FlashApe

I use the app Things as my to-do list to keep track of..well, my to-dos. It’s been pretty great so far, definitely a huge plus for my workflow. I’m also trying to get more into Quicksilver to try and speed up some of the mundane tasks you do on the computer everyday…a good amount of your daily mouse clicks can be reduced to keystrokes by QS (or apps like it).

So today I was thinking it would be cool it I can take a bulleted list of changes from a client and add them to Things without having to manually copy and past them from mail, open Things, and paste each item one by one.

What I found was that you can do this with two features of QS: Proxy Objects, and the Services Menu Module plugin. To install the Services Menu Module, simply open up QS preferences, go to plugins, and click the checkbox next to ‘Services Menu Module’. To enable Proxy Objects, go to Catalog -> Quicksilver and enable Proxy Objects. If you click on the ‘i’ (info) button at the bottom of the window with Proxy Objects selected, a drawer will open displaying al iist of Proxy Objects you can use. They were all already selected for me, so I left them that way, but the one I needed for this to work was ‘Current Selection’.

So after enabling Proxy Objects, I went over to the Triggers tab (still in QS preferences), and added a custom Hot Key trigger. Under ‘Select an Item’ I chose ‘Current Selection’. For the action I chose ‘Things/New To-do containing selection as title’ (which is one of two Services menu item added by Things). Then I clicked on the info button at the bottom of the pane to open up a drawer which contains settings related to the trigger. I assigned the trigger a hot key of ^T (control-T) and made sure that the trigger would be active in all applications.

Now, in back in my email which contains the bulleted list of items, i can select an item, hit ^T, and the Things quick entry window pops up with the selected text already pre-filled in. I can add more info if i need to, tab down and select an approproate project/area to add the todo to, tab over to save and we’re done.

It’s one of those small things where the time savings really start to add up the more you use it, which is my goal of getting more acquainted with QS. The one thing I would like to do is have it so I can select the whole bulleted list at once and add each line as a separate to-do, so that I can skip the part of selecting each line individually. If Things had an API I bet stuff like that would be pretty easy.

I had a situation where I had a CS3 fla with a movieclip on stage, with stop() actions placed on a couple of frames on the timeline. The movieclip was associated with a class through the linkage properties. When i ran the movie, everything worked as expected...however, when loading that swf into another swf, the timeline actions were being completely ignored.

After searching around for a bit I came across MovieClip.addFrameScript, which lets you dynamically add frame scripts to the timeline. The usage is simple, I could just tell it which class methods to call on which frame:

This will call onEnterComplete() on frame 11, and onExitComplete() on frame 31.

Nice to see the release of CasaLib - the CASA flash framework renamed and updated to AS 3.0. The rename is to focus more on the fact that it's more of a code library rather than a full-on framework....I wish I saw more of that. I'd much rather pick some code to pull into my workflow than adapt to someone else's. Anyway, the old AS 2 Casa had some pretty solid code in there, and that looks to be the case in the AS 3 version as well.

I've been setting up multiple servers on EC2 lately, and spending some time using Webmin for each of the instances. I was getting confused as to which server I was currently working on so I figured I would change the theme to make it clear...unfortunately most of the default themes are similar or just plain ugly. I did stumble upon one really sweet one though, called StressFree (on the linked page it refers to it the theme as 'Tiger', but everywhere else - including webmin itself - seems to refer to it as StressFree) . It's super-slick, and it really makes dealing with the webmin interface a LOT nicer.

I've been curious about jailbreaking my iPhone since I first got it, and just the other day I went through with it. I used QuickPwn and it was a snap. For the record, I have a 2G (the original) iPhone and I wasn't going for unlocking it.

It's cool to see all the non-App Store things you can install on your iphone, plus all the customizations you can do with it. I think my favorite app so far is Flixwagon's video braodcasting app, which records video that can viewed live it flixwagon.com/username. Considering I have a new baby in the house and family and friends scattered all over the country who are always asking for pictures, the app has really fit the bill for me. The other thing that has rocked has been customizing the SpringBoard (which, I never knew, is the name for the 'desktop' of the iPhone, the screens that contain all the icons for the apps you have installed).

Downloading new software using Cydia has been every bit as simple as using the App Store. As far as I can tell, the overall selection of apps is not as big as what it used to be because there were big changes in the iPhone software from version 1.x to 2.x and not all apps have been ported over.

One big word of warning to anyone who is about to attempt this: DO NOT INSTALL KATE. Kate is an iPhone customization app the has had many, many problems reported with it. Unfortunately I only learned about that after installing it left my iPhone in an unusable state. Even after i uninstalled it, it was still whacked, so I had to reinstall it, turn off all of its options, and then uninstall it. Then after restarting the phone all the icons were all out of place and a bunch of app's settings were reverted to their defaults.

If anyone has some suggestions as far as killer apps or repositories I should be checking out, please let me know.