Pete's Eats

I’m presenting a mobile Flash session at the upcoming Flash Forward in New York and I’ve been messing with my notes that will be included in the workbook that is given to all attendees.

It occurs to me that there is probably enough material here to form it into a book of some kind. My experiences with various publishers over the years is enough to put a complete stop to the whole thing though so I’ve decided to go down a different route and self-publish the book using a Creative Commons license and make it available for anyone to download for free subject to the CC terms.

It’s going to be fairly comprehensive technically (I hope) but if anyone out there has had any particular experiences when creating Flash-Lite content – of any kind – and would like to contribute to the book then I’d be happy to include you. I hope that if we can get as many people’s experiences as possible then it will cover a lot of ground in terms of platform ability and process – it could end up being quite valuable I think.

So, if you’re a Flash-Lite developer with information to share – or someone who’s just messed around with it and would like to pass on any nuggets of info that you hit upon then please drop me a mail and we can work something out. There will be no revenue from the book because of the way I’m planning on distributing it but it goes without saying that all credit will be given where due etc. Check out the Creative Commons website for more information on their licenses if you want some more info…

After the constant threat of early delivery, Kate was finally born at 0240 this morning after a seriously fast labour. As I write this, everything is good with both Nete and Kate.

More soon…

Kevin posts:

An old friend of mine in the UK is making a movie, Katherina, which I am looking forward to seeing. It’s about Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was famously martyred by being broken on a wheel for challenging church authorities in 329AD.

He’s put together a great teaser trailer based on what’s been shot so far, and he asked me how he should go about promoting it, as I know this online video stuff.

A few years ago the answer would be to pay for some expensive hosting and hope that not too many people downloaded it, but it struck me that this was a chance to show how things are different now.

I convinced him to use a Creative Commons license on the trailer, and I’ve put up a high-quality Bittorrent of the Katherina trailer.

So, download it, tell your friends, and tag any comments with spikedwheel.

I downloaded the trailer and the movie looks great… Plus, the use of Creative Commons for this is pretty awesome too.

I note that Freddie Jones is in the film – he’s always been one of my favourite actors since the days of Firefox!

Anyway, help spread the word, grab the torrent file and leave it open for a while – let it seep around the web for a bit…

Technorati Tags: spikedwheel

This is pretty screwed up. All sorts of things are running through my mind at the moment, the most prevalent being that I’ve just bought my last piece of music from the iTMS. If they are going to get all ‘you can’t do that’ with music that I buy from them then they can go and… well, I’ll leave it to your imagination.

I’d like to know what’s behind all of this. The RIAA again? The music industry as a whole? Or just Apple? Who knows… But it’s a serious step backwards in the move to modernise the music industry…

Yesterday, Roxio released Toast Titanium 6.1. It fixes a slew of Tiger and Quicktime 7 compatibility bugs, and is a free upgrade for owners of Toast Titanium 6.

The interesting thing about this update, however, isn’t what features it includes, but the features it expressly omits.

The Read Me states: “Following discussions with Apple, this version will no longer allow customers to create audio CDs, audio DVDs, or export audio to their hard drive using purchased iTunes music store content.”

Does anyone really have any idea on why they’d do this? (Apple that is)

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Again, snarfed from TUAW, which is slowly turning into a seriously good source of info…

On Saturday 14th May between 12 and 3pm head down to Black Rock in Brighton (next to the Brighton Marina) ‘cos this lot are looking for extras for their film called Brighton-Wok (see what they did there? heh)

Anyway, you’re guaranteed a place in the movie apparently and it looks like a bit of a laugh if you ask me… I haven’t been able to check out the trailer for the movie yet ‘cos it keeps crashing Safari (no, I haven’t moved to Firefox yet…) but if anyone wants to send the movie to me then feel free…

Failing that, might see you down there

Ouch… The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted this today:

I’m not going to make an active link to this site, but I am going to tell you about it and then list the link, and if you really want to check it out, then you can copy and paste the address in your address bar.

Here’s the address:

http://stephan.com/widgets/zaptastic/



Now, if you jump over to that site, it automatically downloads a widget and it also automatically installs it if you are on Tiger, using Safari, and you haven’t bothered to disable the “Open ’safe’ files after downloading” feature.

You have been warned…

How cool is this!!!

Open up your System Preferences, hold down the ‘option’ key while you click on the ‘Displays’ icon. Then in the displays panel you’ll get an option to rotate your screen in varying degrees…

It doesn’t work on my 12″ PowerBook, but it does on the 15″. Rotating it 90 degrees and reading in bed or designing A4 layouts has just taken on new meaning!

(This is a Tiger/Mac thing – sorry PC losers users)

I’ve been messing around with Automator a bit and I’m slowly realising how powerful it really is…

My first Automator Action is a photo_email app. Basically, it allows you to select any image(s) from your iPhoto library without opening that application, makes copies of them into a temporary folder and then resizes the copies as specified by you. It then sends them to a new email message as attachments – you add the addressee details, send it and then the action deletes the temporary folder from your desktop.

It’s easier than opening iPhoto (which can take ages) and it clears up after itself… I don’t know how useful it might be to other people, but it’s something I’ll use quite a bit…

Anyway, click below to download a copy of it – the archive file contains the workflow doc, an application file and a readme file.

Download the email_photo action (.zip or .pkg)

Update: There seems to be some issue with this action on ’some’ machines but not on others… I’m investigating it and I’ll update again when it’s resolved or I know more…