Fixing a Macbook that’s got slower over time.

The following article details how, under load, my MacBook (Pro Retina Mid 2012 2.6GHz Intel i7 with 16Gb) was less than 1/4 of the speed it used to be and how I fixed it.

Over the last few months I started to notice that things were becoming less responsive in my dev environment, that’s an understatement, it was beginning to crawl. Something needed to be done or I needed a new machine!

Continue reading Fixing a Macbook that’s got slower over time. →

High Resolution Cropped Facebook Profile Images

When writing our original Facebook integration we searched high and low to try to work out how to get the square profile image at a resolution higher than 50×50 pixels to no avail. The only options we could find were to get the picture, from which your profile picture is taken, at a higher resolution. The problem with this is that it’s not always square and often the user may have setup their profile image to be a cropped area of it.

Well today I was fed up with looking at low resolution images so searched again and managed to find a solution. Using the graph api you can request facebookid/profile?fields=pic_crop

eg http://graph.facebook.com/tactilefusion/profile?fields=pic_crop returns:

{
   "data": [
      {
         "pic_crop": {
            "uri": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/t1/p320x320/10992_567316339955054_1439725697_n.jpg",
            "width": 320,
            "height": 320,
            "left": 0,
            "top": 0,
            "right": 1,
            "bottom": 1
         },
         "id": "447312341955455"
      }
   ]
}

Note that the left, top, right, bottom fields will always be the above they are there for backwards compatibility as it now always returns a cropped image.

So at last we have full res profile images in our new games in production:

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