At home, I browsed a bit the internet for that song and stumbled upon a version of the song that might be even better than the original. Check out JoeySuki’s remix:

Very nice track!

The site doesn’t contain any i18n, neither I used any PHP framework or other toolkits to built it up. It’s really just some stupid likes of PHP code bound together with the Facebook SDK. Now that’s what I’d call RAD!

It was pretty interesting for me to see, how little effort it takes to “socialize” a site, especially when it’s built from ground up with Facebook-operability in mind.

Yesterday, I additionally implemented an automatic Twitter status update. I’ve registered @likemichde on Twitter, created an Twitter Application, generated access tokens for it and implemented automatic twitter publishing within several lines of code, thanks to Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth for PHP.

It’s very neat how modern media allows us to spread information all over the planet, even with only little knowledge of technology. And if you put in the effort to dig deeper, you use these new technologies to reach even more people and provide connectivity to all kind of different sites.

For example, my photography site mariusmm.com is using Yahoo!’s YQL to query my flickr account for the latest photos and randomly pic a handful of them for displaying as a slideshow. And I’ve implemented everything in 100% JavaScript, there’s no single line PHP or any other server-side language.

First of all: Hell, yeah! iTunes Cloud finally removed the pain and anger brought by Apple’s policy of having an iPod Touch/iPhone only linked with one iTunes Library. For me, it has always been a pain to synchronize my music in a smooth way all over my devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone), especially when it came to MP3s. The fact that iTunes didn’t consider MP3s when using “transfer purchases” took any chance (except of using “Home Sharing”) to get MP3s synchronized all over. With iTunes content I permanently had to go that way: Buy them on my iPhone, connect the phone to my iMac when I was at home, “transfer purchases”, reconnect the iPhone to my MacBook when I was at work, “transfer purchases”, all done. But with MP3s this didn’t work.

Now thanks to iTunes Match and iTunes Cloud, MP3s are being matched to actual iTunes Store content and, if nothing could be found, the MP3s are being uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be streamed/downloaded to all registered devices. Sounds awesome, huh?

Well, actually, it really is awesome. There are some downsides, for example the *very* slow iTunes Match servers for uploading data. I’m not sure if that’s only because of the instant heavy load that recently hit the servers or if Apple just didn’t spend enough money for the server’s to be the dog’s balls. Anyhow, besides of that everything runs just fine so far. Streaming/downloading works with good speed (no endless seconds of buffering, nor interrupts while playing), artwork yet seems to be a little problem since here it doesn’t seem to get synchronized instantly all over my devices and the iTunes Match recognition works okay (only have/had to upload around 1k songs of nearly 5k).

The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that my iPhone actually gets flooded with music and the only way I found to remove recently “streamed” (or “streamed and automatically downloaded) music is by scrolling through my list with nearly 5k rows and swipe-to-remove each song I’d like not to have on my iPhone anymore, so I can use the 16GB for more than just audio.

It would be really nice if someone could point me a better solution to fix that issue or, if there is none, if Apple could please implement a feature that allows me to “clear the least played songs”.

Oh well.

iTunes Match

Seen on the german A8.

I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

I thought, it might be a cool idea to actually proof that something like that should be possible within a few lines of code. No C code, no Objective-C, even more simple: AppleScript (and a little bit of Bash scripting).

However, so I just took about an hour and a half and wrote down this little bad boy:

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget --quiet -O - http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss | while read sentence; do for word in $sentence; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to false
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode = used_code then
				set code_used to true
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used = false then
			tell application "iTunes"
				launch
				activate
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Simply hack it into your AppleScript editor and save it as “Application” with the “Stay Open” option clicked. Now after double-clicking the file that has just been created the script starts fetching a Twitter RSS-feed (in this case @verbsapp’s, heh) every 30 seconds, grabs all iTunes promo-codes it can find and automagically redeems them in the iTunes store. If the could is still valid – lucky you. If not, better luck next time! In any case each code will be added to a temporary “black list” so it won’t be redeemed again.

Feel free to customize and use this script! GNU GPL v2 and stuff. Enjoy.

//update: I’ve just adapted the script a bit more to include promo codes with more than 12 characters length. Besides, I’ve applied John’s “patch” to it – thanks for that one John!

