Dashboard Development
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 14.09.09Last summer I had been working on a project that required a rather large amount of lipsync animation in a short amount of time, and developed a workflow involving Papagayo, Lightwave endomorphs, and some custom javascripts to translate between the two.
Hobbled somewhat by the lack of system integration and javascript security limitations, I had to copy blocks of phoneme frames in, and copy out blocks of translated keyframe data. The project died down, and I didn’t need to revisit the workflow till early this summer. That’s when I finally gave widget programming another chance, and got into using Dashcode, part of Apple’s free Xcode development suite.
Let me preface by saying — Dashcode has issues. Long standing issues that haven’t been fixed for quite some time, even through several update cycles. Colour values inexplicably shift during editing object properties (degenerating into a completely different value headed inexorably south), objects loose properties, elements take on properties from other elements deleted the week before, etc. But once that’s out of the way (and you learn to watch out for disappearing styles), it’s a pretty cool system. Not only did it open up doors for interfacing with basic system events (dragging and dropping files, could it really be any easier to translate a .moho file?), it opened up full access to the OSX command line as well. All using a familiar javascript basis.
And that’s the back story to how I started developing a small collection of utilities for Mac OS X, and my earlier post introducing iaian7.com/dashboard. It’s mostly stuff I’ve needed at work — first the lipsync conversion utility, then a widget to help calculate screen resolutions and ratios.
Yesterday I finished up the the latest addition to my collection; first public release of Chroma, a basic colour conversion utility and swatch library. I also posted everything to macupdate.com I certainly didn’t expect such a dramatic response, but traffic has increased substantially with scores of downloads for each widget just within the first hour or two. I sure hope I don’t regret this, there simply isn’t time for me to keep taking on more projects like this! Even so, I really hope they prove useful to others, and plan on continued development as I have time. Hope you enjoy!
Prowler — interface for the Prowl push notification platform, letting you send notes instantly to your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Sheets — generate sprite sheets from image sequences or group selections. It requires an ImageMagick command line installation, but I have yet to find a good Photoshop solution for this, and Sheets doesn’t crash as often. Oh yeah, I went there!
Chroma — a colour management and conversion utility. The library is a little basic so far, but I’m hoping to continue developing the feature set to include more features and better management. The data is all there (swatches are given a group title and name when added), but how it looks and performs is yet to be defined. For now, I’m just excited to finally have a good solution for colour swatches and web development.
Feel free to head over to MacUpdate.com to rate and leave comments for Lipsync, Ratio, Prowler, Sheets, or Chroma.
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