Loghound.com

Hot on the heels of 0.9 is 0.9.1..

Defect Fixes:
* The CSS style sheet always forced a white background
* The preview pane wasn't always working (and in fact it still doesn't always work... this may have to go eventally)
* Some spelling mistakes fixed

Enhancements:
* You can now choose to sort by many more factors "Relevance", "Interesting" "Date Taken" or "Date Uploaded". The free version only let's you sort by Date Taken
* You can now pick the size of the picture to 'lightbox"
* You can now restrict date search either by "Date Taken" or "Date Uploaded"

Known Problems
* Archiving has a few problems... I need to redo the way I save data, I'll do it in a way so all of your current pages still work.
* Preview pane doesn't work sometimes for what appears to be random reasons, I'm using the webkit engine and I always feed it the data but it stops sometimes...

Get it here

Enjoy

I'm so excited to release version 0.9 of my rapidflickr plugin... get all the flickr+rapidweaver goodness information here

I know I've been talking about 0.7 but I spent so long getting it out and in testing it was working so well I decided to call it 0.9

Why 0.9 and not 1.0? Basically I've not had as much feedback on the advanced features as I'd like so I wanted to get it out there and see what the community thought first..

Enjoy

So 0.7 continues to be 'just a few days away'... I've been working on some slick slideshow features that have required me to work with photosets.

Everything was going well until I started running into 'invalid signature' problems. You see when you make authenticated calls to flickr there is a particular method to creating the calls. Part of that mechanism is to create a 'signature' (basically a MD5 sum) of the arguments including a 'secret key'. It's actually kind of a slick system as it provides secure access without having to give out your flickr username & passwd.

I've had authentication working for quite a while but when i tried to use photosets (which require authentication since I'm creating & adding photos to them) it didn't work and complained about 'invalid signature' Thankfully I got help from another cocoa/flickr developer (Blake Seely) who eventually pointed out my problem, I was ordering the arguments wrong.

"How can this be" I thought "I'm using the standard NSString compare functions"... Well not exactly, you see I was using 'caseInsensitiveCompare' not 'compare'. The arguments to photoset include both photo_id and photoset_id. Guess what? Turns out that case insensitive compare sorts them one way and 'compare' the other which was the cause of my signature problem.

It was strange to me until i looked at the ascii chart:

0 nul 1 soh 2 stx 3 etx 4 eot 5 enq 6 ack 7 bel 8 bs 9 ht 10 nl 11 vt 12 np 13 cr 14 so 15 si 16 dle 17 dc1 18 dc2 19 dc3 20 dc4 21 nak 22 syn 23 etb 24 can 25 em 26 sub 27 esc 28 fs 29 gs 30 rs 31 us 32 sp 33 ! 34 " 35 # 36 $ 37 % 38 & 39 ' 40 ( 41 ) 42 * 43 + 44 , 45 - 46 . 47 / 48 0 49 1 50 2 51 3 52 4 53 5 54 6 55 7 56 8 57 9 58 : 59 ; 60 < 61 = 62 > 63 ? 64 @ 65 A 66 B 67 C 68 D 69 E 70 F 71 G 72 H 73 I 74 J 75 K 76 L 77 M 78 N 79 O 80 P 81 Q 82 R 83 S 84 T 85 U 86 V 87 W 88 X 89 Y 90 Z 91 [ 92 \ 93 ] 94 ^ 95 _ 96 ` 97 a 98 b 99 c 100 d 101 e 102 f 103 g 104 h 105 i 106 j 107 k 108 l 109 m 110 n 111 o 112 p 113 q 114 r 115 s 116 t 117 u 118 v 119 w 120 x 121 y 122 z 123 { 124 | 125 } 126 ~ 127 del

Yup, there it is... at 95 the '_' character, right between uppercase and lowercase. Lesson learned

I've gotten a lot of email recently about rapid blog.... Just let me say it's in the works.

Basically it will allow you to edit/manage a blog from either rapidweaver OR remotely through a web interface. Either way you will get the nice rapidweaver page layout.

My goal is a public beta before Valentines Day (February 14)

Cheers

Hello All,

I've been in Germany for my 'Day Job' this last week... Now that I'm back I should be able to start doing the work to finish up version 0.7... I usually don't bring a camera with me for business trips but my 4 year old was very insistent that he wanted to see 'Pictures of me' so I brought it and snapped a few pics.... It ended up being pretty fun, below are a few pics




Greg & I Enjoying some brew


On the manufacturing Floor..


German Bagels!!

Hello All

Sorry but 0.7 will be delayed a week. I've been sick the last few days and I'm heading to Europe (sans mac) for my 'day job'. I have a candidate release but it really hasn't been tested enough to release yet... hopefully next sunday.

