This blog sucks.
Posted by ajcates on Wed, 25 Nov 2009
Read my rumblr instead!
Although a Frog/Wolf tumblr plugin is coming around the corner…
Bowtie, your sweet little iTunes controller
Posted by ajcates on Wed, 13 May 2009
Bowtie is a stylish application that allows you to control iTunes while displaying album art work. This little iTunes controller boasts theming, Last.fm support, quick search and iTunes shortcuts among it's features. Oh and did I mention it's free.
Depending on the theme you choose to use will vary the functionally of Bowtie. Some themes only show the album artwork while others allow you to fully control iTunes and rate your songs. You can override some of the themes settings in the preference pane such as wether it will show on all spaces or the level at which the controller sits at. Among other settings are automatic updates, starting at login and how the application should display.
Adding themes couldn't be simpler in Bowtie. Just open any ".bowTie" file, that's it. Included with the Bowtie download is one of these theme files. Bowtie's theming is all controlled via xhtml, css and JavaScript. That basically means anybody who knows how to code a website is able to create Bowtie themes. That's a lot of people. On the Bowtie website they offer a theme pack that will get you started. If your looking for even more themes I find searching on DeviantART and MacTHEMES really helpful if you know of any other sources please list them in the comments.
Last.fm support is an awesome feature just because I find the official Last.fm client to be a bit of a resource hog when compared to Bowtie. For those of you that don't know, Last.fm is a social music recommendation service that tracks your music listing habits. If you are really into music and aren't using Last.fm currently, I suggest going and signing up.
Another cool feature that Bowtie is the keyboard shortcuts. I don't use the main ones as I prefer the ones that come built into the newer Mac keyboards. However I do use and love the search keyboard shortcut. It pops up this little window and when you start typing it'll search your iTunes library wicked fast, hit enter and the song will start playing your then switched back to your active application(Think Quicksilver). This is allows me to switch songs in iTunes almost effortlessly. Some of the other keyboard shortcuts include ones for Playback, Volume, Rating, and Showing/Hiding of the controller. They're all easily customizable as well.
Nifty things to search on twitter.
Posted by ajcates on Sat, 25 Apr 2009
So today I noticed this nifty little thing on the Twitter Search. After some thinking I came up with some of my own:
I also added a projects section to my site and updated my Twitter plugin for Frog.
Updated to Frog 0.9.5 RC2
Posted by ajcates on Sat, 11 Apr 2009
Today I updated to the latest release candidate for Frog CMS
In other news I have taken on David's challenge of building an Akismet Comment Plugin.
Twitter Plugin
Posted by ajcates on Sun, 29 Mar 2009
In the last couple of months I have quietly been working on a Twitter plugin for Frog CMS. It comes complete with a system to cache updates.
Instructions:
Unzip and then place the contents in a folder named "twitter" in your /frog/plugins/ directory.
Put this code where you want to show your twitter updates. Replacing "Twitter_User_Name" with your twitter username. The second parameter is the number of updates you would like pull.
<? $tweets = twitterUpdates('Twitter_User_Name', 4); ?>
The $tweets variable will now hold an array of the tweet class. You can simply loop through the array just like any other.
<? foreach($tweets as $tweet): ?>
<li class="tweet"><?=$tweet->text;?><span><a href="<?=$tweet->date?>"><?=$tweet->date;?></a></span></li>
<? endforeach; ?>
The tweet object is mostly the same as the Status Element as described in the twitter documentation. I added 2 more items, url and date for convenience.
Next you need to set the twitter.xml file to be readable and writable to php. You can do this by using the chmod command:chmod a+r+w twitter.xml