On Wednesday, May 9, the founders of Phācia Inc. (CEO Karen Shank and myself) will decide whether we want to accept funding to continue developing our business in the state.

It’s your move, voters.

Phācia was founded in Raleigh, NC, by pharmaceutical and software industry veterans a little more than a year ago, and its founders have worked diligently with their own funds to earn the company’s reputation as a quality app developer and mobile technology company. Today, we’re a few weeks away from a major product launch, and we’re poised to expand our operations rapidly in the coming months — bringing new talent, new funding and new technologies to the area. To do so, we are facing some tough choices about what we’re willing to sacrifice, accept and expect in the near future.

Unfortunately, since our original plans were made last year, we’ve begun to have second thoughts about whether it’s feasible to run a competitive, worldwide business from North Carolina these days: In short, we’re worried that our state may soon tell the rest of the world that it’s not interested in doing business with it.

On May 8, North Carolina’s voters will decide whether to pass a constitutional amendment – not a mere law or resolution, mind you, but a Constitution-altering amendment of the same magnitude as the law prohibiting people from owning other people within the state — that bans any legal union of same-sex couples who wish only to live, work and be happy as any other couple might expect in the state.

Business leaders in North Carolina have been unusually quiet about this law, and this confuses the heck out of us at Phacia. We happen to be a two-person team of die-hard heterosexuals, so one might think we’d have no dog in this fight. But in fact, just about anyone who does business with anyone outside the state — or who hopes to hire anyone from anywhere — has quite a lot to lose if this amendment passes.

“We’re competing with Silicon Valley, New York City, even China, when it comes to hiring top talent and attracting investors,” CEO Karen Shank said this week. “We can’t afford to look like a backwater crossing with intolerant views and no respect for large groups that use our products.”

As Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said last week, “You’re sending a message to the world about what kind of community this is; that we’re not inclusive.”

Meanwhile, we have an established company and a new product that we feel have the potential to bring both jobs and revenue to our state… but frankly, in a field currently dominated by the recruiting powerhouses in Silicon Valley and New York City, we certainly don’t relish the thought of our state’s telling the world that we are intolerant, bigoted and unable to accept others for who they are. It’s already a herculean task luring qualified technical and creative talent to accomplish our goals here; we don’t need yet another reason for them to say no (And believe us, there are many reasons Amendment One would encourage them to say no).

Thus, Phacia has halted its capital-raising, recruiting and expansion activities for now, deciding instead to wait and see what kind of state we live in on May 9 before making any more commitments. We still love NC, but there are certainly other states hospitable to a business that couldn’t care less who its customers choose to marry.

By the way, if passed, this would not mark the first time North Carolina has amended its constitution to place arbitrary restrictions on which couples are allowed to marry: In 1875, the state banned “all marriages between a white person and a negro.” We don’t need another shameful law – neither imagined nor endorsed by the original framers of the constitution – marring North Carolina’s history books. (Thankfully, this last one was abandoned by clearer heads in 1971, when a new constitution was ratified.)

Links:

• The proposed amendment
• Facebook page
• Protect NC Families

Polls show that as many as 90% of North Carolinians still do not understand the harms of Amendment One even though early voting begins on Thursday. These same polls also show that the more people understand the potential impact of the amendment, the less likely they are to vote for it.

– from “The Facts About Amendment One“

When the first iPad was released in 2010, iPhone developers everywhere scrambled to adapt their existing iPhone/iPod titles to the large screen (assuming they thought it worth their trouble). It didn’t take long for most to realize that supporting both existing handhelds and the new large-screen format was going to become a fact of life for future development projects.

And then came the iPhone 4… with its sexy retina display and significant speed increase. Suddenly, there was yet another “new way” to do things: Not only did developers need to include graphics for iPhones and iPads within their universal apps, but they actually had to include two different sets of graphics to support both older and newer handheld models. Still no big deal, really, and if nothing else, it spawned a cottage industry of niche apps designed to do nothing but resize images appropriately.

