PlanetB

Turn Tweets Into a PDF

December 24th, 2010 View Comments

Last night I tried my hand with Google’s app engine. In short, I totally dig it. I figured I’d try to make a very simple app that turned recent Twitter stream posts from a user into a PDF file. It was fun, it was stunningly easy and the Python MVC framework that the Google Apps Engine uses is very nice.

The app performs a jquery JSONp lookup on the entered user screen name to first make sure it’s valid and verify that the Twitter API isn’t “Fail Whale”. Then it submits the user screen name to a POST handler. The POST handler uses a Google App Engine URL fetch() to retrieve the top 100 tweets from the user’s Twitter feed and uses ReportLab’s Open Source PDF generation toolkit to generate the PDF file.

Given that it simply uses the Twitter public API to retrieve the Twitter feed, private users won’t be able to use this to turn their tweets into a PDF file. But if your Twitter account isn’t private, rejoice and click here to turn your Twitter feed into a PDF!

2010 Online Awesome Sauce – Web Tools List

December 17th, 2010 View Comments

Apps may be the hot commodity among smartphones right now, but on the Desktop, web browser based applications are where it’s at. In 2010, I’ve found myself turning more and more to online web based solutions for various things. Here I present to you my list of awesome web tools that I’ve found indispensable for 2010.

How to Use Apache Ant to Automate BlackBerry PlayBook Builds

December 15th, 2010 View Comments

A couple of nuances that I’ve come across with using the PlayBook SDK from the command line include both the need to pass a boat-load of parameters and a lack of documentation on just how to use them. Through a bit of trial and error, I managed to get debugging with the command line tools to work and finally decided to automate some of the effort by using Apache Ant.

Apache Ant is a build tool similar to Make that facilitates the automation of the compilation and installation processes involved in building programs. Ant is also really simple to use.

I’ve decided to share my Ant build.xml file template for PlayBook application building. It’s fairly straight forward. Hopefully the following instructions (and video) will help you use the template. Note that these instructions do assume that you can already build and package swf and bar files and have already been able to successfully deploy to the PlayBook simulator.

2010 Erection of the SVG Christmas Tree

December 11th, 2010 View Comments

This year, like every year, as the holidays approach, my family likes to spend a festive and joyous evening with a nice fire, some hot cocoa, gingerbread cookies and some good old Ben Crosby while erecting the SVG Christmas Tree.

Feel free to steal the code, modify it and erect your own SVG Christmas tree.

Profitting from Republishing Public Domain Content

December 4th, 2010 View Comments

First, Some Public Domain 101

Before the printing press in the 1400′s, documents were largely copied by way of manual effort – painstakingly laborious and error-prone hand copying. Along comes the printing press and exact duplicates of works could be relatively easily created and widely distributed. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the church and government encouraged copying documents as a means of spreading biblical word and government information but also looked down on propaganda that wasn’t their own (critical work, works of dissent). As a result, laws were established to enforce control over what printers could print and for how long they could do so.

In the 16th century, printers from across England formed the Stationers’ Company and were collectively given the power to keep tabs on printed books and ultimately gave them dominant control over English publishing rights through the 17th century.

Ghetto iPhone Tripod Mount

December 4th, 2010 View Comments

What do you get when you mix a bunch of elastics, an old camera flash, some velcro and an iPhone?

PlayBook Dev – Blitting with Copy Pixels Does Not Draw When App is in Background

November 21st, 2010 View Comments

Thought I’d share this. I’m using the CopyPixels ActionScript method to blit images to the screen for animation. In this sample, notice how the CopyPixels method doesn’t update the sprite when the app is pushed into the background. This is unlike some of the device demos where we see movie footage continuing to run when the movie player is pushed into the background. Perhaps the video or media API uses some other method to modify image pixels, or maybe the beta version of the PlayBook simulator doesn’t have that snazzy ability like we’ve seen in the videos of others (Jim B) playing with the PlayBook.