itunes music store

Apr 27 2009

Preview.app Thumbnailing

By: Jon Gales

It’s been a little while since a real PowerUser Monday has been posted. Two
weeks ago was Easter and even though I love writing this column, I still need
a day off every once in a while. Last week was the big announcement from Apple–iTunes
Music Store. In leue of a column I hosted a live chat from the Apple Store
here in Tampa, FL. It was a huge sucess and we filled up 3 AIM chat rooms with
a 4th one going strong.

Onto the real column… How many times have you had a bunch of images you
wanted to view really quickly? After I load up images from a digital camera,
the first thing I want to do is view them all at a reasonable size. The preview
box in column mode is a start, but it’s too small for my tastes. There’s a
hidden feature in Preview.app that can do this… It rocks.

First, open up a folder that has some images/documents (they can be anything
Preview.app can handle: .pdf, .psd, .gif, .jpg, .tiff, .whateverthehell). Next,
select
the ones you want to preview and open them with Preview.app (if they aren’t
set
to open
in Preview.app by default, you can control/right-click and hit Open With >
Preview or you can drag them to
Preview.app’s
icon). There is no step three.

What you see is a beautiful Cocoa drawer full
of your images/documents. You can use the back or forward buttons to move
through the images, use the key commands command-left arrow and command-right
arrow,
or just click on the one you want to see (for you visual people.. I know you’re
out there).

Here’s what I got when I opened up four pictures of my friend Luccia:

multiplepics small Preview.app Thumbnailing

To see it full size just click on it. The forward/backward buttons I mentioned
aren’t on the screen shot because I made the window narrow to make a better
shot. By default they are located after the rotate buttons (I can still get
to them by using the menu icon >>>).

That’s it for this week!

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Apr 27 2009

How To Host Slashdot On a Shared Server

By: Jon Gales

This week’s PowerUser Monday is brought to you by Scott Kelby’s Macintosh

The Naked Truth. Read MacMerc’s review of it here.

If you have a story suggestion, please email it to jon@macmerc.com.

Last week I covered the WWDC Keynote speech live (from the satellite feed

shown at the Tampa

Apple Store). If you missed it and live in a cave, here’s

the archive.

Like all of our live events it was a complete blast–we had tons of people

chatting

in

AIM/iChat

and served

an

amazing

amount

of pages

to enough people to sell out a basketball arena. The most amazing part

of all is that MacMerc is completely housed on a single shared server from

the fine folks at ActaDivina.

spike How To Host Slashdot On a Shared ServerI

could go on and on, but pictures are better than words. Seen at right what Webalizer made

of our traffic spike. The bright blue bar is pages (the main focus of this

article). That spike is pretty impressive… It’s roughly 20 times above our

average. So, what’s the secret to being able to handle the load? Static pages

baby.

Most of the cool features on MacMerc are made possible because of the

cool technology behind it. On any given news article you can comment, moderate

other

comments,

and

sometimes even vote in a poll. On stories like this one you see "blocks"

on the right hand side that give you access to some cool stuff. If you’re a

member (it’s free), you can even see how many people are currently at the site.

On any given page

load, we have server-side code that talks to our database and fetches the

data, formats it, and then exports it off to your browser. It’s all pretty

neat, but

it takes a lot of power to run. I made the decision a long time ago (right

after our server crashed during the iTunes Music Store announcement I believe)

that we would never try live coverage again without going static.

I wrote a

special content management system just for the keynote coverage. It

has a

pretty

slick

interface

and makes a static page as output. It’s also a time saver because it writes

all the time stamps and mark up for me. I just plug and chug. This was the

only scripting going on for the whole site, and only I was using it.

What’s the difference

between static and dynamic? When you accessed us during the keynote

the database

was

completely

still… No server

side programming

happened. Your browser said, "Give me the index page" and our server

said,

"here it is".

To take it a step further, I used mod_rewrite to forward everyone but myself

to the static index page. So if you typed in:

http://www.macmerc.com/ilovedellsomuch

You would see the same exact thing as everyone else. This is so we can assure

that the server is JUST working on shoving out the index page. The only person

that wasn’t seeing this page was me because I was doing the play-by-play.

So how did we do? Well here are some numbers/facts:

  • At our peak we were serving 150,000 pages an hour
  • That peak works out to about 40 pages a second (you should see this fly

    by on the terminal… really something).

  • With almost 500,000 pages served, we only went through about 5 gigs of

    bandwidth (the page was REALLY optimized). Not having any images really helped

    things move smoothly.

  • We still almost got nuked. The highest load average (via top in the terminal)

    I’ve ever seen happened during our peak… Over 100.

  • For a few hours we made Slashdot look

    like a Geocities page. Felt quite good. I felt tempted to try and crash someone’s

    site… Start a tradition of being "Merc’d".

