Things I take for granted:#1 Typing

Today someone admitted to me that they cannot type and it got me thinking.

I work on a computer every day. I’ve noticed it before, but never really put much thought to it, but there are people I work with that are still poke-typing. It’s not a big deal, but I don’t know how the heck I’d be able to do my job if I couldn’t type on a keyboard without looking. It isn’t exactly the type of thing that goes on a resumé these days, but it’s pretty darn important.

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Wired on the iPad. I can’t wait

I already subscribe to Wired, but I’m looking forward to navigating through the pages digitally, but still being able to interact by touch.

Article on TUAW

Check out the video :

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Keyword Character Counter for iTunes Connect

The company I work for often receives a word doc containing what the client wants posted to Apple for the app description and keywords used for the iTunes store. Since Apple started asking for keywords to help correctly index apps in the store, someone had to decide what these keywords would be. If I don’t select the keywords myself, I get them in a variety of formats from clients and the folks in sales.

View the Character Counter here

Apple limits these keywords to 100 characters. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can count words up pretty quickly, but it seems no one has successfully been able to deliver me keywords that contain less than 100 characters. I usually don’t figure this out until I’m on the page in itunesconnect that asks me for them and I have to make a decision about what words to drop or adjust to get the app submitted. I created this simple utility to avoid finding out last minute.

This is a work in progress and as such there are no guarantees it will work for you. I don’t have a lot of free time and I whipped this up one afternoon while in between emails. It isn’t fancy and there are no bells or whistles. I find it handy in my day-to-day uploading of applications to Apple and maybe you will too. If anything is broken or you have feedback, please let me know in the comments.

Known Issues

- clicking in the second input box should select all text for easy copying. It doesn’t work in all browsers

- spaces on either side of commas are not stripped out resulting in an extra character. Just ran out of time.

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Use Grouped Table Background Stripes on Any UIView

Add this snippet to your iPhone project to give the background those familiar vertical stripes seen with grouped tables sections.

self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor groupTableViewBackgroundColor];

UIView with Stripes

UIView with Stripes

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Reset the Feeds!

Between Twitter, Facebook, and the dozens of websites churning out content that I don’t have time to read, I finally faced the reality that I’m not going to catch up. Sure, there might be some valuable article buried in my news reader, but at some point you have to call it what it is and mark them all as read.

feeds

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Work

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Final Straw for PowerPC

A little late to post about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta, as it’s been available for weeks now, but since I had already downloaded and installed it on my Macbook, I forgot to look into compatibility with my tower at home.

As it turns out, Lightroom 3 will not support PowerPC which, for me, means I’m left out for this upgrade. I do all of my photo processing on a dual 2.7ghz G5 which happens to be plenty fast enough for the task, but is running off the wrong chipset. It’s truly a shame that a perfectly good $3000 tower isn’t capable of running new software. What’s worse is that I can only get about $600 on ebay if I were to try to sell it.

Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 has the following requirements for Mac:

Mac OS

  • Intel based processor
  • Mac OS X v10.5 or 10.6
  • 2GB of RAM
  • 1GB of available hard-disk space
  • 1,024×768 display
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Macworld cover, start to finish

Cover creation from Peter Belanger on Vimeo.

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I chose the iPhone over the SLR

At this point, I’m not sure I’m surprised at this, but I took more photos with my iPhone last week on vacation than I did with my Canon. I think the convenience of having it always in my pocket and the ability to switch to video played a big role. Another factor was that it didn’t draw a whole lot of attention when I used it like the other camera would have.

Overall, I’m happy with results and I don’t quite regret not having the crisper, larger images since I have a handful of decent videos instead.

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Make your wedding entrance rock

Having photographed many, many weddings, I’ve had the chance to see a lot of wedding entrances. I’ve never seen anything like this though. A lot of couples will get inventive for their introduction at their reception, but most tend to stick to tradition for the ceremony, especially if theirs is held at a church.

I think what’s great about this video and the way the wedding party entered is that they immediately brought the level of enthusiasm and fun right through the roof. Nothing makes a wedding more memorable (especially for someone like me who has been to dozens) than getting your friends and family involved as much as possible – even the ones that might not like to dance.

http://www.break.com/index/jill-and-kevins-unexpected-wedding-entrance.html

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