography I’m talking about is not your typical “What font should I use” typography but rather your “knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash” typography."

Is there a good solution to the first problem? I constantly find myself confronted with the problem which font I should use. Is there maybe a service that suggests fonts based on a visual design? Or even based on the 'purpose' of a site?

I started building ToddlerTube, a YouTube iPad app for kids. The first minimal version is almost finished.

Is anyone with kids maybe interested in helping beta testing it? Some more info in the google docs form: http://goo.gl/nYIGD

Background: We have an iPad first gen and an iPad3 at home. My young nephew would always ask for the older iPad and for a long time, I didn't understand why. After looking over his shoulder for a few days, I came to realize that he loved to watch certain clips on YouTube (other kids singing his kindergarten songs, Mr. Bean, kitten videos).

Since he cannot type, his search strategy works as follows:

1. Start up the youtube app

2. Go to History (recently watched videos)

3. Piggyback on the app's history feature to watch existing videos and find new related videos.

Since the history of "his videos" were only available on the old iPad1, it makes sense that he would insist on using this device only.

YouTube channels were cumbersome to create and maintain. The user experience was so bad and my nephew so insistent, that I believe there is a problem here to be fixed.