Links for October 25th through January 23rd:
Talkie 1.1 is now available on the iPhone App Store, and it’s better than ever.
The new version connects to other Talkies via Bluetooth completely automatically — start Talkie on your iPhone and within seconds you’ll be connected to anyone nearby using Talkie on the same channel.
Also new are WiFi and Bluetooth connection indicators, and an audio meter for when you’re transmitting or receiving.
For a limited time only, Talkie is available for $1.99. Grab it on the app store.
— And don’t forget, Talkie for Mac is absolutely, 100% free for use with Talkie for iPhone.
Read More
I’ve just finished a new release of my Flickr plugin for WordPress, Flickrpress.
The new version features AJAX-based navigation between pages of images, and improved support for insertion within pages and posts as a shortcode.
Flickrpress 1.0 can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository
See it an action over on my personal blog.
Read MoreThis plugin allows you to reclaim disk space and clean up your uploads folder by deleting old uploads you are no longer linking to.
It will identify unused files within your uploads folder, and give you the option of archiving then deleting some or all of these files.
Before any action is taken, Upload Janitor will automatically make a ‘tar’ archive of all files to be erased, including their original paths, so you can restore if necessary.
Read MoreThis plugin allows you to specify a list of tags or categories to keep hidden: These will no longer appear anywhere on the site, such as in the tag cloud or on the list of post tags. This is useful when using tags to control behaviour of your blog with other software, or when you wish to maintain groupings of posts out of the public eye.
Read MoreA customer recently got in touch with me with an odd problem — Talkie for iPhone was going silent on him. After a little diagnosis, it turned out the audio system was throwing up an undocumented error — -12986 — while starting up on his iPod Touch.
Some googling turned up this thread on Stack Overflow, which presented a solution for the AVAudioSession framework: It turns out, on recent SDKs (somewhere equal to or above 3.0), the audio system will refuse to start up if the session is set to a recording mode, with no input device available, spitting out this error. Alas, the error isn’t listed anywhere that I could find.
So, the way to fix it is to check whether there’s an input device available, then choose an audio category accordingly:
OSStatus status; UInt32 inputAvailable=0; UInt32 size = sizeof(inputAvailable); AudioSessionGetProperty(kAudioSessionProperty_AudioInputAvailable, &size, &inputAvailable); UInt32 sessionCategory; if ( inputAvailable ) { // Set the audio session category for simultaneous play and record sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_PlayAndRecord; } else { // Just playback sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_MediaPlayback; } status = AudioSessionSetProperty (kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory, sizeof (sessionCategory), &sessionCategory); checkStatus(status); |
It’s probably a good idea to respond when input becomes available or goes away, so add a property listener too:
void inputAvailablePropertyListener (void *inClientData, AudioSessionPropertyID inID, UInt32 inDataSize, const void *inData) { if ( inID = kAudioSessionProperty_AudioInputAvailable ) { UInt32 *inputAvailable = (UInt32*)inData; UInt32 sessionCategory; if ( *inputAvailable ) { // Set the audio session category for simultaneous play and record sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_PlayAndRecord; } else { // Just playback sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_MediaPlayback; } OSStatus status = AudioSessionSetProperty (kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory, sizeof (sessionCategory), &sessionCategory); checkStatus(status); } } |
then:
// Listen for audio input availability status = AudioSessionAddPropertyListener(kAudioSessionProperty_AudioInputAvailable, inputAvailablePropertyListener, NULL); |
See the new version, Twitter Image Host 2, which stores images as actual WordPress posts, for more easy customisation and management. It can be run at the same time as Twitter Image Host, for easy migration.
Keep your traffic in the family! Host Twitter images on your own site, with support for comments and trackbacks, image
resizing and thumbnailing with Lightbox.
Twitter doesn’t yet come with its own inline image support, so we tend to be limited to using image hosting services,
and linking to them with short URLs. So, services like Twitpic host the image, and we direct traffic to them in return.
Better to take advantage of that traffic, and host images on your own site. This way, viewers come to your site, instead
of someone else’s!
Posted images are displayed in your normal WordPress template, with support for comments and trackbacks, without any
setup required. Most themes should work with this, but if not, or if a different layout is required, a custom theme template
can also be provided (see ‘Creating a Template’).
Provides an HTML form for posting image content, as well as an API modelled on that of img.ly,
compatible with Tweetie (for iPhone) and any other Twitter clients that speak this protocol and offer configuration of
custom image hosting services.
Uses Twitter’s authentication and a list of authorised accounts, so you can let others use your image host too. You can even
post status updates to Twitter while submitting images.
Provides a widget and shortcode to display uploaded images. This supports filtering by Twitter account, styling with CSS,
and Lightbox/Thickbox.
Twitter doesn’t yet come with its own inline image support, so we tend to be limited to using image hosting services, and linking to them with short URLs. So, services like Tweetpic host the image, and we direct traffic to them in return.
Thinking it’s better to keep things in the family, and take better advantage of that traffic, I put together an image hosting setup of my own. Now viewers come to my own site, instead of someone else’s!
It looks like this
The setup consists of an Automator service, and some PHP smarts on the site.
Under Snow Leopard, I can right-click on an image in Finder, click ‘Send Image to Image Hosting’, type in a title, then paste the URL that’s automatically been put onto my clipboard into a tweet.
Here’s how it works – this assumes a moderate level of understanding of PHP and assorted web administration.
Read More