Barely Concealed Narcissism

Note: If you’re keeping track at home, you may notice that my original plan of February: Self-Sacrifice has gone awry. Not because I don’t want to explore self-sacrifice…but because I simply forgot I had changed my mind last minute before writing my original plan. I had decided to move self-indulgence to May because of our upcoming trip to Italy. So here it is now, instead. I’m sure I’ll find time for that self-sacrifice…

Anyway, taking into consideration that February’s main events were comprised of Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day, I decided this month’s challenge would revolve around food (no, not for Presidents Day). Specifically, food photography has always interested me. So I worked to explore how to take good shots of food.

Valentine's Wine

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Decided to open up Quartz Composer the other day for the first time. Pretty sweet.

After a little playing around I came up with an extremely basic screen saver idea that floats three cubes around your screen, displaying the first 18 images from a given Flickr RSS feed. You can change the feed to whichever you’d like; the default is mine.

Included my patch macros, below. If you have any thoughts, please let me know– I’m extremely eager to get better at this.

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About 10 years ago I wrote a program in REALbasic that simply displayed the same phrase in each of your installed/active fonts. The purpose was to quickly see what your options were when it came to font choice. I uploaded the software to various freeware/shareware sites and it was downloaded a few thousand times. It was also twice featured on the CD included with MacAddict magazine.

FontTasteTester 1.0

Right before the new year I received an email from a past user forwarded to me from my father:

I tried again today to see if FTT had leapt the Mac OSX gap, or failing that, whether there was anytrhing similarly easy and rational for trying phrases and then concentrating purely on their visual effect. I had to upgrade to OSX about a year ago and I really miss that facility and wish I had written fan-mail at the time.

Nothing comes near FTT, even the Linotype widget with its many bells and whistles.

Thank you for your ingenuity and generosity…

So I decided that I would challenge myself to redevelop this thing. I also decided that, as part of my January Self-Improvement challenge I would try to develop something for a platform for which I had never written before. While Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard is technically a webpage in a widget, this was still a new experience. I used Apple’s free Dashcode for development.

As such, I present Font Taste Tester 1.0b3 for Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s definitely still a beta, as I haven’t done extensive testing and it’s my first foray into Dashboard. Anyway – if you give it a try and have comments, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.

This officially closes out my January Self-Improvement challenge. Look for a February Self-Indulgence intro/update soon.