NOTE: This isn’t working in the latest releases of browsers. Please let me know if you have updated or know of maintained versions of this code I can link to.

I have often used JavaScript to add reflections to images. Ideally this would be done server side, but often for quick presentations or mock ups it saves a lot of time.

I have previously used Reflection.js, which uses prototype. Since I now normally use jQuery I looked for a jQuery version of reflection, which I found here.

There is a big problem with the code though. If the images haven’t loaded then the reflection fails. Most of the time if you refresh the page it will work (thanks caching), but that’s not idea.

I have written a work around until the plugin is updated. The work around will run and check each image with the reflect class to see if it has finished loading (using the handy .complete). If it hasn’t it sets a flag to retry after a time out, if it has then we call the reflect function on it, and then remove the reflect class, so we don’t check it again next time. Tom improved this by using the .load function which removes the need for the time out, nice work, I have updated the examples. This works really well, especially when you have lots of large images, or users on slow connections. The code will also add the reflection to each image as it loads, rather than waiting for all of them to load.

<script type="text/javascript">
	$(document).ready(function() {
		$("img.reflect").each(function(){
			$(this).load( 
				function(){ 
					$(this).reflect({height: 0.3, opacity: 0.6} );
				} 
			);
		});
	});
</script>

Please let me know if you have any advice or improvements!

You can see a jQuery Reflection work around example here

On Friday whilst getting my iPhone replaced in the Apple store I picked up a 500GB version of Time Capsule. Time Capsule is Apples solution to backing up you computers via WiFi.

The unit contains a 500GB hard drive as well as a 802.11n wireless access point. The system acts like a mini server, letting you see the hard drive over the network from any of your macs. You can also plug in another USB hard drive, or printer and see them too.

The system set up was a breeze, I plugged in the box, connected it to my router via it’s network port and that’s it. I connected to the Time Capsule via WiFi and then use the Airport admin utility to set it up as I wanted. Using the wizard I managed to use the Time Capsule as a bridge to my existing network, allowing me to have an 802.11n network for my MacBookPro and keep my old wireless router for my non 802.11n devices.

The Time Machine set up was also very easy, there isn’t much to do, although I removed A LOT of the stuff it backs up as default (such as system files and applications), to focus on documents and media and work. The whole lot (about 68GB) transferred wirelessly in roughly 3-4 hours! It now backs up hourly every day (that its on and connected to the network), daily for a week, and weekly until the disk runs out of space, warning you when it deletes old backups. I have also tested using the Time Capsule disk for files, as well as another USB disk, and it all works splendidly! The only minor annoyance I have is the huge green light on the front, not sure it needs to be that big…

I would thoroughly recommend Time Capsule, to anyone wanting a painless back up solution although I am yet to use Time Machine to recover anything, but it looks very nice ;)

Tuesday saw the release of the iPhone software version 1.1.3, and amongst the new features it were web clips on your home screen. This allows you to save bookmarks to websites on your home screen, for quick access.

By default the icon used for a web clip will be a screen shot of the page. This is great, but it doesn’t look nice and makes it hard to tell at a glance, one web clip from another. Dan Dickinson blogged about how you can add custom touch icons to your website by adding a link tag into the head of your HTML.

This is great and many sites have already added custom icons, (pownce, google, twitter) but there are some that don’t (as of yet) such as Google reader.

So up popped Drew with a bookmarklet to add custom touch icons to your iPhone’s home screen. It works by adding the link tag into the head of the document after you specify a path to the image, clever stuff! So all you have to do it host your custom icons, or use other peoples and away you go.

I am not sure how it works on replacing images if they are already there (the twitter one sucks). Lots of people are starting to create their own too. Nathan recommends creating icons at 158×158px to get a crisp look, Mr. Hicks has a nice little RSS icon for Google Reader and Ben Darlow has a host of icons including a nice twitter (twitterific) one.