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "for word in `/usr/bin/lwp-download 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss' -`; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12,16\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12,16\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to "false"
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode as string is used_code as string then
				set code_used to "true"
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used is "false" then
			tell application "iTunes"
				display dialog "Found a new code: " & promocode & " - use it now?"
				launch
				activate
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

(just wanted to have that said)

However, since (at least for me) there’s nothing comparable to Things, I’m trying to benefit from using it the best I can. One possibility to do so is the automation of task-creation. Wouldn’t it be cool to have Things automatically pack specific e-mails together as tasks you would only need to get done – without actually having the trouble of importing the information from Mail.app manually into Things first? I solved this problem for myself by using a feature that Things, Mail.app and Mac OS X provide me by default: AppleScript.

Now, how would this automated task-creation look like. First, a piece of code is needed, which gets the specific information out of an e-mail and tells Things to add those information to its library. The CulturedCode Wiki already provides us such a script and first I’ve tried to use that. Unfortunately, the script seems to be something hacked together with Apple’s Automator and interferes with the UI, what causes the process of task-creation to be visible to the end-user. I didn’t want that – so I just hacked together my own AppleScript using the AppleScript Edior:

on perform_mail_action(info)
	tell application "Mail"
		set selectedMessages to |SelectedMessages| of info
		set theRule to |Rule| of info
		repeat with eachMessage in selectedMessages
			set theSubject to subject of eachMessage
			set theContent to content of eachMessage
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theSubject, due date:current date, notes:theContent} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
			set the (read status) of eachMessage to true
		end repeat
	end tell
end perform_mail_action

You can simply copy & paste this code into your AppleScript Editor and save it somewhere in your filesystem as AppleScript.

Next, we need this script to be called as soon as a new mail arrives. Let’s use Mail.app’s “Rules” for doing that!

Mail.app Rule for Mail to Things

As “Run AppleScript” the script you’ve saved before needs to be specified. What rule you use for yourself actually depends on your incoming mails. In this example, I’m checking the mail’s subject to contain the string [ToDo]: for the script to act on that e-mail. Of course, you can also add another action *after* the “Run AppleScript” for Mail.app to delete the mail afterwards. The only thing my script does is to mark the mails that matched as read.

Now try it out on your own. Write yourself an e-mail containing your match-criteria and you’ll see that the script will automatically add a new task within your Things’ Inbox, containing all details from within the mail itself. Of course, this script can be enhanced for example by leaving away the match-criteria from the subject (s/matchpattern//g), by cutting off everything after “– ” (signature) or maybe even delegating the task to a co-worker or an area of responsibility by parsing the mail’s body. Feel free to extend it the way you need it.

PS: You can make the Inbox entries not being due by today by simply removing the “due date:current date” parameter from the script.

//UPDATE:

Because this whole automation topic is so much fun, I’ve just written an AppleScript that automatically adds every conversation-line you receive that starts with the pattern “task: ” to your Things Inbox.

Here’s the AppleScript:

using terms from application "iChat"
	on message received theMessage from theBuddy for textChat
		set theBuddy to full name of theBuddy

		if theMessage starts with "task: " then
			tell application "Things"
				set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:theBuddy & ": " & my LeetReplacer((get theMessage), "task: ", "")} at beginning of list "Inbox"
			end tell
		end if
	end message received
end using terms from

on LeetReplacer(strng, srch, replc)
	tell (a reference to my text item delimiters)
		set {old, contents} to {contents, srch}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng's text items, replc}
		set {strng, contents} to {strng as Unicode text, old}
	end tell
	return strng
end LeetReplacer

And here’s how you can include it into iChat:

iChat to Things

Enjoy!

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve been using Apple’s newly designed and named Magic Mouse for around a week now and have to say that I’m actually pretty happy to have bought it and replaced my Mighty Mouse with it.

First of all, the new Magic Mouse has no more scroll-ball, what’s probably the biggest change in the whole redesign. Apple finally found a way to remove the always-broken-due-to-dirt scroll-ball by a multi-touch surface that goes across the Mouse’s whole surface. I haven’t had any problems with scrolling yet, except for my habit that lets me always search for the scroll-ball with my fingers, heh.

Besides the new multi-touch surface, the Mouse became way more flat. It really was a weird feeling to work with it in the first few hours, but I got pretty fast used to it and the only thing I’m still missing are the buttons on the Mouse’s side. I had them configured for application-based Exposé and I know that there are some “Middle-Button-Hacks” for the Magic Mouse available which could be used for such features, but still some real buttons would be more comfortable, in my opinion.

