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Interactive Software Development

10 years ago software was developed by people in small cubicals coding all day. Ok, maybe thats a little bit of an exaggeration, but for the most part software companies pumped out a new product every year that had new features that the users of their software just had to have. The software companies didn’t really have that much interaction with their client. Software development today is rapidly changing today. Software is built to accomadate what the user really needs not what the developer thinks the user needs. Software companies like Macromedia ask their user base what features they want in the software, what they think the software needs…

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Hurricane Katrina

A little late in reporting this, but life is busy… The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina is enormous, its very saddening to see an American city looking like a third-world country. Even more saddening is level of crime that New Orleans is experiencing, the raping and stealing that is occurring is especially saddening. Instead of the citizens of New Orleans trying to be charitable to each other, help each other survive, and find a way out of the city; some citizens have given into evil-doing and are committing mass crimes preventing law officials from saving the various people all around the city….

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PDFCombine 1.0

Last week I needed to combine a couple of PDF’s together. I thought ‘I’m in this advanced operating system it should be easy’. Well, it wasn’t, and the solutions out on macupdate.com and the like were either shareware (I wasn’t going to pay $20 for such a simple task such as this), or didn’t output the PDF correctly (for instance, you couldn’t search/select the text that previously was searchable/selectable). I was kind of annoyed that simple task like this could not be completed on such a modern operating system such as OS X; so I wrote my own program and thus PDFCombine 1.0 was born. PDFCombine uses the new PDFKit framework introduced in 10.4 to do all the hard work, so it was really very easy to write the program…

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App Stop 1.0b Released!

I’ve just released App Stop 1.0b. The following fixes & changes have been made: Fixed a bug where applications that should be in the menu bar item’s menu, weren’t Upgraded AGProcess to .5, which fixed a few small bugs that were occurring Some small speed optimizations I rewrote the background-application update algoririth, ands its much faster using much less CPU when checking for background-applications Fixed a bug where your selection on the table view would change to the newly added application Totally rewrote the helper application which handled peforming actions on root and other applications not running on the current UID…

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Back From Vacation!

I’m back from vacationing in New Hampshire. I stayed up in the mountains near a small lake, a place I go to every year. It was awesome; I went sailing, nee-bording, tubing, boating, swimming, diving off of rocks, hiking, biking, eating :D- it was an awesome time. The rural landscape is awesome, the air is so clean- I can’t wait to go back next year. On another note, I’m preparing to release V1.0b of App Stop, it should be released within the next week. I’m pretty amazed at the popularity of my easingScrollBar class, it has received almost 1200 downloads to date. I’ve also finally decided to buy Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine (Amazon had the best deal)…

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Interprocess Communication in C

Recently I’ve been trying to understand the concept of interprocess communication in C. I’ve looked at some example code, read the man pages for fork() dup() pipe(), exevc() and the like; but the concept just wouldn’t sink in. Luckily, someone I met from the Kirupa Forums, njs54345 said to search google for ‘Beej’. I followed his advice and was happy I did, Beej has some awesome information. I did some small example projects based of the IPC tutorial and posted the source files on the source section of this site. If your trying to learn network, or inter process communication in C I would highly recommend those tutorials- there great.

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attachSound() Won’t Play in Loaded Movie- Another Flash Bug!

I came across this bug awhile ago. Lets say you had the following code in a SWF: It worked perfectly, the sound with the linkage ID in my library names “asound” played and everything was great. Now try loading that SWF info another SWF, the sound will not play. I searched the net and found this nice little comment here: “For what it is worth, I had the same issue, and found a solution to this. When declaring the “new Sound”, you have to specify a target movie clip. For example: new_sound = new Sound(this)” Ah-Ha! Specifying this in the Sound object’s constructor magically makes it work. This isn’t anywhere in MM’s docs. Thanks MM for wasting 30 more minutes of my time!

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