Author Archives: Ron Radu

About Ron Radu

Ron's role at Palomino Labs finds him working with developers to manage and guide the products they build. He has experience working on a broad swath of web and mobile projects, often wearing many different hats. Ron spends the rest of his time designing and assembling pretty and usable interfaces for clients, and making regular code commits.

Introducing Our First Incubation Project: SpottingSession

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Palomino Labs is proud to officially launch our first incubation project, SpottingSession.

spottingsession-4be36c314da1b1c16df9f1ab2a92c4d5

SpottingSession is an app for TV and movie post-production that automates creation and organization of everyone’s spotting notes. It’s already been used on several major shows and motion pictures, and our users have reported back that it’s helped them save a ton of time, money, and effort. We’re using our initial success as a launching pad to get SpottingSession into the hands of post-production experts around the world. Development continues actively, and we plan on improving on an already impressive multi-platform technological achievement.

If you work in post-production and have a use for something like SpottingSession, or you know someone who does, either download a free trial version of the app or email us at hello@spottingsession.com and we can help you get set up.

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Mac Apps We Like

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Here are some apps for OSX that help some of us at Palomino Labs work better, faster, and more efficiently:

TotalFinder ($18, 14-day free trial)

Say goodbye to multiple Finder windows! TotalFinder lets you have consolidate them into one window with Chrome-like tabs. It also brings a bunch of other improvements like Dual Mode which makes working with two directories at once a cinch.

totalfinder

Moom ($10, 100 free uses)

Moom brings Windows 7-style window pinning to Mac, and one-ups it by allowing you to customize everything about it. Easily resize and position windows to pre-defined sections of your screen by snapping it to the edges, or using a handy keyboard shortcut.

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Side-Scrolling Parallax Background Effect Using Only CSS3

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The parallax effect, or using multiple moving images to give the illusion of depth, is increasingly being used on sites across the web. So its worth exploring how we can create this effect using CSS, without the need for any JavaScript.

Let’s start out with this:

.bg {
  position:absolute;
  top:0;
  bottom:0;
  left:0;
  right:0;
  background:url('front.png') 0 0, url('middle.png') 40% 0, url('back.png') 80% 0, #000;
}


<div class="bg"></div>

This styles the element to stretch to the size of the first non statically-positioned parent element, and layers three different background images on top of each other. Note that the x-positioning of each image is offset a certain percentage, so as the element size changes the images move disproportionately to each other, creating that sweet depth effect.

parallax

Now to get them moving we have a number of options. First option is to use the transition declaration, and add it to the .bg class. Vendor prefixes are still needed for some browser versions— check out Can I Use for the latest details on which browsers support CSS transitions.

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Tips for an Effective App Store Listing

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So you’ve just finished building your amazing new iOS application. You’ve spent countless hours making sure it’s the best Facebook-integrated location-based to-do list with slick bird-flinging action, and you may be excited to finally get it listed in the App Store. But you’ve got a little more work and careful consideration to do before you submit your app for approval, because you need keywords, a good description, and some screenshots for your App Store listing. So here are some quick tips and best practices to help you out.

appstore-1

App Store Optimization is becoming as sexy and lucrative as traditional SEO. While Apple constantly tweaks the App Store search engine, the name and keywords of your app are the two fields Apple seems to regard the most important when it comes to search (others include number of downloads and ratings; the description of the app is mostly disregarded). Although Apple doesn’t encourage you to do so, the app name in the App Store can be different than the name that shows up on the home screen under your icon (the two have to be “similar” though, and Apple’s approval team gets to decide what that means); you may want to take advantage of that to include additional terms you don’t put in your keywords.

Speaking of keywords, you’re allowed 100 characters worth, separated by commas (to make the most of that limitation don’t put a space after each comma). Think about what keywords best describe your app, but don’t be too broad as you’re likely to be drowned out by the thousands of other apps with that keyword. Nor should you be too specific–make sure it’s something people actually would search for. Don’t include your app name and company name as part of the keywords, since you’re already searchable by those terms. And if your app is free, the keyword “free” is automatically associated with your app, so don’t include it in your list. Apple also doesn’t let you use keywords that are irrelevant, offensive, and refer to other apps, products, or trademarks. In the latest search update, plural forms of keywords seem to be handled similarly to singular forms, and similarly, using phrases as keywords offers no advantage–use “peanut,almond,butter” rather than “peanut butter,almond butter”.

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