I went dormant because of school. It was a very busy year. This summer, of course, has also been very busy. I’m an intern at a local homeless shelter, doing website work. I also have my first for-pay, private web design client, which is very exciting.
I hope to keep up and actually post this coming school year. I have a few things that I built for my own personal use that I will likely post for download relatively soon. It’s good to be back.
With Halo: Reach less than 1 day and 3 hours away (for me), I was browsing around Bungie’s newly redesigned website, when I saw the new player map for Reach. Seeing something that the Bungie guys threw together a while back with Halo: 3′s map, I decided to write a small program that downloaded the map from bungie.net every 10 minutes.
I will probably make a time lapse GIF spanning Reach’s launch. I will also, post my collected images around 24 hours after launch starting from midnight tomorrow.
Also, here is the program I wrote. I’ll probably give it its own page and post the source code to it soon. Enjoy.
A while back, Randall Munroe, of xkcd, conducted a color survey where participants were asked to name the color they were shown. The full summary of results is here (Probably NSFW). The survey resulted in a file rgb.txt which contains the hex values of 954 names colors.
Now, browsing across the web, I came across requests of a Mac OS X Color Picker plugin utilizing the results of the survey. Of course I had to do it!
So, after consulting the documentation, I set out. With the help of some freely available source code, I was able to create a full table of the colors complete with swatches.
Soon, once filtering and sorting are implemented, this project will see the light of day. I hope you can enjoy it soon!
I’m back! After wrangling PHP and fighting a slightly buggy WordPress iPhone app, I finally return. And I come with great news: The QC Reader app is currently undergoing a major overhaul. Instead of relying on an external Python script to download the comics, the rewrite will be completely in Objective-C. This means increased download speeds, and greater efficiency. Also, as a side note, I have determined how to retrieve the comic titles for listing and bookmark capabilities. These improvements will soon be coming to the xkcd app too.
As a special bonus for your patience, I would like to announce a simple Safari plugin to make reading QC on questionablecontent.net even easier. It intercepts left/right key presses to load the previous/next comic respectively. The new plugin can be downloaded here. This means I am now am semi-proficient at Javascript. Maybe.
After a small break from the world of technology, I return with news of a new app idea and great things to come.
As you probably know, Apple has released the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, ushering in a new era in app development. I plan on taking full advantage of this opportunity to develop further for the iPhone.
If you own or manage a web domain, you may, like me, use cPanel to manage and control domain and hosting settings. I haven’t been able to find an adequate cPanel client for Mac or iPhone.
I plan on, like with many other apps, implementing functionality first using Cocoa on the Mac, then using much of the same code to adapt the app to the iPhone.
As you may know now, Safari 5 is out, along with new extensions. This presented an opportunity to adapt my in-development yoURLs app into a safari extension. This would provide easier access to the functionality for Safari users. Unfortunately, the extensions are written in Javascript, an area where I have little experience. The plan is to release an initial version of the desktop version of yoURLs, then focus on creating a working Safari extension, then possibly branching off into Mail, Firefox, and Chrome.
Because of its very “connected” nature, yoURLs has the potential to fit in many different situations. A desktop app would be useful and compatible with any app, but not as connected or integrated into that app’s workings. Having a specific plugins for a handful of apps, and a central desktop app to manage the plugins and provide functionality outside of those selected apps would be the ideal system. Of course because the Safari, Firefox, and Chrome extensions would be cross-platform, the settings would not be removed from the extensions themselves.
I hope you may soon see the completed app and extensions ready and available for download.
ReachStats, which is still in development (not functional), is now publicly available through Google Code here. The code site is still a work in progress, and will be recieving constant updates. Also, I have set up Subversion to integrate with Xcode. This means I can have a full repository of versioned files. Every time I make major progress or finish a programming session, I can automatically have all of my files uploaded and made publicly available.
This way, early adopters can get a look at what’s coming, and people can access what currently is one of the only Reach API clients written in Objective-C and Cocoa.
Because Bungie has extended the availability of the Halo: Reach Beta Player Statistics for a few more weeks, I have decided to take ReachStats off of the back burner and begin work on it again.
Also, Bungie has made a new Halo: Reach Stats API available to developers, making screen scraping obsolete. Now, the app can make less web requests. One to update the Reach Resources Database at startup, Three to update stats for a player, and one to view the details for a specific game. Instead of screen scraping stats for each player from over six full HTML pages, it now only has to parse through three simple JSON files. With the help of the JSON Framework to parse the API returns, the app is starting to take shape.
Eventually, once the game is released in full, and the desktop app has been updated accordingly, I plan to start work on a matching iPhone/iPad version. This doesn’t present too much of an obstacle because most of the code can simply be copied and the interface reworked. I hope to produce one of the first fully featured desktop/mobile clients for Halo: Reach stats.
If you are reading this now, then you know that I have started using a new theme on the website. I am now using the CA OHM theme from Rapid Ideas. I hope, with the variable-width format, and new vertical navigation, that the site will be more extensible and better looking than ever. Along with improvements to the sites CSS and PHP, I have been working with newer verions of WordPress and plan to upgrade to version 3.0 as soon as it is available.
Along with some behind-the-scenes upgrades, the login form and the logout button on the homepage have been improved so they both redirect back to the homepage once they are clicked.
Hope you enjoy the new experience!
As you may have noticed, from late last week until earlier this weekend, the website was down (Well, actually just locked down). This was because an error during an FTP upload, which deleted the second half of the index page. I have been able to completely reconstruct the page, and have even improved some of the underlying PHP and Javascript.
In other news, because of the end of the Halo: Reach Beta, I have begun work on a different app in the Bnet series. This small, lightweight app simply uses the ASP.NET functions built in to Bungie.net to retrieve various images. It is able to take a list of user-set options and return an image of the player model, the emblem, and the campaign complete symbols, all for both Halo 3 and ODST.
It was made more as a proof-of-concept, but I will put a link up when its a ready. It will go up at the same time as the Bnet project page, along with screenshots and more details.