marius » Release

iTunes Match released in Germany?

Marius — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:52:46 +0000

iTunes Match

Palm webOS (formerly Palm Pre) Development Bundle for TextMate 0.3

Marius — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:45:23 +0000

Releasing version 0.3 of my Palm webOS development bundle for TextMate, with plenty new features and a stand-alone “Mojo”-language.

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

TextMate Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Marius — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:55:58 +0000

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.

Sun xVM a.k.a. VirtualBox 2.0.0 released

Marius — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:37:28 +0000

Sun has just released their xVM/VirtualBox 2.0.0. Go and get it.

Thanks to tuhl for this info.

A first look at openSuSE 11.0 (alpha)

Marius — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:59:25 +0000

Besides all the code hacking and playing around with Zimbra I’ve also downloaded the openSuSE 11.0 (alpha) KDE LiveCD and took a first look at Novell’s soon-coming distribution. The reason why I’ve chosen the KDE image was the fact that I’ve been absent from that area for a very, very, veeery long time now. I think the last time I really worked on a KDE box was somewhen in 2004. And since every [KDE-]person seems to be praising KDE4 with Plasma and its other stuff to the skies, I thought that it would be interessting to take a look on that. To be honest, I actually didn’t believe that KDE would still be “alive” or at least under heavy development, since I think that there’s no more popular Linux distribution which ships with KDE by default. RedHat/Fedora uses GNOME. Novell uses GNOME. Ubuntu uses GNOME. And I think that even the [non-linux] OpenSolaris install GNOME by default. But of course, not everything that’s widely spread and used must be good per definition – so it’s good to still have alternatives. And it would be even better if one of these would be called E17-Stable. But whatever, that’s another story. Back to openSuSE.
The boot-screen of 11.0 became even more lickable. I always liked the graphics SuSE and afterwards Novell were using in their distributions and I like to see that they keep the UI-Design constantly good and innovative. For example I hate it to see how ugly Ubuntu looks. Not that it has been always ugly. When the first release using this brown/human theme came out, it surely has been something new and pretty cool. But now they keep doing the same thing old thing for already too much time. I can’t remember where I read it, but as far as I still know I’ve seen some news-article when Ubuntu 7.04 had just been released. This news article told something about Ubuntu having a re-design on its next LTS version. Something orange/black/grey. Whatever, they really didn’t. Actually, the only thing they changed was the default wallpaper. I don’t know if I’m the only person thinking like that, but in my opinion a Desktop on which I’m working over eight hours a day has to be looking pleasant to the eyes, else I’m getting unmotivated and decline to work on it. Or would anybody of you believe that a Designer working for Apple would ever do such lickable stuff on a Windows XP?
Besides of the inteface-tuning openSuSE also provides a set of the pretty much latest software available. Like I already said, the LiveCD contained a KDE4 with Plasma and all the other applications around that Desktop Environment. When the desktop finished loading its elements I clicked a bit through KDE and played a bit around with the software installed on the LiveCD and I must say that I’m still not enthused of it. Everything is kind of chubby and rattly. I’m missing the sort of smooth desktop environment and interface that GNOME provides me. Of course, Qt is theoretically a very powerfull GUI toolkit, but that’s pretty worthless when elementary things are missing. For example it seems not to be possible, to make the Qt interface (regardless of what theme it uses) look a bit more minimalistic and… well, smooth. The KDE desktop consumes in my opinion too much space on the screen. Space, which could be used for important this are mostly wasted on hyper-thick button border or super-fat scrollbars. In comparison the Gtk interface can be stripped down to some pixels per widget [if wanted] and it still doesn’t look squashed. I think the best way to visualize what I’m meaning would be to put a Konqueror/Opera besides an Epiphany browser. Or Skype/Kopete besides Galaxium or Empathy. Or KMail besides Evolution. Or or or. But whatever, this is more a personal-taste-thing.

I’m now really excited about the first stable release of openSuSE 11.0 and I’m even more excited about how to upgrade from openSuSE 10.3 to 11.0. I’m not sure whether it’s still as simple as it was then ago, when the system was still called “SuSE Linux”. I remember upgrading from SuSE 7.3 Pro to 8.0 using the (bought!) upgrade-package, which worked out pretty fluent and nice, then ago in 2002. Maybe I’ll buy a full box of 11.0… hm… let’s see.

More to Do!…

Marius — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:39:21 +0000

So, after I’ve published my first two GNOME Do! Plugins I’ve already hacked and release my thrid and fourth plugin. The one is an Add-On for looking up function names using Devhelp and the second one provides subscribing to newsfeeds by entering the feed URL or displaying a feed’s site by entering its name. Now I’m actually thinking about a way for implementing a Dine-O-Matic, though I don’t really know whether Do! supports the features that would be needed. I’m thinking of something like entering a buzzword like “pizza”, “pasta” or “sushi” and automatically receive a list of where you might find that for lunch. The first problem is actually getting that list. Either the user would have to manually configure it, or I would need some service on the web that could return me a list (XML) of restaurants found by certain criteria. Actuallly the last option would be pretty cool, but unfortunatelly I don’t know such an (internationalized) service. The only site I would know for finding cool places here in Germany would be Prinz.de, but they don’t seems to have any XML-Interface for receiving the data. So everything I could actually do would be to launch a web-browser and open the search URL to which I’d append the buzzword the user entered. But that is uncool. Besides, a co-worker told me that it’s possible to define own search-engines in Epiphany by saving the URL as bookmark and add a %s at that point at which Epiphany should enter the text typed into the address-bar. What actually is easier than writing or even installing a Do! Plugin. Hum.
Well, however, you can download the two new Plugins from my Project site. Enjoy!

REX: Sources Released!

Marius — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:20:50 +0000

Just a little info: I finally managed to release the sources (MonoDevelop project) for my REX User-Interface software. You can now find them in version 0.1 on the REX Project-Page. Enjoy!