You're reading Bits, publications on design, development and software management. Written by the TheoremOne team.

We believe in the not-too-distant future your home will know if it should save power by turning off the lights and lowering the heat because you are away on a business trip. We believe that your cars engine will start to warm up for you as soon as your thumb touches the handle on your front door. We believe you and your family will be protected from danger with smarter smoke detectors powering a more responsive fire department and providing a wealth of air quality data to more informed parents. But most importantly: we believe our ideas about what might happen pale in comparison to the explosion of creativity and genius that the product design and development community will unleash.

Motion detection is a tricky problem to solve, the key is to balance sensitivity so that it doesn’t catch light changes but still catches movements in the frame. In this article I will describe 2 methods to achieve motion detection: calculating frame differences manually and harnessing the power of the H.264 encoder. Finally, we’ll store the results online using using a connected devices (Internet-of-Things) platform from AT&T.

A friend recently sent me an email with screenshots describing KP.org’s workflows for sending a message to a doctor. He was telling me how painful the process is. Of course in my head I thought “it’s 2014…how bad can it be.” After reviewing his screenshots, I wasn’t entirely sure it could get much worse.

Today’s blog post isn’t about coding per-se, but instead about life as a coder, and how switching to a standing desk could be a big win. I’ll cover why I made the switch, how I did it, things I learned along the way. At the end I’ll tell you how this all culminated in me designing and building my own standing desk, which is something I highly recommend (if you’re brave enough to try!).

Frontend work is usually a rather messy job if things are not organized properly from the start. A CSS styleguide is a useful tool for establishing common criteria for the team, in terms of both CSS coding syntax and CSS architecture.

Xcode has a comprehensive SDK that provides everything you need to create beautiful, interactive applications. However, due to its closed-source codebase and no official support for extension hooks it falls short in the realm of social and community supported code. It lacks the flexibility that allows the community to grow and feel at home by adapting and maintaining their own code and tools.