Rick Curran

February 26, 2008October 1, 2020

AIR Vs Silverlight? Adobe Vs Microsoft? Open Source Vs Proprietary?

TechCrunch ran an article on 26th February titled ‘Adobe AIR Vs Microsoft Silverlight: It?s All About Numbers‘ which kind of compared them both as being quite similar, but it struck me that it’s really not a fair comparison.

There’s a big difference between AIR and Silverlight at the moment. It’s fair to say Microsoft will push Silverlight forwards quickly but there’s no fair comparison between them just now, it’s far closer to compare Flash and Silverlight for the time being as AIR features a lot more than Silverlight.

Flash and PDF have huge market share and AIR brings those plus regular HTML/CSS/JS web development into one runtime as well making easy cross-platform offline / online application development.

Competition = good

It’s certainly good that there’s some competition in the market but AIR’s incorporation of various open source projects such as Webkit as well as the fact that Adobe have open sourced a lot of their own code such as Flex and Flash Player code will hold a lot of mindshare of developers. While AIR is not 100% open source it’s certainly a lot more attractive on several levels, not least being able to create Apps whether you’re used to HTML/JS, Flash or Flex.

Competition is good, and the fact the MS are developing web development apps to challenge Dreamweaver is a good thing. Dreamweaver is a great program but it needs to keep progressing to provide the tools that developers need.

One aspect that Dreamweaver (Adobe / Macromedia) has done a good job with is support for multiple server platforms such as their own ColdFusion but also PHP and JSP development. I’m not sure we’ll see any of Microsoft’s ‘Expression’ development apps support PHP and JSP any time soon! This multiple server platform support is something Adobe need to keep supporting as it’s definitely one thing that will separate their tools from Microsoft’s offerings.

~Rick

January 15, 2008October 1, 2020

MWSF 2008: Why is Apple charging for iPod Touch application updates?

Well Macworld San Francisco was upon us again, as usual Apple didn’t disappoint in delivering some cool things.

MacBook Air, iTunes video rentals, Apple TV V2, Time Capsule WIFI backup drive to name a few. There was also an update for applications for the iPhone and new applications for the iPod Touch. The update for the iPod Touch brings Mail, Weather, Maps, Notes and Stocks apps to iPod Touch users, however there was a slight sting in the tail for existing iPod Touch users as the update will cost you £12.99 / $20!!! Ouch.

As annoying as this is (especially as these can be had for free if you jailbreak your iPod Touch!) I’m wondering if this is not just a matter of accounting requirements on Apple’s part?

A while back Apple introduced new MacBook Pros which had support for the new 802.11n WiFi networking but which wasn’t enabled to begin with. Apple then brought out new Airport Extreme base stations which supported 802.11n, anyone who had one of the new MacBook Pros had to pay a small fee for a bit of software to enable this functionality. I wonder if the upgrade charge for the iPod Touch applications is down to the same GAAP accounting policy that was at the heart of the 802.11N WiFi enabler? It seems odd to charge existing users for this but give it free to new purchasers otherwise.

As far as the iPhone app updates are concerned they are free as the iPhone purchases are accounted in a subscription method so these kind of updates can be provided free of charge. So, good news for iPhone users but slightly annoying for people like me who have an iPod Touch!

December 31, 2007October 1, 2020

Happy New Year!

It’s been a fun year blogging here on Suburbia, if any of my ramblings have been in the least helpful to people reading it then that’s great. Overall I just enjoy writing about various tech things that interest me.

As I end the year 2007 I’ve enjoyed an interesting year of work and I’m excited about the year to come in that area. I’m also excited about the impending birth of my second child any day now!

I wish a Happy New Year to all those on the ‘InterWebs’!!!

December 14, 2007October 1, 2020

BBC iPlayer launches for Mac / Linux using streaming Flash format

This week the BBC launched a version of the iPlayer that is compatible with Mac and Linux by allowing viewing of streamed movies via the Flash player rather than the Windows-only DRM based download method.

Screen shot of BBC's Stremaing iPlayer interface

First impressions are pretty good although I would have liked the quality to be a little bit better, or at least the video to be a larger dimension. The player uses a 512 x 288 pixel video format and offer the fullscreen playback option, however, playing full screen on my 1680 x 1050 pixel monitor resulted in fairly pixellated video. That’s a pretty extreme example of zooming I’ll admit but if the video was larger to begin with it would make the zooming feature much better. The recent addition of support for H.264 video within Flash Player 9 would potentially offer an big improvement if the video could be offered using that format instead of FLV video files.

Share iPlayer videos with other people

Nope, it’s not what you might think by reading that heading, you can’t share the actual files but there’s a nice little feature available via the ‘SHARE’ link in the player menu.

Picture of sharing features of the streaming BBC iPlayer

This offers the ability to either send a link to a friend via email:

Link to iPlayer 'Send to a friend' page

You can also post a link to the Social Networking sites Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook and Reddit:

Link to sharing page of BBC iPlayer

It’s nice to see those links to these sites, it would be great to see a larger range though to include sites such as Ma.gnolia, MySpace etc but perhaps these can be added.

