Safeguarding Your Productivity

By Justin Kulesza | Published: January 27, 2012

Kernel Panic, Mac

Recently, my Mac greeted me with a kernel panic (an unusual occurrence for most people). It seems that one of the RAM modules in my Mac failed. It shouldn’t have been terribly exciting. Things like this happen. My Mac had two SO-DIMMS (2x4GB) so it shouldn’t have been a problem. Regrettably, when the RAM module failed, Mac OSX lost its cookies and somehow managed to corrupt my entire primary OSX partition.

This could have severely impacted my productivity. I need my computer and everything on it in order to do my job. In just a few moments I had gone from having a fully functioning computer to a useless computer which I couldn’t even retrieve a large portion of my data from (the filesystem was catastrophically damaged).
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Thank You Economic Gardening Team

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: January 27, 2012

Late last year, Atomic was selected to participate in the Pure Michigan Economic Gardening Pilot Program.

The program offered expert business consulting for growing companies.

We focused the opportunity on Atomic’s strategic growth goal of opening an office in Detroit.
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A New App Marketplace: Your Car

By Nick Christensen | Published: January 26, 2012

January is a great time to be a geek. Even better if you’re also a car geek, because January is the month of both CES and the North American International Auto Show. New technologies continue to permeate every corner of our lives, and the car has never been an exception. It’s fitting then, that these two events happen around the same time. It can be a logistical challenge, but also a great opportunity for car makers to attract CES fans. Not just their latest models, but also their latest in-car gadgets. One CES announcement that caught my attention this year was related to the in-car gadget known as OnStar. It’s basically a cellular data and voice connection for your car that has been around since 1997. What’s new is that GM, the parent company of OnStar, is looking for developers with big ideas to create apps for the OnStar system. If trusted, the developer will gain access to the OnStar API for app development.
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Understand Design or Fail

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: January 26, 2012

Design is a loaded word. It means something different depending who you talk to. For example, design in the context of an innovation services firm (like AO) means something entirely different than design at an ad agency.

Unfortunately for many, lack of understanding for what design is and what it can do for products, goods and services traps them in a monotonous rut of lack luster performance.
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Mining our passions for the “why”

By Jason Porritt | Published: January 25, 2012

Last fall, prompted at least in part by Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk “How great leaders inspire action”, Carl discussed his evolving thoughts about identifying the why of Atomic Object. I ran across his post again a few weeks ago while catching up on some reading. It hasn’t left my spare mental cycles alone since. Such a difficult, interesting, and important question demands much of any reader, but especially those of us who share in this “why”. Is it possible to sum up all of our passions and work into a common, binding thread?

First off, I believe Carl is on the right track with his statement of our why:

To build great software and find better ways of doing it.

But there’s also a tension that has stayed with me — a feeling that there’s yet another, deeper vein that drives us. In my quest for resolution I’ve been reflecting on what the people of Atomic Object care about most deeply to (hopefully) identify that vein.

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Designers are more valuable than programmers

By Shawn Crowley | Published: January 24, 2012

Designers are more valuable to software product development efforts than programmers. Designers will continue to fuel and shape innovative product development efforts as programmers fall by the wayside as a commodity to be cost managed.

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Posted in Culture, Design & Development | Tagged , , , , , , , | 34 Comments

Highlight strings in Cucumber features with Vim

By Patrick Bacon | Published: January 22, 2012

I am currently working on a project that is using Cucumber for its system/integration testing, and I am using MacVim as my primary editor. MacVim comes with Tim Pope’s excellent vim-cucumber plugin pre-installed, so you get syntax highlighting of .feature files right out of the box.

After having used TextMate to edit Cucumber features in the past I was a bit disappointed that double-quoted strings were not being highlighted in Vim. I looked around in the plugin code a bit, and the best I can tell it is only configured to highlight multi-line strings (which are triple-quoted).

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window.location as a global variable

By Matt Fletcher | Published: January 21, 2012

Lately I’ve been building web applications with quite a bit of the app implemented on the client side with JavaScript. Backbone.js has been handy in building these applications. Here I’ll be sharing my experience building up Backbone Routers, and how I’ve come to prefer an event-based mechanism for page navigation over setting the window.location directly. Why? Because then I’d be treating window.location as a global variable, which I’ve learned to avoid. Read More »

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Atomic Object’s Summer Interns 2012

By David Crosby | Published: January 21, 2012

A mentor working with two interns on an iPhone app

Happy New Year! It’s time to apply to Atomic Object for you 2012 summer internship. Some of you early birds have already applied… the competition’s already looking tough!

Atomic is working on a large number of challenging, interesting projects, so we’re looking for a group of the best apprentices we can put together to help us through the season. And if you’re one of the best, you should be asking yourself a few questions before you apply.
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Mobile Safari on iOS 5.1 Unexpectedly Making Cross Origin Resource Sharing Requests

By Mike Swieton | Published: January 20, 2012

I was astonished when I finally understood a problem my web application was experiencing recently: After viewing a PDF file from Mobile Safari on the iPad, the browser treated all future Ajax requests in that browser tab as Cross Origin Resource Sharing requests and subsequently sent the HTTP ‘OPTIONS’ verb, rather than the ‘GET’ verb I expected. That caused a lot of my functionality to break. It’s been quite a while since I’ve experienced a bug in my application this esoteric.

If you’ve seen this behavior in your application, you should be able to fix it by using “Content-Disposition: inline” and not “Content-Disposition: attachment”. For the long version, keep reading.

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