TOKI WOKI. 

I recently wrote a pretty big tuto­r­ial about Adobe AIR, its cap­tive run­time mode, and how to gen­er­ate a Win­dows installer on top of that. It was writ­ten in French and pub­lished on flex-tutorial.fr.

I then con­tacted the fine folks at Adobe Devel­oper Con­nec­tion and offered to trans­late it to Eng­lish. They accepted, reviewed it, and boom: pub­lished it.

Wether you’re a French or Eng­lish reader, I got you cov­ered. Tell me what you think.

Back in 2008 I would spend some of my Sat­ur­day after­noons sit­ting in a Laun­dro­mat, wait­ing for my clothes to smell good. I quickly real­ized these moments were per­fect to bring my lap­top with me and code. One of the first AIR apps I wrote was Shrink O’Matic, now you know where the name comes from.

It quickly became suc­cess­ful. It now has been down­loaded 168,000+ times, a best-seller of sorts. Except it’s free.

But with suc­cess comes feed­back, and with feed­back comes fea­ture sug­ges­tions. Most of them were included through updates, some of them didn’t make the cut. Prob­a­bly because of me being lazy or because of AIR’s limitations.

Then AIR 2 came out, then I learnt Robot­legs… So I re-wrote it from scratch! Intro­duc­ing Shrink O’Matic 2, the same quick and sim­ple app but with more fea­tures and a nicer theme.

Here’s what’s fresh off the oven:

• Drop fold­ers onto the app: every image in it (or in its sub-folders) will be shrinked.
• New “Rota­tion” set­tings pane: either use a spe­cific angle or let the app read your images’ EXIF data and decide what to do.
• Cus­tom name option: choose exactly what the out­put name will be using your own pat­tern and inject­ing the orig­i­nal file’s name (using $name) and/or its posi­tion in the queue (using $num).
• PNG files now keep their trans­parency when shrinked.
• Water­mark: water­mark your images, even choose where to place the overlay.
• Drop files onto the app while it’s pro­cess­ing, no problemo!
• No more dimen­sion limits.
• Shiny new theme!

But! I decided some fea­tures had to go. I removed the “name pre­view” that used to be in the sta­tus bar. I also removed the abil­ity to drop images from web pages. If you need these fea­tures and want them back, make sure to drop a com­ment and let me know!

That’s it, go get it!

“W-Architectures is an archi­tec­ture and urban-planning agency. The firm brings together a highly-qualified team of archi­tects with inter­na­tional expe­ri­ence.” This is how they intro­duce them­selves and I couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself.

I recently pub­lished their brand new web­site, designed by Chris­telle Bon­net and devel­oped by me. It’s been a pretty long process (they are very busy guys) but it’s here and I like it!

I used mostly Word­Press and MooTools to develop it. Every­thing was designed to be light and sub­tle, I think I can safely say that it is.

I’ve been work­ing on an app for a French sport hos­pi­tal, designed to browse its msk image library. It’s called “MSK view” and it is avail­able for free in iTunes (iPhone and iPad ver­sion) and in the Android Mar­ket.

Pretty tech­ni­cal stuff in it, not sure every­one will want to install it but hey, there may be some doc­tors out there!

The hos­pi­tal is French but the app is both in French and Eng­lish. Built in Flash Builder with Flex Mobile, Robot­legs and AMFPHP, UI design by Jumo.

Now go show off brows­ing images of “Scapho­trapezial Syn­os­to­sis” or “Rec­tus Femoris intra­mus­cu­lar Haematoma”, what­ever it may be!

Boks is one of my most suc­cess­ful apps and this is prob­a­bly not only because of its use­ful­ness, but also because it is free, too. I released it more than 2 years ago and it is still heav­ily downloaded.

The CSS com­mu­nity is really active and fast-moving. When I wrote Boks, Blue­print CSS was one of the most watched and forked project on GitHub which is mostly why I chose to base my UI and logic on it (it still is at the top, by the way). But with today’s CSS3 hype and because of the ever-growing list of CSS frame­works (not going to list them here) I started receiv­ing lots of fea­ture requests.

At first I thought I could wait and han­dle them later, but I quickly real­ized it would need a lot of time, and I defin­i­tively didn’t have it in my hands (or at least not for this project). The idea to Open­Source it seemed obvi­ous and I’ve been slow doing so, but here it is. If anyone’s will­ing to take a look at what I wrote and fix or improve it, do it! Don’t for­get that this has been writ­ten a while back and I wouldn’t re-write it this way (think Robot­legs); I know the code will look crappy to some but hey, we all learn and evolve, right?

I’ve licensed Boks’ source under GNU GPL v3 in order for it to remain Open­Source, but if you have other sug­ges­tions, just tell me.

Remem­ber Evnt, the quick and sim­ple UI to gen­er­ate AS3 Event subclasses?

Well, it’s still here but I don’t use it much any­more, since I’m a big fan of Robert Pen­ner’s Sig­nals! So I wrote Signl. It’s basi­cally the same thing, but for Signals.

I know writ­ing Sig­nal classes is an easy task; but, why not make it eas­ier? I hope this helps! Oh, and by the way, it’s Open­Source, just like Evnt was.

Hey, fel­low english-reading vis­i­tor, this post is going to be in French! Hope you don’t mind.

Si comme moi vous ne pou­vez pas vous empêcher de dire “flim”, “ouiche” ou encore “un pour l’argent, deux pour le spec­ta­cle et trois pour le cail­lou”, cette appli­ca­tion est pour vous.

