Here in St. Louis, we're going into our second week of 100°+ temperatures, and even the birds are doing all they can to keep from burning alive! Case in point:

This robin was sitting splayed out like this for at least five minutes outside my window. Another robin came over and started to do the same

The Jesuit Conference today announced the release of the Jesuit App , a mobile app that lets people find Jesuit locations in the US, see Jesuit news, and view Jesuit prayers and spiritual works.

The Jesuit Conference hired me a few months ago to build this app for them, and it's the third iOS app I've built, and the second Android App. I built the app on top of the open source Catholic Diocese App , and hope to continue making that project more flexible, and even easier for

The Jesuit Conference partnered with Midwestern Mac, LLC to create a new app for the 450-year old Society of Jesus; the app includes three sections—Locations, News and Prayers—that offer users the ability to find Jesuit retreat centers, parishes, and schools, follow along with Jesuit news from National Jesuit News, and join in with users around the world in different Jesuit prayers and spiritual works.

Download the app: iTunes Link | Android Link (coming soon!)

The App

I've been looking around for a good set of Android map marker icons (drawables), and I've only seen a few that included a vector image (Illustrator or EPS graphics) so I could customize the icon however I wanted. So, I just created my own icon, saved five common colors to a set of xhdpi, hdpi, mdpi, and ldpi sizes, and posted them to a new repository on GitHub: Android Map Marker Drawables (icons) .

Please see the GitHub repo for more

A few days ago, I noticed the latest Where is Matt? video on YouTube. In these videos, Matt is shown in various locations around the world, dancing in various exotic and urban locations, often with natives.

The videos are extremely simple, don’t require tons of professional equipment, crews, or even much more planning than “where to next?” Matt speaks quite a bit about how he’s made these videos, who’s helped sponsor him, and more on his site and elsewhere

I posted this to my personal site, but I wanted to mention it on this blog, as it's a performance optimization that I use quite often when programming for the web or for native applications: Don't Wait, Delegate! Proper use of threading and queueing .

There are hundreds of ways you can improve your app or website's performance, but few have the potential to improve your app or website's responsiveness as much as queueing or using background processes.

There are hundreds of ways you can improve your app or website's performance, but few have the potential to improve your app or website's responsiveness as much as queueing or using background processes. There are so many complex operations that can be improved by looking at them in a new way. For example:

Not-so-Instant Oil Change

I like changing the oil in my car, but it often takes a bit of time (definitely not an 'instant!'), and involves the following:

In a break from the typical kind of writing I do here, I'd like to mention a few thoughts I've had after reading some opinion pieces on the reparability (or lack thereof) of the new MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Early PCs and Macs

The first computer I owned was a scrap-parts 386 DOS-based PC . I found a working 386 processor from a broken computer, scrounged 1MB of RAM from a couple dead motherboards, found a small hard drive and

Every so often, I like to document my workspace. Lately, there's been a trend to go completely minimalist for a workspace (it seems to be the fad these days), and I've seen pictures of people with just a MacBook Air on a matress on the floor . Or a MacBook air sitting on some exotic slab of wood with a simple coffee mug next to it.

I've been subscribed to the Slow-Mo Guys' YouTube Channel for a few months now, ever since I noticed some of their great videos of random things that look quite interesting when recorded at over 1000 fps and played back in slow motion.

Their most recent video, How a Hard Drive Works (in Slow Motion) is one of my favorites, not because it's elaborate or amazing, but it's the first time I've ever actually seen the internals of a hard