Step by Step

1. First drag this link to your safari bookmark bar. Set touch icon or Override Touch Icon
2. Sync your iPhone (with bookmark sync turned on)
3. Browse to a website you want to make a web clip of through safari on your iPhone
4. Open your bookmarks and find the one you just added to bookmark bar
5. Enter the URL of an icon/image you would like to use
6. Hit OK, then click the + at the bottom of the screen
7. Select, “Add to Home Screen” and wait for the icon to appear
8. Enter a name and hit, “Add”

UPDATE:

I have hacked and updated Drew‘s bookmarklet to override sites with existing Touch Icons: Override Touch Icon

It’s a bit dirty as it removes all link elements in the head, however this shouldn’t be a problems as you shouldn’t need them after the page has loaded and this is a one off for setting the home screen icon :) Also be sure to wait for the icon to load, can take a while…

UPDATE 2:

Drew has taken my hack and made it a little more efficient and less reckless by just removing link tags with the “touch icon”‘s rel attribute, and then breaking when it finds it. It’s fun learning about bookmarklets, although I am sure there is a better way of writing them than how I was doing it :p

UPDATE 3:

Cameron Hunt has updated the bookmarklet even more to give users some of the most commonly icons by default (and make it look slightly nicer). Cameron Hunts’s Friendly iPhone Web Clip Override

UPDATE 4:

Check out iclypso for a great source of icons and instructions on how to do it!

Initially I had teething problems with both. Change to something you are so used to is not always easy to take, and with PES2008, as with all new version I struggled to get to grips with the new look and feel, especially as this is the first real version in HD. Have to say improvements in hardware have been felt in graphics as well as AI, the computer is now far more intelligent and frustrating to play on hard. New additions such as diving seem to be quite a skill, and I am yet to get anything than booked for trying!

Leopard also had a hard start! I initially got an apple blue screen of death when upgrading, something I later found to be a fault with Application Enhancer, a framework tool that hadn’t managed to upgrade, or warn it’s users of the fault!

I was relaxed knowing how OS X works, and was assured to know nothing would be tampering with my home folder! I eventually got it working, and it’s a lovely OS. Spaces is a desktop manager with some usability built in. Being able to keep some applications on all desktops, will stop you skipping back and forth, while stacks make my dock much more organised and smaller.

Networking had really been simplified, browsing, controlling and connecting is now a breeze, and iChat’s screen share makes helping my sister in Scotland a LOT easier!

I’m sure I will find gripes and more great features in both releases, but it’s great for stuff to live up to their hype, well done to Konami and Apple!

With the latest version of iLife Apple released its new .mac web gallery, a very overdue updated to it’s .mac service which tries to catch up with the likes of Flickr and Picassa.

New features include a host of browsing methods similar to those in Leopard and iLife, and apple have stuck to their no Flash policy, well at least they have tried.

When I saw the keynote I was amazed by the carousel view which looked a bit like the dock or cover flow, and I was intrigued to see how they had done this without using Flash, unfortunately they hadn’t, and a quick right click confirmed this.

The question I guess is why then didn’t they use flash for the rest of the system. The JavaScript they use is OK but suffers from that spit and polish you get from Adobe. I guess they could argue that it’s more accessible, which some may disagree with, and it’s not like a photo gallery really needs to be super that accessible, given that 90% of the content is graphical anyway. There is also the system resource it uses up, firefox starts to struggle after a few minutes on the slide show.

However I feel the main reason for the lack of flash IS accessibility, but not in the sense of user accessibility but system accessibility. The iPhone has no flash support, and hence developing the system in Flash would have rendered it useless on their “internet navigator”, hardly a great PR stunt.

So I guess in the end it came down to having their hands tied, they have done quite a good job without using it, but I would love to see what Apple would get up to if they embraced Flash, and now it’s going the way of open source, perhaps they will…

I have to say, yesterdays Keynote got me excited, really excited. So I thought rather than spitting and spluttering out excited whimpers of geeky excitement I would sleep on it and post today… well that and I couldn’t be assed.

So what came out of the WWDC 07?

The main focus was Leopard, the iPhone has take the lime light recently and myself and others have been worried that Apple Computers (inc) was becoming a Jack of all trades. So I was really happy to see the focus back to what I love most about my mac (mag safe aside), the OS.

Now what’s new that we haven’t heard about in Leopard already?

The desktop in Leopard

The desktop has a nice clean, the top bar becomes transparent which is kind of nice, in a way is slightly more than the curved top we got last time. The other big thing is the doc, it’s now 3D, has reflections, and has something slightly more exciting, stacks. From what I can tell stacks are like a more advanced folder in the doc, they have some cool animation and should be a really neat way to tidy up your doc, currently I have most of my applications in there, but soon I can just have my applications folder… phew!

Finder in Leopard

The new finder is really interesting, and I mean interesting in a strategy way. Apple have integrated iTunes into an OS, meaning millions of PC users suddenly know how to use a Mac… cunning!