And now comes the iPad 3, with its promise of retina display, too – and with it, yet another high-resolution image to add to the standard app bundle. Sigh…

Time to crank up Photoshop/GIMP/whatever and start resizing those tiny little graphics again.

Sure hope you had them saved in at least 2048×2048 resolution. :p

I have often thought that gift giving sometimes seemed laborious, contrived and almost meaningless.  It’s a birthday, anniversary, Valentines (see blog from Valentine’s Day), Christmas, or any other gift giving holiday and “Oh dread, I must go and spend money that I don’t have and buy a gift they don’t want”.  Well I learned just recently what this saying really means: My husband and I made the decision this last Christmas to “scale” back a lot on how much we spent on Christmas. This was extremely hard to do and to express to our families to please reciprocate.  It was actually liberating and fun to do, for everyone, and gifts seemed more meaningful and thought-out and better yet, didn’t break the bank!

Since starting Phacia early last year, our families have financially sacrificed and emotionally supported us through this business venture, so I know oh too well the meaning of “It’s the thought that counts”.  And this time, it REALLY does!  So with this thought and understanding in mind and the knowledge that we’re not alone in this financial struggle, Phacia is developing something really clever to remedy some of this meaningless spending and put back, “It’s the thought that counts” in gift-giving.

So stay tuned for more…

As anyone who deals with program logic knows, most decisions come down to a choice between one of two options: true or false.

Unfortunately, when reading data back from remote or unknown sources (or, god forbid, receiving text from a mere human typing on its keyboard), one often finds it necessary to jump through a series of hoops to figure out whether the actual response means yes or no.

As humans, we understand that “ok,” “sure,” “yep,” and “correct” all generally mean the same thing (“true”), and likewise, “nope,” “unh-uh,” “not a chance,” and “are you kidding me?” usually mean the opposite (“false”). You could test for all of these possibilities each time (I have in the past), or write a function that loops through the myriad of choices when they arise (I’ve done that too), or you could just use a simple Objective-C category like the one presented below to let the response itself tell you what it means.

One of my favorite features of the Objective-C programming language is the availability of class extensions, or categories. Unlike subclasses or external utility libraries, categories allow us to bend the language itself to our will — adding or overriding the default behavior of built-in Cocoa classes to make them behave as we need.

If you’re not clear on how to use categories to your advantage, I’d highly suggest learning more about them, perhaps starting with Item #11 of Cocoa Dev Central’s excellent introduction to Objective-C (You remember, that single-page tutorial you visited when you first installed that new copy of Xcode way back when).

The code presented here is nothing fancy, and it could no doubt be made more efficient, but I tend to keep it this way, as it’s easy to read, and more importantly, it’s easy to add/subtract new words that mean “yes” to it. You can always go back and add fancier string-parsing functions later, but I tend to reach for this snippet when I need to do a lot of true/false parsing quickly.

Feel free to use this category in your own work, or adapt it to your own needs. Basically, it translates a string such as “OK” or “sure” into the boolean value, true, and other, unknown phrases into false.

Its use is as follows:

#import "NSString+BooleanLogic"
.
.
.
NSString *stringToTest = @"ok";
if ([stringToTest evaluatesTo: YES]) { // Does 'ok' mean yes?
NSLog (@"The phrase %@ evaluates to true!", stringToTest); // Yep!
}

// Check if an http response code string indicates a success...
// In http-speak, 200 indicates success, so a 500 (server error) would evaluate as 'NO'
//
NSString *httpResponseCode = "500"; // HTTP response code 500 indicates a server error
if ([httpResponseCode evaluatesTo: NO]) {
NSLog (@"The server responded with an error.");
}

The NSString+BooleanLogic source follows:

NSString+BooleanLogic header

/*

NSString+BooleanLogic.m

Created by Mike Fahy on 9/7/11.
Copyright (C) 2011 Phacia Inc.

http://www.phacia.com/?p=1341

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
*/

@interface NSString (NSString_BooleanLogic)

