Software Updates

I’ve finally gotten round to updating iSyncIt and Set Icon for Snow Leopard, as always you can download iSyncIt here and Set Icon here.

The new release of iSyncIt fixes the only bug I could find under Snow Leopard – the icon not changing correctly under bluetooth on / off conditions.

The Set Icon release fixes the problem of the application not performing it’s one and only function – setting a drive icon. Along with the bug fix I modified the image conversion to prevent the (frankly awful) stretching of non-square images to fill a 512×512 icon, images now scale nicely. I also removed the terrible tool-tips that show up when you start the application I used to think they were ‘cool’ but soon realised the error of my ways. However, in place of this I added some ‘brilliant’ window resizing when you remove an icon – we’ll see how long that lasts. Oh, the application will also run as a 64 bit application now – not that that makes any difference what-so-ever, I just did it because I could.

Check back soon.

New rFlickr Ruby Gem

After I started to use the rFlickr gem it didn’t take me long to realize that development of the gem had all but halted, yes it worked, which was more than the original Flickr gem did, but it was still a little bit out of date and in the end, a little bit broken.

In one of my older posts I documented a fix for the gem and provided a download to unzip into your plugins folder, however, with the advent of the wonderful GitHub and it’s marvelous gem support I’ve decided to move the project onto GitHub.

I have preserved the original gem’s GPL license and copied the source code from it’s original repository on RubyForge to a new, public, GitHub repository. In the process of the move I have dropped old code from the project, updated the readme & license information and generally performed a little house-keeping.

You can find the project at: http://github.com/digitalpardoe/rflickr/. You can install the gem using one of the following methods. First involves adding GitHub as a gem source (always a good idea) and installing the gem:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ sudo gem install digitalpardoe-rflickr

The second method it to add the gem as a gem dependency to the environment.rb of your Rails project:

config.gem 'digitalpardoe-rflickr', :lib => 'flickr', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

And run a rake task to install the gem:

$ sudo rake gems:install

Whilst performing the code migration I also added the fix that was documented in my original post and implemented support for the (not so) new ‘farm’ based Flickr URLs for images (which should make things easier to implement).

The future plans for rFlickr include new tests, improved usage examples, updated readme / documentation and implementation of missing API methods, time permitting of course.

Until the readme is updated please refer to the original post for information on how to use rFlickr.

That’s all for now, enjoy the new gem and as they say, if you don’t like it, fork it.

Just A Few Updates

It’s been almost a month since my last post and a lot has happened since then so I thought I’d bring any readers of my blog up to date.

If you are a frequent visitor to the website you may have noticed the new layout (implemented about 20 days ago now). The layout is much simplified over the old layout. It makes use of a single column layout with items from the old sidebar in the top corners. For now the advertising and Last.fm widgets have been removed whilst I decide if they should make an appearance in the new website. The visual changes comes with a fairly comprehensive code re-write that should drastically improve the performance and security of the website, the changes come thanks to a series of Rails podcasts I have discovered, you can find them here.

A quick list of the main changes to the website are as follows; the removal of all AJAX & AJAX-like functionality (other than Lightbox), everything now works statically for increased accessibility, the blog can now be browsed by category. More user feedback has been introduced. The appearance of forms has been improved and the website now makes sole us of PNG and JPEG images for transparency and quality.

The secondary reason for this post is to officially announce the availability of iSyncIt 1.5, you can download it here. This release, whilst not been too far detached visually from version 1.3.1 comes with a boat load of code improvements. The main changes are as follows; a new preferences system, doesn’t look any different but it’s easier for me to manage. The move to Leopard only. A fix for the problems that were caused in version 1.3 by Growl notifications. You can now enable & disable the login item from within the application. Updates to Sparkle & Growl. Menus now update properly. Scheduling now functions better and the control of bluetooth is improved.

Finally, an unfortunate side-effect of the iSyncIt re-write is the loss of German localization. I will be getting in touch with my friendly volunteer translator shortly to see if he will be willing to re-localize the application for me.

That’s all for now, check back soon.

About Time Too

It’s been well over a month since I managed to write a post now so I thought it was about time I started the cogs whirring again, especially as all my assignments are now finished and handed in.

Even though there has been a lack of posts in the recent month there hasn’t been a lack of feverish activity. First on the books was the release of Set Icon 0.2, this release just bought basic bug fixes and a much improved authentication system. This was followed in recent weeks by the release of Set Icon 0.3, in this release I fixed yet more bugs and introduce an option to remove a custom icon from a hard drive. You can, as always, download Set Icon from it’s download page.

On a more website orientated note, I have moved the website to new servers. Prime Hosting weren’t terribly Ruby on Rails centric in the end, hence the continual website downtime. The website is now hosted with media72. They have proven themselves over the last month to be far more reliable hosts than Prime, even though I am hosted on their beta testing server.

