Michael Bianco

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…

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…

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)…

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.

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!

with() Problem/Bug

This is yet another bug I found while doing some Flash-dev, it has to do with the with() statement. If you use with(this){…} it will give you erratic/unpredicted behavior, for instance take this code: You would think that output would look like this: But, instead it comes out as: Seems as though Flash does not allow you to set variables when using this in a with() statement. You can get the .fla i used to make the test cases for this bug here. Thanks Macromedia for wasting another hour of my time! 😛

App Stop Comic?

I recently found this while browsing the web: It came from this web-site. Someone made a comic about my free-ware application.. hehe 😛

App Stop V.9

App Stop V.9 has just been released, here is the list of changes: Added the much requested support for background applications Added a UID/User-name column to the table-view Fixed problem where the menu icon would be really small on OS X 10.3 Fixed a problem where checking for updated while disconnected from the internet would report than a new version is availible Obviously the big change in this update is the support for background processes. If you are running OS X 10.3 you may experience crashes when changing preferences related to background processes. I have no idea why these crashes are occurring, hopefully I will be able to track down the problem by the 1.0 release…

Of Flash & ID3 Tags

Flash says it supports ID3 1.0 & 2.0 tags, but from my experience MM implementation of ID3 tags in Flash is very poor and half the time I cant get any ID3 information. Has anybody had any luck with ID3 information in Flash? Most Flash-based MP3 players out there don’t use ID3 information for song titles and such but load the information from an XML file, so I assume this is a commonly known bug although I haven’t seen any information about this anywhere on the net…

Determining When A Movie Clip Is Initialized

This is a common problem in Flash, determining when a MC is fully initialized. This problem only really arises when you are using attachMovie() to dynamically make/attach MC’s to the stage. An example of this problem is if you have a MC with timeline animation that you are going to attach to the stage. The timeline animation has stop() on its first frame and its last frame. You use this code to attach it to the stage: The attached “box” MC wont play (Here’s an example of what I’m explaining). Other common problems like this are trying to grab the height of a dynamic textfield with autoSize = true contained in a MC that you have just attached to the stage and assigned alot of text to the internal textfield…

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