Scruffles.net: July 2003

Saturday, July 26, 2003

iTunes 4 doesn't let you add pictures to multiple songs at the same time UNLESS one of the songs has an artist assigned to it's ID3 tag. I hope their not calling that a feature!

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

There is an interesting article on Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about just how unusable PDFs are on the web. I have never liked PDFs for many of the reasons Nielsen sites on the article.

Because Nielsen provides advice to creators of content, rather than those who invented the tools in the first place, he doesn't provide any useful solutions.. just workarounds. I don't expect to ever see a layout solution that works well for e-books, web browsing AND printing, but hopefully Adobe (or a competitor) is paying attention, and will make it much easier to design a document for multiple formats.

Labels: Programming

Yahoo2iPod

Saturday, July 12, 2003

As I�ve mentioned earlier, this week I wrote a simple program to convert data from my Yahoo account so it can be accessible on my new iPod. It isn�t much, but it�s something I needed for myself. I decided to apply the ol' spit-and-polish for the sake of learning a bit about my Mac. I made a Swing GUI (screenshot) for the app using the Aqua look and feel and packaged it in an Mac application bundle. I had some issues that I�ll probably write about at a later date, but for now I�m just going to post the program itself.

Here is a mac deployment, an executable jar and source code. It should run on a PC as well, but hasn't been tested yet.

I�m new to the world of Mac development, so if someone has a suggestion for a site that may be interested in knowing about this tool, feel free to send me a message.

I'd also like to thank Dave and Florian for thier feedback on my last post. Your ideas worked great!

Labels: Programming

iPod help

Tuesday, July 8, 2003

I just bought my first mac a couple weeks ago, and an iPod last weekend. So far I love them both. One of the first things I did with my iPod is write a quick sync program to read information from my yahoo account (addresses, calendar info, etc) and format them for my ipod. I ran into one problem, however.. I can't figure out a generic way to reference my ipod. The mount point is named after the name of the ipod.

If I can't find anything, I'm going to prompt the user on first use ("What is your iPod's name?"). What I would really like is for the program to be smart enough to detect the attached ipod on it's own. I don't mind if the solution is mac-specific. If anyone has any ideas, or can point me in a good direction, please post a comment below, or write me.

Labels: Programming

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