Author K. Adam White

Entries 31 Total Bio

I am a Boston-based web designer, digital artist & disk jockey. I grew up in Chicago, I wield a Bachelor's from Brown University, and I make a mean Chicken Tikka Masala. 

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Regarding the iOS 5.1 Lock Screen

Mar 18, ’12 11:43 PM

Apple’s iOS 5.1 software update for iPhones makes the camera icon appear persistently on the lock screen. Previously the camera could be launched by tapping on the camera icon; after 5.1, you now have to swipe the icon to launch the app. When you try to tap on the camera icon now, the screen bounces slightly to indicate you must swipe upwards instead.

I know this was to prevent the camera from triggering as you carry the phone around in your pocket, but it’s just not very affordant. On a dark background you can barely see the subtle lines around the camera icon that indicate dragability in iOS, and the screen-bounce seems like a clumsy solution to the problem. Since 5.1 came out I’ve seen people on the street try repeatedly tapping the icon before they understood what they had to do—call me crazy, but maybe it’d have been better to go with a double-tap on the icon instead? I’d willingly take the hit of a few photos of the inside of my pocket in exchange for a button-like icon that actually acts like a button.

OK, </grump>. That concludes this week’s episode of end-of-weekend blues manifesting themselves through UX criticism.

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TEDxSomerville: “Ideas Worth Spreading”

Mar 12, ’12 10:06 PM

Independently-organized TEDx conferences serve as locally-franchised versions of the greater TED experience, providing the consistent TED branding and format on a local scale. I had the opportunity to spend a day earlier this month at TEDxSomerville, which ran all day long on the 4th at Arts at the Armory here in town. TED’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading”—I won’t talk much about the Ideas part here, but I’d like to dig into the ways we spread them.

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“Mixed Up” on Snip.It

Feb 6, ’12 12:44 AM

Around New Year’s, I talked a bit about writing up interesting cocktail recipes in a blog. If it’s not obvious I’m not exactly the world’s best blogger, so let’s try Snip.It. A bookmarklet-based collection should be maintainable, and if anything warrants a write-up that I can’t find on another blog, Mixed Up articles might just cross over into this space. If you’re one of the people who expressed interest in reading my thoughts on mixed drinks, give it a follow:

“Mixed Up” cocktail recipes collection on Snip.It

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Bypass the WordPress password form by using the_password_form

Jan 9, ’12 8:05 PM

Last month, I found Kieran Lane’s blog post on bypassing the WordPress password-protected post form while researching how to allow a client to skip the password form via a URL parameter. Kieran’s solution required editing a WordPress core file, and at the time neither of us had found a less brittle way to solve the problem. Fortunately, it is possible to do just this by using WordPress’s the_password_form filter:

function bypass_password_form( $output ) {
  // Check for a hash of the password
  // exactly as in Kieran's example
  if ( $_GET['pwd'] == md5( $post->post_password ) ) {
    return apply_filters(
      'the_content',
      get_page( get_the_ID() )->post_content
    );
  }
  // Or return the output as normal
  return $output;
}
add_filter('the_password_form','bypass_password_form');

They are not well documented, but there is almost always a way to do something in WordPress using filters—it can just take a few weeks of digging to find the right one! If you are managing your own site, modifying the core files may be fine, but I encourage any WordPress contractors or developers to research and share ways they have found to avoid customizing the core. Having this kind of functionality in a plugin or your theme’s functions.php will make for fewer headaches for clients when they need to upgrade ;)

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Stepping Into Custom Post Types

Jul 23, ’11 4:23 AM

My slides for today’s presentation have been uploaded to Slideshare! I will post a link to the video when it is available.

Stepping Into Custom Post Types
View more presentations from kadamwhite

UPDATE 9/11/11: The video of my post types talk is now online! My sincere thanks to Kurt Eng for all the effort WordCamp Boston put into filming these talks.

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Custom Post Types at WordCamp 2011

Jul 22, ’11 11:24 AM

I will be speaking at WordCamp Boston this weekend, giving an introduction to Custom Post Types for intermediate theme designers. If you will be coming to WordCamp this year, I hope you will drop by!

I’ve cross-posted my blurb from the official WordCamp blog:

WordPress 3.0 expanded theme and plugin developer’s abilities to create Custom Post Types, representing data more complex than the average blog post. This functionality firmly establishes WordPress as a viable Content Management System, but it can be difficult to know how to use these new post types effectively in your themes.

