HP Touch Pad – touch to share with webOS!

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

As I have blogged before HP are voicing a serious commitment to webOS. I say voicing because it is hard to see many actual devices yet, but it is a non-trivial task they are about so we shouldn’t expect instant products and it is easy to doubt just because the kit isn’t here yet.

Here is a link to a video the sort of thing that should be along soon but as yet no price or firm date.
Fierce Wireless – HP TouchPad demo

Looks good though! The Touch to Share looks cool (10:20 mins in). Plenty of other videos after this one has run.

As a developer, webOS is good with me, if you can write a web page (java script, css, HTML, …) you can write apps. You can also write in C/C++ if that’s your thing, just get hold of the PDK to do that.

Da Pain, Da Pain

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

How can life be so cruel? Here I am with a copy of QuarkXPress 9 to play with and I haven’t got time to give it more than a cursory glance. One thing is for sure, this is the most exciting version of QuarkXPress… ever. It has jumped miles ahead of inDesign even though Adobe fans will never admit it.

QuarkXPress 9 has become the best production tool encompassing digital publishing in just about all formats, from books and magazines, through web and Flash to the new world of E-books and Apps. All in one package that even designers from the era of QuarkXPress 3 will feel comfortable with. The cycle will be complete when the iPad App creation plug-in is available (for free) in a couple of months time.

So what’s new?

As a long-time jogging designer I’ve done just about anything in print. Each design job needs different tools; for press ads and one page designs I usually reach for inDesign but for anything heavy-weight or requiring superb typography, QuarkXPress is the tool for me. Especially for 300 page, heavily illustrated books of which I must have desgined near-on 2000 or more.

I can’t wait to get my next book because of the new tricks Quark has given me to play with. The list is beyond the scope of a blog and the 45 minute introduction to QuarkXPress 9 is well worth watching, here <http://vimeo.com/21189237>

For me as a book designer the best elements of QuarkXpress 9 includes the new and amazing conditional styles, which can automate the formatting for an entire book. Once styles are set-up in the new pallet, text is formatted word-by-word, line-by-line. It is a bit like the nested stylesheet idea in inDesign – but with a turbocharger. Quark has taken it to new level by looking for certain conditions such as a return, column break, tab, or whatever you set as a conditional style marker. Then repeat the action until it reaches the last conditional style marker. You can even format text forwards or backwards.

This really is easier to see demonstrated and to set things up is a bit of a mind bender involving a certain amount of experimenting. Once done, styling even a whole manuscript is a case of a click or two instead of an hour or two. There is even a new story editor, dragged in from Quark’s Publishing Solution (as used by daily newspapers and the like). So it’s taken Quark 20 years to copy one tiny part of PageMaker, Calamus and just about every other DTP package, but it makes life so much easier.

Got the bullet

Also new are bullet, numbering and outline styles which can also reflect the formatting of imported text. As can Quark’s new import filters which are, at last, smart enough to leave in place local styles such as bold and italic. If it could even change the typeface rather than the local style, it would be perfection. Before sending any job off, one should really search for incidences of text being turned bold, italic, small caps, etc, and swap it for the bold, italic, small caps version of the typeface. It is the matter of moments to do and usually one finds spurious fonts, colours and so on which have been retained from imported text.

Another big plus is the way QuarkXPress handles text flows. It used to be a pain in the proverbial to unlink and reflow text and often a sure way to accidentally loose text in long chains. In QuarkXPress 9, text boxes can be linked even if they contain text, or unlinked retaining the text already in the box. I’m just not sure about the controller’s name, Linkster. It just sounds too much like a Batman arch enemy.

Calling all outs

My favourite feature, apart from the new and as yet untested (by me) E-Book publishing, is graphics and call-out handling. If I am designing a book on the uniforms of the KGB (which I have to admit is one of mine) I want to make sure the photo of the cap badge sits neatly beside the text referring to it. This used to be a matter of attention to detail but when one cap badge looks almost the same as the next and you are already finding yourself bored to death by the subject, it was easy to let the two get separated. Not so now with QuarkXPress 9’s new Callout Styles which anchors text and graphics or other text boxes together even to the point of positioning on the page. As text flows back and forth due to author’s changes, the graphics move with it.