/*
Common strings that generally mean "yes" can now be evaluated as "true"

ie:

NSString *stringToTest = @"ok";

if ([stringToTest evaluatesTo: YES]) {
NSLog (@"The phrase %@ evaluates to true!", stringToTest);
}

*/

-(BOOL) evaluatesTo: (BOOL) b;

@end

NSString+BooleanLogic implementation

/*

NSString+BooleanLogic.m

Created by Mike Fahy on 9/7/11.
Copyright (C) 2011 Phacia Inc.

http://www.phacia.com/?p=1341

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
*/

#import "NSString+BooleanLogic.h"

@implementation NSString (NSString_BooleanLogic)

-(BOOL) evaluatesTo: (BOOL) b
{
// Feel free to add your own "true" sayings inside this array to ensure they evaluate to true.

NSArray *positive = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
@"yes",
@"true",
@"ok",
@"okay",
@"right",
@"correct",
@"success",
@"positive",
@"absolutely",
@"sure",
@"yep",
@"good",
@"gotcha",
@"affirmative",
@"200",
@"10-4",
@"roger",
@"check",
@"will do",
@"1",
nil
];

return (b) ? [positive containsObject: [self lowercaseString]]
: (![positive containsObject: [self lowercaseString]])
;
}

@end

It had me before I even knew what was going on!

Yes, I know that out of the 11 million plus visitors/users, 97% of them are women… I guess I didn’t have much of a chance. Was it the never-ending colorful pictures (I love pictures), the short comments you can make to someone’s “pin”, the “like” it and move on possibilities or the “repin” to your own customized boards? For me, it’s all of the above and a little more. A friend described it as getting a great printed magazine and seeing a recipe, decorating/craft idea, or a great fashion piece and tearing out the page for later reference, but this time instead of lots of ripped pages or magazines cluttering all surfaces of the house, you can “figuratively” rip out the pictures and “pin” them to your own boards for later review or inspiration. Why didn’t I think of that?!!

So with that being said, Pinterest is getting so much publicity (which isn’t a bad thing) and has brought the attention of some companies that don’t want their content “pinned”.  Pinterest has recently released code for companies to embed into their websites to block “pinning” of their content to someone’s personal boards.  Along with limiting pin captions to 500 characters in an effort to deal with copyright infringement laws…ah, the price of growth and fame!  

An excerpt from a post by Joann Pane published on Mashable states: “Josh Davis of LLsocial.com points out that 99% of the pins on Pinterest are against the company’s own Terms of Service. Pinterest states that when users pin items, this indicates they are either the exclusive owners of the material or someone has granted them access to re-publish content. One of the points of ‘Pinterest Etiquette’ also stands to remind users to credit sources.”  The full post can be seen on:  http://mashable.com/2012/02/20/websites-block-pinterest/)

So Pinners, please be responsible and learn the etiquette of “pinning” and don’t forget to credit your sources.  I would love to see Pinterest stick around for a long time!  I have so much more to pin to my boards!  :-)  Happy Pinning!!!

I’m definitely not the first to notice this, but occasionally it hits me just how different my daily routine is now compared to just two short years ago. It’s safe to say that a real convergence has happened in the last two years — and it was so much more than anyone might have predicted.

It happened so quickly, but it definitely happened: Unlike the computer, which slowly and clumsily tried to work its way into my daily non-tech routines over the years, my iPhone (and even more so, the iPad) swept in with ease: My morning newspaper in the kitchen now doubles as my TV remote in the living room, but right now it’s making itself useful as a word processor so I can write this blog post. Even more incredibly, my wife will use the same device to film our son’s playdates later, and I have a relative in California who uses the same model to produce major-label music recordings and videos (Not amateur music, mind you, but pieces you hear daily on television, radio and elsewhere). Even my parents pick it up to talk to their grandchildren (or to use as a quick fix for my mom’s slot-machine addiction), and I have friends who use it daily to check their heart rates while exercising.