All in all it’s a good start towards better cross platform support by the BBC. My daughter was especially pleased to be able to watch kids shows whenever she wanted! Like many people though I would still like to be able to download shows and watch these on other devices such as iPods etc, I’m looking forward to finding out more about the BBC’s plans for providing cross-platform downloads.

November 19, 2007October 1, 2020

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard – Part 3: My weird Mail.app dialog box pondering

I’ve previously posted pictures in my Flickr account of the dialog boxes that appear when erasing Junk mail and erasing deleted messages in Tiger’s Mail.app. Interestingly in Leopard they’ve been updated to make the text clearer but there’s still an inconsistency in the naming of these dialog boxes and also the type of dialog boxes used for each.

Erasing junk messages uses a modal dialog box with buttons with the words ‘Cancel’ and ‘Erase’ on them, Tiger’s Mail.app used buttons with the words ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ on them instead. I still don’t see why these dialog boxes aren’t the same type and why they don’t use the same buttons and wording.

Erase Junk messages:

Erase Deleted Messages dialog box

November 19, 2007October 1, 2020

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard – Part 4: Software update

Here’s another thing I noticed about Leopard since running it for a couple of weeks.

Software update – Postpone reboot

It’s nice that Leopard’s Software Update gives you the chance to postpone rebooting after installations that require it. On Tiger and previous versions you would always have the windows hanging around until you made it reboot. I’ve also noticed that when you do reboot that the computer gives you more feedback on the installation as it proceeds which is cool too. It’s nice to be kept informed!

Picture of Leopard Software update reboot dialogue box

November 15, 2007October 1, 2020

Deleting Dreamweavers _notes folders

If you’re like me and you decide not to use the ‘Design Notes’ or the synchronisation features of Dreamweaver at all (or at least not very often) and/or you use other FTP clients to transfer files and/or pass site files over to other designers to work on then you have probably been bugged to have to manually remove all of the ‘_notes’ folders that Dreamweaver makes inside every folder of your site.

I’d gotten tired of doing this manually so I thought I’d make a quick and dirty solution to it, after a little it of work using Mac OSX’s Automator application I created a script which looks for all instance of folders named ‘_notes’ and then puts them in the trash. So all I have to do now is run this application every so often and then they all get dumped in the trash leaving my folders clear and ready to pass on to someone else or upload using another FTP client.

Presenting ‘Delete _notes’

Icon for 'Delete _notes' application The application was pretty simple to make using Automator and was saved as a proper ‘.app’ package application. I then went and made little icon for the file instead of the generic icon, again this is fairly quick and dirty (admittedly it looks like it’s for deleting Dreamweaver itself!!!) but it looks ok.

I then packaged the app into an installer using the PackageMaker application that is part of Apple’s developer tools to make it easy to install. Although the application can run from anywhere on your machine the installer will put it in the ‘Applications’ folder, but you can change this to any location you want.

Download ‘Delete _notes’

I’ve made the app available here to download in case it’s of any use to anyone, it wasn’t terribly complicated to build but maybe it could be useful? Please remember that you use this at your own risk, no warranty or guarantee is given or implied. You should always make sure you have backed up all files before running potentially risky software that intends to delete files like this one! That said it runs fine on my machine running Leopard and does what it was intended to do.

If that hasn’t put you off then go ahead and download it! I’ve zipped it up so it’s only about 120Kb in size

» Delete_notes.mpkg.zip

Addendum: It is possible to stop ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place

Just in case you weren’t aware that you can stop the ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place then I should link to an Adobe Technote explaining it. I’ve been confused by this in the past so it’s probably worth linking to here so that if you don’t want the _notes files created at all then you can do so, rather than running the ‘Delete _notes’ application all the time!

Read the Technote : "An _notes folder and dwsync.xml file are created even when the preference is turned off in the site definition"

~Rick

November 13, 2007October 1, 2020

Configuring Apache 2 with Virtual Hosts on Mac OSX Leopard

I recently installed Leopard on my development machine by doing a completely fresh install in order to have a clean system. One thing I found that I couldn’t get running correctly was recreating my preferred Apache web server setup including Virtual Host configuration. Leopard runs Apache 2 by default but I had been running this on Tiger anyway rather than the default Apache 1.3.

Problem #1: Access denied using custom DocumentRoot

My first problem was that I like to use a different location for the DocumentRoot configuration, I keep my site files in ‘Users/rickcurran/Documents/Client_Data’ located in my Documents folder in my user account rather than in the default ‘Library/Webserver/Documents’ location. The problem I encountered was that if I changed the DocumentRoot to point to my preferred location I got a ‘Forbidden – You don’t have permission to access / on this server’ message. I tried to get it working and just gave up for a while and used the standalone MAMP application in the mean time to get working because this had no problem pointing to my custom DocumentRoot location.

