dirtystylus

Bye-pod

My trip down to North Carolina last weekend with Jordan (for a friend’s wedding) went smoothly, save for one detail - my iPod went missing from my hotel room at some point during my stay. I had put it in my bag the first night I was there, and never used it during the stay. When I went to pack my bags and check out, it was gone. I’m upset, partly at myself for being careless and partly at whomever swiped it. I hope he/she enjoys my conversational Japanese podcasts, church sermons, and over 35gigs of tirelessly handpicked music. Perhaps the person will emerge with better taste as a result.

Mostly, however, I’m upset that this now puts me at the mercy of Apple’s opaque product release schedule. I would be tempted to hold out for the inevitable successor the the 5G that is currently out there, but that could mean waiting indefinitely - ask Jordan how long she waited for her Macbook. For more than six months I kept saying that the iBook replacement was going to drop any day now. That said, I’m typing this entry on her new machine, and it’s fantastic. Perhaps next year when Adobe releases the new versions of Flash/Photoshop I’ll pick one up to replace my aging 12″ Powerbook.

As for the iPod, the likely scenario is that I’ll wait and see if anything gets released in the next month or so, and if not I’ll look for a refurbished model to tide me over.

one. one. one. one.

I’ve finally put up my one-year photography project at shutter.dirtystylus.com.

I also just received the iPhoto book and poster in the mail; I’ll take some quick digital pics of both and post them shortly. I will also try to include my impressions on the Bessa/Zeiss combo I used for the project.

Curiously, no sooner had I put this project to rest than Zeiss announced a new superfast 50 in M-mount. Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer has the details.

DS vs DS

This space has been silent for a few days, but with good reason. I started my new job at Domani Studios on Wednesday, and I spent a bunch of time getting my workspace in order, mostly on the Flash/XCode integration end. I’ve been using XCode as my primary Actionscript Editor for a while now, but in setting up my computer at work I found some improvements had been made to the framework:

1) Josh Buhler’s post on Flash/XCode/NaturalDocs. This was written last year, but it’s still useful. There’s a project template, plus build scripts for Test Movie and/or generating documentation via NaturalDocs. The only modification I made was to change the build scripts in the XCode Project Template and the User Scripts to point to the Flash 8 IDE.

As a bonus Josh also has a tutorial on using XCode with the Flex SDK (which I guess will have to do until Macrobe gets around to releasing Flex Builder for the Mac).

2) There’s updated Actionscript2/3 code completion files for XCode here. One little wrinkle I found is that I had to unwrap these in a different directory other than ~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications/. Having more than one Actionscript.pblangspec file in Library directory caused problems with code completion. My guess is that XCode was reading in both the AS2 and AS3 files, and that created a conflict. Moving them to a different directory, and then just copying the one I wanted over did the trick.

There’s also CSS/PHP code completion files at opencode as well, just in case you never want to leave XCode.

Thanks to both Josh and the opencode crew for sharing their works with the wider world.

New Macbooks

Details here. Everybody expected these either last week or this Friday (at the big NY flagship store opening) so I was a little surprised to see them released today. They look like great machines, and Jordan can finally get her own laptop. But what’s up with the premium just for the black finish?

I’m personally holding off for two reasons: 1) an aversion to rev. A products, and 2) I’m not sure about running the Flash IDE under Rosetta.