Après une semaine de vacances avec une per­sonne touchée par cette mal­adie et sans avoir accès à Inter­net j’ai vite réal­isé qu’il me fal­lait une appli­ca­tion con­tenant tout le script de ce mag­nifique flim : La Classe Améri­caine. Je savais qu’un fou avait déjà fait tout le sale boulot et qu’il ne me restait plus qu’à extraire ces don­nées et créer l’interface pour les parcourir…

Grâce à Google Chrome et ses Out­ils de développe­ment j’ai pu injecter MooTools dans la page. Petite astuce très sim­ple et très pra­tique (script à copier/coller dans la console) :

var scriptNode = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
scriptNode.type = 'text/javascript';
scriptNode.src = 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.3.2/mootools-yui-compressed.js';
var headNode = document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD');
if (headNode[0] != null) headNode[0].appendChild(scriptNode);

Après ça, quelques lignes pour extraire les don­nées, les net­toyer et les stocker directe­ment dans le presse-papier au for­mat JSON :

var data=[];
var images=$$('table.script img');
for (var i=0; i<images.length; i++) {
    var tr=images[i].getParent().getParent();
    var o={};
    var scriptTag=tr.getElements('td')[2];
    scriptTag.getElements('a').dispose();
    data.push({
        ts:tr.getElement('small').get('text'),
        script:scriptTag.get('html')
			.split('’').join("'")
			.replace(/\n/, '')
			.replace(/<br>\n$/, '')
    });
}
console.log(data.length);
copy(JSON.encode(data));

Un petit coup de Flash Builder, saupoudré de Robot­legs et hop, une appli Android ! Pas de ver­sion iPhone pour l’instant, mais si quelqu’on m’offre de quoi me payer un cer­ti­fi­cat de développeur, je ne dis pas non !

Au revoir, Messieurs-Dames. C’est ça, la puis­sance intel­lectuelle. Bac + 2, les enfants.

When writ­ing in French I’m always look­ing for char­ac­ters that can’t be eas­ily typed with a key­board (like œ, for exam­ple). I used to go to copypastecharacter.com for its sim­plic­ity: just go to that page, click on a char­ac­ter and boom, it’s in your clip­board, ready to be pasted!

But I wanted some­thing more powerful/thorough that would remem­ber my fre­quently used char­ac­ters. So I wrote Uni­pasta!

Here’s what you should know about it:

1. Every input under the selected char­ac­ter (char, code and hex) can be edited and will update each other. Eas­ily jump to any character!
2. The font met­rics (base­line, x-height and cap-height) are auto-calculated and will help you know where the char lives;
3. Click on the “More Info” link to jump to fileformat.info and access a lot of details about the selected character;
4. Every char­ac­ter your click will be auto­mat­i­cally copied to your clip­board, handy!
5. Use the “Recent char­ac­ters” list to quickly access your favorite ones (lat­est used will always be listed first).

If you think some miss­ing Uni­code blocks are impor­tant to you or if you’d like to add a new char­ac­ter list­ing, just ask for it!

Remem­ber Shrink O’Matic, the “oh, so easy to use” image shrinker for Win­dows, Mac and Linux? Intro­duc­ing Shrink O’Mobile, the “oh, so easy to use” image shrinker for Android!

Because cam­eras on phones take big pic­tures and because you might want to send smaller/lighter versions, Shrink O’Mobile is here to help out. Just launch the app, choose the way you want your image to be shrunk, pick your image and BOOM! Your fresh, smaller, new ver­sion is instantly stored in your cam­era roll. Easy as pie.

And did I men­tion the app is free? It is.

As a free­lancer I mostly work on AIR apps, but when friends asked me to develop their new web­site I hap­pily jumped aboard!

Le bureau baroque is an archi­tec­ture agency in Bor­deaux; play­ing with art, design and — of course — archi­tec­ture. They’re the ones that set up the Pecha Kucha event in Bor­deaux and who invited me to show off a bit! Of course they work on lots of other great projects so they needed a site to let the world know what’s up.

They wanted a highly visual site that would be easy to update, we con­sid­ered a few options but quickly came to the con­clu­sion that Index­hibit was exactly what we were look­ing for. But one thing that was really bug­ging us is how most (if not all) Index­hibit sites look the same. Indeed they’re a great way to show big images and the nav­i­ga­tion is damn sim­ple, but hey, why not keep these great qual­i­ties but in a more orig­i­nal layout?

Since we’re really keen on hor­i­zon­tal lay­outs we went for this. But some­thing both­ers me with this: you get a hor­i­zon­tal scroll­bar at the bot­tom of the page; which is hard to see, because it sits at the bot­tom of your screen and we — dumb humans — are not really used to it. So I thought: why not have a hor­i­zon­tal lay­out scrolled by a ver­ti­cal scroll­bar? That seemed a bit tricky at first, for two reasons:

1. Is that tech­ni­cally feasible?
2. Isn’t that too weird, for the end-user?

Both ques­tions could not be answered with­out try­ing, so I tried. And it looked cool!

When the pro­to­type was ready I started tak­ing a look at Indexhibit’s guts; and although it looked a bit ugly to me, I real­ized pimp­ing it was no big deal… A few e-mails and burger-meetings after we were happy with the newly cre­ated theme. Chris­telle Bon­net helped out with her great typographic/balance eye and we were ready to go!

Go see the site live, enjoy those nice projects, play with that side-scroll con­cept and tell me what you think!