kill-the-dinosaur

Ow noes! Illustrators’s panels, windows etc are gone!

admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:34:12 +0000

This is the second time I’ve had this problem. Once with Illustrator CS3 on OSX 10.5 and now with the CS4 version running on 10.6.2.

I start up Illustrator and everything is gone, all the panels, toolbars, except for the drawing area and the Illustrator toolbar.

Ever heared of spaces, dumbass?

Like every normal person working with adobe products on a mac, you must be saying “well duuuh! Everybody knows that panels and windows dissapear all the time using spaces!”

true.

Spaces + adobe products = bad

however, in this case it was something completely different as switching through the spaces, restarting Illustrator and such didn’t solve a thing.

Oh silly you, choose an other workspace or restore your old one…

Nope, also didn’t work as the “Window” menu was completely empty. “Uhm,… say what again?”. The window menu was odd enough completely empty. So no workspace stuff

Then what was it?

After cruising the web a little bit, I found nothing. So I did what any person would do: Erase your preferences.

I’ve found the “Adobe Illustrator CS4 Settings” folder under User/Library/preferences/. I backed up all the settings and deleted the ones that were in the folder. Empty folder should create new preferences on startup. And it worked. Hooray! Everything back where it was.

Country code XML

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:13:29 +0000

I’ve been working on a school project to display stuff per Country on Google Maps. The data to work with was a Country Code. A quick search didn’t give me a decent xml file with just the countries and there ISO code.

So I created one myself.

enjoy!

Migrating from Outlook (PC) to Entourage (Mac)

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:25:25 +0000

Yesterday I had to Migrate a small home business from an old Dell to a brand new 24″ iMac. One of their biggest tools is their email/mailing list system. Formerly a hybrid of Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook 2001. Since Thunderbird is cross platform exporting and importing their contacts, emails and persona’s wasn’t a big deal. It went very fluid. But then came the time to export from outlook 2001 and import the files into Entourage.

First of all, Entourage doesn’t support outlook archives of any kind that wasn’t on the same platform. Bummer. So i had to find another way. I searched the net but couldn’t find any converter that would fit the deal (for free anyway). The only free option I’ve encountered (and that works perfectly) was Eudora.

Eudora

Eudora is an old rusty email client available for Mac and for PC. So I installed eudora (free edition) on the PC and it immediately allowed me to import all of outlook’s settings, mailboxes, contacts,…. nice!. Next up was exporting those files to the mac. But I couldn’t find any exporting options. After a quick search I discovered that you have to go to the app’s data folder. ( Run: %appdata%\Qualcomm\Eudora ). it has a lot of .mbx files or Mailbox files. I copied all of those without a problem. Then went on to the mac, opened up entourage and chose to import Textfiles. After you follow the wizard you’ll see that you have a choice between .csv of MBOX files. Choose MBOX. Entourage will now start to import everything and there you have it, your old emails on your new computer.

Problems that occurred

3 problems did occur, so don’t let them scare you of doing things wrong.

The 3 applications crashed a lot, but they still did all the right imports
Entourage imported double the amount of email that were in the mailboxes, but they were empty. If I had 20 emails, it would show those 20 + 20 empty ones as well. I just deleted those.
Some emails (maybe a 5%) were unreadable. I have no idea how. Maybe I did something wrong, but they were all just these weird symbols instead of text. Haven’t found a problem for that one.

Building a lightweight bulletinboard for iPhone/iPod Touch + setting up an RSS feed

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:23:28 +0000

Currently I’m developing a manager for bands in AIR. It syncs al band info, gigs, rehearsals, contact, finances etc with your other band members. One of the things I’m integrating is a basic bulletinboard for band members to communicate.

As most of the members in my band have iPods/iPhones I thought “Wouldn’t it be great to release that AIR app for the iPhone OS?” . As it turned out, that’s not the best solution. (As I’m trying to make this public, for every band to use)

Reasons:

You have to distribute things through the app store
My objective-C isn’t all that great (it sucks :p)
It would require like a huge database with a dedicated server, logins, etc…
time

So I started to work on a webApp. Wich didn’t require any new skills for me. I used Dashcode to do all of this, because it provides you alot of cool nifty starting templates and the basic features you’d want an iPhone webapp to have (+look and feel).

1. Getting your database data in a readable format

By far the most easy choice was creating an RSS feed of my database. Allowing to show what and what not to give away from my central database which manages my air app.

I found this great PHP tutorial on making an RSS feed from a MySQL database.