The latest Mac User, another Dennis publication, says the Table tool now handles text and graphics but as far as I’m concerned, it did in version 6 or 7 and I have the books to prove it. However they also say that live links can be created between Excel and QuarkXPress. Something I didn’t know. It all sounds similar to that what Apple tried to achieve in System 7 or 8 but developers weren’t as forward looking in those days.

Finally, and again as a book designer, another great improvement is the way QuarkXPress 9 handles repeated graphics. This is a further escapee from Batman called the Cloner. In reality it controls copies of anything across multiple pages or even documents and even replicates stylesheets.

When a 300 page book has 5 images per spread, the designer has to establish a means to communicate with the editor over which picture goes where. The easiest way is to make a contact sheet which, until QuarkXPress 9 and Cloner, meant using an AppleScript to automatically import graphics into a grid but they arrived naked with no caption. It was easier to import the images into something like iView and create the contact sheet complete with labels. Cloner solves this dilemma.

There is just so much to learn and like in QuarkXPress 9 it is going to take me two or three months to get to the bottom of it, if l ever do. It is the first version of QuarkXPress which makes me feel completely de-skilled because there are just so many new features. Even so, the interface after  two decades will still be familiar and immediately usable by a DTP pro in the early 1990s.

Even so, there are one or two minor anachronisms, such as the PPD selection list which still has a too small window and the book pallet still needs attention.

As far as E Books and Apps, they will have to wait until the final elements of QuarkXPress 9 are in place.

Who’s in charge? Using _set_invalid_parameter_handler to avoid GPF’s

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Don’t you hate it when the system knows better than you? I have coded my open file so not only can the user specify the file name they can also set the C open mode. OK, this assumes they know what they are doing (there is an option not to enter it and it will sort it out for you) and many would say that assuming a user is competent is a HUGE mistake. However, I am a user too and maybe I would like to set the mode manually sometimes. Why? I don’t know why – if I knew why I could have coded the option! Maybe in 10 years time they’ll be a new mode I want to support, maybe I want to specify Unicode, whatever, one day I might know better than I know now so why limit the thing?

Anyway, I allow the user to set the mode and if they set an invalid mode the open fails & I tell them. Not on windows. Using MS’s fopen if the mode is invalid it throws an exception and closes the whole app. Thanks Bill.

To avoid this you need to code an over ride to the invalid_parameter_handler. eg

//write a pointless handler
void myInvalidParameterHandler(const wchar_t* expression, const wchar_t* function,
const wchar_t* file,
unsigned int line,
uintptr_t pReserved)
{
// do nothing because the error return handles it anyway, thanks for the extra work Bill
}

// set hook to pointless handler
_invalid_parameter_handler was_invalid_parameter_handler= _set_invalid_parameter_handler(myInvalidParameterHandler);
_CrtSetReportMode(_CRT_ASSERT, 0);
if ((fopen_s(&fp_, fn, mode)!=0) || fp_==NULL){
messageBox( “Cannot Open File\”%s\” mode \”%s\”"), fn, mode);
}
// set handler back to where it was
_set_invalid_parameter_handler(was_invalid_parameter_handler);

webOS Connect – tweet central

Friday, April 1st, 2011

An exciting night at webOS connect,

http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/03/21/developing-for-mobiles/
http://webosconnect.com/en/home/home
I live a sheltered life but I have never seen so many people tweeting at one event. There were various presentations all enthusing about webOS and its new development environment. My favourite presenter was ubershinysheep (AKA Ben Tattersley) – youth and enthusiasm are always going to win in a 10 minute slot.

The key new thing seems to be display scale-ability – the same app running nicely on a phone or a slate. That and a much nicer development environment – but they always claim that. The key buzz word is Enyo – you can do your own google.

Have a look at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23webosconnect for some tweets – if that’s your thing, if it isn’t then maybe you shouldn’t be doing mobile development.

Amazon releases cloud music player… for US ears only

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

I was genuinely excited when I woke up this morning to discover Amazon had finally launched a cloud-based music service.

I’d now be able to connect to the cloud with my HTC Desire, hook up to all my tunes, and then buy more songs when out and about via the Amazon MP3 player. I went online and ordered my 5GB Amazon Cloud Drive and uploaded some songs (for whatever reason it took 3 hours to upload around 3GB of music – not massively impressive…).

Then I discovered the smartphone-to-cloud capability was only available in the US. My dreams were shattered into tiny shards of pain and I put my headphones over my ears and went back to blasting out some tunes in my inconsolable, cloudless depression.

