Mandar Apte

UI/UX Designer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Articles

  • Males and Females in Human Resource (HR) Recruitment in the Era of Feminism / Illusion of Patriarchy or Illusion of Brahmanical Patriarchy in Brahman Hatread Society

    With the invention of Feminism. The female audience was introduced to the term called Patriarchy and, for Hindu haters Brahmanical Patriarchy. Feminism tells young female audiences to blame Male dominant society for their natural human body periods of pain. They somehow ask why boys should not suffer the same and why just girls or women.

    Even with the disclosure of Twitter Files by Elon Musk. Vijaya Gadde from Twitter also got sued in court for her bias Twitter’s social media administration or moderation. (Vijaya Gadde is an American attorney who served as general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter. – Wikipedia) I remember her saying, “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”, out of nowhere. Why are American companies’ social media heads blaming or shaming Brahmins from India / Bharat / Hindusthan for no harm they did?

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  • My side of the story of selling Apple iPhone apps on the Apple App Store while doing a day job…!!!

    I am selling apps on Apple App Store since 2012, Tried free apps with excellent sales but no revenue or no Apple iAd revenue or very little. I kept doing that for two to four years. Then I removed all of my apps from the sale and kept my account inactive with no apps on ready for sale for almost one or two years.

    Then Swift language was introduced with support for Unicode while watching Apple’s Keynote presentation, I got the idea of Learning Devanagari Script apps with support for Marathi, Sanskrit and Hindi Languages.

    It got almost 3 months of the year 2016 for me to record 500 audio samples and videos with proper code to get to the level of MVP i.e. Minimum Viable Product.

    Next three years I finished recording audio and designing videos and vector illustrations. So it was a total of 700 Audio Recordings with statements and alphabets (Vowels, Consonants and Barakhadi), and 422 animated videos for stroke by stroke guide. Then almost 500 vector and raster illustrations.

    With Covid and Corona Epidemic and forced leave from March to November I finished and upscaled all of my apps with visual and performance quality for my Mudrakshar, Swarakshar and Chitrakshar apps.

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  • Accion Labs Employee Churn, Their Hiring Process & Corporate Culture. My Professional Experience with Accion Labs.

    I worked in AccionLabs for a year. I worked on a single long project for my whole tenure.

    At that time, they used to have offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. And they were supposed to open an office in Pune when I left the company.

    I joined AccionLabs as a Senior User Experience Designer. When I started interacting with my senior staff, who were UX Architects or Project Managers, all were over-stuffed with projects out of their capacity. I was working in the Mumbai office, so I don’t know about office culture in other offices. There was a sense of uneasiness everywhere. Employees were allowed to play cricket outside during office hours. One employee never showed up to work but received a salary for the last four months. My project manager and CTO were rude in every meeting. They will discuss some random employees’ performance and why they should warn them to install PIP (Performance Improvement Program) or why they should have been fired. They were a few billable employees who sat ideal doing nothing.

    It was such a situation that three or four employees resigned and left the company every two or three days. The company ask them to resign but hosts a send-off party somehow out of no shame. Even two colleagues told in the send-off party’s last speech that they had no work since joining or for the previous four months, and the company asked them to resign, so they did. The churn rate was high.

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  • My experience in converting my paid educational apps to a subscription business revenue model.

    After experimenting with various apps, I ventured into an educational language-earning app in 2013/14. I developed three apps Mudrakshar for tracing Alphabets, Swarakshar for Pronouncing Alphabets and Chitrakshar for Alphabet Charts with Illustrations and audio pronunciation. All three apps were dedicated to Devanagari Script—mainly Marathi, Sanskrit and Hindi Language. For Chitrakshar, I added the English Language with Latin script.

    I am developing my apps for Apple iOS, iPadOS and macOS platforms. Here is my Apple Developer Profile if you want to check it out.

    I think the In-App purchase / StoreKit framework was not introduced back then. That’s what I remember. So I used paid app business model to support my app development and time invested.

    Maybe because I started sailing my apps with an upfront paid pricing model, I was forcing my users to purchase them without allowing them to try them before they bought. As a result, I had significantly fewer downloads or sales. But over the years, I sold almost 1,000 units of apps or more. I also utilised App Store Connects’s App Bundles feature at that time. App Bundles undoubtedly helped me to sell more apps with discounts.

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  • My Solution to my year-long back pain and health issues

    Since I started my health and fitness journey, I have been facing issues with tremendous back pain and mobility.

    As you may have guessed already, I started walking, but the pain was not going anywhere whatever I did.

    I took physiotherapist assistance, machine exercises, long distance and long time walking but with no relief.

    But one day, I just turned off the air conditioner for the whole night in my room for one or two weeks, and somehow, my back muscle was relieved, and I had no pain or muscle stiffness issues. But after that week, I turned on the air conditioner for the next three-four days, and the back pain was back again.

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  • Removing the Title Bar from the Mac Catalyst App

    Learn how to remove the title bar from your Mac Catalyst app.

    We are using Swift Programming Language.

