The Kaptain on ... stuff » Apple

VIJUG Griffon/Groovy Presentation

TheKaptain — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:36:12 +0000

I had a great time tonite geeking out with Griffon in front of an audience. My thanks to everyone that attended, and especially to Manfred Moser and VIJUG for the chance to show off some Groovy and Griffon Swing code!

The venue was great – very nice that the Vancouver Island Tech Park is kind enough to host meetings. Next time I’ll have to come early enough to figure out how to make the projector do better than 800X600 resolution, however. Hard to show much other than a slide deck presentation with that little space. Then again I may be a little spoiled when my usual is 1920X1200.

I love using Keynote for presentations with the Apple infrared remote. Between the presenter view with notes to guide what I wanted to say(and to remind me when to step out and demo some code) and the timer to keep me on track, it went really pretty smooth. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. The software, both Griffon and Keynote, worked flawlessly so if things weren’t perfect, there’s only me to blame.

SwingPad seemed to make quite an impression, which is not hard to understand considering how little effort it takes to start showing results on the screen. Put that together with the recent CSSBuilder integration and the rich samples for other builders and I think more than a couple of Java developers will be installing it soon.

The question came up enough that I want to directly reference this blog post from Andres Almiray regarding GSQL in Griffon. Apparently people like to have databases handy at all times

And a big thanks to Andres for sharing two free copies of the upcoming Griffon In Action that he is co-authoring for raffle prizes tonite. Through the magic of Twitter he was very supportive about 20 seconds after the original announcement went out. Now if only they can kill all those nasty spam-bots, etc that are messing with my Twittiness!

I’ve uploaded the demonstration application at github. It shows a simple Griffon app with three tabs. The first is a minor port of Andres’ Trident/GfxBuilder example to show animation. The second is a simple demo of the @Bindable AST transformation along with the SwingBuilder syntax for accesing SwingUtilities; it comes along with an accompanying Fest test. The third requires an internet connection as it parses out the DZone rss feed and delivers it into a GlazedList, demonstrating usage of SwingWorker courtesy of the SwingXBuilder. I showed those samples along with installer plugin built versions of some of the included Griffon sample applications. WeatherWidget is a one fine looking translucent UI example!

Please ping me if you have any problems running this Griffon app, as I did trim out a bunch of the extraneous project files and test reports right before uploading. This was my first time ‘really’ using Git for source control so it’s bound to be a bit messy – nevertheless the Git experience has been great so far. I also tried to get the slides up on SlideShare, but that appears to… not be happening(been uploading now for over 20 minutes this time- about to kill it, again). So here’s the pdf.
Source code download here.

Slidedeck download here.

Griffon Presentation

View more presentations from The Kaptain.

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iPhone 3.0 and Bluetooth Stereo

TheKaptain — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:39:36 +0000

One of the unexpected benefits of the recent 3.0 update to ithe Phone/iTouch operating system is the rebirth of my Motorola S9 bluetooth headset. I originally bought a pair of these on special from tigerdirect.ca ($19.99 as I recall) to use with a MacBook Pro and they were pretty hit and miss – I eventually gave up on them because everytime the connection dropped the laptop speakers would immediatley blare out whatever I was listening to.

I’d pretty much shelved them until I was reading over the list of new features and saw the new support for bluetooth stereo. Sure enough I dug the headset out of a box, charged it up and took the dogs for a walk – with beautiful wireless stereo sound piped out of my iPhone. The connection was very solid and the sound was at least comparable to the earbuds that come with the iPhone.

A quick test indicates that the microphone works great for phone calls as well, making these a great alternative to the earbuds. The lack of wires is a big bonus since the majority of the time when I’m listening to music from the iPhone it’s when I’m out with the dogs – and they do love to jump up and “accidentally” rip the earbuds off my head.

I thought I was doing pretty great with cut and paste and spotlight in the new feature set, and I get this added bonus for the same price as the rest: free . Thanks Apple! I can even almost forgive you the $10 charge to update the iTouch OS(tsk tsk).

If you’re interested in a good headset for the iPhone, here’s a nice article with some alternatives. I’m also EXTREMELY glad to see that I seem to have gotten a good deal on the headset, since they’re still listed online at $49.95US and I paid less than half of that, including shipping and handling. Thanks tigerdirect.ca!

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Mac and Windows are fighting over my Contacts and Calendar

TheKaptain — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:09:54 +0000

One of the truly stellar features in Mac OS X Leopard is the ‘sync’ of information between computers. I use multiple computers in different locations and having the ability to access a common Address Book, iCal, etc is invaluable.

In particular, when I bought a new Macbook Pro not so long ago, the sync allowed me to turn on the laptop, plug in an ethernet cable and enter my MobileMe identity – and that was it. When the sync was done, I immediately had access to my wireless network at home (KeyChain passwords sync’d seamlessly) – no trying to find, copy down and manually transfer my encryption key! That in particular is handy since I have over a dozen wireless network configurations stored.

Another nice to have, since my employer uses an Outlook system for email, was the Entourage sync. Or at least it would be if the damn thing didn’t keep duplicating all of my calendar entries and contacts! When I noticed it the first time I said to myself : “not perfect, but I can live with it for the convenience it provides”. By the time I started getting calendar events showing up on my iPhone for the fourth time, I said enough was enough and went Googling.

Starting with this article on the Entourage support page, I ended up reading this over on MacWorld, which brought me to the iCal Dupe Deleter. That took care of the iCal problem in under 20 minutes with less than 10 button clicks. Not bad – tnx to the creator of that software John Maisey, it worked fast, correctly and exactly as advertised.

I haven’t yet done the same for the iPhone, but it looks like iTunes supports a sync option to just replace the info on the phone and start anew, so I anticipate no problems.

Seeing as how it appears that neither Microsoft or Apple have anything planned to address this obvious problem in the software interaction(strange that those two don’t see eye to eye), it’s fantastic that the community out there in intarweb land is so great at sharing ways to address it. So let Mac and Windows fight over my stuff, I still win. Nyah nyah!

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