Loopy: Finalist for the 2008 Best App Ever awards!

Vote for
Loopy
in
Best Musical Instrument App
<div style="float: right;margin: 5px;width: 80px;background-color: #242426;padding: 5px;border: 3px solid #731616"><a href="http://bestappever.com/v/moui/300257824/vote" target="_blank"><img src="http://bestappever.com/images/bae-small.png" width="80" border="0" class="noframe"></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 9pt;line-height: 12pt;text-align:center;color: #d9d9d9">Vote for<br /><b>Loopy</b><br />in<br /><b>Most Original User Interface</b><br /></span><a href="http://bestappever.com/v/moui/300257824/vote" target="_blank"><img src="http://bestappever.com/images/button_vote.png" border="0" class="noframe" /></a></div>

Loopy has made it into the Best Musical Instrument and Most Original User Interface categories as a finalist of the Best App Ever Awards, and could really use your help! The winners are announced at the 2009 Macworld Expo on 7th January, and 10 runners up are eligible for the ‘Best App Ever’ award.

Please vote, and encourage others to vote as well, if you think Loopy is worthy!

You can vote for Loopy in Most Original User Interface and Best Musical Instrument by clicking the ‘Vote’ buttons at the right.

You can vote once in each category. Voting ends 6th January.

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Elegant Grunge 1.0 released

A significant update to my WordPress theme, Elegant Grunge, has been released. New features and fixes include:

  • Configurable sidebars! Choose from no sidebar, a sidebar on the right (the standard layout), or a double sidebar on the right!
  • Support for WP 2.7 paginated and threaded comments
  • Support for a custom header image – just enter a URL to an image, typically a transparent PNG, and it will appear in the header instead of the text (SEO friendly)
  • Some bug, compatibility and i18n fixes

Note: If you have problems with this theme, please post your question at the WordPress forums. Please don’t contact me directly, as I don’t have the resources to help you.

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Impressions of iPhone development so far

A friend recently asked for my thoughts on iPhone development so far. I thought I’d copy them here:

My thoughts: Well, it’s certainly fun, for the most part – the development environment is generally very well designed and the APIs are intuitive and well documented. There are a few glaring exceptions, and when things go a bit wrong, they go very wrong. That’s a feature of any closed-source API, though, so not Apple’s fault. The other thing is there’s a pretty strong developer community and a number of reasonable forums (Apple’s Beta Developer Forums, the Developer discussion forums, the #iphonedev channel on irc.freenode.net) to discuss problems.

A very impressive part of it all is the speed with which one can accomplish great things; I wrote most of Loopy in about a week – the rest of the time has been adding polish. I wrote TSWebServer, which I’m now integrating into Loopy (http://twitpic.com/rjw4) in two days. So it allows for quite rapid, satisfying development.

I can’t comment on the non-tech side yet, as I’m yet to release Loopy, my first app. I know there’s a big community of iPhone users and they’re quite vocal; there are quite a few sites that cover new apps and such. I get the impression that once you get lucky and get the attention of some important individuals, you can accelerate pretty quickly in publicity. Apple’s featured and top lists are the holy grail, of course; with over 10,000 apps now on the app store, the competition seems quite fierce though.

You do hear success stories, but that’s just a couple out of many thousands of developers, so… Who knows. Maybe we’ll all get lucky.

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Links for November 24th through December 9th

Links for November 24th through December 9th:

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My latest iTunes iPhone playlist setup

I have iTunes and my iPhone configured to sync tracks automatically, without requiring manual intervention. Smart playlists, coupled with my application, Autorate, pick my favourite tracks, and make sure they’re on the iPhone. I previously wrote an article on my iTunes playlist setup; this draws on that prior setup, but this is slightly more refined.

Like the prior setup, I have two standard playlists: iPhone Exclusions and iPhone Selections, which allow me to manually include or exclude tracks.

I then have three smart playlists which work in tandem to select the top tracks, not including the exclusions, and including the selections. The top-most smart playlist is then selected as the playlist with which to sync tracks for the iPhone.

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RSS aggregation for PHP

I have written a mechanism in PHP that can take several RSS feeds, filter and manipulate them, and re-display them in either RSS or straight HTML.

This can also manipulate content (through the preg_replace function, and configurable per-feed), such as removing names from Twitter entries. I’m using it on loopyapp.com to show all relevant items from both this blog and my Twitter feed automatically, as an alternative to creating a separate blog. I’m also using it on this blog, to incorporate blog entries and Twitter postings.

It uses the MagpieRSS RSS parser for PHP, which provides some nice functionality, including caching.

Here’s the code: aggregate.zip

To use it, unzip it to somewhere in your webroot, then edit aggregate.php and possibly rss.php to set your configuration. Make sure that either the aggregate directory is writable, or create a ‘cache’ directory within and make that writeable, to enable caching. Point your web browser to the rss.php file to immediately view an RSS feed aggregating your supplied feeds. To add a link to the RSS from a website, add it in the header:

 

To include content in a website, the provided render_aggregate_items function will do most of the work, or you can write your own rendering code. You just have to include the file, use the functions to obtain and draw the content, and then provide your own CSS styling. Example:

<div class="items">
 
</div>

A more comprehensive example is in sample.php.

The code is GPL, so use it however you want – keep the header comments there, though.

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Loopin’ with Loopy

Loopy beta in action:

[media source=”http://atastypixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/loopy.flv” width=”300″ height=”206″ preview=”http://atastypixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/loopy-preview.jpg”]

A much more polished demo will be forthcoming once the few remaining software glitches are dealt with.

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Loopy in Beta

200811251323.jpgLoopy, my live performance application for iPhone, has reached the beta testing stage. There are a few minor issues outstanding, but the application is almost ready to hit the App Store. Stay tuned, folks, this is going to be awesome.

Please, let me know if you’d like to have a sneak peek at the application – the more testers the better, and you will have much gratitude from me. You’ll need an iPhone running version 2.1 or later.

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