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Archive for September, 2009

23
Sep

QikBlogr. WordPress Blog posting from my iPhone

Working on a new iPhone app for snapping pics, blogging and pushing it to my WordPress blog using WP’s built in XMLRPC server. Here is the proof, upped from the phone. Success!

When I started this last night, I had no idea how to post data from Objective-C to the web. I thought the php side was going to be a snap since I have some experience with it, but I hit some snags there too. It appeared that no matter what orientation I snapped a pic, portrait or landscape, it would end up rotated or flipped on the server but look fine in iPhoto etc.

From what I could gather, the browser does not respect the image orientation like iPhoto does. It was no good just rotating the image server side because it has no clue if an image looks right!, so finally after an hour of research, I had enough info to tweak the server side php to read the exif metadata and get the orientation then take the appropriate rotation or flip steps. Oh well, lesson learnt.

Anyway, that’s the hardest part over I think. On to lots of features and enhancement.

php exif code added post-post. My app is not that fancy.

 ...
 
$exif = exif_read_data($urlImage, 0, true);
$oriented = $exif['IFD0']['Orientation'];
 
switch($oriented)
   {
        case 3: // 180 rotate
		$imageRotate = imagerotate($src_img, 180, 0);
        break;
        case 6: // 90 rotate
		$imageRotate = imagerotate($src_img, -90, 0);
        break;
    }
 
imagejpeg($imageRotate, $urlNewImage, 90);
imagedestroy($src_img);
 
...

Yay…

QikBloggr Screen Shot

QikBlogr Screen Shot

Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.

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11
Sep

Tipr on the iPhone

My friend and colleague Aaron Gustafson of Easy Designs, LLC created a tip calculator a while back for use on mobile devices that had an interesting twist. Tipr calculates tip percentages, 10, 20, 30% etc. and then modifies the total and the tip by a few cents to create a palindrome. Huh!

In case you don’t know, a palindrome is word or number that reads the same way from front to back, e.g. Madam or $123.21. This comes in handy when reviewing your credit card statement. At a glance you can see if you have been accidentally overcharged by a restaurant or bar or anywhere you might leave a tip. If you always total to a palindrome, you should always see palindrome totals on your statement.

Anyway, to get to my point, I have been dabbling in iPhone development and find it very gratifying to build apps and then pop them right on my iPhone. Trouble is coming up with ideas? So when I can’t, I look for a good candidate that I think needs iPhonification. Tipr seemed like something I could tackle. I am a newbee to Objective-C and useful, relatively simple apps are my limit just now.

So here it is. Or @ least a movie of it. Getting stuff onto the App Store is a whole other ball game.

height="385" codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab'>

controller="true" loop="true" pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>

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9
Sep

Star Wars Kids

Dad how do they do the Light Sabers in Star Wars?

Talk about an open invitation to waste the entire weekend doing kid’s “nothing in it for me!” stuff.  First stop is The Home Depot for $100 “yeh!, some tools I needed to buy, ahem.” of items to built authentic Star Wars Light Saber hilts. Radio Shack for some LED’s, wire, batteries etc. and then after that a quick choreographed Light Saber battle. A little later it’s off to After Effects. Awesome. Another weekend gone and like I said, totally nothing in for me!  See the results on Flickr.

Light Saber Hilt

Light Saber Hilt

Colin and Liam battle it out.

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1
Sep

Flex Journey

An Adobe Flash guy for many years I ignored the advent of Adobe Flex for a long time. I felt it was just another product to achieve the same results that anyone with Flash and Actionscript skills could accomplish.

To make the story short, I landed an 11 month contract with Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks etc. in Mountain View, CA. I started work with an engineering team on fancy next generation payroll software all done in Flex. Move over Flash, make some room for Flex. Once again I found the best way to get good at something quickly is to get thrown into the deep end and learn to swim.

Needles to say I feel different about Flex now and feel good about my new capabilities. I can quickly ascertain whether a project should be done in Flash or Flex or both.

In hindsight, I see that ignoring Flex made me the very thing I dislike. Unwillingness to keep an open mind and keep moving forward.

I wish I could post some sort of demo or pics from the project, but I cannot.

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