TOKI WOKI. 

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!

My “anniversary” intro

It’s been five years (this monday) since Google added the ability to simply chat inside Gmail and to store your chat history, just like your regular e-mail discussions. This poster is a celebration of that, plus a big high-five to my “chat pal” (who hopefully received my package on time), plus a technical and aesthetical look at what we wrote during these years.

Let’s make history

Back to the chat history thing… I remember being pretty happy when Google announced it, mainly because I knew I’d use it for later reference, archiving links and thoughts had become much easier.

Here’s a copy of the announcement they made:

Chat with your friends from right inside Gmail. There’s no need to load a separate program or look up new addresses. It’s just one click to chat with the people you already email, as well as anyone on the Google Talk network. And now you can even save and search for chats in your Gmail account.

So it’s been five years. And I’ve chatted quite a lot; mainly with one guy, my buddy Renaud. We chatted around 2,800 different discussions so I thought there might be some interesting data to dig in these archives… So I dug.

But digging thousands of discussions is not an easy task, so I had to take a look on the tech side of things.

Join the tech side of the force

Before digging, I had to retrieve all the discussions we had, in an easy-to-analyse format. I used Gmail’s offline feature: applying a new label to our conversations and locally syncing this label. For some unknown reason it would crash on Google Chrome so I had to use Mozilla Firefox. When syncing was done I got a pretty big file in my “Google Gears for Firefox” directory.

Cool thing is, Google Gears stores data as SQLite databases, so I fired up Lita in order to understand what the structure was like… Things looked a bit messy but I eventually found everything that would interest me; and it was in the “MessagesFT_content” table. Here’s the query I ran:

SELECT c1Body FROM MessagesFT_content WHERE c0Subject LIKE '%Chat%'

Almost cool. The query still returned a bunch of HTML code, our names, and other useless crap. So I fired up Flash Builder, imported the SQLite file and wrote a few AS3 lines, in order to grab the results and filter them with regular expressions. Bang: plain text! Oh, this useless AIR app is OpenSource, by the way.

Now that the data was clean and ready to be analyzed I had to find a cheap or free way to do it. I chose Primitive Word Counter, not because it’s perfect but rather because it’s very simple and could handle the large amount of data I was going to feed it (some other apps simply crashed)…

Running it gave me the most used words and phrases, I only picked the most interesting (at least to me) and launched InDesign.

A celebration poster

I decided to go for an A1 poster, mostly focused on those words and phrases but with a tech twist to it. I kept it all secret, got it printed, and sent it to my pal… Happy fifth Google-talk-history-enabled anniversary to him; and to all of you out there that use it on a daily basis!

Hey! Another free AIR app! This time that ain’t no side project I made on my free time for some obscure users, but rather a big thingy for a big company. Namely Fotolia.

I did all of the coding part (ActionScript 3, Flex 4) and Steaw is responsible for the UI and all graphics. The app is basically a solution for power-users, providing most of the functionnalities of the website and adding some more (such as direct download and local library). Allowing you to search, browse preview and buy all types of medias, including video and vectors. You can also log into your account and store your favorites in a lightbox or create and fill galleries.

This is my first multi-lingual app: to this day it provides 13 translations including Japanese, Chinese and other funny looking languages!

Flex 4

This is also my first big real-life project with Flex 4 and I have to say it’s way better/easier than Flex 3. Really. What changed my life is the way it handles states and component customization via skins… Oh boy, this is easy!

AIR 2.0

Yep, using the brand new AIR 2.0.2, buddy. What for? Mainly for global error handling and the almighty openWithDefaultApplication (for both folder and medias). I’ve also heard this version of the runtime is faster and lighter, and we all like that.

OpenSource

As for every project I work on, I try to have some OpenSource bits so that anyone can benefit from the work and time I spent on it. I asked Fotolia if the AS3 API I was going to write could be OpenSource’d and guess what, they accepted. So here it is, based on the as3-rpclib and on the as3 Signals logic: fotolia-as3-api. I implemented most of (if not all) features of their official API so building an AS3 app off of that should be pretty easy, do so!

Go get it!

Yeah, go get it.