Marcus Vorwaller

Tonight was the Worldwide Macromedia Usergroup meeting. This was only the second Macromedia Usergrop meeting I’ve been to. My local group meets in Williamsburg, Virginia at The College of William and Mary. Overall it was pretty good. The format for our meeting was first, a presentation by a semi-local Flash Developer – David Vogeleer – I came in a little late on it but what I saw was very good.

The next half of the meeting was a demonstration by several members of Macromedia’s development team. The presentation was done online with Macromedia Breeze. I think Breeze was the most interesting part of the presentation even though none of it was actually on Breeze. Some of the cool things it can do are:
-Realtime Polls
-Chat
-Screen sharing (the entire desktop)
-Great quality live audio
-Powerpoint type presentations
-Shared Flash animations

Those were just the features I saw tonight. Very impressive.

As far a the actual content of the presentation, it seemed to be more of a marketing pitch than anything. They showcased the features of Central 1.5 and some of the new ColdFusion features. I could be wrong but I think Central is never going to take off and I don’t use ColdFusion (though it seems pretty cool). In addition, they showed features of the new version of Contribute and they mentioned some new featues of Flex–again, products I don’t use.

Afterwards David showed off some of the Making Things stuff he’s been working on. Pretty cool.

One of the reasons I have always shied away from Linux is that the desktop has always felt unpolished to me. No matter what theme I used or what font settings I used, it just didn’t feel finished.

This time around, I’ve found that much seems to have changed — at least using the Gnome desktop environment. Fonts aren’t bad at all. They aren’t near perfect yet, but not bad. I imported all my fonts from windows (oddly enough the one I found to work the best is Microsoft Sans). I then created a hybrid theme from a Linux port of Milk 2.0 and theme called Orbital. I used the Milk 2.0 port for the window border and Orbital for the controls.

I then found a nice, similar theme for Mozilla Firefox (not pictured) called Smoke. With all that in place, fonts are looking decent (not great) and my theme is looking really nice. I also found a nice desktop calendar called gdeskcal.

Wow. Linux isn’t looking bad. On top of that, there are other features I really like — multiple desktops (see bottom right), Ksnapshot (a great screenshot program), cool image previews in Nautilus (Gnome’s “finder” or “file explorer”). And with my custom wall paper featuring the logo of a site I need to revive, I’m feeling pretty good about things. Sodi Podi is the pictured illustration program that is under development for Linux. It really isn’t bad. I mocked up that small gdeskcal design in a couple minutes without too much struggle. It was a pleasant departure from the Gimp–a Photoshop clone (sorry but it is) that I just cannot get used to.

So… am I switching to Linux from OS X and Win XP. Nah… I’ve used it every day for the past few days whenever I can, but the fact still remains that it can’t run Photoshop or Illustrator CS or Flash MX 2004 and I can’t work without those programs. It still fun to play with Linux (and even get some work done) on the desktop.

Last night I was able to install Lphoto (from Linspire on Mepis. It wasn’t the easiest process (I had to install a number of Python addons) but I have to say it was worth it.

In case you’re up to it, here are basic instructions on Debian:
apt-get install python2.3-dev python2.3-qt3 python2.3-id3lib python2.3-pyxine (I think the last one is only needed for Lsongs)

Download it:
Lphoto
Lsongs

Extract it to a directory somewhere.

Open the directory from the command line, become root and type:
python install.py

type lsongs or lphoto and if you’re lucky, it should run. Straightforward enough.

The application is pretty much an exact clone of iPhoto, but it’s a decent clone. As you can see from the screenshot, the interface is pretty much the same. Suprisingly, it’s a lot faster than iPhoto is. Actually, it runs at nearly the same speed as iPhoto on my 1.6ghz G5, but I’m running Lphoto on a PII 450. Hopefully in the future Linspire will try to come up with some original features for it, but in the meantime, kudos for releasing it as open source software.

I also installed lSongs. It is, again, a clone of iTunes, but a pretty good one.

Along the same lines, I’ve really enjoyed Linux on the desktop this time around. I’ve been using Gnome as my desktop manager (I couldn’t get fonts to look even half way decent on KDE). I’ll probably write more about this in the near future, but things are looking up for Linux. Less GUI crashes, better office software (kOffice seems underestimated to me), easier to use overall.

This is something I never thought I’d see: OS X Running under Linux.

