Michael Tyson | A Tasty Pixel

Featured Artist: Ian Ljungquist

There’s some very interesting things emerging from Loopy’s user base lately, and I thought I’d start writing about some artists who are using Loopy to great effect.

McKittrick by Breakable Plans

Ian Ljungquist sings in and writes for 4-piece Brooklyn-based indie-rock band Me You Us Them. Since discovering Loopy, Ian has begun a new experimental solo project entitled “Breakable Plans“, in which he explores the medium by creating loop-based music spontaneously and with whatever’s on hand at the time. In his words:

“I’ve always loved making loops. Creating loop-based music has been a passion of mine since I first discovered the extremely limited loop function on an old Line 6 Echo Pro delay rack unit.”

“I’ve been having so much fun with [Loopy] that I decided to turn it into a project in which I embrace, and even place emphasis on the limitations of the process. The idea behind “Breakable Plans” is that I just very casually and spontaneously record when I feel the urge, using only Loopy for iPhone, my voice, and whatever else is laying around.”

Ian’s unique deep-layering recording technique yields some fascinating results, lending a depth and scale to his “vocal electronic” productions that defy their humble iPhone-based origins.

Definitely someone to keep an eye on, Ian continues to post his creations on SoundCloud under the “Breakable Plans” moniker.

Right Where I’m Supposed To Be by Breakable Plans

Sparrow users beware: Bug sends prior draft instead of latest email version

Update: The Sparrow guys tell me they’ve found and nailed the bug, and will release the fix in 1.4 in late September.

I’ve just discovered a critical issue with Sparrow that I thought others should be warned of. It just bit me, big-time, when in the middle of an important negotiation with a third party, an earlier unpolished draft was sent out instead of the final email, when I experienced a momentary Internet connection dropout.

Sparrow has an issue where hitting “Send”, in unreliable network conditions, on a draft message that has been modified, results in a prior copy of the message being sent, rather than the latest version.

To replicate this issue reliably:

Create a new message (Cmd-N)
Specify a recipient (oneself), subject, and some body content (say, the letter “A”)
Hit “Save”, to save the draft
Change “A” to “B”, then disconnect the network connection (in my case, turning off the radio on my external WiFi adapter), then hit “Send”. Sparrow will report a failed connection, and will keep the outgoing message with state “Pending”
Restore network connection. Upon detecting the restored connection, Sparrow will proceed to send the message
Check email. Received test email will have “A” in the email body.

Scary stuff. I hope they’ll fix this soon, but it’s going to make the app difficult to trust in future!

Update: I should mention, a probable workaround for this is to never, ever hit “Send” until you’ve saved the draft, and verified that the save operation has completed (perhaps even restart the app first).

Seamlessly manage portrait and landscape view controller layouts

A headache-inducing scenario: I’m working on a view controller, and I realise that in order to support landscape and portrait modes, I’m going to need to provide two different layouts.

So, I create two different views within the nib, one portrait, one landscape, each with the same view hierarchy, but with a different layout.

When the orientation changes, I set self.view to the appropriate view. I initialise both views on load, and keep both of them synced to properly reflect the app’s state — basically, I’m double-handling everything, which bloats my code and increases the chance I’ll make a mistake.

So, here’s an easier way: Rather than maintaining two separate view hierarchies and switching between them when the orientation changes, why not just change the layout of one single view hierarchy? The only changes between the portrait and landscape views are layout changes, so if we can extract just the layout information from each view, then we don’t have to worry about maintaining both view hierarchies.

Basically, we’re talking about using each view version as a layout template only.

That’s what TPMultiLayoutViewController class does. It’s a drop-in UIViewController subclass that automatically manages switching between different view layouts for portrait and landscape orientations, without the need to maintain view state across two different view hierarchies.

It works by defining portraitView and landscapeView outlets which it traverses upon loading the nib. It matches each subview element to its counterpart in the other layout (based on tag, target/action, title, etc.), and stores just the layout attributes of each element.

Then, when the orientation changes, the view hierarchy is traversed and these layouts are applied to each subview.

To use it,

Set the superclass for your view controller to TPMultiLayoutViewController.
In Interface Builder, create two different views: one for portrait orientation, and one for landscape orientation.
Attach your portrait orientation root view to the “portraitView” outlet, and the landscape orientation root view to the “landscapeView” outlet.
Attach one of the views (whichever you prefer) to the “view” outlet, and connect any actions and outlets from that view.

Grab it from the TPMultiLayoutViewController GitHub repository, and let me know what you think.

Personalising AddThis’s Tweet Button

AddThis is a quite useful WordPress plugin for adding a host of sharing options to your blog posts.

By default, the “Tweet” button that AddThis provides will append “via @AddThis” to the end of tweets, which seems to me a little uncool, given that it’s your content.

So, here’s a little plugin that lets you specify your own Twitter account name instead of @AddThis.

The principle is simple: AddThis were kind enough to define their own filter for the plugin’s output. The plugin plugs itself into this filter, and makes an adjustment to the Tweet button.

To use it, put addthis-modifier.php into your wp-content/plugins folder, open it up and set your twitter name where indicated. Activate it, and you should be good to go.

Download the plugin: AddThis Modifier Plugin

For extra marks: Here’s some code you can use to replace line 14 (the $twittername = … line) to provide a different Twitter account for each post author. Is that not awesome?:

    $accounts = array('Michael'   =&gt; 'MichaelTyson',
                      'Katherine' =&gt; 'NellieWindmill');
    $twittername = $accounts[get_the_author()];

Supporting WordPress shortcodes and captions in MarsEdit preview

I noticed that WordPress these days uses a shortcode to define image captions, of the form:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630" caption="Image title goes here"]<img src="http://domain.com/imgpath/../image.jpg" width="630" height="420" />[/caption]

I’ve recently redone our blog template at Technomadics, and while setting up the new preview template in MarsEdit, thought I’d take a stab at implementing support for captions, too, via some javascript in the template.

I was successful! Here’s how I did it:

Added the following to the “head” section:

 
var prior_content;
function watch_for_changes() {
  var check = function() {
    var elt = document.getElementById('content');
    if ( elt.innerHTML != prior_content ) {
       elt.innerHTML = apply_filters(elt.innerHTML);
       prior_content = elt.innerHTML;
    }
    setTimeout(check, 100);
  };
  setTimeout(check, 100);
}
 
function apply_shortcode(source, name, callback) {
   return source.replace(new RegExp('\[' + name + '\s*([^\]]*)\]((.|[sn])*?)\[/' + name + '\]', 'g'),
                         function(match, paramString, content) {
                           params = new Object();
                           reg = /([a-z]+)="((:?="[^"]+"|[^"])*)"/gi;
                           while ( (match = reg.exec(paramString)) != null ) {
                             params[match[1]] = match[2];
                           }
                           return callback(params, content);
                         });
}
 
function apply_filters(html) {
  html = apply_shortcode(html, "caption", function(args, content) {
     return '<div>' + content +
             '<p class="wp-caption-text">' + args.caption + '</p></div>';
  });
 
  return html;
}

…changed to ‘body’ tag to…

…And wrapped a div around the main “#body#, #extended#” content with an id of content:

<div id="content">
#body#
#extended#
</div>

Basically, it polls the content area for changes, and when triggered, runs it though a filter. The above is extensible, and by adding additional “apply_shortcode” calls from “apply_filters“, more shortcodes can be simulated.