Now, considering most albums are actually released here a few days before the US, how come we have to wait longer for this?

In fact, if cloud computing is meant to make access to files super fast and insanely easy, and if data can be delivered from anywhere over the cloud, why the Dickens can’t the UK and elsewhere get hold of this service from today? Are we not good enough guinea pigs for you Amazon? You must have enough storage space to accommodate our musical needs…

And I thought the tech world understood that my generation was full of impatient brats like myself, so why aren’t they catering to my every demand? I want it and I want it now, so deliver it unto me posthaste.

Perhaps others will pip Amazon to the post in making cloud-based music services available to the world…

Almost all of my music is stored on Apple software/hardware. Now, given how much Apple hates being behind competitors, I’d hope Steve Jobs and Co will have a cloud-based music depository ready soon. And I’d hope they’d make it available in the UK straightaway, not treat us like unwanted relatives and keep us waiting.

Surely the likes of Google and Facebook are having a look at what they can do in this arena as well. Even BT are rumoured to be bringing out a music streaming service, although that’s a slightly different kettle of fish.

If tech behemoths like these all get on board, the cloud might prove to be the chimera that is the ’saviour of the music industry’ (that’s if the industry is actually dying – another question entirely). It will certainly change things anyway. Let’s just hope everyone has the foresight to do things globally now, rather than acting in an insular fashion.

Fun with LaTeX

Monday, March 28th, 2011

All right, calm down, not that kind of fun or indeed that kind of latex, “LaTeX” is no typo, it’s a typesetting / document layout language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

If you have need to layout tricky documents or, as in the case of a friend I was helping at the weekend, write a document full of special symbols it’s just what you need. Of course it is from UNIX and was used with TeX. Which is good because it is open source and you can use free software like
http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
to produce PDF documents with weird and wonderful symbols – for all elements members of curly C mapped to gamma to the power theta anyone?

It was quite nostalgic to work with non-WYSIWYG text editing but also frustrating. There doesn’t seem a way to map the PDF back to the source – when you spot an error in the final product it’s a case of searching the source for the relevant text. Fortunately Texmaker does take you to the problem line if the “compiler” throws an error. We got there in the end though!

Developing for mobiles

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Since HP acquired Palm webOS has had a lot more going for it. HP seems to want it on all platforms, not just phones
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110209xc.html

The idea of an OS that runs on your PC, slate, phone, MP3 player, …. seems nice for users and a joy for developers – though it could put a few of us out of a job, the hours I’ve spent porting apps from one OS to another have kept me in work and mortgage payments many a time!

The idea of an OS written with the web in mind also seems a good one.

Anyway, if you are interested try a google, but I’d suggest
http://www.palm.com/us/products/software/webos2/ & http://developer.palm.com/
as good starters.

And if you want to get more involved on a less virtual level try
webOS CONNECT London Kick-off
http://www.amiando.com/webosconnectlondon.html

I’m off to polish my java / java script!

Help

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

There were three of them, we were young and they looked oh-so sexy in their silvery grey jackets. We became intimate immediately, slept together every night and I devoted all my attention to them equally. It was exhausting and especially when my wife joined in and made it a ménage à trios.

(more…)

Massive Amounts of Big Language Abuse

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

IT and the US are both major sources of corruption – of the English Language at least. HP has just acquired Vertica
http://www.vertica.com/

and I was going to blog of the IT business implications but can only get as afar as
“Customers Can Analyze Massive Amounts of Big Data at Speed and Scale”

Where else could you read “Massive Amounts of Big Data”? You only have to look further down the page before you hit a “monetizing”. Eugh!

Anyway, hopefully this is part of HP’s commitment to high value, high return software rather than low margin hardware.

Fixing meeting dates – a doddle?

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Has anyone used http://www.doodle.com ? Seems a great way of scheduling a meeting without sharing outlook calendars or sending a thousand I can do … can you? mails.

Being an old cynic I’m reluctant to enter all my invitees (is that a word?) email addresses – if they get a ton of spam I’ll feel responsible. Am I being unreasonable?

Having had a bit of a google I’ve found several similar tools and this rather nice slide show comparing them

http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/online-scheduling-tools-doodle-and-more

I’m rather taken with http://www.slideshare.net/ itself too!

So has anyone written an app that lets you chuck all your phones in a heap and it sorts out your next available evening / weekend / work time meeting in a range of dates? Should be do-able unless someoen has one of these.