crueltown.com

Tell iCal to Stop Sending Replies when you Accept a Meeting Invitation

I really don’t like that iCal takes it upon itself to send an email notification to the meeting organizer whenever I accept a meeting into my calendar. I pull them in from an IMAP client from my office Exchange mailbox, and if the meeting is in there, I’ve already responded to the organizer and don’t want to do it again. I finally found a right way to make it stop.

Find this script and open it with the script editor:

Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt

Now look for this function and stub it out with comments:

on send_mail_sbrp(subjectLine, messageText, myrecipient, myrecipientname, invitationPath)

Just type two dashes in front of every line between on send_mail_sbrp and end send_mail_sbrp, then hit the Compile button.

The next time you accept an appointment, iCal won’t send an email notification.

Even better would be to make it give me the option, or open the email so I can cancel it if I don’t want it to go out, but for now I’m happy with this.

Superfine

I just got some Uniball Signo bit pens from Jet Pens. Jet Pens is a great place to get cool pens that are hard to find in the United States, like the Pilot Hi-Tec C. The Uniball Signo bit is touted as being the “World’s thinnest pen.” I like writing with a very fine pen, and this one is easily the thinnest I’ve ever seen. Almost like writing with a very sharp pencil, the tiny tip can seem to be scratching against smooth Moleskine paper until you get the right touch. The lines from my 0.38’s look downright chunky and bold in comparison with the 0.18mm lines from these.

If you’re a fine point fan, you need to give them a look. They’re not cheap, though, so be sure you mean it.

My iPhone Rant

I’ve had my iPhone for a week or so now, and I really do like it. However, I’ve got a few questions. Doubtless thousands of other bloggers have mentioned most of this same stuff, but I haven’t posted anything in a while so I’m going to join the chorus.

• What do you mean I can’t copy and paste?

  This has been a ridiculous limitation on what is touted as such a sexy and incredible device. Trying to ride on a friend’s WiFi network the other day, it was impossible to type the long security key correctly (the iPhone won’t let you see what you typed in a password field), and without copy and paste he couldn’t even mail it to me. Trying to remove large amounts of text from something you’re forwarding, etc., is also a pain since you can’t select chunks of text.

• What do you mean I can’t write software for the device, only web pages for the device?

  This is another glaring omission. This is largely how Apple lost the initial war to Microsoft - it was easier to develop stuff for Windows machines. Not letting us build native apps for this machine, depending on everything to run in the browser, is completely backward. Face it, if I want to run web apps, I’d rather be at a real browser, not a phone browser. The Safari browser works pretty well, but an application platform it ain’t.

• What do you mean it won’t run Flash?

  With the amount of Flash web content out there, Apple puts a lot of web sites out of the iPhone’s reach by leaving this out. Hopefully this was a rush to market decision and we’ll see a Flash player on the device soon.

• What do you mean I can’t search for anything?

  One of the true beauties of the Palm OS is the way you can search the entire device for a bit of information. On the iPhone, you can’t search for anything. You would think that the contacts list would provide this at the very least, but nothing I’ve seen so far gives you the option to search, short of pulling up Google in the web browser.

• What do you mean birthdays and other dates I attach to contacts don’t show up on the calendar?

  This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity for applications to work together, but the contacts list and the calendar are oblivious to each other. You see other evidence of the vacuum in which some of these were created by watching the position of Done, Edit, and other buttons. They are not terribly consistent.

• What do you mean there is no punctuation on the keyboard?

  I’m getting used to the touch keyboard - it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, although I do miss my Treo keys - but I don’t understand why they hid the period and the comma. When you type in an email address, the space bar turns into extra punctuation, so there’s clearly room. They should just leave it on all the time. They could make the symbol key itself a lot smaller and gain room for quotes or a question mark.

• What do you mean there’s no menu?

  Apple sometimes goes for minimalist stuff when it just doesn’t make sense. I would love to see a standard, top of screen menu that lets me get to settings and such for the app I’m running. If I need to tweak something in my mail settings, it’s stupid to make me leave the mail app and launch the Settings applet, then drill down to mail settings, tweak, exit, load mail and then start the whole process again.

• What do you mean not all of the apps rotate?

