Palm Pre Development Bundle 0.2

Yes, after not even four hours I’ve already finished building the 0.2-release of my Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate. In case you’re wondering what weird stuff I’m talking about, please read my previous post first.

However, this second release includes a lot more features than it had before, plus I’ve made use of the CocoaDialog now. Let me describe the new features from the top to the bottom of the screenshot on the left site.

First of all, there’s “Generate New Project”. This lets you execute a palm-generate with all important attributes and opens the created project afterwards using the “mate” terminal-command, which needs to be available for this to work. All you have to do then is simply to save the TextMate project right into your generated project-directory.

Next, we still have “Generate New Scene”. I’ve enhanced the feature now, so that you’ll get a cocoa dialog asking for the scene’s name. Beware: The generation usually works as it should, the only problem is the TextMate project-drawer, which doesn’t seem to refresh by itself. A workaround: Cmd+H to hide TextMate and then click on its Dock-icon to make it appear again. Then all newly generated files should be visible in its drawer.

The next three features work just as before, no enhancements at all. On the fourth, the “Launch Project in Debugging-Mode” feature, I’ve implemented a palm-launch with debugging options, that can be run on an existing, packaged and installed project.

Next, there are ways to close and remove installed Projects. “Close running project” of course only works, when the App is actually running and “Remove installed Project” removes the App from the device. As device for all those commands the first device found by the Palm toolset will be taken – so if you would like to use the Emulator, better disconnect your real device and vice versa.

I’ve also built-in two features that let you simulate test calls and SMS on your Emulator, if you changed from password authentication to SSH public key authentication. You can do this either manually or try to use the feature at the menu’s bottom named “Auto-install SSH-Pubkey on Emulator”. Depending on your SSH-key-setup it works out or… not.

The other seven features allow you to simulate GPS drives on the Emulator – again only if you’ve set-up SSH-Pubkey authentication.

I hope you enjoy this release of the Palm Pre Development Bundle for TextMate! :-)

Download: Palm-Pre-Bundle-0.2

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available! Get it here. Or use GitHub.

The scene generation works like this: You implement your this.controller.pushScene(“Main”);-statement, select the scene’s name (Main, without the quotes!) and select the scene-generation command from the bundle’s menu. The command will immediately generate you a new scene named just the way you chose to name it. :-)

The other three commands can be ran by pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+F5/F6/F7. Attention: The bundle only works with TextMate Projects! Generate your Palm Pre project like you always do, by using the following command:

palm-generate -p “{ title:’ProjectName’, id:com.my.ProjectName, version:’1.0.0′ }” ProjectName

Then, create a new TextMate Project and drag&drop the folder palm-generate created for you (“ProjectName”) into the Project’s drawer. Save the project within your Project-directory (“ProjectName”) and then run the commands.

This is the very first version of this bundle and I’ll keep constantly improving it with other features that help me and hopefully others on the development of Palm Pre Web-Apps.

Enjoy!

Download: PalmPre-Bundle-0.1

UPDATE: There’s a newer version available now! Get it here.

However, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the current iWebKit version and patch the framework to have the sliding-animations working again, even on the latest version. Now, that it seems to be working here and also it seems to be working for Christian, maybe others can also benefit from this.

If you would like to use the sliding-animations (no warranty! :-)) on your iWebKit-based design, just download the Framework package attached to this post and apply it to your iWebKit installation. It should be working pretty much out of the box.

Feel free to report bugs if you should find any regarding the sliding. Enjoy! :-)

Download iWebKit_4.6.2_Framework-likability-patch

And yet another, brand-new Bluebird Theme: Plain.

It’s simple.

It’s light.

It’s Plain! :-)

Download plain.bbtheme

UPDATE: Plain v2!
… just as requested. :-)

Plain v2

Download: plain-v2.bbtheme

Indie Bluebird Theme

Indie-Compact Bluebird Theme

Indie-Mini Bluebird Theme

Three brand-new Themes for Bluebird: Indie, Indie-Compact & Indie-Mini.

Themes were inspired by the Indie Labs.

Download the Indie-Collection!