However, I really like the new Mouse, especially since it’s a bit heavier and doesn’t feel like a cheap and shaky plastic-puttogether, as the Mighty Mouse did. Regarding the Bluetooth connectivity, I can’t see any differences yet. I didn’t experience problems neither with the Mighty nor with the new Magic Mouse. As soon as I’ll have some information about the power-consumption of the new Mouse, I’ll update this post – yet, I still run the one-time-batteries Apple provides with their devices and it’s still working pretty fine, at a battery-level of 88%. If the discharge-procedure continues straight-line I’d expect the life of those average batteries to end in around three weeks – at least with my more or less heavy usage. Of course, I’ll replace them by re-chargeable batteries, since I’m not really a fan of the one-time-use.

My conclusion on the Magic Mouse is, that it’s indeed a very high priced mouse but also uses the great multi-touch technology to provide best user-experience at the lowest annoyance possible. I think that, if the actual internal hardware is qualitatively good enough, Apple finally did a good and lasting job on this Mouse. And if you’re not one of those fanboys, that really really really need to always have the latest stuff around, you might be sticking to this Mouse for a long time.

Hope this feedback helps some of you at least a bit on deciding whether to get one for yourself or not. Enjoy!

CandyBar makes OS X appear even more lickable than it already is. It allows to simply change each application’s icon and provides a cool management of all the available icon-sets. Besides, also the Dock appearance can be tweaked and managed. It would be really nice, if CandyBar would provide a way to sync the collection from one Mac to another, since now, I need to keep my collections on my iMac and my MacBook manually in sync, what’s pretty meh. However,  although it’s pretty pricy, it’s worth to have it.

Colloquy is the most advanced, free IRC client I’ve found yet. Its feature-list is pretty good and there’s a similar iPhone client available, too. I used this client already in 2006, when I still had my PowerBook and have to say, that it’s pretty bloated and slow on older hardware. But on the current generation of MacBooks, iMacs and MacPros it should be running like a charm.

Width Dropbox you can easily keep your files in sync over two or more different devices, regardless if it’s a PC, a Mac, a Linux or even an iPhone – all your data is always up-to-date. Besides, you can share files with friends and receive shared folder invitations yourself. 2GB of space is being provided for free, more is affordable for some cash. Though, I’d never put sensitive data “into the cloud”.

Echofon is probably the best Twitter-suite available on the Mac and the iPhone. Thanks to their Sync- and Push-Notification-Service it’s a pleasure to use Twitter, even with multiple accounts and on multiple devices. Thanks to the intelligent Sync-Service, Echofon notices when you’re not on your desktop anymore, and starts pushing notifications to your iPhone client when you get mentioned by someone else – very cool! Yet, the notifications will be pushed only every 15 minutes, but from what I’ve heard, the Echofon guys are already working on shrinking this interval. If you haven’t tried out yet – be sure to do soon!

Is there much to say about iPhoto? I think you can call it the image-management application on OS X. Since ’09 it also supports Faces & Places, what makes everything even more sexy. In combination with the photos shot on a GPS-able camera (like the iPhone) it even detects automatically, what place you’ve taken the photo. Although, yet the face-recognition doesn’t work as I would expect it to. You need high quality pictures with much contrast to get iPhoto recognize the people.

I used to be registered on Last.fm since I was using Linux with its Media-Players with Audioscrobbler plugin, so I’ve just continued using this pretty cool service. It let’s me tag the music I listen and discover new tracks I might like. I never tried out Pandora or similar services, so I can’t say whether Last.fm is better or not – I’m just used to it.

After discovering and trying out LaunchBar there was no way around it anymore – not even by using QuickSilver, what I did quite some time. LaunchBar is extremely fast, supports a ton of different Applications and even provides an easy way to write and include your own plugins. I wouldn’t want to miss it again in my daily work.

LittleSnapper in combination with its web-service (former QuickSnapper, now Ember) is a very nice enhancement to the OS X desktop, since it provides a very quick and easy way to share screenshots with others, without having to use “Grab” and manually upload the images to some service like ImageShack. In addition to the Desktop client, I also use the iPhone app to share camera-snapshots with others.

With Money managing finances became as easy as a finger-snip. I bought my license on a MacUpdate Promo for 20% less and have to say that it’s worth every penny, especially when there’s such a friendly and helpful company like Jumsoft behind. Money supports backing up the whole database to MobileMe and by that even synchronization of two Macs with each other. The iPhone client yet only supports sync over WiFi from what I’ve seen, but hopefully there will be MobileMe support in future, too.

Let me just call it “Poor man’s Photoshop” – in an excellent way! Pixelmator is, what GIMP is to the GNOME Desktop. It let’s me create/edit images in an easy and smooth way, without much knowledge of the actual application itself. Pixelmator provides me a light and intuitive application with a feature-list that fits my needs perfectly without being over-bloated.

