stilldesigning

serious web development. seriously.

I probably would have found this site ages ago if Google-ing for “free fonts” actually brought up sites with free fonts instead of bait-and-switch poser sites. But thanks to a recent post on Ajaxian, I know have an excellent source for open source fonts to use in whatever project I want: Font Squirrel!  I can embed it with sIFR or canvas-text, I can give them to everyone in my Thursday night typography circle, and I can create header images until the cows come home.  No more looking over my shoulder wondering if that assassin from the all-powerful font maker lobby has finally tracked me down.  (I think I lost him in Munich.)

http://www.fontsquirrel.com

Viva la open source!

It’s official! Apple took my $99, and now I can write applications and submit them to the iTunes App Store! I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Time to start reading up on PhoneGap again. Appropiately, I am writing this post from my iPhone.

For those of you still anxiously awaiting a working version of Albatross, we are one big step close!  The latest test builds of VLC 0.9.9 have fixed on-the-fly transcoding and streaming to Flash video format (.flv)!  Okay, it’s almost fixed.  They still haven’t fixed the problem where transcoding the audio to any sample rate other than the source file’s native sample rate causes the audio and video to speed up or slow down accordingly, but at least it’s working again!  You can download them for Mac OS X here:

http://jones.videolan.org/~videolan/0.9.9-test/

I’ve only tested this on the Mac so far, but history tells me that it should work in other environments as well.  Works with a stock installation of Albatross 0.5.1.

The new 2.7.1 release of WordPress was just too good to pass up.  I had installed it on another clients site (soon to be launched), and just fell in love with the new interface.  It’s very snazzy, I love the auto-updates, and the layout is fab! But there’s one thing that was still missing… themed login pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I have joined the legions of iPhone users. This means that I can blog from anywhere! For example, I’m blogging from my iPhone right now as I’m sitting here… at my desk, in front of my computer. Okay, bad example. But this sure is a fun toy! And with projects out there like PhoneGap, there will very likely be a lot less free time in my future!

New and improved!  Albatross Home Media Streaming Server 0.5.1 is released! New features include:

• support for mfs_ftp (this method is more reliable if you need to kill the stream)
• improved stream killing (it actually works in most cases now)
• user interface tweaks and improvements
• detailed program information in HMO mode
• more awesomeness!

TyStreamer is now the Albatross Home Media Streaming Server!  The new release has many, many new features and improvements including:

• Support for unhacked TiVos through the HMO interface
• Watch videos on your Nintendo Wii’s Internet Channel!
• Major user interface update
• Cool new logo!

Good news from our scientist friends over in France and Switzerland.  The Large Hadron Collider went online today, and our planet did not get sucked into a black hole!  Yay!!!  Unfortunately, this also means that I still have to attend my mid-year review at work.  Ah, well.  C’est la vie!

Sure, you love the full-bodied debugging environment that comes with Firebug 1.2, but when you’re on the move, jumping from browser to browser, you just can’t get weighed down by being tied to Firefox all day. When I’m surfing Safari, live at the Opera, or kickin’ with IE, I debug with Firebug Lite, now with more debug! Read the rest of this entry »

The TyStreamer page has moved from its old home on wiskars.com to the main Still Designing web site!  This by itself is not necessarily “blog-worthy” as the content hasn’t changed much… yet.  But some of you may have noticed that the VideoLAN team has just release VLC version 0.9.0-test1.  TyStreamer now requires version 0.9.0 for its ability to stream flash video, allowing you to use 98% of all web browser installations to watch video on your TiVo or home computer anywhere on the internet.  There hasn’t been a new release of TyStreamer in a while largely because VLC 0.9.0 has been a bit of a moving target.  Now that we’re starting to see some slightly more stable releases from VLC, TyStreamer can likewise start showing its stuff.  Some of the cool new features you can look forward to over previous versions:

• Streams Flash video
• View video files on your home computer as well as TiVo programs
• Support for multiple video sources from the same TyStreamer installation
• Cool new Web 2.0 user interface using jQuery!
• Streams to the Nintendo Wii’s Internet Channel!