Solution to #1: Change the user that Apache webserver runs as

I eventually figured out that in Leopard Apache’s default user (www) doesn’t have permissions to access my Documents folder. I simply went and changed the User and Group settings in the httpd.conf file to use my user and group and then it worked fine. I’m sure you could probably add the default Apache user to a group or some other Users / Groups / Permissions setting but for a development machine this solution works fine!

Problem #2: An alternative to name-based virtual hosts avoiding netinfo / hosts files

I like to have all my sites both current and past projects running locally so that I can fix any bugs etc without having to work on live sites. Apache’s Virtual Host configuration is perfect for the job. At first under leopard I just couldn’t get them to work but I realised that I’d simply missed something out in the configuration, so it was more a human error really. However whilst Googling trying to figure out what I’d done wrong it reminded me that most tutorials on configuring Virtual Hosts under Apache do so by using name-based hosts which require you to edit the ‘/etc/hosts’ file (or via Netinfo Manager on Tiger).

The drawback to this technique is that the sites are only viewable on your development machine, if other users on your network want to view the development sites they need to configure their own hosts file. This is a problem when you’ve got several machines that need to access the sites.

Solution to #2: Port based virtual hosts

To get around the hassle of Netinfo / hosts configuration I use an alternative virtual hosts setting which uses a different port for each site and can be accessed on any machine on the network.

To set up port based virtual hosts you need to first uncomment a line in the main httpd.conf to enable virtual hosts in the first place. Next edit the ‘httpd-vhosts.conf’ file found in ‘/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf’, comment out the example virtual hosts that are there by default and then add your virtual hosts in the following way:

<VirtualHost *:80
DocumentRoot "/Users/rickcurran/Documents/Client_Data/intranet"
</VirtualHost>

Listen 8081
<VirtualHost *:8081>
DocumentRoot "/Users/rickcurran/Documents/Client_Data/myexamplesite_co_uk"
ServerName 192.168.0.2:8081
</VirtualHost>

The first sets a default virtual host on port 80, the second sets up a site on port 8081. The examples above are very basic configurations, you could add support for error logs etc but this gets them up and running.

Restart Apache by unchecking and rechecking the Web Sharing tickbox in the Sharing System Preference you should then be able to access the ‘myexamplesite_co_uk’ site by using the URL ‘http://localhost:8081’. Also anybody else on the network can access the site too without messing around with the ‘etc/hosts’ file!

Scared to edit httpd.conf etc? Try HeadDress VirtualHostX

Update: It seems as if HeadDress is no more, the website has been down for ages so I’ve updated this section to refer to another app called VirtualHostX. If you don’t like editing config files via the Terminal then there’s a nice application called ~~HeadDress~~ VirtualHostX that gives a nice user interface for the whole process of setting up Virtual Hosts. VirtualHostX allows you to create sites running on their own local domain name by editing your /etc/hosts/ file, you can also specify a specific port for the site too.

I still prefer using my own method #2 above as it allows multiple users on your local network to view your sites as well, whereas with VirtualHostX you’d need everyone to edit their /etc/hosts/ file. For single machine web development it’s a great application and costs only $9.00 for a licence.

November 9, 2007October 1, 2020

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard – Part 2: Saving PDF documents

Mac OSX supports PDF natively and has always handled them quite well, one very useful feature is being able to save a PDF version of a document. This is done by simply selecting Print and then clicking on the little ‘PDF’ button in the lower left of the resulting dialog box, you then get a pop up menu with several options, the one at the top being "Save as PDF…". Give it a file name, hit save and there you go, a PDF copy of your document!

Leopard improves this PDF workflow by giving the ability to add meta data such as Title, Author, Subject and Keywords in the document more prominence by putting the fields right there in front of you as part of the Save process.

A further improvement is the addtion of a ‘Security Options’ button that then allows you to restrict access to the PDF by requiring a password. You can restrict the opening of the document as well as copying and pasting text or printing the document.

A lot of the improvements in Leopard are the many smaller details that have been improved, these extra PDF functions make it even less essential to have any third-party PDF applications.

One feature that’s still missing is the ability to save PDF form data and re-open it – a feature that’s missing from the free Acrobat Reader too. Why this type of saving is not available in Acrobat Reader is a mystery to me, and one that is a great hinderance to the use of PDF in some of my client’s workflow.

November 9, 2007October 1, 2020

Vectormagic – Convert images to vectors online

There’s quite a few online tools for editing images around now such as Picnik and Splashup (formerly known as Fauxto) but I just came across an online tool that will convert images into Vector graphics – VectorMagic.

Don’t let the fairly simple looking web page that appears fool you, simply use the ‘Choose file’ button to upload an image for you to convert and you immediately get taken into the VectorMagic editing application. Once you choose an image the app attempts to figure out what kind of image it is in order to give the best results possible, once you confirm the type of image you then choose between low, medium and high qualities.

I did a little test using a 140 pixel avatar image that I use on Twitter and other sites, here’s the resulting low, medium and high vector outputs:

High:

Medium:

Low:

VectorMagic gives quite impressive results for a web application, the resulting vector conversions are easily as good as, if not better than, those produced by many desktop applications.