As the name already says, Quiet Read provides you a way to temporary bookmark for example web-pages and read it later, when there’s more time for it. It’s actually the similar concept Instapaper follows, although it doesn’t really extract your site’s content for any mobile platform, nor does it have any web-service in the background to which you can sync multiple installations. MobileMe support would be a great feature, maybe Bamboo Apps will implement it some day.

Shovebox is a great companion for Things and Quiet Read which also provides a pretty cool iPhone client that’s for free. I got the App itself from within a MacHeist Bundle, where I didn’t need to pay anything for it – and maybe that’s the reason I’m actually using it. Yet, I would not really pay money on this App, since its yet pretty “small” (regarding its features) and I have most things already managed by Things and Quiet Read/Instapaper (free).

Yes, it’s Telephone! And yes! It’s OpenSource! This application allows you to use your VoIP account provided by your ISP directly on your Mac. At the moment, several ISP are supported and the list gets longer and longer. Telephone makes it easy to dial and receive calls on a VoIP account without much hassle.

TextMate – THE Editor. I think, there’s nothing better for writing any kind of code under OS X. This editor is light, fast and provides hell of a feature-set you’ll probably never finish to explore. MacroMates did an excellent job with this application and I know of many tries (especially on Linux) to re-create something similar, but yet no other (GUI-)editor reached TextMate.

Things is probably one of the most amazing task management applications for OS X available today. It provides all you need for successfully managing all your ToDos and even syncs them up to your iPhone client. Two big cons of Things are the yet still not available MobileMe sync (today, it does sync only over WiFi, without even using an encrypted connection) and the pricing on both, the desktop and the iPhone app. Still, the App is just lo-ve-ly and a must of everyone who’s really into task management.

A very nice newsfeed reader with excellent graphical user interface. Times provides you all basic-features you would expect form an RSS-reader plus the possibility to read the whole articles within the application itself. Very nice idea, and pretty cool implementation, though I’d wish it to be faster and not that bloated.

Versions – and you’ll never need to look up svn –help again. Since the last version of Version (ough, what a sentence) it even supports the latest SVN 1.6.x and provides you to work with several different SVN repositories at a time without much practice. Although, with $39 it this application is very pricy.

Viscosity is yet the best user interface for OpenVPN available on OS X, in my opinion. It lets you import your OpenVPN config-files and edit them within a very nice preference-window. Also, it shows you statistics about your running connections and makes OpenVPN easier than it already is – and with $9 it’s quite a fair deal.

Storing passwords, credit-card information and other sensitive data. Wallet allows me to manage all my logins and other passwords in a very nice and fast way, it provides me an add-on for Safari and Firefox and it allows me to sync my Wallet-database via MobileMe and even browse it on my iPhone with its iPhone app – although it took years until the iPhone pendant was available here in germany.

I think, that’s it so far. Besides those application, of course I use the regular tools like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, iTunes, the Terminal and all the other not-worth-mentioning programs that come with OS X.

So, what’s new in 0.3? Well, just about everything. I’ve renamed the bundle (at least its metadata), since webOS is not just limited to the Pre and I’ve modified the shortcuts of existing features to fit TextMate’s styling guidelines a bit better. I’ve also created some snippets which can be used for faster code-writing now and in addition to that, I’ve implemented a very own language for the bundle, which can’t be found in the document type picker named as “Mojo”. “Yeah baby!”, as Austin would say now. Actually, yet it’s just a copy & paste of the JavaScript-language implementation in TextMate, but I’m planning to extend it to fit the Mojo-framework even better.

The TextMate bundle is now also available on GitHub, for everyone who can’t wait for me packaging the releases and releasing them here. If you have any ideas for improvement, feel free to contact me by mail or just leave some lines here on my blog.

Enjoy!

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Yes, after not even four hours I’ve already finished building the 0.2-release of my Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate. In case you’re wondering what weird stuff I’m talking about, please read my previous post first.

However, this second release includes a lot more features than it had before, plus I’ve made use of the CocoaDialog now. Let me describe the new features from the top to the bottom of the screenshot on the left site.

First of all, there’s “Generate New Project”. This lets you execute a palm-generate with all important attributes and opens the created project afterwards using the “mate” terminal-command, which needs to be available for this to work. All you have to do then is simply to save the TextMate project right into your generated project-directory.

Next, we still have “Generate New Scene”. I’ve enhanced the feature now, so that you’ll get a cocoa dialog asking for the scene’s name. Beware: The generation usually works as it should, the only problem is the TextMate project-drawer, which doesn’t seem to refresh by itself. A workaround: Cmd+H to hide TextMate and then click on its Dock-icon to make it appear again. Then all newly generated files should be visible in its drawer.