I still have a separate TV, stereo and computer, of course, but that’s not where the revolution happened after all. Whether it’s an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone (or to a lesser extent, an Android device), there is now one single device that singlehandedly makes hundreds of other gadgets — including $1 flashlights and $5,000 assistive technology devices — utterly obsolete. I don’t even seek out new gadgets anymore; I seek out new apps.

If I really wanted to, I suppose I could get rid of the computer, television and receiver and replace them with my iPad (and a good set of speakers), but strangely enough, this still seems to be the least practical application of the device at the moment. I’m sure it will happen eventually, though… Perhaps when the iPad adds a built-in projector?

I’d write more, but I need to use this synthesizer/telephone/DVR/flashlight/checkbook/radio/medical device to scan a few documents and watch the season finale of Downton Abbey now.

The app, an emergency and information app for diabetes sufferers, is the second in a series of lifestyle-enhancing apps from Phacia to help patients take control of their own care.

In addition to being a handy “In Case of Emergency” (ICE) app, Diabetes Alert also includes many other features to earn its place on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Among them:

• Create wallpapers to alert others of your condition
• Read more about living with diabetes: Updated information from trusted resources includes news, recipes and information for families and individuals living with diabetes.
• Locate nearby pharmacies, hospitals and emergency rooms at the touch of a button

We think diabetics will get a lot of use out of Diabetes Alert, and we look forward to hearing how you use it in the new year!

Additional information:

• Apple iOS App Store page
• YouTube support channel for Phacai apps

• Step 1:  Brand team would select Phācia for this project. (Simple)
• Step 2:  Phacia and brand team would sign any non-disclosure/any contract(s) needed to start discussions.  (Yes, lawyers are always involved)
• Step 3:  Once any and all contracts are signed and a minimal, agreed-upon discovery fee is paid, Phacia and the brand team would start the design stage/discussions for your branded app.  (Let the fun begin!)
• Step 4:  Phacia would treat this project as any other project. We would spec and price out all design and development elements that we as a team have decided on.  (Snapshot into how mobile apps are priced and valued)
• Step 5:  Once the team has made most or all the decisions on the design, look and feel of their app, Phacia will start development.  (This part is the “heart” of the app!)
• Step 6:  We’ll continue all communications and updates on where the app is in development.  (Sigh, just a little longer)
• Step 7:  App is in final stages and is going through testing mode.  (Need to make sure it’s “All systems go”)
• Step 8:  App is ready to go to Apple for final approval.  (Ultimately, Apple has the final decision)

So I said, “Minimal cost” to the budget, right?  This is what Phacia would require:  We would require any expenses for travel and other out-of-pocket costs to be covered.  The project timeline would be estimated at the beginning of discussions and will be assessed during that time.

Okay, so here is the “hook:”

During the whole process of design and development, we’ll continue to keep you and your team abreast of the “cost” to develop your app.  When the app is ready to go to Apple for approval, Phacia will then give you the opportunity to continue with the “launch” or drop the whole project and walk away (and not go to Apple for final approval).  If you decide to go with the launch “best decision ever”, then at that time, the brand would be responsible to pay for the app – and oh, did I mention that all prior expenses would be deducted from the final cost of the app?  If you go with the “not so good decision” of dropping the project, then your team’s only cost will be the travel, minimal discovery fee and out-of-pocket expenses.

Phacia understands that making a decision to partner with such a new company is probably a hard pill to swallow, but we believe we are the best at what we do, and because of that, we are willing to absorb most of the risk for you.  Give us a shot; it really is a win, win for everyone!

Phacia is opening this opportunity to many brands.  We will be accepting ONLY the first THREE brands for this one time offer, so don’t wait too long: You could miss out on this Awesome Opportunity!  If you are up for the challenge, please contact us at:  http://www.phacia.com/contactus/

Thank you and good luck!

And most importantly, it’s free today only! On Nov. 4, the price rises to a dramatic 99 cents!