    The code will look something like this:

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  • क्लेशकारक अनुभव गांधिवधानंतरचा | Life of Chitpavan Kokanastha Brahmins After Killing of Mahatma Gandhi By Subhash Apte

    Complete Monologue by Subhash Apte in Marathi:

    १९४८ साली गांधींचा वध झाला तेंव्हा मी आठ वर्षांचा होतो. दुसऱ्या दिवशी मी सकाळी उठलो तर सगळे वरचे लोक ओरडत होते. पेपर मध्ये आले आहे महात्मा गांधींचा खून झाला आणि मारेकरी पळून गेले अशी बातमी पेपर मध्ये आली होती आणि त्यात एक उल्लेख होता की मारेकऱ्यामध्ये गोडसे व आपटे आहेत. मी काही पेपर वाचला नव्हता परंतु वरती पटेल म्हणून राहत होते त्यांचा मुलगा होता त्याचे नाव आठवत नाही मी बाहेर आल्यावर ते म्हणाले, “गांधीजींचा मारेकरी आला, गांधीजींचा मारेकरी आला”. मी म्हणालो, “काय केले रे मी बाबा तुझे?”. अरे तुम्हारे चाचाने मारा है उसको! गांधी को मारा! पण मला काहीच कळले नाही. मी परत घरात आलो आणि वडिलांना विचारलं हे कसे का मला चिडवताहेत? ते म्हणाले, तू बाहेर कोणाशीही काही बोलू नकोस. पण तो बाहेरून मोठ्याने बोलत होता, “वह मारनेवाला चालमे रहाताहै आपटे!” पण आम्ही कोणीच त्याला प्रतिसाद दिला नाही. दुर्लक्ष केलं. थोड्या वेळाने तो शांत झाला. त्याने बोलायचे बंद केले. नंतर माझ्या वडिलांनी पेपर वाचला आणि सांगितले, “गांधीजींचा खून झाला आहे. आपटे आणि गोडसे यांनी खून केला आहे. आपलं आडनाव साधर्म्य आहे त्यामुळे आपल्याला ते लोक म्हणत आहेत. तू कोणाकडे लक्ष देऊ नको”. असा सर्वाना सांगितलं. त्या दिवशी आम्ही कोणी शाळेत गेलो नाही. आम्ही आपला घरातच होतो.

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  • With the release of macOS Big Sur & macOS Monterey, the user cannot format External Hard Disk to ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)’ format as there is no option to do the same.

    With the release of the macOS Big Sur Mac Operating System, Apple has removed the option under Disk Utility to allow users to format External Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) format.

    There is only one option for Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but no choice with encryption. It only allows users to format Hard Disk with Apple File System APFS without encryption, with encryption & with case sensitivity.

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  • In-depth Review of Matrimony Website by Anuroop Wiwaha (anuroopwiwaha.com)

    I have used the Anuroop Wiwaha Matrimony Website for the last four to five years. In addition, I have extensively used their mobile Apple iPhone app and website for my bride search. As a result, I discovered a few points that Anuroop Wiwaha Portal / Company improved upon to help the community get the right matrimony match for their search.

    Observations:

    Few Points that they can improve on.

    Mobile App & Website Portal:

    1. At every event, they talk about having 20,000 Profiles / Accounts of the bride and groom registered on their portal. An average Anuroop Wiwaha account cost is INR 5,000/-.
    2. The user (Bride or Groom) can’t register with a free account as they don’t support free accounts. The user must pay an account fee upfront before registering to the portal. So it gives assurance that the user is at least serious about their search, and even the user has to submit identity proof within seven days of registration. So in a way, it eliminates the possibility of fake accounts or fraud.
    3. Even with this money of 20,000 Accounts * 5,000 Fee, the Bride or Groom Search is cumbersome and hectic. The mobile app is not full fledge as compared to a web portal. They use non-native software technologies for the Apple iPhone app, which takes minutes or sometimes fails to load content and data.
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  • Apply UIVisualEffectView & UIBlurEffect to any Views in iOS / iPadOS or macOS app.

    Apple describes UIVisualEffectView & UIBlurView in its support document as follows:
    Depending on the desired effect, the effect may affect content layered behind the view or content added to the visual effect view’s contentView. Apply a visual effect view to an existing view and then apply a UIBlurEffect or UIVibrancyEffect object to apply a blur or vibrancy effect to the existing view. After you add the visual effect view to the view hierarchy, add any subviews to the contentView property of the visual effect view. Do not add subviews directly to the visual effect view itself.

    In other words, you don’t have to use Adobe Photoshop to get a blur effect and fake superimpose it on your UIView. Instead, you can programmatically get the same effect for every situation without hassle.

    Note: If you are using UIVisualEffectsView in your app, I would strongly suggest you use a system setting called ‘Reduced Transparency’ to condition code it. If the user doesn’t want transparency, Blur, or Vibrancy effect for all of the apps on his iPhone, iPad, or Mac, he can do it with a single switch in the settings app. Another note view that you are applying effect should preferably be the Popover View Controller. Another thing to remember is to replace the blue color below with the UIColor of your choice with alpha channel transparency.

    For UITableView and UITableViewCell, use the following code in your UITableViewController’s viewWillAppear function:

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