digital:pardoe

Back From My Holiday

Just in case you were wondering why the recently flurry of activity had ground to a halt, I was on holiday. Only for a week, but it was enough to make the website look dead. Anyway I’m now back and working on iSyncIt and another, secret, application. Just a quick update on iSyncIt, thanks to a gracious user there should be a complete German translation included with the next version of iSyncIt as well as some new snazzy menu bar icons / features, I also hope to be creating some manuals / help files relating to iSyncIt and the other items available for download.

Hope this keeps you interested for now, check back soon.

Another Update

I’m pushing them out as fast as I possibly can now. iSyncIt has been updated yet again (download here) to version 1.1. The main emphasis for this version was a revised scheduling system. I was happy with the previous system but after many emails I felt it was necessary to implement a time based system as well as the current timer based system. This new system makes the program much more useable and should cater for the needs of many more people. It may also have introduced a few bugs so feel free to email me with them using the contact form.

My plans for the next release of iSyncIt include a menu bar item that will change depending on the current bluetooth status, unfortunately this requires a re-write of my older, less well formed menu bar code so this release will take a little longer to push out than recent releases, but please bear with me.

Check back soon.

More Java & TextMate [Updated]

Update: Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work any more.

A while ago I wrote a short post (here) about some additions that I had made to TextMate in order to improve its compiling of Java applications, I had made the changes because I had started programming in Java at university and wasn’t happy with the way that TextMate handled the files. In the post I promised a follow up post detailing some other improvements I had made to the Java bundle, finally, that post is here, sort of.

I’ve made so many changes to various bundles and themes it has become to difficult / long winded to document the changes in a post so instead, I have decided to release the changes as a small download from the website. You can find the files you will need on the relevant software page (this does not work anymore, read the update at the top of the page). The main changes are some slight tweaks of the Blackboard theme, the main theme I use and the addition of some new snippets, the compiling shortcuts from my previous post & some menu reordering in the Java bundle.

Make sure that you follow the instructions on the download page or in the README file when installing the files, I don’t want you to go breaking your computer now.

Sorry for the delay in this one, hope it satisfies you appetite, check back soon.

Using rFlickr

I said it was coming and here it is, my little tutorial on how to use the rFlickr Ruby on Rails gem to create a photograph section like the one on my own website. The first thing to note is that pretty much all of the options available in the Flickr API (here) are available for use in rFlickr due to the fact it is all based around XML. There is a laborious process of configuration to go through, however, to make everything work, but once this is done you should have no problems.

Firstly install the rFlickr gem, I should at this juncture note the fact I am primarily a UNIX user so will aim these instructions at other UNIX users, mainly because I don’t know the specifics for Rails installations on Windows. So lets dive in (‘$’ denotes the terminal prompt and ‘\’ denotes line continues below):

The second thing you will need to do is make sure you have a Flickr account with some photos on it then pay a visit to http://www.flickr.com/services/api/keys/ and sign yourself up for an API key, once you have generated the key make a note of the key itself and the ‘secret’ that you are given, you will be needing these quite a bit.

The next thing to do is to basically follow the tutorial here, albeit with a few modifications, I have re-written the tutorial in full below.

To make differences clear the Rails console prompt will be shown as ‘>>’, don’t forget to replace the x’s with your information.

The above just sets up your rFlickr object and makes sure that you don’t already have a key.

This returns a value that you will need to save somewhere.

Click or copy the link you are given into a browser and authorize the API for usage, don’t worry, we’re almost there.

Right, this is as far as the tutorial online goes, but there are some other useful steps we need to take to make everything more useable, mainly the moving of the token as the ‘/tmp’ directory may get cleared by our host.

Now we can get onto the actual programming and leave the authentication business behind.

We’re going to need a controller to use, for the purposes of this tutorial I will use a controller named ‘Photography’, it should save me some time as that’s what mine is called, the page to be rendered will be called ‘view’.

In the file ‘photography_controller.rb’ we will need the following information, rename as necessary to your application.

Then in the ‘view.rhtml’ that you will have created in your ‘views’ folder (or at least, are creating now) paste the following code.

And that’s it, your basically done, all the thumbnails will link directly to your Flickr page, easy wasn’t it? The main problem occurs when you load your newly created page, it’s very, very slow, due to the speed of the Flickr API (I think). In order to improve the situation I would recommend using either page or fragment caching, but that will be covered in a future tutorial.

Hopefully this will have given you a few pointers in using the rFlickr gem, read through the Flickr API for more inspiration if you are feeling adventurous. Check back soon.

Update: If you are having problems with Rails 2.0, take a look at this fix.

Update: I have written a new tutorial on caching your photos page, that should speed it up a lot, assuming you are having problems.

Scheduling & Photos

Things appear to be moving along more quickly than expected this week, I posted my main application iSyncIt and the My Book Icons on a few forums and the Apple software website and suddenly the visits to my website have rocketed from 200 a day up to 700 hits or more a day. Not as massive as some websites but it’s certainly an incentive for me to do some more work.

After many requests I have started to implement a more suitable scheduling system in iSyncIt, I added the original system for people that change their calendar and contacts very often but it seems people want more flexibility so I am currently coding something more suitable and user programmable.

Also, partially as an experiment and partially due to me wanting to unify my websites into a single website I have today programmed and uploaded a photography section to the website. This portion of the website showcases some of the better photographs that I take, for other people to see. It has been created using the ‘rflickr’ gem and my Flickr Photostream. I had several problems creating the section due to the lack of documentation for the ‘rflickr’ gem, so I will be writing a tutorial in the coming days to help other people who want to create something similar.

Well, thats all for now, check back soon.