Michael Bianco

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.

CSS Optimizer .7 Released!

After lots of hard work, I’ve finally finished CSS Optimizer V.7. Improvements in this version include: Recursive directory searching support. Specify a directory and use the -r option to optimize all the CSS files contained in the specified folder. Much better filesystem support. New -s & -n options. Better command line argument parser. Download it here. Read the readme that comes with the application for more information on how it works. All the source code is now available for download, if you compile it for windows or linux please send me the binary so i can post it on the product page. Recently, I came across Crockford.com. On his site he has an application called JSMin, which does the same thing as CSS Optimizer; just for javascript…

Embedded Pixel Fonts in Flash on OS X

Recently, while building my new version of my flash web-site I had a problem with a free pixel font i downloaded from Orgdot. Here were the symptoms of my problem: If I embedded the pixel font it would blur when used with a dynamic text field. The same pixel font would not blur if in a static text field. The pixel font would not blur in a dynamic text field that used system (A.K.A. device) fonts. Flash did not give me any errors when embedding the font. The windows version of the same font caused the Flash IDE to hang when it embedded the font (IE when the movie was published) I was following standard pixel font guidelines, sizes in multiples of 8, integer coordinates, 100% _xscale & _yscale…

AMFPHP Web-Site contest

Patrick Mineault has announced on his the AMFPHP Web-Site contest. The prizes look awesome, if I wasn’t so busy I would probably cook something up.

66 Miles

Not related to programming or web-design in any way but… Over the weekend my friend and I biked 66 miles across New Jersey, it was a blast. There was miles and miles of flat farmland, a car maybe came by once every 10 or so minutes. I’ve been in what some people would call ‘the middle of nowhere’ (upper NH), but this was seriously in the middle of nowhere, houses were spaced out a minimum of two miles away from each other. Anyway, it was a great experience and I would highly recommend doing it sometime!

Color Blender 1.0!

I’ve released my first Cocoa application, Color Blender. I wrote it because I got frustrated when i couldn’t convert a hex value to a rgb value quickly and easily, this immensely slowed down my workflow when trying to pick out a color scheme for a new web-site. Hopefully you will find it useful too. On a side note, a new version of CSS Optimizer, (renamed from Web Optimizer) which will have recursive directory searching support, and much better underlying filesystem support, among other things; is almost complete.

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