However let me share a recent build screen shot





See the pictures to the right? That's the live preview.. I'm not 100% sure this feature will make the final release but I'm playing with it (the feature works fine, I'm just getting worried about the UI getting too cluttered). It is sort of slick that as you are changing things this little window is updating in near real time. Any thoughts? Let me know loghound @ gmail . com


Regards

-jm

Version 0.7 of rapidflickr is close to release..... Hopefully by Saturday evening... If not it will have to wait since I'll be out of the country starting sunday for a week..

Biggest changes include authentication, new visuals (lightbox & drop shadow effect) and registration (sorry) I may not have the purchasing system online yet and in that event I'll just give out a SN that will unlock all of the features (until about mid feb). If you prefer to only use 'free' features just don't enter the SN and the features that are enabled will always be free.

So I'm going to macworld in a few days and I'm sooooo excited. Isaiah was laughing at me because I'm geeking out even more than he is. Right now my plan is to be there tuesday & wednesday (sadly I can't stay through thursday because I need to get some work done at my day job)

So I was thinking it would be fun to set up a blog of what I see & do, and since I own a fine Treo 650 phone I can pretty easily take pictures, add a little text (using the surprisingly good keyboard) and then mail them out.

in order to make it somehow cohesive I put a seperate blog for macworld '06 coverage here and I'll send updates via my phone throughout the day. Right now it just has a few pics of my kids as I was testing the service.....

"But wait" you say "How can this be? Your new blog is a Rapidweaver blog and we all know that you can't remotely manage them. You have to be on the original computer that made the web page to add entries

is that so?




Funny.. I was able to send emails to have the blog automatically update and I'm able to edit it online and I'm able to create new posts away from my mac, but it sure looks like a native RW page... If I change themes then it updates properly... For instance compare this and this. Same exact blog but different themes applied without any other changes!


(edit 1/21/06 the e-mail link below has been disabled but trust me, it works)
Hey, maybe you can try it. Send e-mail to loghound.test_macworld@blogger.com and then refresh this or this page...

Hmmm too bad someone hasn't made a plug in to enable this in an really easy way.......

Well I was originally going to have my next version out before Macworld but for a couple of reasons (including my concern over what Apple introduces in the way of iWeb) I may not make it

However I do have a teaser.... What new feature am I showing here but I'm not showing here?

It really shouldn't be that hard to notice (and the fact that the pictures on the two pages are different sizes has nothing to do with it)

Let me give you a hint. It's a feature that makes viewing 'gallery' type pages like this much more enjoyable... You sort of don't lose your place in the gallery.

Another hint. in the blog entry from yesterday you can see the new option in the GUI. (scroll down a bit to look at some of the new options)

Think you know it? Email me at loghound @ gmail . com

Ok, day two of my blog (well technically it's day 3 since I skipped yesterday).

Some big news today, the 'rumor' sites were saying that a new iLife app, 'iWeb' is to be released at macworld next week. Depending on what Apple actually does it could be very, very bad for RapidWeaver

Let's take a look at the three scenarios, shall we?

1. 
   
2. Apple puts out a doggy version 1.0 app that only works with .mac -> Possibly this is actually good for RW (get folks interested in the idea of their own web page but leave em wanting more)
3. 
   
4. Apple puts out a decent app, (based on pages) and charges < $35 for it -> Probably this is the death of RW
5. 
   
6. Apple puts out a decent app, bundles it with iLife -> This is the death of RW
7. 
   

Not too optimistic am I, only way RW survives in any meaningful way is if apple either doesn't do it or they flub it... Before we get in a panic let's see what they do next week.

Now on to a more fun topic. rapidflickr

The nice thing about how I did this app was the technology preview/beta has a ton of 'infrastracture' work complete meaning to add new features I just need to start 'hooking stuff up' in a fairly small way

For instance....




Yes that's right... I have authenticated searches working... and they work great. Now you can create a photo page of any of your photos (public or private)

I'm also working on a bunch of new styles



This (hopefully) won't be the Final ui... It's more of a playground right now for me but you can see what version 1.0 will look like.

Any comments or suggestions? let me know at loghound @ gmail dot com

Ok, I know it... I need a blog...

Truth be told I'm so busy on working on rapidflickr that I really haven't had time to things such as update the web page... make it look halfway decent, etc.

So it occurs to me tonight that even though this is a 'half ass' (no, no, it's really a whole ass) it probably makes sense to get SOMETHING out there as opposed to NOTHING... So this is what you are seeing...

First a thanks:

Let me start out by publicly thanking Isaiah Carew for all of the great help he's given me so far... My plugin development days would not be nearly as far along without his help..



Now on to an update

Let's talk about rapidflickr... So far the response has been quite nice, several hundred downloads but I've yet to receive an email about a problem or bug... I suppose my first public beta release was so bullet proof that no one has a problem or (just perhaps) people aren't using it?

I suppose upon reflection that the market for this plugin could be quite small. Basically the intersection of flickr users & rapidweaver users. I'm hopeful that with some of the new features in the works this plugin will increase that set of people.