  People are always wowed when they see the Safari browser or the photos turn sideways when I turn the phone, but why don’t all the apps do this, or do this consistently? The browser will let me view it from any angle, but the video player has to be held a certain way. HTML mail messages are often difficult to read because they are too wide, but turning the phone doesn’t affect the mail application.

• What do you mean there is no SD slot?

  This is another place that Apple suffered in the hardware wars - expandable PC’s ruled over closed Apple hardware. They could easily have fit an SD slot in this thing and give me some power to increase the capacity.

• What do you mean the battery is soldered in?

  I know that they claim they couldn’t have made it this small and had a user replaceable battery, but I cry foul. I was comparing the phone with my wife’s RAZR. The back of the RAZR is thinner than the iPhone, but somehow they managed to incorporate a door and a removable battery. Are Motorola’s designers more clever than Apple’s?

All that being said, I still love my little iPhone. I’m just hoping that they rushed it to market and will fill in many of these blanks as time goes on. I was more surprised that they shipped it with such huge gaps. It’s got it all over my Treo (with the possible exception of the keyboard), so I’m happy I switched and I will not be going back.

Although I’m pretty sure I’ll have to upgrade if V2 has a real keyboard.

OpenLaszlo Project Blog » OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial

I’ve been looking at OpenLaszlo a little more, and found this great video introduction on the project blog. 

Link to OpenLaszlo Project Blog » OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial

OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications

OpenLaszlo lets you write Flex 2 applications without shelling out cash to Adobe. Plus, you can compile it to run as a Flash swf file, or as DHTML. Looks pretty good. 

Link to OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications

One thing to watch out for, though… at least on the Windows platform. It creates a batch file that sets the JAVA_HOME environment variable and then starts the Tomcat server (on my machine, it was here: “C:\Program Files\OpenLaszlo Server 4.0.2\Server\lps-4.0.2\lps\utils\startup.bat”). If you had the wrong JAVA_HOME value set during the install (I upgraded my JDK after I installed OpenLaszlo, so it was pointing to an old folder), the Tomcat startup will always point it at the old value, so go rip this line out of the batch file before you stumble over it like I did.

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Stumbled across this, looks kind of interesting. Be sure to follow the Mobzombies link and watch the video of people running around in a crowd, staring at a handheld computer. I like the notion of location-based games. While this one isn’t really location-based (you could easily run into a wall since the game knows nothing about the spacial environment it’s in) you could certainly couple this tech with real world geometry.

Source: Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Mayonnaise and Beer

Read this if you could use a little perspective, or if you could just use a beer.

Hold the mayo.

Link to A.I. Answering Service & Call Center - Mayo and Beer

Flash Element TD | Novel Concepts

My current favorite online time waster, this game is one where you drop towers to defend yourself from various “creeps” who traverse the map and try to get out through your back door. Sort of odd that the minute they get out they come right back in, but it’s still strangely engaging game play. Always fascinates me how something this simple can keep you enthralled for so long. If you’ve got lots to do, don’t follow this link.

Link to Flash Element TD | Novel Concepts

» Second Life to open-source grid; will Google bite? | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

So every day it seems it gets easier to create compelling content for the web, the PC, the handheld device - the trick is coming up with something that is actually compelling. By open-sourcing Second Life, does a true multiverse now become possible? I’m always intrigued by this kind of news, then disappointed because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the one making anything exciting happen with the technology, but I’m definitely an interested observer.

I wonder if my host would let me run a grid under my shared account? 

Link to » Second Life to open-source grid; will Google bite? | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

Powerful Printing in Flash

I haven’t messed around with Flash in a long time, and when I implied that I wanted to do a presentation with it I was warned that you couldn’t print a “deck” from a flash presentation like you could from PowerPoint. I figured this probably wasn’t true, so I started poking around for articles on how to go about printing from Flash.

Sure enough, it’s doable with a little scripting. What I found interesting was that none of the articles I stumbled across were newer than 2002 or so. I’m hoping that means that the printing mechanism just hasn’t changed much in a long time.

This article gave a nice, simple overview. If you’ve had any experience printing with Flash, especially dumping a bunch of key “slides” out as a deck for distribution at a meeting, feel free to comment and post links. I wouldn’t turn down that kind of help.

Link to Powerful Printing in Flash