Archive for the ‘High Tech’ Category:
Controlling iTunes remotely
So I just got this shiny new MacBook Pro. Absolutely love the thing. I’ve been away from the Macintosh platform for far too long…
Anyway – I’m sitting in my office listening to music and realized that the speakers, while okay for what they are, suck by most standards. So I pop over to my PC and fire up iTunes, hit play, and use my sound system that’s hooked up to it. Sounds great. But, I’m lazy and I got tired of switching over to it change tracks, stop, pause, etc. I figured there had to be a way to control iTunes remotely from the Mac. Doing a bit of research, I found some stuff for the Mac and a PHP script that did me no good.
Finally I came across a Perl script (can’t remember where…) that simply runs a Daemon. Everything that I needed was already there! All I needed to do, was point a browser at the box and it had a nice simple stripped down interface for play, pause, stop, next, etc…
After some time, I realized I hated having to keep the browser window open. Enter MacOS dashboard widgets.
After some quick fiddling with Dashcode, I came up with this little dashboard widget to send the requests to the PC. The current track name only updates after a command is sent, so it isn’t updated dynamically.
Now my iTunes controls are at my fingertips, and I don’t have to spend the time moving my hands the whole 24 some inches to the right to do it on the PC.
Free web based imaging software
Aviary has recently released another web-based application. Raven, which is still in beta (all of their applications are. that’s so web 2.0!), is a web-based vector editor. Their product suite consists of four applications at the moment:
- Peacock – a visual laboratory
- Raven – vector editor
- Phoenix – image editor
- Toucan – colors watches
Peacock is kinda cool. Image generation is done by patching together generators, effects, controllers and resources. Fun to play with, I must say. Pretty amazing use of Flash. Pretty cool to have this sort of development going out there…
The products, at the moment, are all free to play with. Go check ‘em out: http://aviary.com/
Flash is (or is not) coming to the iPhone
Somewhat of a sore spot for Flash and iPhone developers, the hope that the Flash player would make its way to the iPhone is still very much up for debate. A recent quote from Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, has some left some believing it’s very much on its way and others thinking it’ll never make it.
“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” [Adobe CEO Shantanu] Narayen told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”
Some claim the Flash Player could never be written in a way that would sit well with the ARM processor. The power requirements of running such an app would be too much for a mobile device. Others have said it’s a political/business decision on Apple’s part.
Who knows. I just hope it finally makes its way to the iPhone platform. I think it would open development up to a lot more people that don’t feel like trying to wrap their brain around Objective C. Apple still has very strict control over what applications make it to the iTunes store, so the concern about quality of apps shouldn’t be an issue.
I personally feel that it’s more political than anything else. But, I’m a cynic.
WordPress for iPhone
Just testing WordPress for iPhone…