A short summary:

 header("Content-type: text/xml");

echo "";

echo "";

echo " We seem to have prikbord Notifications on rehearsals etc…
http://www.yoursite.com/ ";

require("db_connection.php");
// Query database and select the last 10 entries.

$data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY id");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($data))

{

// Convert database images data into actual image link.

$row[Intro] = str_replace("images/", "http://www.yoursite.com.au/images/", $row[Intro]);
// Continue with the 10 items to be included in the  section of the XML.

//

http://www.yoursite.com/article.php?id=".$row[id]." //        http://www.yoursite.com/article.php?id=".$row[id]."
echo "
".$row[title]."
http://www.weseemtohave.net
.$row[date]."]]>

          .$row[message]."]]>
.$row[user]."]]>

";

}

// substr can limit the number of characters. First number is starting point while the second number is number of

//characters.

// otherwise just use $row[Intro].

//  is an optional sub-element of  but recommended if you don’t want to receive a warning when

//validating your RSS.
echo "
";

?>

The db_connection file looks something like this:

 @mysql_connect(‘databaselocation’, ‘username’, ‘password’) or die(‘ERROR–CAN’T CONNECT TO

SERVER’);

@mysql_select_db(‘databasename’) or die(‘ERROR–CAN’T CONNECT TO DB’);

?>

I modified the webWicked file, according to the RSS 2.0 specification, so I could add the author.

My CMS in AIR allows you to add stuff to the DB, this RSS feed displays everything in my DB I wanna give public.

So for the iPhone/iPod app , all that was left for me to do was make a simple RSS reader. At first glance you wouldn’t say it’s an RSS reader, it looks like the webapp goes right into my database and picks out the data. But by creating a webapp on top of an RSS feed ontop of my database, I unintentionally just made things even a little more secure.

2. Why?

Q: Why would you create just an iPhone app, instead of a normal readable webpage?
A: iPhone OS web apps have their own ways of using javascript + you get the tools for immediatly applying an iPhone OS look and feel to your web app (like Panel/Views animations). Also, the templates for an rss reader that were provided made it sooo much easier for me to develop this kind of app. Almost no javascript/html/css was required to make this. Even Pascal Vyncke could have made this.

Since I wanted to add the author to the RSSitem (like a blogpost actually), i had to alter some code.
In the app’s main.js file i added the user.

setRepresentedObject: function(representedObject){
// To start, the represented object of our detail controller is simply a string, the title of the list row that the user chose.  You may want to make the represented object any kind of object when you customize the template.
this._representedObject = representedObject;
// When the represented object is set, this controller also updates the DOM for the detail page appropriately.  As you customize the design for the detail page, you will want to extend this code to make sure that the correct information is populated into the detail UI.

var title = document.getElementById(‘articleTitle’);

title.innerText = extractText( feedResults[this._representedObject].title );

var user = document.getElementById(‘articleUser’);

user.innerText ="posted by: " + extractHTML( feedResults[this._representedObject].user );

var article = document.getElementById(‘articleDescription’);

article.innerHTML = extractHTML( feedResults[this._representedObject].description );

var date = document.getElementById(‘articleDate’);

date.innerText = "Published on " + createDateStr(feedResults[this._representedObject].date);
var self = this;

var backLink = document.getElementById(‘backToHeadlines’);

backLink.object.onclick = function() {

document.getElementById("StackLayout").object.setCurrentView("frontPage", true);

};

}

};

In the RSSSupport.js I added the fact that it has to read the managingEditor tag.

//parseAtomFeed(){

.

.

.

var user = findChild(item, "managingEditor");

.

.

.

results[results.length] = {

title: title,

link: link,

user: user,

date: new Date(itemDate),

description: description

}

}

And voila, in a total of 10 minutes I created a lightweight (currently) read-only bulletinboard for the iPhone OS.

2M09 here I come! whiii!

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:00:21 +0000

Tomorrow I’m heading towards the XPO in Kortrijk for the biggest free Multimedia event in Europe. I’m really looking forward to hearing Aral’s new talk.

See you all tomorrow!

The 8 most useful sidekick applications

admin — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:58:26 +0000

1. Things

Personally this app is a must have for me. For the people who aren’t using basecamp or other large management programs. Things can save you a lot of headaches. You can assign tasks to projects, projects to fields, to certain team members. Plus , it’s also available for your iPhone/iPod touch. You can sync right away with you mobile device or iCal. You’ll never forget what you’re supposed to do en when it’s supposed to be due.