The next three features work just as before, no enhancements at all. On the fourth, the “Launch Project in Debugging-Mode” feature, I’ve implemented a palm-launch with debugging options, that can be run on an existing, packaged and installed project.

Next, there are ways to close and remove installed Projects. “Close running project” of course only works, when the App is actually running and “Remove installed Project” removes the App from the device. As device for all those commands the first device found by the Palm toolset will be taken – so if you would like to use the Emulator, better disconnect your real device and vice versa.

I’ve also built-in two features that let you simulate test calls and SMS on your Emulator, if you changed from password authentication to SSH public key authentication. You can do this either manually or try to use the feature at the menu’s bottom named “Auto-install SSH-Pubkey on Emulator”. Depending on your SSH-key-setup it works out or… not.

The other seven features allow you to simulate GPS drives on the Emulator – again only if you’ve set-up SSH-Pubkey authentication.

I hope you enjoy this release of the Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate!

Download: Palm-Pre-Bundle-0.2

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available! Get it here. Or use GitHub.

The scene generation works like this: You implement your this.controller.pushScene(“Main”);-statement, select the scene’s name (Main, without the quotes!) and select the scene-generation command from the bundle’s menu. The command will immediately generate you a new scene named just the way you chose to name it.

The other three commands can be ran by pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+F5/F6/F7. Attention: The bundle only works with TextMate Projects! Generate your Palm Pre project like you always do, by using the following command:

palm-generate -p “{ title:’ProjectName’, id:com.my.ProjectName, version:’1.0.0′ }” ProjectName

Then, create a new TextMate Project and drag&drop the folder palm-generate created for you (“ProjectName”) into the Project’s drawer. Save the project within your Project-directory (“ProjectName”) and then run the commands.

This is the very first version of this bundle and I’ll keep constantly improving it with other features that help me and hopefully others on the development of Palm Pre Web-Apps.

Enjoy!

Download: PalmPre-Bundle-0.1

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available now! Get it here.

However, after I bought Money, I exported my whole transaction info from my ING-DiBa account as CSV (since they do not provide me anything else) and tried to import it into Money – and it failed. I was using the latest version (3.4.4 v1938) and had quite a few problems with the CSV import. First of all, the columns haven’t been recognized automatically. Also, I didn’t really knew how to import the transaction-value, since I only had one column containing a positive (income) or a negative (outgoing) number, where Money expected “Withdrawal” and “Deposit”. Also, Money seemed to have problems with the punctuation of the numbers, what cause 1000€ to become 100€. And in general, the software didn’t work well with the CSV my bank provided me. I had to manually cut out the first few lines (which were just some additional information but not party of the transactions) and stuff line that. I was wondering, why this is so, since Squirrel automatically recognized the CSV and imported it just perfectly into my virtual account.

I wrote an e-mail to Jumsoft and explained the problems I have with my freshly purchased Money and of course asked for help. After some more mailing, I got a patched version of Money one day later. I tried it out and: Bam! It worked! The CSV imports work just as they should now, even if there’s still no automatic column recognition. Still, I’m very happy that Jumsoft helped my out that fast and in such an uncomplicated way – I’m not used to this from Apple-related companies anymore.

After I had all my data imported into Money and got everything categorized, synced the info up to my iPhone, what also worked out as smooth as I’d expect it.

The one thing I did not check yet are the possibilities to sync Money over two different Macs. I’m sure it’s possible by using the Dropbox-way, although I would not like to upload such sensitive information to my Dropbox. Maybe it’s possible to sync via W-LAN, dunno.

It seems to be possible to sync different Macs via MobileMe! Hurray! I’ll test it out and give some feedback as soon as possible.

Enjoy viewing!

The first thing needed is a client computer running any kind of the supported OSs by the Amazon API tools and of course the tools themselves. After you’ve installed those and configured all credentials the right way, we can create a new pair of SSH keys for our new project. Due to the location I’m currently in, I’ve chosen to use Amazon Instances in the western EU. Execute the following line on your command-line:

ec2-add-keypair –region eu-west-1 test-keypair

The result should look something like this:

[Deprecated] Xalan: org.apache.xml.res.XMLErrorResources_en_US
KEYPAIR test-keypair e1:1a:d1:a1:a1:1c:10:a1:b1:d1:cb:11:11:1a:11:11:f1:11:ae:fe
—–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–
XXX
—–END RSA PRIVATE KEY—–

You can now copy the lines from BEGIN… until END… (including those two) into a file which you’ll be using as SSH-key for connecting to your instance. Don’t forget to chmod 600 it!

