Three sixty five! Three sixty fiiiive!!!

About a week ago Dorien was talking to me about her blog. We were talking about 365-days projects. Personally, I’d love to do one myself but shooting a decent picture every day? Not gonna happen. I can’t find the discipline to take a shot using my DSLR every day. Not to mention the time invested in preparing the shot, getting it right, getting to your computer and uploading the shot… That’s (at least) a one hour job every day! During one year…

So I was thinking about a way of getting the shot wherever I want, whenever I feel like it, and upload it right away… I figured using my iPhone and some photography apps might do the trick. About an hour later I uploaded my first shot. I really like the fact that it is instantaneous. I shoot, I process, I upload it to Flickr. *magic happens* Wordpress gets the latest picture from my set on Flickr and displays it in the sidebar. Done.
It only takes a few minutes a day and I’m pretty sure that next year in September I’ll have a cool collection of pictures (which I’m planning to use in my next big project )

You can see the latest picture in the sidebar. And because I like the process so much, let me share how the workflow is like on the right. (From left to right: I take a shot, I edit it a bit and then I polarize it (and add the tag of the day)).
If you like it, check out my Flickr set which is updated daily (duh)!

If you’re interested in what iPhone apps I’m using:

• Default camera app
• Vint Green (take a shot and immediatly have it developed into a vintage green version)
• TiltShiftGen (take a shot/open an existing picture and edit colors, vignette, blur (circle/tiltshift) (I love this one)
• Polarize (convert the image to a polaroid: frame and color correction)
• QuadCamera (get 4 shots one after each other into a single picture)
• CameraBag (take a shot/open an existing picture and add one of 9 effects)

If you got any cool suggestions or ideas: just let me know

Open Microphone pt 1

If you’ve come by here a few times you know I have been experimenting with computeSpectrum and webcam motion detection. At a given moment I wanted to combine the 2 of them in order to use voice commands in order to make stuff happen on the screen. That would be pretty badass, right?

However I soon learned the microphone feed didn’t go through the SoundMixer of the Flash Player, therefor would would not be able to be analyzed. There was a workaround with FMS/RED5 and bouncing the stream off the server but that’s rather overkill (not to mention the lag). Read the rest of this entry »

Dooodl misery!

Let me start this post with a big…

I really screwed up yesterday. I updated the Dooodl plugin and commited it to SVN. After having done that I wanted to wait until the changes reflected on the Wordpress site (which sometimes takes a few minutes). However I had to go over to Ward for dinner, so I took my laptop…

When arrived there I checked the site back and saw the changes. I updated the plugin on my site immediately using the WP-plugin auto-update functionality. That’s when all hell broke loose…
I saw that all the doodle-images on my site were gone, but the userdata (in the database) remained. When checking the FTP I realized what happened… The images are saved inside the plugin folder in a folder called ‘doodls’. Once you let Wordpress update the plugin automatically it tells you it ‘removed the old version of the plugin‘, before it ‘upgraded the plugin succesfully‘. It actually removes everything in that directory. I did NOT know that! I expected the plugin to replace all the existing files with new files and add the missing files/folders. And that’s why everything saved by the plugin was was lost once updated…

In my case I immediately lost about 120 doodles you guys submitted. Lucky for me I took a backup only half an hour before running the upgrade . In the end I only lost 11 images. I hope I’m the only one who ran into this misery.

But now…
There’s a new version online (1.0.5) (1.0.6  featuring smaller brushes ) which will not have that issue anymore. But before running off and installing this version please take a look at this and please be absolutely sure to have a backup of your doodles before installing ANY other version of the plugin…

1. Before updating, download the /wp-content/plugins/dooodl/doodls/ folder. This folder contains all doodles your users saved. If you don’t, you will lose all images your users saved.
2. Create a folder in /wp-content/uploads/ and name it ‘doodls‘.
3. Upload the images to this(/wp-content/uploads/doodls/) folder.
4. Now you can upgrade the new version of the plugin.

Again: I’m terribly sorry about all this and I really hope you didn’t lose (too much) of your doodles. I already tested 1.0.6 and it’s working perfectly. If you safely copy/backup the folder with doodles (using the steps above) then you should be safe

Having said all this…

If you got any feedback or information on how Wordpress updates itself and plugins, do let me know. I really wouldn’t like running into this kind of trouble again…

Snow Leopard broke your Grabup? Create your own!

About a year ago I bought GrabUp, a small application that sits in your menu bar, waiting for you to take a screenshot. Once you do so, it immediately takes the file and uploads it to my FTP server. When it’s done it copies the url to the screenshot to my clipboard. The simplicity might not impress but the workflow amazes the more.

However…
Ever since I got myself Snow Leopard GrabUp died on me: Whenever I take a screenshot GrabUp won’t upload it to the server anymore… And I’m not alone. Lot’s of users are experiencing this issue.
The people at GrabUp HQ probably don’t give a damn about their customers because they don’t seem to be working on an updated version.

So…
I’ve been looking for a replacement but nothing really compares to the power and yet the simplicity of GrabUp.
So what does a good developer do? Create his own workflow in Automator… I won’t go into the details of this. If you love GrabUp but Snow Leopard broke yours, this is a simple walkthrough to get a (free) GrabUp-like workflow running on your own FTP server Read the rest of this entry »

Dooodls for everyone!

A few days ago I presented the Dooodle application I built. You guys created some cool doodles and I totally love it!

But it’s still an independent application hacked into Wordpress using basic widget.  That means I can’t just share the code so you can use it too on your website (since you’ll have to set up a database, fill in config files, etc… Boring stuff). So yesterday I decided to compact this into a handy Wordpress plugin.
And this is what I did: I give you Dooodl!

[UPDATE] Mark asked me to share the source of the Dooodl Creator App, so I did Feel free to send me links to your own creator. I might add different creators to the plugin, and let you choose in the WP-admin which one you’d like your visitors to use

Read the rest of this entry »