The last time I check out the project, there was no such daemon for Unix(-like) platforms but Mac OS X itself. I decided to take a quick look at the independend istatd Project on Google Code and give it a shot. I fetched the sources, built them on a Debian Lenny and ran the daemon with a slighly modified configuration – and it worked! :-)

I found it pretty cool. Actually, I found it so cool that it was the reason for me to buy the actual iPhone App. I have no Mac OS X Servers I’d like to monitor, but I could think of plenty of Linux machines which I’d like to keep an eye on – not as an replacement for Nagios, just as a solution for quick-live-monitoring.

However, I decided to build a Debian package, to make it easier to deploy the istatd on a couple of machines. I attached the Debian package to this post, so you can just download and install it on your Lenny machines. Warning: It’s not a clean and tidy built, lintian conform packge! I just hacked it together to have something that “just works”. And that’s what it actually should. Besides, be warned that the daemon takes quite long to shut-down, due to the fact that I’ve just used the regular /etc/init.d/skeleton to create an own /etc/init.d/istatd script, without going into deep workflow-checks. Here, the script takes something around half a minute to kill the istatd.

Anyway, now I’m going to take a look at the sources and see, if I could probably commit some enhancements to the projects. The last time I was doing C++ is *quite* a time ago, but it shouldn’t be too hard from what I’ve seen so far. On the project’s site it says that there’s no support for fans and temperature measuring, yet. I will check whether it’s possible to use lmsensors for getting those information and maybe hack it in – or even rewrite the daemon in C, what would be the best to do anyway. ;-)

Oh well, however. Enjoy the package. :-)

Download: istatd_0.5.4-1_i386.deb

Sleek Bluebird Theme

Yay! Yet another cool, new theme for one of best Twitter-clients available on the OS X platform: Bluebird. This time, the theme called Sleek is inspired by 2Smoke’s Silent Night Theme for Bowtie, what’s one of the best Bowtie themes available out there btw.

The theme itself is 100% CSS without any pictures besides the background-image. That one’s the same I’ve also already used within my HUD and HUD-Mini themes. I call this environmental-friendly recycling. :-)

I made use of the cool features Safari already implements, like for example round corners or gradients. It’s just nice to see how much can be done using these features – at this point, the CSS hacks replaced any kind of image plus the whole work needed to make gradient-images in HTML/CSS scalable. A very cool time- and work-saver!

However, I hope you enjoy this new Bluebird theme!

Download sleek.bbtheme

HUD-Mini Bluebird Theme

As requested, I’ve just “scaled down” my “HUD” Bluebird Theme to make it more minimal and small-sized. The theme now is less padded and doesn’t eat-up that much space within your Bluebird as before.

I hope you like HUD-Mini. :-)

Enjoy!

Download hud-mini.bbtheme

HUD Theme for Bluebird

Some weeks passed since I’ve released my last Bluebird Theme called “Refresh”, mostly because of the lack of time to think of other cool and new designs, but “luckily” today it was a pretty crappy-weather-sunday, therefor I can now just announce a new Theme called “HUD” for the great Bluebird Twitter-client! :-)

The Theme itself is based on and made with Pixelmator ( / Pixelmator’s HUD user-interface) and additionally inspired by Delta909′s Summer Wallpaper. Of course, as usual you can replace the background if you should not like it by opening the bbtheme’s package-content, navigating to /img/ and replace the background.png. :-)

I hope you enjoy my new Bluebird theme!

Download hud.bbtheme

//comment: I’ve just updated the theme to use text-shadows. Enjoy! :-)

Silence. For no reason.

Enjoy! :-)

Refresh Bluebird Theme

A fresh theme a day. My latest creation for the Bluebird Twitter-client is called “Refresh” – a refreshingly new theme!

This time it’s no modification or port of another app’s theme to Bluebird. Instead, it’s a new theme from scratch. The theme is held in a dark mood combined with orange and sky-blue colorized elements. For the background picture I made use of zygat3r’s Dark Wood wallpaper, which I’ve modified a bit in order to still look good if the window would ever get too big and the image’s borders would be visible.