Next, let’s see what base-images for creating our instance we could you – first, provided by Amazon themselves:

ec2-describe-images –region eu-west-1 -o ‘amazon’

The list is contained of several different OSs and versions, although in our current project we can’t make use of any of those. Therefor, we’re now searching for a perfectly fitting, really good operating system:

ec2-describe-images –region eu-west-1 -a | grep -i debian

And yet, we receive another list with several different versions of the Debian Linux distribution. After we’ve picked the one we’d like to run, we should check what instances are currently up and running:

ec2-describe-instances –region eu-west-1

If you’re using Amazon’s EC2 for the first time, there shouldn’t be any items listed. We can now start our very first instance, by copying the instance’s identifier (in the second column, a string starting with ami-) and pasting it into our command:

ec2-run-instances –region eu-west-1 -k test-keypair -g ‘http/s’ -g ‘ssh’ ami-b8446fcc

In this command, we tell Amazon to start up a new instance that’s built on top of the ami-b8446fcc-image, using the key-pair we just created before and using some custom built firewall-rules named “http/s” (which allows us to connect to port 80 and 443) and “ssh” (port 22).

We need to wait a few seconds, until the instance comes up. We can use the describe-instances command from above to check the instance’s status:

ec2-describe-instances –region eu-west-1

As soon as it’s up and running, the “pending” column should have been replaced by a dynamically allocated hostname and the status “running”. Keep in mind, that this hostname/ip is dynamically allocated! If you want a fixed IP, you need to allocate and assign an Elastic IP – I’ll show you later how to do so.
If our firewall rules worked out, we can now connect using SSH:

ssh -i ~/Library/EC2/id_rsa-test-keypair root@ec2-11-111-11-111.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

By default, Amazon sets up a Small Instance, that provides around 10 GB of hard drive, an Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2218 with 2600 MHz and around 1.7 GB of RAM. Small instances, in comparison to the bigger ones, also still provide a real swap-partition which is limited to 895 MB. Here, you could run into problems when installing some Oracle for example, since the DB would like to have 1 GB or more Swap-space. If 895 MB should not be enough, the only way to enlarge it seems to be to use a file within your file-system for that. Either, by placing it somewhere into / or by using /mnt for that. /mnt is a special mount in Amazon instances which provides you 147 GB of additional volatile storage. Amazon doesn’t guarantee in any way the storage to be stable/solid or even backed up – and usually /mnt is only used for bundling your instance. You might now think “so, where could I place my data, if / is only providing me 10 GB of space and /mnt should not be used for storing sensitive data?” – well, there’s a third possibility named Elastic Block Storage. An EBS is being displayed to your instance as regular block-device (/dev/sdb, …) that’s format- and mountable. There, sensitive data could be stored, by bind-mounting the directories you’d like to have your data in. I’m not going to explain how this works, else I’ll never finish writing this brief documentation.

However, since we’re connected to the instance now, we can set it up the way we want it, with whatever software we need on it. I’ve assumed, that most people would set it up as regular LAMP-instance, therefor I’ve also added the firewall-rule for HTTP/HTTPS. After we finished installing the software we need, there’s one more package that should be plugged into the system: The Amazon AMI Tools. Simply wget them from http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip and unzip the package. Those tools make use of Ruby, so ensure having it installed on your instance. Also, you need to have the private key (pk-.pem) and the certificate (cert-.pem) you created the instance with somewhere within your instance’s filesystem, for later use.

Before we bundle up our system now, let’s come back to the topic we had before: The hostname/IP. Amazon allocates some dynamic address, unless you tell them to give you a fixed (called Elastic) IP. You can do that by simply executing:

ec2-allocate-address –region eu-west-1

… within your client’s command-line (where the Amazon API Tools have been installed – not on the instance!). As result you’ll get some IP address that has now being allocated by Amazon for you. The IP isn’t bound to any instance yet – it’s just allocated for you to be able to use it. ATTENTION: You pay for Elastic IPs as long as you do not assign them to an instance. Yes, that’s right. Amazon charges you for every allocated but unused IP hourly. By that, they want to prevent people “collecting” addresses, I guess. To assign the address you just received to your instance, simply run:

ec2-associate-address –region eu-west-1 -i i-11e11b1e 79.125.11.11

The i- is your actual instance’s ID, where the last, dot-separated number is the IP you’ve received. And yes, those are fake numbers – so don’t even try.

Now it could take a bit for Amazon to reconfigure the instance, but as soon as it finished, you should be able to re-connect to the instance using the IP you just assigned to it.

