A Tasty Pixel » Geekspeak

Developing Loopy, Part 1: Interface

Loopy is my first iPhone app, a loop-based performance/musical scratchpad app based on looping audio equipment and inspired by, equally, the fantastic and free “Freewheeling” application, and an a capella performance by Imogen Heap.

It’s development was a whirlwind of obsessive coding, near-vertical learning curves, impatience, excitement and occasional burnout and writers block.

I thought I’d share some facts and lessons learned from the process, in a several-part article. For part 1, read on.

Monday to Friday (And Most Of Saturday) Zombies

The 9-5-plus-preparation-and-commute, five-day-a-week, living-for-the-weekend lifestyle is one I’ve become increasingly unimpressed by, particularly after meeting my partner Katherine three years ago and realising that life has so much more to offer (mostly, West Wing and Indian food delivered). Not so long ago I came to the decision that it just wasn’t for me; that living a balanced life was too important. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my pretty-easy-going PhD (and there may only be one thing, aside from the less comprehensible your writing is, the smarter you must be), it’s that I don’t want the big career I planned for. I just want to enjoy my life with Katherine, see the world, create awesome stuff, and do what I can to help some other folks along the way. I think I’m fortunate enough to have the ability to give it a shot.

Writing About It

Emailing with a new visitor to the blog, Charley, gave me the idea of focusing a little more on this journey towards true freedom and independence – the merging of career into lifestyle (not the other way around). This is a bit of a career ‘holy grail’ to many of us – at least, it is to me – and while it’s mostly for my own benefit, writing about my efforts might make for a moderately interesting story arc, and give this blog a little direction.

This will be a story about indie software development, the amazing, wonderful and supportive community that is the Mac world, the awesome marketplace that is the iPhone App Store, travel, play, hard work and hopefully quite a bit of luck.

Imogen Heap playing with Loopy!

Imogen Heap: It’s a beautiful day! Being silly. Singing into milk with loopy. on 12seconds.tv

Links for December 29th through January 28th

Links for December 29th through January 28th:

Dramatic Gritty Effect In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to add a dramatic, gritty, bronzed effect to your images.
Propel Propel is an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework for PHP5. It allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and retrieving data.
The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time Passwords to try when I desperately need to get onto a locked Wifi network for some reason. Don’t tell anybody.
Foreign Exchange Rates (FOREX) XML Feed or CSV Feed Free for commercial or non-commercial use, updated daily, XML/CSV format
10 Places To Publicize Your iPhone App A list of iPhone App review/gallery sites

Website maintenance with Textmate and FTP/SSH Bundle

I tend to work on local copies of my websites, which have either corresponding vhost entries in my local Apache configuration, or are simply symlinked to my ~/Sites folder. That way, I can test to make sure everything’s 100% before I make changes live.

This has typically been a bit of a messy workflow – I make changes, and then when happy, either open up a terminal and rsync the whole lot over, or open up Flow/Transmit and manually copy the changed files over. The whole thing makes me disinclined to make changes at all!

That is, until on a whim, I did a google search for a Textmate FTP bundle, and found Bernhard Fürst’s FTP/SSH Bundle for Textmate. This little gem lets you configure FTP settings for a project, then hit Option-S to save to the remote server, or Option-R to reload from the remote server. This way, when I’m happy with the changes, I just whack Option-S to send them to the server straight from Textmate.

That makes me happy.

One little caveat – the bundle does an odd thing with the project directory, opting to use the parent folder of the Textmate project file, something which won’t work for ad hoc projects, when one just drags a folder into Textmate (one of my favourite features). A quick fix:

Find Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/FTP-SSH and open its contents
Open up Support/lib/helper_functions.php
Change the $PROJECT_DIR definition on line 15 to:
$PROJECT_DIR = $_ENV['TM_PROJECT_DIRECTORY'];

Voila!

Unwired Usage Dashboard Widget

Introducing the Unwired Usage Dashboard widget for Mac OS X: View your Unwired usage statistics right on your Dashboard. No more logging in to check on your quota.

Displays both on-peak and off-peak quotas, and shows time remaining right alongside your quotas so you can compare your progress through the billing period.

Download it here:
Unwired Usage 1.0.1

Counting words in LaTeX documents with TextMate

When working on LaTeX documents in TextMate, the default word count feature isn’t too helpful, as it also includes all of the LaTeX control sequences in the count. There are plenty of suggestions out there, but this is one I came up with, which works the same way as the default word count facility (Ctrl-Shift-N):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
 
def pretty(number)
  number.to_s.gsub(/d{1,3}(?=d{3}+(?!d))/, ',')
end
 
counts = `detex -l | wc -lwc`.scan(/d+/)
counts[0] = counts[0].to_i + 1 # increase one to the line count
 
%w[ line word byte ].each do |unit|
  cnt    = counts.shift
  plural = cnt.to_i != 1 ? 's' : ''
  printf("%11.11s %s%sn", pretty(cnt), unit, plural)
end

This is just a copy of the default statistics action from the Text bundle, but with the ‘detex’ utility added into the pipeline to remove all LaTeX control sequences.

Put this in a new command in the LaTeX bundle, with ‘Selected Text’ for input, and ‘Show as Tool Tip’ for output. I assigned Ctrl-Shift-N as the key equivalent.

Elegant Grunge PSD

Due to popular demand, I’m making available the Elegant Grunge PSD, so that users can make modifications more easily. It can be downloaded here (5.5 Mb):

A note on contacting me: Please don’t make direct contact asking about customisation, as I don’t have the resources to help you. These kind of questions should be directed to the WordPress forums. Thanks!

If you like Elegant Grunge, please consider buying one of my products.

Geekspeak