The icons for the individual tweets are the very same icons from Mark Jardine’s “Mars Metallic” theme, with the difference that I’ve inverted their colors to make them fit better into my theme.

The tweets use rounded corners and all kind of transition effects provided by the WebKit CSS-properties. I actually also inserted a property for making the avatar images have rounded corners, but as it seems either Bluebird or WebKit itself doesn’t honor this at that point. :-/

However, the theme is written using Bluebird’s new theme-definitions and should be compatible with Bluebird 1.0 Beta 1.1 and (hopefully) later. :-)

Enjoy!

Download refresh.bbtheme

Minimalistic Tickets Bluebird Theme

Yet, another Bluebird theme. :-)

“Minimalistic Tickets”, like the name already says, is a minimal theme where each tweet is being displayed as a “ticket”. The idea came me, when stumbling through the currently existing themes and noticing that each one has something in common: They all go from the top to the bottom. There was none, where the tweets are right next to each other, side by side.

The theme is pretty much just a demonstration of how new themes could look like. “Breaking the ice”. Trying out something new.

Whatever. I hope you enjoy! :-)

Download minimalistictickets.bbtheme

Modification of Flarup's "Glow"

Today I’ve just played around a bit with Bluebird and its theme-ability to make it fit more into my actual desktop. First of all, I took a look at what theme I could use best for my first tries. I decided to choose Michael Flarup‘s “Glow”-theme. The theme itself looks very neat and tidy and provides cool effects like avatar-reflections and a menu for each tweet.

First of all, I took some new picks on the colors of each tweet (regular tweet, reply, direct message, own tweet) and turned the gradient around, so that it doesn’t “pop-out” but looks more like “punched-in”. Then, I’ve changed the fonts used by the theme. The CSS definition for the fonts now look this way:


...
font: 12px/16px "Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk BE", "Lucida Grande", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-Serif;
...
font: 13px "DIN Medium", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-serif;
...


Unfortunately the first fonts to be used (Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and DIN Medium) are commercial fonts which I can’t just pack-in and distribute. :-( Though, it doesn’t look that bad using the Lucida Grande/Verdana fonts.

However, after that I’ve fixed a bug the theme had at least on my Mac (Safari 4), where the background-height was too small so that a small white line always remained at its list’s bottom.

If you like the theme, feel free to download it here and comment on it. :-)

Enjoy!

On October the 6th, 1997, Dell’s CEO Michael Dell was asked, what he would do, if he owned the financially stricken Apple Inc. and he answered:

What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. [link]

A few years later, Mr. Jobs then wrote the following e-mail message to his employees:

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve. [link]

So as we can see, there has always been differences between Dell and Apple, what – in my opinion – lead to the competitive behavior Dell presents use with their store.

Not that I would regret Dell to be successful with their try, I just don’t believe it. In my opinion, Dell just tried to get into a market that’s ruled by some of the biggest companies world-wide (e.g. Amazon), which are very hard to top. But okay, we will see.

Btw: It’s funny, that I cannot access Dell’s Music Store. The reason: Dell Music Download Store is currently only available for French, English and German Customers. I’m really wondering of how they decide, what kind of customer I am…

My first Dashboard Widget

So, I’ve just played around a bit with Dashcode, Apple’s IDE for Dashboard-Widget development, and I have to say that it’s pretty cool. It’s quite easy to use and provides excellent WYSIWYG features. I just started a default RSS-Reader project and customized the template it gave me the way I liked it. It’s really interesting what can be done with a little JavaScript. Of course, by using that script language, Dashboard Widgets might not be the best in performance or system-usage, but in my opinion this way is a better one for writing widgets, than for example OpenSource projects like Karamba provide. I don’t want to have to learn Python from ground up, just to be able to write my own RSS-Reader widget. And of course, for writing more advanced Widgets with Dashcode, the developer must know JavaScript – but it’s a small difference between the time it takes to learn simple JavaScript and the time it takes to just understand Python or whatever other language.

However, I think I might be doing some more playing around with Dashcode. I don’t know yet what widgets to implement, but I’m sure I’ll find some interesting ideas I could realize.

You can download the RSS-Reader for my Blog here. Enjoy! :-)