Atari days The generation of gamers who have been raised on Sony and Nintendo may not remember Atari, which today exists only as a logo and a brand used by a video game software company, but Atari essentially created the home video game industry as it stands today. The VCS was the first massively…

If you use CoreData then you will probably face the problem of database migration sooner or later. Automatic migration is turned on easily, but how can you be reasonably sure that your fresh app update will still be able to open databases using the old schema? Like when people were using the app and…

I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow . This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL. But sadly, the discussion has not been as… fact-based as I would like. So what I’m going to do in this post is…

The Problem You may be interested in how to wire up or sync CoreData to a remote web service . There are plenty of frameworks to do this, like RestKit , RestfulCoreData , and various defunct libraries (CoreResource, etc.) The problem with these libraries is twofold: They assume things about your…

In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military study his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention. Photograph by Martin Schoeller A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act…

In late February I am in my basement, which is really a very nice part of my house that is not done justice by the word basement. For the purposes of this story, let’s call it the Parnassus Fulfillment Center. I have hauled 533 boxed-up hardback copies of my latest novel, State of Wonder , from…

Update : This is the post describing the original iOS 6-styled callout view. For an updated version, see the latest post . There’s a great UI widget that’s been on iOS since day one: Ever wonder what that black pointy bubble is exactly? It’s kind of a strange beast. The way it “bounces” when opening…

Xcode 4 has been out for a while now, but a lot of people are still uncomfortable with its interface and find it awkward to use. I am not in that group, as I’ve actually quite liked the way things are setup overall. This is probably largely because it’s similar to the way I was using Xcode 3…

Editor’s Note: The original essay below, by New Atlantis contributing editor Matthew B. Crawford , was published in 2006. Mr. Crawford has expanded the essay into a bestselling book — Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work — published in 2009 by Penguin. To read excerpts from and…

× Illustration by Violet Lemay The American shopping mall was invented by a Viennese Socialist. Architect Victor Gruen came to this country during World War II, and in 1956, he designed the nation's first enclosed mall: Southdale, in Edina, Minn. It seems Gruen wasn't wild about America's postwar…