The new sharing looks much better, and if it’s as easy to use as iTunes I can’t wait to use it at work! The cover flow looks a bit gimmicky but I can see myself using it, as we all know about how our brains are adapted to recognise images (faces) rather than text.

Quick Look

OK this isn’t the most interesting thing but I bet it will make previewing (without preview) things a little better, and to be honest I expect I will use it for images and videos more that loading them in QuickTime and Preview.

64 bit

32 and 64 bit in one system! Now thats going to see 64 bit processors becoming a lot more viable, as you don’t have to worry about it!

Parental Controls

(remember I’m trying to look at the new things) Not having seen this before, it looks cool, well if your trying to keep your kids in check, you can set times for internet browsing and even check what they have been doing (scary) including who they have been chatting to. Now I don’t have kids but if did I think I would feel a lot safer with them on a Mac rather than a Windows box!

Boot Camp by default

This is sure to sway those Windows users who are scared to get a mac, a bit of a fail safe I guess, but my bet is most of them will be using OSX in no time, but also a great way for Apple to boost their hardware sales, especially in the laptop market, where they oh so rock.

Front Row

Finally Apple are giving a front row a make over. It looks like they are taking the Apple TV set up and adding it to the standard OS. This is great for me as I use a mac mini as a media center, and front row just dosen’t scale!

DVD player

The new DVD player looks pro! There are some nice features with screen shots and also some nice new features like zoom!

So thats it for new stuff

There are loads of other things but for now thats all the new stuff that stood out to me (not mentioning the old Leopard stuff like spaces and time machine! There are also another two massive points… Safari on Windows and the new apple website, but thats another post for another day!

I recently brought an device for watching TV through my Mac from The Apple Store. I got it working although I had some problems with the reception but everything was hanky dory. However the Mac mini that I was running it on had various problems and I ended up formatting and eventually changing the machine.

When I got a working mini I started installing all my products, and one of these was eyeTV which is the software that came with my TVMini which is the hardware for watching TV on my Mac. Typically I had lost the box and subsiquently the software key for the software.

I took a long shot an emailed the makers of  eyeTV (Elgato Systems) asking if they had a record of me and could tell me my software code… which they didn’t, but said if I emailed them an invoice for the product they would give me a new key, which they did!

No fuss, not trying to get out of it, and polite to boot! So if you have any TV on mac requirements make sure you check out  eyeTV from Elgato Systems!

Initially it looks really cool, you have a spotlight search by tapping the apple key twice and it gets results from your gmail!

But what really impressed me was that when I now search on google.com I get results from my computer! Very very clever!

Check it out now and let me know what you think…

In doing so it has also separated into a locked down version which limited your speeds after 10 minutes and also has some strange search bugs added to annoy you into buying the Xtorrent pro version!

Xtorrent pro is only $20 (£12ish) and a snitch for what it is. So what is it, well its torrents for the p2p generation. I have often tried to explain torrents to friends, usually they get it but a lot of them glaze over and find it hard to establish why you would download a file that is nothing only to open it in another program…

So what does Xtorrent do that the others don’t, everything. Xtorrent is an all in one app, loads up and looks just like a p2p program including the normal drizzle of sexiness one has come to expect from David Watanabe (creator). There is a search (which will look in google and yahoo, or you can add your fave torrent sites), and a filter for your search results, sorting via type, itunes integration for music, auto torrent downloading with folder actions, RSS feeds, swarm strength, and much more.

So go check it out if you love torrents and definitely if you don’t!

So anyway in one small step for me but one giant… ok ok I’ll start again…

Today whilst eating my chili (turned out to be spag boll, which doesn’t really go with rice… need to start labeling my frozen left overs) I downloaded the Apollo add on for flex builder and knocked up a nice simple application, that should (I say should because my first flex app doesn’t) run on any platform that the Apollo runtime is made for.

It took about 1 minute (30 if Simon is reading… it’s not like Dreamweaver) and I think it will pave the way for application development in the future… move over Java, your time has come.

Oh and I also had to quash Tom’s claims that

“I’ve just got this image of all regard to taste and usability being replaced with a 10 pixel by 10 pixel dancing banana.“

Apollo runtime free download 

So with out further adoooooo…..

My first Apollo app (PC)

My first Apollo app (Mac)

(joking they are both the same file ;)