Using a recent client project as a case study, this talk is a candid introduction to Custom Post Types for the intermediate theme developer. I will examine how creating your own post types can benefit you while developing a site, while also calling out some drawbacks and “gotchas” I found while designing a site heavily dependent on my own post types and taxonomies. If you have been developing your own themes and are beginning to need your content organized more clearly than categories allow, this talk may be for you!

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BostonIndies.com redesign launched!

Jul 18, ’11 8:22 AM
Boston Indies Logo

Boston Indies is a local game development group, founded by Scott Macmillan as an offshoot of the larger (and more corporate) Boston PostMortem meetup. I’ve been proud to be associated with the Indies group, and was excited when Darren Torpey asked if I would be available to help them with a site design. Managing editor Jonathan Myers has brought in a lot of good content to the site so my design was pitched to take a backseat to the articles themselves, giving just enough structure and consistency to let the content shine. Check out the new, cleaner look of Boston Indies here.

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Trapped in a Tiny Tower

Jul 5, ’11 9:18 AM
This is my tower. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is my tower. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I have spent way too much time this weekend playing tiny tower. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my holiday—just that, every fleeting moment I could snag between grilling, family events and fireworks, I would dash to my phone to restock my tiny businesses.

As time-wasters go, Tiny Tower has a leg up on the competition. The writing is clever (and delightfully referential), and the pixel art feels fresh in a market over-saturated in nostalgia. The art’s strength is in abstraction of the familiar: an Apple Store, a wood-grilled pizza parlor, and a brewery are all represented, each row no more than about 50 pixels tall. With a nod to its social-game ancestors, Tiny Tower even abstracts Facebook: your ‘bitizens’ will post status updates about their jobs, favorite pop-culture quotes, or speculations on 8-bit existence. Sam Cooper, one of my “Mapple Store” genius bar associates (complete with blue polo—you can customize each character’s outfits) muses, “If we were thinking with portals then we wouldn’t need these elevators!”

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Slam Bolt Scrappers to be released next week!

Mar 9, ’11 8:25 PM

If you’re not familiar with the video game Slam Bolt Scrappers, I strongly suggest you go check it out at Fire Hose Games’ site. I have worked with Fire Hose several times in the past, most recently this winter to design and launch their new website, and they are great folks. More importantly, the game is a lot of fun! It’s a mashup of sorts, combining elements of Super Smash Bro’s, Tetris and several other games—that may sound weird, but it works. I’ve yet to win a match, but this weekend at PAX East I will be challenging ‘Fire Chief’ Eitan Glinert to a rematch from last year’s PAX, where I suffered a crushing defeat!

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a PSN exclusive, and will be released digitally on March 13. Catch them this weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, PAX East, in Boston to try the game.

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Global Game Jam 2011

Feb 3, ’11 1:25 PM

My first game jam experience was last year’s Global Game Jam, and I’m happy to announce that one year out I did it again! I’ve gone to a number of smaller jams over the past year, and was much more confidant that I knew what I was getting into this time around.

One of the achievements this year was to build a game using aggregated data. After Friday’s video keynote and kickoff meeting, the first idea I pitched was a trading card game where the deck is built from the list of people you follow on twitter. While that game didn’t gain enough traction to win a team, other jammers did grab on to the idea of twitter integration. My friend Ryan came up with a pitch of his own, and a platformer originally pitched as TwitAssassin came to life as @TwitApocalypse!

TwitApocalypse has a pretty silly premise: You are the grim reaper, and you have overslept the end of the world. Upon waking, you must use twitter to find and eliminate the survivors. Based on the idea of culling the people you don’t care about from your twitter list, the goal of the game is to traverse a platformer level and gruesomely destroy your friends. The game tracks who has tweeted most recently, and gives you a ‘Kill List’ of recent tweeters—These are your priority targets, and you get a bonus for taking them out. Killing somebody not on your list results in a penalty.

We had an awesome group of people working on this project: Ryan Kahn, Darius Kazemi and Imran Malek handled the programming; Shervin Ghaemmaghami served as our voice actor and narrative designer; Vytenis Krukonis and I took care of the art; and audio genius Akash Thakkar came on mid-Saturday to help us with sound and music. It was a great group, and I hope to continue working with this team on future projects.

Just as last year gave me an opportunity to stretch my musical skills, this game jam saw me doing my first ever pixel art animations. While previous projects had involved some pixel art, I’d never tackled anything as complex as our grim reaper player character. Despite my lack of experience I am extremely happy with how it turned out, and I will post an animation demo of the character soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of @Death’s poses there to the left.

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