2006 - Page 2 of 5 - Michael Bianco

WWDC Announcement Thoughts

The announcements this year are not as impressive as last year. Probably the most exciting thing for most people this year is the new Mac Pro: 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, dual 64 bit 3GHZ processors. Wow, I want one. I am sort of disappointed with the end-user Leopard features. The time machine idea sounds and looks cool, but I’m wondering how useful it will be and how much it will slow down my computer. The improvements to iChat are very welcome, and the screen sharing feature looks incredible. Spaces looks awesome, finally we are going to get built in virtual desktops. I really don’t use Dashboard or iCal, so changes to those areas of the OS don’t really affect me…

Here Goes Nothing

A couple days ago I went ahead and bought my first guitar, a Fender DG-8. Hopefully with this guitar, a couple teach-yourself DVDs, some books, and some help from my guitar-playing friends I’ll be able to become half-way decent at the guitar. Wish me luck!

XASH 1.3

XASH 1.3 has finally been released!..

Task Manager

Today I departed on a search for a task manager (AKA To-Do list) for os x that would suite my fancy. I guess I’m pretty picky because I didn’t really find anything computer application I really liked. Most of the applications I found were either too tied to iCal (which I don’t use at all), made 2+ years ago and haven’t been updated since, just to complicated to be simply a glorified to-do list, or just plain ugly to look at. I guess I’m more picky than most when it comes to Mac applications: I want a great looking fully functional Cocoa based mac application. My search finally ended, but instead of finding a mac application to suite my needs, I found a nifty little web-application; GTDTiddlyWiki…

Two Web-Dev Tips

Applying Filters To a Loaded Image I haven’t done any Flash work in awhile, and I guess I forgot the amount of quirks it has (although its getting much better). Applying filters to a loaded image doesn’t work. I loaded a MC using this code: [code] var loader = new MovieClipLoader(); var listener = {onLoadInit:Delegate.create(this, imageLoaded)}; loader.addListener(listener); loader.loadClip(“pic.png”, holder); [/code] Then tried to apply a filter like so: [code] var blur = new flash.filters.BlurFilter(30, 0, 3); holder.filters = [blur]; [/code] But nothing happened. The filter works fine on a MC containing a image from the library. The solution?..

Transparent PNG To JPG Conversion

Converting a semi-transparent PNG to a JPG without severe artifacts or “transparent area color meshing” is a much harder task than you would expect. I thought it would be as simple as loading the image into Image_Transform and using _generate(null, ‘jpg’) to convert the image to a jpeg. Well, that code will convert it to a jpeg, but all the areas that are semi-transparent end up looking absolutely horrible becoming sort of flattened…

Back From Retreat

Just got back from a three day church retreat at Stuebenville Ohio (which was an awesome experience). I’m happy to be back and have alot of new things in the pipeline. Within the next couple weeks I should have the following available: XASH 1.3 (you can actually download it from the SVN repo right now) XTrace 1.1 App Stop 1.2 (with intel compatibility!) A few PHP scripts along with some new AS classes

XTrace Subversion Repository

Continuing with the trend of moving all my projects to using SVN, a repo for XTrace is now available. You can checkout the latest source with the following command:[code lang=”bash”]svn co http://svn.mabwebdesign.com/XTrace/[/code] For anyone using TextMate as their primary editor, you should checkout this article which explains how to use XTrace, TextMate, and MTASC to create a slick Flash dev environment.

XASH Subversion Repository

I’ve recently created a SVN repo for XASH, anybody whose interested in the latest source can anonymously checkout through the following command:[code lang=”bash”]svn co http://svn.mabwebdesign.com/XASH/[/code] Juan Carlos Anorga (thanks Juan!) has committed some great changes that are worth checking out if you have Xcode and are willing to compile XASH from source. I’ll be releasing XASH 1.3 which will include his changes within the next week.

iDictionary 1.1 Released

iDictionary 1.1 has just been released, new features include: iDictionary Lite has been merged into iDictionary, this means that if you don’t own a license you can still use iDictionary; but, your dictionaries will be restricted to letters a-z. Added “Created Dictionaries” window. You can now view and select all previously created dictionaries to easily copy them to your iPod. The “Created Dictionaries” window also features a “Reveal in Finder” function which allows you to see where the selected dictionary is located on your computer. User interface improvements to the dictionary & iPod selection tables “Under-the-hood” improvements to the iDictionary code base. You find a little more detail about the release on the new Prosit Blog…

Year: 2006