Download:
http://culturedcode.com/

2. Lita

This is without a doubt the BEST SQL lite manager out there. Cross platform , free and fast. Must have for anyone developing with SQL lite.

Download:
http://www.dehats.com/drupal/?q=node/58

3. MAMP

For all your local dynamic website testing. Easy to use, fast, great features even for a free version.

Download:
http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html

4. OXYGEN

An XML editor with reminds you of the Eclipse IDE. Really great, does what it has to. With this program you can manipulate XML the way it’s supposed to. Not free, but a fucking treat.

Download:
http://www.oxygenxml.com/

5. Komodo edit

Though it’s designed to support multiple languages, it is superb in javascript. Auto complete, cross platform, free. Hell yes. it also reminds me a bit of Coda.
Start your javascript engines!

Download:
http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

6. Pref Setter

Tired of changing .plist in a non suitable environment and don’t feel like installing those developer suites from apple itself? This lightweight app is your answer.

Download:
http://www.nightproductions.net/prefsetter.html

7. Dropbox

O…M…G! Seriously this has been a life saver. Workign on projects with other people from a long distance can be a real pain in the butt. With this you can autosync files by dragging them to a single folder.

MUST HAVE. period

also crossplatform:)

Download:
http://www.getdropbox.com/

8. TextMate

No explaination needed. Get this app right now! It will save you time and money.

Download:
http://macromates.com/

O RLY?

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:11:09 +0000

Logo: sketch to full design

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:57:13 +0000

A client of a client of mine asked me to do a logo design for a company called HPM. You won’t find anything about them on the net yet because they’ve just founded it and are setting up their identity. So they asked me to do a logo design.

It had to represent the following:

Solid
Absorbing
Personality must be central
leadership
experience
all around service

Solid, most of the time , means a thicker kind of logo, a bolder type of font.
Leadership and personality made me think of trying to incorporate a person or figure in the logo.
Experience and all around service made me think of a sphere or circle.

I’ll post a scan of my sketches or something like that. But to see the current state:

Some color suggestions I’ve made

UPDATE:

Here is the final version:

Twitter in AIR: easy as pie

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:19:32 +0000

Yesterday I started searching for a suitable way to twitter within an AIR app. I’ve encountered this new (launched this week) library on the google code site. It’s called “Tweetr” and is made by SWFJunkie.

it’s great. it has great docs and examples are on the way. I contacted the creator Sandro Ducceschi about a first quik example.

//create a new tweetr instance

var tweetr:Tweetr = new Tweetr();

// add your login credentials

tweetr.username = "yourUsername";

tweetr.password = "yourPassword";

// add some event listeners for when a request succeeds or fails

tweetr.addEventListener(TweetEvent.COMPLETE, handleResult);

tweetr.addEventListener(TweetEvent.FAILED, handleFail);

// now send your tweet

tweetr.sendTweet("my test tweet");

this is how easy it is to tweet in AIR. Piece of cake , 3 vital lines of code, boom, there you have it.

tweettweettweet

FITC day 3: final day :(

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:00:07 +0000

I’m finally back in Belgium. Just got back from my 4 day trip to Amsterdam. It as so awesome, in my previous post I showed you some pictures I took. Yesterday i tried to take pictures as well , but after my first photo my camera blew me off. (Damn you sony).

So no pictures. (everybody goes *aaaahhwwwww*)
I started the day with an introduction session about the Flash 10 sound API, which was really cool. But most of the stuff said there were things I already knew. Next up was Robert Reinhardt ‘s session about personal branding. That was probably one of the most interesting session’s I’ve witnessed over at FITC amsterdam. It blew me away.

I went back to the main building to attend the Sound Visualization presentation. Which was awesome, but again nothing new.

Then the worst thing of the whole festival: The iPhone SDK for Actioncripters was a total mess. I’ve met the guy giving the presentation the day before and he was a total douchebag. Bragging about what he’s been doing the last couple of months. In every presentation I saw him writing code snippets in xCode not paying attention. Then his presentation came and it sucked monkey balls. none of his examples worked, he kept dissing apple’s xCode, the interface builder,… But none of his work seemed to function (and none of his functions seemed to work either). It was a real pain to watch. He was supposed to be an expert on the subject. But dear god, the manual provided with the SDK is more useful.

Last of the day was Theodore Watson from open frameworks displaying his works. I’m not interested in developing in C++ with open frameworks, but it’s incredible what open frameworks can do. (you may have heard of the lasertag graffiti project)

One of his examples was an interactive forrest for children.

Have a look!