Barely Concealed Narcissism » app

Newport Folk Festival iPhone App

gaboosh — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:32:23 +0000

Last year, I had the great opportunity to work on the official iPhone app for the Newport Folk Festival. Downloaded over 1000 times (for a festival that only has 10,000 attendees), the app was received very well—so well that they’ve asked us to update it for this year’s show. I’m extremely excited, as working in PhoneGap and getting some mobile app development under my belt was a great experience. Last year was, as usual, a bit of a rush to the finish. This year, we hope to add a number of features and also make it available for the Android platform.

Did you use it last year? Do you have any comments or ideas? Drop me a line if so.

Quartz Composer Flickr Screen Saver

gaboosh — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:15:18 +0000

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.

Root Macro Patch

Controlling cube position

Timed Sampler Patch

Passing Flickr RSS to parsers which output images to cube sides

Flickr RSS Parser which downloads the thumbnail and passes to output

Self-Improvement: Font Taste Tester (beta)

gaboosh — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:16:10 +0000

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.

An Oldie But Goodie: The Lender Blender

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:35:34 +0000

This launched this summer, but my blood, sweat, and tears are all over it. Well, all over the animation and Flash code at least.

About Virgin Money:

Virgin Money helps people access affordable and flexible credit, offering unique financial services and a customer experience that most banks cannot match.

The Lender Blender allows users to calculate how much they’ll save by diversifying loan sources.

Was a good exercise in Flash based web application development. And hey – would you believe it – it was even a finalist for a MITX.