As last task for today, let’s bundle up the image the way we have it now. Bundling an image allows you more than just eating up your credit card’s limit by dumping your S3 buckets. On the one hand, with bundles you can recover machines that crashed or lost data within a few blinks and on the other, you can created new instances out of a bundle (talking about “scalability”).

For bundling, we use the AMI tools we installed. First of all, let’s create a directory for the bundle:

mkdir /mnt/myimage

After that, run the bundle-vol-tool:

ec2-bundle-vol -k pk-.pem -c cert-.pem -s -u -d /mnt/myimage/

This command takes several parameters for the private key, the certificate, the size of the resulting bundle in MB and your User-ID (without dashes). The User-ID can be found within your Account Information on Amazon’s EC2 site. The command should ask you, what architecture you’d like to bundle the system for – i386 should work out perfectly for what we’re doing. The following procedure could take some time, since the tool collections every peace of the system and builds a bundle into the directory we specified. As soon as the tool finished, we can upload our bundle to our S3-bucket:

ec2-upload-bundle –location EU -b -m /mnt/myimage/image.manifest.xml -a -s

Again, we need to specify some credentials (our access-key and the secret-key) for the upload to work. Also, we need to pick a globally unique bucket-name for uploading the bundle, what shouldn’t be that hard as long as you don’t try stuff like “linux” or other common words. The bundle will then be uploaded to your (private) bucket, so you have it for later use.

From within the web-interface you could now simply create new instances out of the uploaded bundle, without even knowing how the actual system was set up or having the Amazon API tools installed on your client.

Cool stuff, enjoy!

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations.

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

Well, what else can we do then? Oh wait, haven’t we just set-up our Dropbox account recently? So why not use it for poor-man’s-sync?

First of all, move the subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/ named “Things” into your Dropbox folder and let it sync up to the cloud. After that, start Things for Mac while pressing the Option (Alt) key and select “Choose Library…” – and choose the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder.

Then, install Dropbox on your other Mac and again navigate to the Cultured Code directory named above. Now, you just delete the Things subfolder and yet again you start Things while keeping the Option key pressed – and select “Choose Library…“. Then, you select the Things directory from within your Dropbox-folder and you’re done!

CAUTION: This solution allows you the synchronization of Things between two (or more) Macs, but not the simultaneous running! Your Things database might break if you try to run it on both Macs at the same time!

This is a pretty good solution until Cultured Code implements something better.

As I’ve written, moving the application-folders into the cloud seems to be working pretty good on one client. Now I’ve tested, how it is when using two clients and pulled the information contained in the cloud (from client A) down to client B. Each of the three applications worked in general, Pidgin started with the account configured on client A, Evolution started with the Inbox configure in client A but asked me for the password to access the mail-server (what’s clear, because I did not synchronize the key-rings) and Firefox displayed with the preferences configured, but prepended a message box that said:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

This confused me a bit, especially since the actual browser ran without any more problems. However, I’ve been to lazy to track down this permission problem.

After I’ve checked, if “one-after-another” synchronization worked, I tried out the simultaneous usage of both machines, while being connected and synced with the cloud on each of them. As I’ve expected, I ran into some problems: Suddenly, some more folder (thumbnail) appeared within the client B’s Ubuntu One folder, that contained his app-information. The folders remained until the actual Home folder finished receiving the data from within the cloud, then they just disappeared. I don’t know, if those have been merged or just deleted – it just worked afterwards.

Ubuntu One seems to be using “semaphores”, in a similar way token-ring was using: At first, client A is allowed to sync his data with the cloud. When this is finished, client B is allowed to sync. Then, it’s client A’s turn again – and so on. Theoretically, this is good. But in practice, Ubuntu One unfortunately seems to overwrite locale changes when pulling data down from the cloud. In comparison: MobileMe asks the user and merges the data, as good as possible.

In the end, simultaneous usage was unable to sync both machines in a way, so that data was kept consistent. Either one machine lost information, or the other. Especially when adding a new Pidgin account on client B, waiting for the sync, closing Pidgin on client A (which then seems to save a final account-info) and waiting for the sync there, you will be surprised your account not to be available when re-launching Pidgin on client A.

Of course, synchronization always is a tricky feature, but I guess, Ubuntu One lacks of an SVN-like back-end, that keeps track of all changes and makes merging possible. I’m really interested in how Ubuntu One will continue to evolve and I’ll try to keep tack of its development status. This could really kick ass someday, as soon as everything works seamless and simultaneous.