Along with the change of host I have modified the way in which the website is run, updates to the website are now performed via Capistrano, I hope to write a little more on this system in a later post to explain how it can help improve your Ruby on Rails development.

Don’t expect too many posts or software updates over the next two weeks, unfortunately I have a series of exams that require some serious revision, however, if I get really bored of revising you might see some posts / software appearing.

I’ve also recently acquired a new lens for my camera, a Tokina 12-24mm f/4. As part of my endeavor to expand what I write about I will hopefully (assuming I remember) write a small review about the lens as it took me a long time to find any concrete opinions on it before I purchased it.

That’s all I can think of to write for now, no doubt I will think of something else eventually.

Check back soon.

Set Icon, The Initial Release

After literally tens of emails from people having problems applying the ‘My Book Icons’ to their external hard drives I came to the decision that I needed to write some software to make the whole process a little easier. The result of this decision and a couple of (short) days work is Set Icon.

You may remember from my previous tutorial that setting a custom hard drive icon (correctly) required some Terminal wizardry and some extra command line tools. Set Icon provides and all in one, drag and drop way of setting a custom (ICNS format) icon for a hard drive (including your internal hard drive), without the need for any external tools.

The advantages of using Set Icon rather than copy & paste are; the icon will appear correctly in the Finder sidebar under Leopard, will appear correctly when the hard drive is mounted over a network and will appear correctly in the Boot Camp chooser.

There are a few extra features I plan on adding to Set Icon and I also plan on creating a Tiger compatible version in the near future so all you Tiger users don’t feel left out.

You can download Set Icon from its software page. If you like the software please consider making a donation using the button on the right hand side of the website.

That’s all the news for now, check back soon.

Issue with 1.3 [Updated x2]

I have received several bug reports about version 1.3 of iSyncIt closing after the sync has been completed. I have now narrowed down the cause of this problem and will rectify it ASAP. For the moment you can use the previous version of iSyncIt by downloading it from:

http://digitalpardoe.co.uk/downloads/isyncit/iSyncIt_1.2.1.dmg

Update: The crash appears only to affect Intel Macs, I’m looking into the issue and hope to have a fix sooner rather than later.

Update: I have now (at least I think) fixed the bug that has been plaguing iSyncIt on Intel macs. The new version of iSyncIt is 1.3.1 and you can download it here.

Check back soon.

New Version Available

Version 1.3 of iSyncIt has been released, this release adds Growl support and will be the last release for Mac OS X Tiger. This is due to the fact I only have one machine for testing and it now runs Leopard. You can download the new version here.

From my preliminary tests iSyncIt appears to work in Leopard, but it will still be undergoing a re-write to take advantage of Objective-C 2.0 and the new Interface Builder palettes. The next release may be in development for a little longer than normal, but I promise I won’t forget about it.

That’s all for now, check back soon.

Hi, Again

After a flurry of activity over the summer it would appear that moving back to university has taken me out of my stride as far as developing and maintaining the website goes. However I am going to try and manage my time better in the coming weeks and increase the activity on the website. Hopefully what I write below will help to clarify this.

In regards to iSyncIt, the 1.3 release is moving on well, albeit a little slowly at the moment, I am aiming to release it within the next week if my workload and university commitments don’t pile up to quickly. In a sort of executive decision I have decided, with Leopard dropping onto my doorstep next Friday that 1.3 will be the last release for Tiger, assuming there are no major problems. My main reason for doing this is that I don’t really have the time to simultaneously maintain two versions of the software, nor do I wish to run two different OSs.

Again, workload permitting, I am hoping to update the Western Digital My Book icon set to incorporate the new style drives that have been announced by Western Digital. It would appear that my current set are quite popular and I don’t want to disappoint.

Finally, the website went through a short migration earlier this week, hence a small amount of downtime (yet again). Everything appears to be working fine, but if you notice some unusual glitches please contact me.

I think that’s about all I have to vent about for now. Check back soon and roll on Leopard.

Problems

I am aware that there were a few problems with the website earlier today and most visitors that weren’t downloading files received “HTTP 500” errors. The problem turned out to be a rouge FastCGI process that was created and wouldn’t shut down or handle requests, I have shut the process down manually now and all systems should be running fine.

On another note regarding problems, I have been made aware of a bug in iSyncIt that causes iSyncIt to crash under certain circumstances. I have only had one actual report of this but if you have also being experiencing problems please contact me through the website. Please include details of your system, language etc. in your bug report. I am working on a fix as you read this.

Thanks in advance, check back soon.

Small Update

iSyncIt has been updated yet again, just a few localization corrections, not much else. Download it here.

Check back soon.