A Tasty Pixel » Posts

Links for November 13th through November 17th

Links for November 13th through November 17th:

How to Price Your iPhone App out of Existence Write-up on the dangers of pricing an iPhone app too low, and the need to 'correct' the market
Open Radar Community-driven, open Apple bug reports
Free Australian Postcode location data "…Both the original CSV is available zipped below and contains Postcode, Suburb, Latitude and Longitude, a MySQL dump of the data is also available in a Zip file below. You can also download the PHP functions we coded to interface with the MySQL database. Simply call the postcode_dist() function with the two postcodes as shown in the example and you'll have a result in Kilometers returned quite quickly, these functions are freely available under the BSD licence."

A OS X service to encode HTML characters

I find myself frequently writing HTML code in comment forms which support use of HTML formatting, which means that I have to encode the html entities if I want them to show up (as in representing ‘>’ with ‘>’, for example).

This gets rather tiresome, particularly if there’s a fair chunk of text to encode by hand.

I used the always-useful ThisService app with a short PHP script which does a htmlspecialchars() on whatever’s passed to it, to create a OS X service called ‘Encode HTML‘. Put it in your Library/Services directory, possibly log out and back in again, and you’ll be set.

Select the text to encode, click the system menu, Services, Encode HTML, and it’ll be automatically encoded in place.

Using RemoteIO audio unit

I’ve had nasty old time trying to get some audio stuff going on the iPhone, no thanks to Apple’s lack of documentation. If you’re an iPhone developer interested in getting RemoteIO/IO Remote/whatever it’s called working on the iPhone… Do I have good news for you. Read on.

Custom Permalinks

Custom Permalinks is a WordPress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure.

Lay out your site the way you want it. Set the URL of any post, tag or category to anything you want. Old permalinks will redirect properly to the new address.

‘Paged Comments’ plugin theme for Elegant Grunge

I’ve recently enabled the Paged Comments plugin for this site, as the comments over at the Elegant Grunge page were getting a little large in number. A few tweaks were required to make it look right, though.

So, here’s the Elegant Grunge theme for the plugin – put this in the ‘themes’ directory under the ‘paged-comments’ plugin directory.

elegant-grunge-for-paged-comments.zip

Core Audio and freakin’ error -66632

This will only be of interest to a very small minority, but for those of us who have used Core Audio and come across error -66632 in all its glorious undocumented-ness, this is a helpful note.

The error occurs when using AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer. It happens when one tries to enqueue a buffer when the queue in question is no longer running.

Wrap the AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer in a statement that checks to see if the queue is actually running, as in the SpeakHere/SpeakHear (depending on where you look) example. Something like:

if ( [track recording] ) {

  // Re-enqueue this buffer

  status = AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer (inAudioQueue,

                     inBuffer,

                     0,

                     NULL);

  checkStatus(status);

}

..Should do the trick.

Some useful mini-plugins for WordPress

Originally for my own use, I put together a couple of WordPress plugins, which I thought I’d make available in case they were useful to anyone else.

Google AdSense shortcode

This is the simplest plugin, which provides an ‘adsense’ shortcode to output a Google ad. To use it, use Google’s tools to create the ad, then paste it into the php file where indicated, then put {adsense} (replace the curly braces with square brackets) in posts/pages where you want the ad to appear (remove the spaces around the square brackets).

adsense.php.zip

And now for a demo + shameless attempt at monetization:

Media player

This one is useful if you occasionally post a video file on your blog, and host it locally. If you use video more frequently, there are plugins that probably are more suited, but I personally didn’t want the overhead, and I wanted to store videos in the standard upload locations, instead of having a separate repository, which seems to be what other plugins do.

This one uses the JW FLV player, provided in the plugin. Use something like:

{media source="http://my.site.com/path/to/video.flv" width="400" height="308" preview="http://my.site.com/path/to/preview.jpg"}

(replace the curly braces with square brackets)

mediaplayer.zip

I used this just the other day on a post demonstrating the output of the simulator I’ve written for my PhD.

Music player

This is the plugin that renders the content for my music page, as well as providing mini-players for other posts. Give it a path to a directory, and it will display all mp3 files in that directory with flash players based on the XSPF Web Music Player. Recently-added mp3 files will be marked as ‘New’. Use something like:

{musiclist path="path/to/my/music"}

(replace the curly braces with square brackets; add optional nolink=”true” parameter to avoid linking to the mp3 files from their titles)

For just one track, use:

{audio source="path/to/audio.mp3"}

musicplayer.zip

Saying no to IE 6

Edit: Whoa! savethedevelopers.org now links to Microsoft, and the script is gone! What gives? Buyout? Hostile takeover?

IE 6 visitors to this site will notice a message sliding down from the top of the page directing them to update IE. This is a script provided by savethedevelopers.org who are all about making IE6 go away. Bravo I say. That said, I’d be happy if it directed users away from IE altogether (because it sucks; even the U.S. government is ‘pleading users to stop‘ using it) but – one step at a time.

Visit their site to grab the markup for the script if you’re interested in supporting the cause from your site too. Save a developer today!