Black Pixel is an iPhone and iPad software development business located on Queen Anne Hill, in Seattle. We are looking for a smart, self-directed individual to join our team as an executive assistant (EA), ideally someone with a strong interest in working for a highly Apple-oriented company. This person will report directly to George Dick, our COO, and will be a vital part of our team. The position requires frequent use of QuickBooks online – previous experience with QuickBooks is a plus but not required so long as the candidate is capable of getting up to speed on its use within a few weeks of start.

This position requires adaptability of James Bond/Emma Peel, appreciation of the iPhone, Star Wars, Northern Kung Fu. Minimally we would love someone that is alert, responsible, detail-oriented, and self-directed. Oh, and if you can sing like Barbara Streisand or Harry Connick Jr., someone here will be very happy. The position is a part time position requiring between 20 and 25 hours a week, offers flexible hours, and pays a competitive salary.

Responsibilities Phone and mail. EA will be responsible for answering phones, checking voicemail, checking the mailbox, etc.

Client relations EA will be often be the first point of contact with new customers, faxing nondisclosure agreements, answering phone calls, etc. It is expected that they will strive to attain a general understanding of the work that we do so that they can handle introductory questions about our service offerings, with additional technical backup from members of the Black Pixel staff.

Bookkeeping EA will be expected to be comfortable working with QuickBooks Online and will be required to reconcile QuickBooks with our bank account twice a week. They will work in conjunction with our accountant to assist in filing annual tax returns, etc. EA will also be expected to work with George to keep an updated cash flow projection for the next two months as a part of this job.

This requires a solid understand of our burn rate, projected income, the state of our current contracting efforts, which implies a reasonable amount of responsibility, diligence, and inquisitiveness about our general operations.

Bills EA will be empowered to pay bills, state taxes, etc, on behalf of George and the company.

Business Administration EA will be expected to fill out and submit forms, make phone calls, etc, with state and government offices on an as-needed basis to handle quarterly state taxes, corporate paperwork, etc.

Invoicing EA will be expected to invoice customers, under the direction of the management team, using QuickBooks Online.

Send email with cover letter and resume to george (at) blackpixel (dot) com.

We’re excited to announce that Bistromath 1.2 is now ready for sale in the iTunes App Store!

Bistromath 1.2 is a substantial update to the original product and takes the application to a whole new level by using Apple’s GameKit framework to allow users on different devices to edit the same check in real time. If you want a friend to help you out with a check there are only a few simple steps to get started.

For the person sharing the check

1. Make sure Bluetooth is turned on or you’re connected to a WiFi network
2. Go the the “Totals” screen of the check you want to share
3. Tap the Action button in the upper right
4. Select “Start Wireless Editing” from the action sheet
5. A marquee will appear that will keep you notified of when friends join your session, create, edit, or delete items in the check.

For people joining the check

1. Make sure Bluetooth is turned on or you’re connected to the same WiFi network as the person sharing the check.
2. Go to Bistromath’s “Checks” screen. Your friend’s check should show up in a few seconds with the name of their iPhone or iPod as the title.
3.  Tap the check to join
4. You should then see an exact copy of your friends check, with your own marquee.

Any changes that anyone in the shared session makes will be visible to the rest of the group.  This makes reconciling checks split between very large parties easy to do and a lot more fun.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

That new app of ours, Bistromath, sports a custom numeric keypad for entering prices. This isn’t unusual; you’ll have seen something similar on almost every Finance app in the App Store because the iPhone’s standard 12-button numpad lacks a decimal point. What’s unusual about ours (beside Bil’s dogged persistence to make it the best custom keyboard iPhone OS 3.1 can handle, bar none) is the order of the keys: most iPhone apps arrange their buttons like a calculator with the top row ordered 7-8-9, while Bistromath’s are laid out like a telephone with the 1-2-3 on top.

This decision wasn’t arrived at lightly, mostly because I couldn’t make a choice until I knew why there were two options in the first place! It seemed mysterious and arbitrary and, frankly, stupid that they could be so similar and still so different. Were calculators optimized for math, and phones optimized for mental recall? Or were they both just mechanical artifacts of a bygone era, like the analog clock face or the QWERTY keyboard? I did some research, and found the answers in an old American Scientist article by Henry Petroski that I’ll summarize here (It’s behind a paywall, my apologies).

Calculators

Calculators inherited much of their design from the mechanical adding machines of yore, which had their keys arranged in long columns like a steampunk abacus. Each column was a power of ten (meaning an eight column adder could handle numbers just shy of one hundred million) with the numbers nine through one spilling down the column in descending order. The higher numbers were literally higher on the machine.

When the big adding machines gave way to ten key adders, and then to electronic calculators, the columns were collapsed into a single numpad. The high-to-low descending order stayed as it had on the columnar design, and it’s understandable why. After all, if you were trying to transition an existing customer base from one adder to another, wouldn’t you try to keep it friction-free as possible?