Sebastian Biallas has created the beginnings of what could prove to become a very, very popular and interesting project.

After a couple of the busiest (and most productive) weeks ever… I return with an OS X Panther rant.

1. Why do I click an plus (+) icon to shrink iTunes? I’ve been using iTunes for months now and it still gets me every once in awhile. It’s no better from the menu–it’s Window > Zoom to shrink the player.

2. Why don’t home and end keys function the same from application to application. In some they take you to the end of a line, others to the end of the document. Same with ctrl+-> (arrow) sometimes it moves you to the end of a line, others it’s to the end of a word.

3. No insert key? Did Apple decide that having a “help” key would be more useful than insert? F1 is standard for help and still works in most Mac apps… Using programs like Freemind (not to mention Word) becomes much more of a hassle without an insert key. Two help keys, no insert key. Nice.

4. Ctrl+a (select all) seems to work in property fields about half the time. It does in Dreamweaver, but not Photoshop.

5. You can’t add color labels, rename or delete files from file browse dialog boxes. Why? If I’m looking for a file, and want to make it more apparent next time around, I have open the Finder, browse to it again and and give it a color label.

6. Why’d they take away the window shade (roll up) feature from OS 9? I had to buy shareware to get that functionality back (more about that later). When I used OS 9, even though I wasn’t a big fan of the OS, that was one of the best features.

Well… that was an experience. I spent most of the evening yesterday finalizing my lesson, which was why I missed a day on the weblog for the first time in about 70 days, and finally got it to a point I felt good about.

Teaching went fairly well. I know Dreamweaver like the back of my hand, I can explain it I’d say only on an average level. Six (yes, 6) straight hours is a long time to talk about Dreamweaver. My class was beginners–I had people who ranged from hand coders wanting to move to a WYSIWYG (imagine that) to people who had never even seen html or were fairly new to computers in general. In one day we went from basic HTML concepts all the way to tables. A fairly broad range I’d say.

While my students rated me well and I feel I imparted the information in a comprehensible way, for some reason I don’t feel that good about the class. Maybe it’s all the time that went into it vs. the money coming out… maybe it’s that I wasn’t cut out to teach that type of material. I’m not sure. I’m going to stick with it, try to improve and give it some time–hopefully I’ll feel better after future classes, or if not, at least I’ll know.

It’s been a couple months since I had Linux (that’s GNU/Linux for you diehards) on the desktop and even when I did I never really used it. The time has come to do it again, this time with a real, practical purpose. I chose Mepis because it’s based on Debian which, if you’re not familiar with Linux, is a distribution (version) that makes it very easy to install new software. Mepis makes Debian easier to install and configure. It also works as a live cd (as I mentined a couple days ago).

The purpose for installing it this time is backups… lately I’ve had data-loss paranoia and Linux seems like a good way to back up both my remote server and laptop to one place. I found a tutorial I’m going to try which uses rsync.

Tonight I disovered (and in a couple of cases, rediscovered) a few interesting and useful pieces of software.

1. Synergy – This is free software that lets you use one keyboard and mouse for multiple computers and even across different operating systems. It works great! I’ve only tired it from windows to windows so far. This is a great space saver on my desk. One cool feature is that you can even copy and paste between two computers.

2. Mepis – I began using Linux on Red Hat and from there went on to try several other distributions. I’ve finally settled on one… sort of. Debian is the Linux distribution that I like the best, with only one small problem; I can’t install it. I probably could if I really wanted to learn how, but why when there’s great distributions like Mepis. Mepis not only make it easy to install, but can also be run as a live CD–you can run it on any computer without installing it. Mepis also looks great and is one of the easier-to-use Linux’s (along with another favorite of mine, the controversial Lindows (which will soon be changing names)).

3. Sepiroth – This guy is amazing. Not only has he written and released as open source the best Actionscript (for Macromedia Flash) editor around, he also has placed, as I discovered tonight, one hundred useful Flash files on his site for download. In addition to these two things, he’s put up several prototypes for flash, a great flash community and many other Flash resources. Amazing.

4. PhpGedView – I didn’t discover this tonight by any means, but there has been some major work going on in this project and the new releases are amazing. John Finlay has created software that will take a GEDCOM file (exported by most family history programs) and allow you to view and even edit the contents online. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Genealogy. I had the opportunity quite awhile back to contribute some of the icons this project is using.