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.
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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.
]]>In other news I have taken on David's challenge of building an Akismet Comment Plugin.
]]>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 ]]>Some things got changed:
- New Design
- New Portfolio section
- New Portfolio items
- Comments re-enabled
Hopefully soon I will take the old ajcates.com site and make a wordpress theme out of it or something cool. No sense in letting a perfectly good design die.
]]>#textArea img {
max-width: 100%;
}
#textArea img:hover {
max-width: none;
} ]]>
]]>To use place this in your comment-form snippet some where in between the form tags(I personally do it right above the textarea). Oh also enable the plugin.
<?php captchaProxy::drawQuestion();?>
I really like how Frog version 9.3 handles everything in a cleaner manor making it easier to write plugins for. I really hope in future version we see more event usage, as that is where I feel the power of plugins will shine thur.
xmlcaptcha2.zip Download ]]>The biggest feature of it that it has removed, comments, files and other things from the core and moved them into plugins. That means I can crack open up the source of these files and use similar code in my own plugins. The licensing has also been changed(I've been thinking about forking it) to the AGPL.
I plan to be doing an update on my site hopefully soon. With the update I can hopefully get rid of this spam problem that I seem to have.
Edit:
So I am like almost all updated, it seems I can not get comments working with an updated version of frog. I have wrote out my Captcha class to work with frog 9.3, but it will not work on http://ajcates.com for some reason. Also in the back end admin interface, where it says comments, it just stays at none for some reason(even tho I manually set it to open in the db).
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So here I am browsing around the web like I do everyday, and I run into a little open source project called Vanilla. Vanilla is a web based forum system, very similar to phpBB or vBulletin. It doesn't have all the bloat like the other two and handles things a lot smoother and cleaner. If you plan to start a forum, I highly suggest you use vanilla, it may seem almost to simple to use, but have no fear there are lots of add-ons for Vanilla to make it just as complex as phpBB or vBulletin.
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I am also working on something that will put me on the map as an established web developer, something that no one has yet to do. I plan to give it away for free as well.
]]>I am so happy, this means I am near professional status when it comes to designing websites, all I need to do is get a bigger portfolio, and I will be well on my way.
]]>I read all the documentation, and set up a few layouts, and was hardly even touching the CSS, at first I thought that this was great then I realized that it was like designing with tables, except instead of table tags, you just have div soup. You basically set up the layout all in class attribute of your divs. The reason CSS was introduced was to separate content from style. When you use a frame work like Blueprint you are not doing that, your mixing it together and making soup.
I also hate Blueprint CSS because it uses pixels all the way through its code, there for it makes it very difficult to change its predefined static width of 950px. So developing and designing fluid width layouts is out of the question. A simple solution to this would be to make the width fluid, and base everything off of percents rather then pixels, because 100% of 950px is always going to be 950px. Doing things with percents would allow for fluid or fixed width layouts with ease.
Blueprint CSS is also very heavy in file size, first you have to either embed it in your current CSS, or have it as a separate style sheet, then you have to add in a lengthy class attribute to each of your div tags, so all the html you have just became fatter. The CSS size really isn’t a problem, but when you are adding to my lean and clean HTML we are gonna have a problem.
My last issue with Blueprint CSS is the fact that it changes my colors on my fonts, and I have to go searching through there CSS files to change it, or use an ugly !important.
]]>From Wikipedia:
A bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. The term is a portmanteau of the terms bookmark and applet. Whether bookmarklet utilities are stored as bookmarks or hyperlinks, they are designed to add one-click functionality to a browser or web page. When clicked, a bookmarklet performs some function, one of a wide variety such as a search query or data extraction. Usually the applet is a JavaScript program.
So I have came across some really cool ones, some that help me in web design big time. To use these, right click and click on "Bookmark this link". You can test them out on my site just by clicking on them. Note: These are only tested in Firefox.
]]>- New site design coming soon
- New Websiteninjas.com site design coming soon
- New portfolio piece with custom php backend