2005 - Page 5 of 7 - Michael Bianco

10.4: Ignore Ownership?

I noticed this new feature in OS X 10.4, there is now an option to ‘Ignore Ownership on this Volume’. While working on a project that involved changing permissions, I was having trouble since no errors were being reporting from the functions that were changing the permissions, but the permissions were not being changed. I finally figured out that it was the Ignoring Ownership ‘feature’ that was causing this problem. As far as I can tell changing ownership on a file/folder in a volume that has that enabled will not really change the permissions, and no error will be reported. I dont understand what the point of this ‘feature’ is, but now I understand were my confusion in this permission problem was coming from! 🙂

Bitmaps & Flash

I was working on a flash-based project recently which consisted of alot of bitmaps. I always export my bitmaps from Photoshop as png-24, since I always find they yield the best results and have the best support for transparency. The problem I was having in the project I was working on was that when I imported the image, it work look fine- just as how I outputted it from Photoshop. But when I exported the movie, the bitmap lost some of details and replaced jagged grungy edges with straight ones, this was not what I wanted since the site was a ruff & grungy style. I finally discovered that Flash was exporting the image as a jpg, changing it to exporting as a png fixed the problem giving the me the jagged grungy lines I was looking for.

Flash Quirk Of The Day!

Flash has so many weird odd bugs it’s sickening. I was working with a simple timeline animation in Flash that looked like this: On the timeline was a shape tween that was acting as a mask for two MC’s. I had some initialization code that I only wanted to fire once contained in one of the MC’s, but for some reason it was called twice because the MC was being instantiated twice. I couldn’t figure out why the MC was being instantiated twice, so eventually I took a shot in the dark and converted the shape in the shape tween to a symbol. It worked and the code only fired once. So in the end my timeline looked like this:

CSS Optimizer .9 Released!

CSS Optimizer has been updated to version .9. This update includes a small set of improvements & additions: Improved recursive directory processing Improved compatibility with fie/directory names that contain periods Added support for parsing css information inside <style> tags Added -h option adding support for .html & .htm files In addition to those improvements I’ve written a Cocoa GUI for CSS Optimizer, which can be downloaded on the CSS Optimizer product page. The Cocoa GUI, named CSS Optimizer X, supports many Mac OS X features such as Drag n’ Drop, sheets, and drawers. The source code for CSS Optimizer is updated, I also posted the source code for Color Blender, and CSS Optimizer X. Enjoy!

Delaying a function call

What I’ve always found a major pain in Flash was delaying a function call from being called for a short period of time. The only reasonable way to do it was to call setInterval() and then clearInterval() after the function was called. I had to keep a intermediate variable to keep the interval id that setInterval() returned. This was a major pain and often ended up in cluttering up my project with code like this: I hate having to make intermediate variable & functions to accomplish really simple task. I came across Tom Rethaller’s schedule() method on proto.layer51.com and it was just what i was looking for except it had some scope issues and wouldn’t allow you to schedule the same function to be called on multiple instances of a object…

Apple + Intel

I never thought it would happen, but I’m happy it did! Apple is officially switching to Intel processors. I think this is a very good move for Apple, this will allow them to put faster, cheaper processors into Macs. According to the information on the WWDC keynote, developers wont have to do much at all to make their Cocoa based apps work on Intel processors; I’m pretty amazed Apple could pull this off. Most Windows/Linux users are probobly thinking “Now I can run os x on my Dell.” I would suggest that Apple, to the best of their ability, will make this impossible to do…

Open-Source Flash

Leaps and bounds in progress have been made in the journey towards total open-source flash development. MTASC, Swfmill, Xcode-Actionscript plug-ins, but one thing has been lacking; a resource of information on how to fully integrate all these applications together to create a Flash-IDE-Free development environment. Well, this problem has just been solved by the big players in the Open-Source flash movement by the unveiling of OSFlash.org wiki & mailing list. I’ve added some content to wiki, and many, many other flash developers have added content too. Its already an incredible Open-Source flash resource!

CSS Optimizer .8 Available!

CSS Optimizer .8 is now available. This release finalizes the long-hand to short-hand converter which now supports all short-hand CSS properties. The command line argument parser is also improved and is much more flexible, I’ve also fixed some minor bugs and improved error checking/reporting. I also uploaded the updated source code. Enjoy!

iPodLinux

I’ve been looking at iPodLinux for awhile now wanting to put it on my 4g iPod, unfortunately iPodLinux does not officially support the 4g’s yet and from looking at previous posts on the iPodLinux forums they will not offer help if can’t figure out how to install it from their directions on their web-site; which were a little too vague for me. Somebody put together exactly the type of directions I was looking for which made it easy, actually almost too easy to install it on my iPod. Thanks to exDev for the great directions! Its pretty cool to have linux on my iPod, the iPodLinux team did a great job on this software- but it’s not near finished…

App Stop .5 Released!

App Stop is a little application that allows you to pause an resume an application thus allowing other applications to use the CPU time previously occupied by that application. Right now its in its very early stages, and there is alot I am planning on adding to it, but its perfectly stable and works fine.

Year: 2005