For my tests, I was using a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 with latest package versions/updates installed. The installation of the PPA was pretty simple, thanks to the DEB provided on the Ubuntu One site, although I could not install the Ubuntu One GNOME-Client using the one-click feature implemented on the official Install-site. This probably could be the first thing a regular user could trap on.

So, after installing the packages manually by using a terminal and aptitude, the client appeared in Ubuntu’s “Internet”-submenu of the panel-main-menu. When a user installs Ubuntu One on a new computer and clicks the client’s icon within the menu to start the service, he will get a browser-window containing an Ubuntu One authorization-page. There, the user needs to click the “Authorize this Computer” button, so the computer will be able to sync with the Ubuntu One cloud. I took a quick look behind the scenes and as far as I’ve seen, Ubuntu One uses regular OAuth to authenticate computers to the cloud. The OAuth-token therefor will be saved within the “Passwords & Keys” thingy, that’s found somewhere in the main-menu.

However, the sync service itself creates a “Ubuntu One” folder within your home-directory, which syncs up into the cloud. Within this folder, there’s also a sym-linked-folder for Public content. The client-daemon doesn’t seem to be using some mechanism like iNotify to sync the folder contents up to the cloud, or if it does, it’s simply broken. At least on my test-machine, the client synchronized periodically – and by periodically I mean cycles with noticeable pauses in between. On one way that’s good, because not every tiny-whiny change that will be made to the folder’s contents will be pushed up to the cloud, what would literally kill your bandwidth, but on the other hand, the actual duration from one sync to another is just too big to be used with multiple devices simultaneously (e.g. an Android implementation or even another client-computer).

Talking about the simultaneousness, I don’t think that Ubuntu One is (yet) planned to be used on multiple computers simultaneous. On my test-setup I’ve created a sub-folder named “Home”, where I moved some dot-starting-folders from within my actual $HOME to and soft-linked them back to their actual location. My setup then looked something like:


devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$ ls -la | grep ^lrw*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 38 2009-09-12 20:32 .evolution -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/evolution
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 36 2009-09-12 20:31 .mozilla -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 35 2009-09-12 20:33 .purple -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/purple
devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$


By this, I’ve pushed the preferences and information of my Firefox, my Evolution and my Pidgin into the cloud. A quick test showed me, that none of those three applications complained about their new “home” being a symlink to some directory within the cloud – and neither about any insufficient permissions that could have happened, if the cloud was set-up crappy (+1P for Ubuntu One). Still, this setup seems not that perfect for me, at the moment.

The synchronization of a modified .mozilla and especially of a modified .evolution folder seems to take for years. While I’m writing this text, the client-daemon is still synchronizing the files (it started nearly at the same time I’ve started writing this entry) and says “Updating 6 of 270 files…” – this could become a looooong night. Though, I don’t want to complain about Ubuntu One’s performance, since yet, it’s still in Beta (even if I don’t know, if Beta isn’t just an upcoming trend every company has to stick with -> e.g. Google).

I’ll try to clone this Ubuntu-installation and run them both with Ubuntu One being active – first, one after another (to see, if the applications could be synced without them complaining about parameters, that are incorrect for the secondary host they get synced to -> e.g. hostname information) and then I’ll try to run them simultaneously and hope for the best. If it should work out (what I don’t expect, just from what I’ve seen in similar projects), it would be really cool, because then, most applications could be synced this way without much hassle. I’d be really surprised, if this should be working, because then, the cloud seems to implement some kind of “merge” service, which allows you to upload data from two (or more) clients and seamlessly merge it up in the cloud together to one, consistent state.

Eh, I will see. Altogether, Ubuntu One is yet already working pretty cool, though I’m not quite sure, what a regular user should do with it, if he’s already aware of service like Dropbox or Amazon’s S3 – because at the moment, Ubuntu One unfortunately isn’t any better than those services. It just integrates more seamless into the GNOME-desktop. Hm… oh well.

However, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the current iWebKit version and patch the framework to have the sliding-animations working again, even on the latest version. Now, that it seems to be working here and also it seems to be working for Christian, maybe others can also benefit from this.

If you would like to use the sliding-animations (no warranty! :-)) on your iWebKit-based design, just download the Framework package attached to this post and apply it to your iWebKit installation. It should be working pretty much out of the box.

Feel free to report bugs if you should find any regarding the sliding. Enjoy!

Download iWebKit_4.6.2_Framework-likability-patch

And yet another, brand-new Bluebird Theme: Plain.

It’s simple.

It’s light.

It’s Plain!

Download plain.bbtheme

UPDATE: Plain v2!
… just as requested.

Plain v2

Download: plain-v2.bbtheme