12/12/2009
Update 2: New versions of several of these apps have been released. Things are
a lot better.
Update:I’ve had feedback on this post from O’Reilly both by email and in the comments. Both Andrew and the other O’Reilly representative I’ve been in contact with seem sincere when they say that these apps will be updated with fixes for the downright broken content and that they intend to invest in further development for the mobile platform.
Since this was pretty much what I’d hoped to hear, I’m going to say that this little outburst served its cause.
To whom it may concern.
I have for years been a satisfied customer of O’Reilly. I’ve bought and enjoyed several books from you both as dead tree paperbacks and downloadable PDFs.
To my chagrin I also bought a number of titles on the iTunes app store once I found out that you publish a selection of your books as standalone apps there. I’m sad to report that I found these apps to be rather disappointing. In fact they are complete and utter crap.
It’s apparent that what you have done is to adopt the Stanza engine and stripped it down to contain one book per instance. Unless you’ve reinvented an already triangular wheel it also seems that you simply process your Safari PDFs through the downloadable helper app and then push the results to the app store.
Look; Stanza is a great e-book reader when it comes to downloading and reading “Frankenstein” as a Public Domain EPub book. And if you have some totally-not-copyrighted PDF you want to get onto your iPhone the desktop Stanza app does a tolerable job of ripping the file to HTML and reflowing it to read nicely on the small display, but converting PDFs with Stanza in this manner is, undeniably, a hack. It’s a workaround to get a PDF meant for a big screen unto a small screen, no questions asked.
Stanza is admittedly a pretty good solution to get a book onto the iPhone, a few formatting issues aside. There is however a considerable difference between reading a novel and feeling slightly irked because the chapter titles don’t show up in bold and reading a book on programming where half of the code is illegible, broken, or overflows beyond the page and into oblivion.
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3/12/2009
No no. I’m not about to start a kerfuffle about changing the location and / or name of my blog again. I just wanted to make sure you’ve heard about the new ria.creuna.com site.
Basically me and the other RIA-developers broke out and started our own blog. If you like the code, geek and tech content from this site you should be sure to check it out. For example you could start with my huge post about URL Recognition, or you could read how my co-worker exposes the clickTAG sham for the lousy stinky piece of bad stuff it is.
6/06/2009
Lately the internet has had a wave of sites using the cherished Konami Cheatcode to reveal easter eggs or similar functionality in the site or app.
I wrote a (crappy but working) class to implement such functionality in ActionScript about a year ago here.
I decided to polish it up a bit for the benefit of myself and anyone else and in the process ended up creating a small utility class to work with keystrokes in the process.
You can download the (fairly self-expaining) classes and a sample project right here, or read on for a bit of explanations.
(Text) Keys.as.
(Text) Konami.as.
(Archive) Neatly zipped + example.
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21/04/2009
Do you use any Adobe products? Tell me if this sounds familiar: “Oh hai! I need to update some totally unrelated stuff on your machine! You know, some camera raw stuff or InDesign whatchamacallits, so I’m just going to force you to quit all your browsers, because lordy lordy who knows what might happen if you coincidentally were looking at interwebs while I was installing this shit. Woohoo!”
Yes… The old adobe installer/updater. Let me count the ways I hate you. Quite a few! So, more out of spite than anything else I started checking out what browsers might not be sniffed up by the dreaded ugly beast that is the Adobe Installer/Updater. Turns out they’ve been thorough. Fluid gets away with it, but it’s really not that great for anything but site-specific stuff (which it was made for, and indeed does very well).
So in the end I wrote my own web browser, and of course I did it in AIR (Adobe Integrated AIR Runtime… RAS!).
So let me advice you; This is NOT a good browser, and it is NOT much of a feat to have written it, but it WILL work during an Adobe installation does its thing, and it IS fucking hillarious to use Adobe technology to subvert Adobe technology.
The source is available in the app itself, and you’ll notice that I’ve used this guys styles to pretty it up a bit. Knock yourself out if it takes your fancy. If you install the app you’ll get a very basic browser. A URL field, back and forward history buttons and a search field. Impressively it seems to remember your logins from other browsers, which is not my doing at all. Clicky clicky badgy badgy to install.
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
22/03/2009
Update!! Yahoo did the same dick move of cockblocking Flash. :/ To remedy this the URLRequest on line 80 had to be changed. If your project used to work but doesn’t anymore; Try this. If this is your first time here; Ignore this message.
—
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
So, I saw that I’m still getting some traffic to this post where I suggested a solution to the Twitter crossdomain.xml problem.
The Yahoo pipes solution still works fine, but my code is a godawful mess and I decided I’d have to fix it up a bit. The methodology is essentially the same. We’ll be using this yahoo pipe, but it’s neatly blackboxed so that you just need to know your Twitter ID to use this class.
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