Phones

If you’re Ma Bell, the answer to that question is “no.” Bell Labs started playing with the idea of a push-button telephone in the 1950s. They knew the rotary dial wouldn’t last forever, but weren’t rushed to replace it because speed to market is not a pressing concern for monopolies. They wanted to do it right.

Bell’s scientists produced a massive variety of dialers and tested them all on ordinary people in a lab setting. They were trying to find the best possible numpad by measuring input speed, error rate, and people’s stated preference. They tried circular layouts, triangular layouts, buttons arranged in rows, in columns, and grids. The now-familiar 7-8-9 and 1-2-3 layouts were both tested as part of this Numpad Battle Royale.

The fastest dialing speeds were found with layouts that aped the existing rotary dial, and the most user-preferred layout was long, with two horizontal rows. But the eventual balance of speed, error rate, user preference, and practicality put the 1-2-3 grid on Bell’s phones, and the world followed.

So?

To this day we’re stuck with two numpad layouts that are incredibly similar, but just different enough to slow you down when you switch between them. Apple’s phone uses the 1-2-3 layout, and their Calculator app uses 7-8-9 (though its appearance has more to do with Dieter Rams than anything else).

Most of our competitors arrange their buttons like a calculator, and probably with good reason. Lots of professional types—payroll clerks, accountants, cashiers—use a 7-8-9 layout for hours a day, and Bistromath’s layout probably frustrates them.

But most people aren’t payroll clerks or accountants or cashiers. I use a calculator maybe once or twice a week, and my Apple keyboard doesn’t even have a numpad, but there are some things we all use every day: telephones, TV remotes, ATMs, and supermarket debit terminals. These everyday machines follow the 1-2-3 layout pioneered by Bell, and we use them so often I’m willing to bet you could type your ATM PIN blindfolded. By comparison, the calculator layout is almost niche.

And that, friends, is why Bistromath has a numpad like a telephone.

It’s been a gigantic year for us here at the Black Pixel. Only mid-May and we’ve shipped a couple of stellar apps for our clients and, at last, taken some time to work on one of our own. When you set out to make a product of your own, whether you’re a carpenter or an X-ray technician or an iPhone developer, they say you should scratch your own itch. You’re your own best customer, they say. So we found our itch.

There’s a recurring problem when we developers get together for dinner and drinks, and that’s how to split the bill. When you’re dining alone or with a friend you can use mental arithmetic or your iPhone’s Calculator to figure out what you owe. But get into parties of five or ten or twenty—the kinds of dinners we find ourselves in at Seattle XCoders, WWDC or the tearfully-remembered C4 conference—and you’ve descended into a new level of hell. Some people don’t eat, some people don’t drink, nobody remembers the sales tax, and everybody needs change.

That’s the problem we set out to solve with Bistromath.

I could sit here and write at length about what makes Bistromath special and why we’re super stoked to release it. I could go on a feature-by-feature tour, but that wouldn’t leave me with anything to talk about next time. Suffice to say we’ve made something shockingly powerful and flexible beneath a calm, restrained user interface. We like it a lot, and we think you should check it out.

Voices That Matter hosted an iPhone development conference in Seattle this last weekend, and we were asked to participate in Saturday night’s panel discussion, as well as cover a presentation for one of the attendee’s marooned in Europe by Eyjafjallajökull

iPad Panel!

I sat in on the panel discussion along with August Trometer, Brent Simmons, Kyle Kinkade, Tim Wood, and Erica Sadun. The talk was fascinating and I personally enjoyed getting the chance to hear what my fellow panelists had to say on the matter.

Game Programming Presentation

I was also asked to stand in for Michael Daley’s Beginning Game Programming talk. I only had about a day to get ready for the presentation, and I got to the presentation a bit late* but I think that, overall, the presentation went very well, and that the audience had great energy.

I tried to make sure that the material Michael had in his original presentation was honored as much as possible, and also added in some of my own thoughts about the logistics of designing your own game and bringing it to market, how one assesses the technology choices to use in a game, and some approaches for building up the skill sets required to create great games.

Sample code from the presentation

I wanted the presentation to be genuinely useful, with some concrete examples of the concepts I’d discussed, so I pulled together a demonstration application late Friday night to show at the presentation. Bil Moorhead, our CTO, showed up to help cover a few of the technical issues, including sprite animation, one of his specialties.

The application is a basic Breakout game for the iPad, using OpenGL ES 2.0 for the graphics and the Box2D physics engine for dynamics and collision handling. The code uses some of the es utilities created by the authors of the OpenGL ES 2.0 book, along with some paddle control code from Ray Wenderlich, who’s own version of Breakout Cocos2D on the same game I discovered late in the game while working on the demo on Saturday night.

I have posted the project on github under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Loosely speaking, people are free to use this any way that they want, but we expect to get a shout out if this code gets used in other people’s projects or applications.

The slide deck from my presentation is available here if anyone is interested in seeing it.

Thanks to everyone for helping to make this happen, it was a wonderful time.

*A giant ‘thank you’ to Erica Sadun for keeping the group entertained until I got there. You’re a lifesaver!