If you’re looking for a host that can handle peaks, check out ActaDivina (nope,

we don’t get anything if you sign up… we just like them). They were superb.

They noticed the peak and streamlined Apache to make things

a little more smooth. Didn’t even have to ask them. If you got any questions

(or suggestions, we are going to be doing this again the

next

time

there is

a similar

event)

please let

me know. If you’re going to be having a similar event and want to find

out more about the content management system that I wrote, feel free to ask.

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Apr 27 2009

Director MX 2004 sneak peek

By: Jon Gales
January 5th, 2004

box dirmx2004 Director MX 2004 sneak peek
Director has long been the de facto tool for multimedia gurus. It has actually been around since the 80′s, but has obviously added a lot more power in the years since. Once Shockwave was installed on most internet connected computers, Director became really powerful because its applications were able to be deployed over the internet, in the browser.

Today Director is being used to power enhanced Enhanced CDs, such as on the popular release by Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol winner. Enhanced CDs help drive sales, as you don’t get access to the content without buying the actual CD (sorry iTunes Music Store!). Another popular use is prototyping. Because development in Director is rapid, companies can test out new designs for products like slot machines in just days instead of the weeks it takes with more conventional methods.

What’s new

If you’re going to shell out cash for an update, you better know what’s new. Here it goes.

Ever since the MX family was announced, every release has brought the applications more tightly integrated. I’m happy to report that Director MX 2004 does not change this fact.

  • Flash integration – You can now import .fla files directly, and take advantage of all the optimizations the latest version of flash has to offer. According to Macromedia, you should notice a 15-70% performance increase.
  • Components – One of the more handy features of Flash is now in Director. There are components for common interface elements:
    • Button
    • Check Box
    • Date Chooser
    • Label
    • List
    • Numeric Stepper
    • Radio Button
    • Scroll Pane
    • Text Area
    • Text Input
    • Tree
  • Docking – The stage can now be docked. One of the best features of the MX interface is the ability to dock windows, especially when you consider that docked windows can be minimized by clicking the carrot to the left of the name.
  • Display template – You can now control the elements of your projectors in one easy MX like pallet. Complex tasks, such as creating windows and drag masks are now as simple as selecting a cast member in a pop down list.

That’s about it for the integration with the rest of the MX suite, on the next page we’ll take a look at some of the new features that aren’t seen in the rest of the MX family.


We see a lot of focus on integration with other MX products, but that’s not enough to warrent a new version. Below follow some killer features unique to Director (although seeing some of these in Flash would be slick):

  • HOT! Use JavaScript in place of Lingo – Up until this release, Lingo was the only way to program in Director. Although a fully developed language, having options is nice. Director MX 2004 supports JavaScript fully, which greatly reduces the learning curve for users that already know JavaScript (no need to learn Lingo, a whole other beast). You can see a screenshot of this functionality here. Lingo also got an update to its dot syntax.
  • DVD video support – You can now directly embed DVD video into your projects. Why’s this handy? Cross platform training materials are a cinch. But there are a million other uses. Just remember that home DVD players aren’t able to play Director files.
  • Real Player tweaked – When Director MX shipped, Real Player for the Mac was still a bit wonky. In the last year, Real has fixed things. Thus, the support for Real media is improved (that is on the Mac side). Windows Media is also supported in this release, but is not of much interest to Mac developers.
  • HOT! Cross platform projectors – In prior versions of Director, you had to compile your project in both Mac and Windows versions to get it to work on both platforms. This lead to some Mac users being shafted, when there really is no reason for having a Windows only Director app. In Director MX 2004, you can export for both Mac and Windows with no extra work. This can be seen in a screen shot shown here.
  • Sticky publish settings – When you publish your project for public consumption, there are a ton of settings. Director MX 2004 remembers your settings, so that every time you publish you do not have to re-configure. This is a major time saver, and frankly should have happened a long time ago. However, it’s never too late to say hi to a great feature.
  • HOT! English named sprites – This is another one of those features that we should have seen a long time. Director MX 2004 now lets you name sprites with real English names. No more integers to gum up the works. If you have a pipe sprite, go ahead and name it “pipe”. Can’t get any easier than that! This feature can be seen in a screen shot shown here.

These aren’t the only new features seen in Director MX 2004, but they are the highlights. It’s a major update, and is a must-have for serious developer.

Pricing

Nothing has changed on the pricing front:

Full version: $1,199
Upgrade: $399
Education full version: $499

Macromedia says Director MX 2004 will ship in February. At that time, expect more coverage here on MacMerc.com. For now, remember that all screenshots are still subject to change, as the software is still in beta.

If you have any specific questions on this release, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Comments are welcome too.

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