Martin Normark's Blog

Martin Normark's Blog

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Opinionated vs. Un-opinionated products

Opinionated vs. Un-opinionated products

Uncover the balance between opinion and practicality in product creation. Explore the impact of opinions on creating a passionate community, and how integrations and automation shape products. Learn how small SaaS companies compete with behemoths by finding their unique opinion.

A world without files - we need new protocols

A world without files - we need new protocols

Could we have "content type" protocols like doc://, sheet://, code:// or design:// and a governing body to define the standards of those protocols? Bring your own storage provider for each protocol, and control your data.

Run My Container — Docker and the Super Powers of FROM!

Run My Container — Docker and the Super Powers of FROM!

A Dockerfile and some application code that sits in a git repo, is the purest form of digital value that you can get.

The art of logging

The art of logging

Logs are thrown into code, just like comments. Comments doesn't add much value, is subtle to the code. But logs can potentially add value, however it clutters the code a lot.

Shipping APIs scale vertical SaaS

Shipping APIs scale vertical SaaS

APIs can scale vertical SaaS or integrated operations at any company. Shipping APIs is no exception, and provides a bridge from digital to physical for many software vendors.

A simple cheat sheet for Seaborn Data Visualization

A simple cheat sheet for Seaborn Data Visualization

Just gonna put this out here, courtesy of Kaggle's Data Visualization course [https://www.kaggle.com/learn/data-visualization]. It is a super simple description of the different plots you can do with Seaborn [https://seaborn.pydata.org/], simply divided into the type of story you're trying

Let's focus on the Interface Layer

Let's focus on the Interface Layer

It's not unusual to see ideas for different interactions for products that already exists in abundance. Everyone kinda wants their own little ideas baked in, and it usually comes from frustration experienced first hand. Something lots of people struggle with every day, is video collaboration, and a little

SaaS marketing – scratching the surface

SaaS marketing – scratching the surface

This is primarily my beliefs around how to create distribution for a SaaS product, packed with links to what I regard as the go-to resource for each topic. This is not a "get rich fast" or "how to get success in 10 easy steps" kinda post.

Presenting iOS View Controller as bottom-half Modal

Presenting iOS View Controller as bottom-half Modal

Presenting view controllers in iOS is a trivial thing. At least if you can do with the capability provided by iOS out of the box. But sometimes it makes sense to go a little beyond the default capabilities. You probably see it all the time in the apps you love

Overwhelmed by the Full Width

I almost always prefer adding stuff to a page with a constrained, fixed width. Of course the width will adjust to the device viewing the page, but building a page in a web app that uses the full width of the browser often ends up being ugly. There's

Playing video in an Apple TV App with tvOS in Swift

Playing video in an Apple TV App with tvOS in Swift

So yesterday I did a small little experiment with tvOS, namely a TVML based app [https://martinnormark.com/tvos-client-server-experiment/] which was fun to see how Apple is trying to make it more accessible to new developers (TV networks, content providers etc) without having to know Swift or Objective-C and Cocoa

An experiment with client-server apps on Apple tvOS

An experiment with client-server apps on Apple tvOS

I've spent a little time digging into the SDK for the new Apple TV - tvOS - specifically using the client-server app architecture. In about an hour I got a local Node.js server running to serve templates and JavaScript files to a native tvOS app... Yes, client-server

APIs are the new Business Development

APIs are the new Business Development

Back in 2008 I spent months and months on integrating with a new partner that the company had hit up. Literally hit up. Talk, meet, go out for lunch, out for beers, meet and talk some more and then see what the technical aspects of such an integration would look

Things without substitutes

In the business of software, there are no substitute for a great product if you want to truly succeed. Look at all the companies you admire - the one thing they all have in common, are great products! It's so easy to get into the habit of optimising

Adding SQL Azure database as Linked Resource to Web App

The so called Azure Preview Portal, that has been in preview for ages and ages, is less than ideal or should I say confusing in a few places. One thing I particularly find difficult to grasp, is the concept of linked resources. In the old portal (or current, since it

Be aware of how Azure auto-assigns Resource Groups

Resource Groups [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-portal/] in Microsoft Azure is used to structure all your apps, databases, services, VMs etc. into logical containers that you can manage at once. But when you create new resources, the Azure Portal often makes a guess about which resource group

Adding more depth to modal View Controller Transitions in iOS

Adding more depth to modal View Controller Transitions in iOS

The default modal view controller transition in iOS is something that I've become a little annoyed of. If the view controllers (the one being presented, and the one presenting the modal view) both have vivid bright colours, the flat dimension to the transition makes it a little difficult

Prototyping your iPhone app idea

Prototyping your iPhone app idea

You have an idea for an iPhone app. You believe it's great. You can think of so many ways it will be successful. In fact, you can only think of how your app will become a huge success. You constantly search the App Store for similar apps, but

iOS 9 news - Notes from following WWDC 2015 remotely

iOS 9 news - Notes from following WWDC 2015 remotely

I'm not at WWDC 2015 [https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/]. Unfortunately! But this year Apple has made it a much better experience to follow along without a ticket. They release WWDC 2015 videos [https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015] on a daily basis and even stream some

Home Button gestures on iPhone

Since the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the increased screen size has caused new issues for single hand navigation around the OS that I notice on a daily basis. The worst impact is the go back edge pan that pops a view controller off the stack, which I think was

Text Recognition in iOS with Tesseract OCR

OCR [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition] is an old technology. I remember from my early days with my own computer that I bought a handheld scanner that featured OCR capabilities, and I experimented with handwritten notes to see if it could recognise my hideous scribbling. As far

Easily display different formats of your logo in Swift

I constantly make very small UI sub classes in my iOS apps to make it easy to display a certain type of label, button or text field. I'm using Swift in my current project and when I wanted to make a sub class of UIImageView that displays a

A Vibrant Background Image View in Swift

A while back I wrote about how you could make the transition from Launch Image to root view controller look smooth [https://martinnormark.com/smooth-transition-from-launch-image-to-view-controller-in-ios/] with a background image as large as the iPhone 6 Plus resolution. I recently found myself using the background on a few screens for logging

A Weird Case of UIVibrancyEffect on iPhone 6 vs. iOS Simulator

I've often seen a couple of differences between how a real iPhone device and the iOS simulator renders some advanced stuff. But it's often the iOS simulator that is acting out, and everything is good on the device. I was adding a background image to the

Allowing an Idea to go Out of Control

Allowing an Idea to go Out of Control

By natural instinct, most people and organizations tend to get defensive and protect their ideas and products when they start to go beyond their control. I'm not talking about Blockbuster who refused to move forward when it was clear that their model of movie rental were about to