I admit that the term “app store” is quickly making its way onto Buzzword Bingo boards across the country. But sometimes, a buzzword is worthy of just that – buzz. (more…)
Catching Up With ’09: Cold Feet
Catching Up With ’09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.
I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project two years in a row now. While 2008′s entry marked my debut not only as a participant, but a writer and actor, the experience was surely hectic. The 2009 experience, however, proved to be much smoother sailing. We had a smaller, more focused team. I was also fortunate enough to avoid being cast as any character and instead got to try directing out for a bit. And would you believe, I enjoyed it.
We weren’t recognized with any awards, but I wouldn’t have changed much if we had to do this again. Hats off to my production team, Barry Frechette and Bob Holt, for seriously knowing what they were doing.
Cold Feet from Gabi Schaffzin on Vimeo.
Generating Flash Style “Size Reports” in Flex Builder
As I continue the transition from building ActionScript executions in Flash to going with a Flex-only method, I came across something I hadn’t tried in Flex before: size reports.
The Flex debugger provides an “uncompressed” size of your application in the trace output, but there’s no obvious way in the UI to show that breakdown. Being that Flex’s guts are in the command line, however, that’s where we can generate the size report.
If you check out your project preferences, click on ActionScript Compiler and add the following to the text field under “Additional compiler arguments:”
-link-report output.xml
where “output.xml” is the path to the file generated.
Once you’ve got your file (which is really a thorough report on class linkage and more), though, you’re not yet done; if you open it up and take a look, it’s quite confusing.
Fortunately, there are a couple apps that will parse and clearly display the size report. I haven’t really tested them fully, but both look promising:
ItDepends by Joe Berkovitz
AIR Link Report Visualizer by kahunaburger
h/t to Tim Walling for help on this
New Job
I’ll be starting at LocaModa in Cambridge on Apr 1. Pretty excited for the opportunity.
Digital out of home (DOOH) will provide exposure to a lot of the technologies I enjoy working with, and through a delivery mechanism that’s growing in popularity and innovation.
For more on what LocaModa does, check their site and blog.
LocaModa's Jumbli game playing in Times Square
Self-Improvement: Font Taste Tester (beta)
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.
Inauguration Quick Thoughts
Waiting for the train to the plane back to Boston. Exhausted after two days of constant moving and doing. Admittedly it will take more than a lot of walking to get me down from the high of yesterday’s events. Will provide a full recap once I’m back, rested, and laptopped again. For now, a snapshot of Tuesday’s crowds.
