http://bluespark.tumblr.com/

The coolest way to use Dropbox on a Mac to send...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:14:07 +1300

The coolest way to use Dropbox on a Mac to send file.

http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons/Dropbox%20Service

Once installed you can simply right click on any file and copy/move it to your Dropbox public folder. The public URL will automatically be copied to your clipboard. Awesome.

My take on how the new iMac should have been designed. Even less...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:44:10 +1300

My take on how the new iMac should have been designed. Even less noise than the latest iMac with “reduced” noise.

Graphed data of New Zealand fixed and 2 year floating rates from...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:38:14 +1300

Graphed data of New Zealand fixed and 2 year floating rates from 1964 to Jan 2009
Full Size

The PUMA Index

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:56:06 +1200

The PUMA Index:

How all stock marketing charts should be created. !=

Ever wonder what the differences between Arial and Helvetica...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:54:59 +1200

Ever wonder what the differences between Arial and Helvetica were?

Configuring OSx for hosting with Snow Leopard.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:53:45 +1200

So I wanted to setup a Snow Leopard web hosting super duper cool machine.

There are few things, if you want a fresh install, put in Snow Leopard DVD, hit Utilities on the welcome screen and it will reboot.

— Server Install
1. Erase drive. Install Snow Leopard.
2. After some time, install xcode, this will give you all the tools to build think you will need to build.

— Configure Web Server Stuff.
1. Apache, this is very good to configure your hosting files.
http://clickontyler.com/virtualhostx/
2. Get PHP going (you can google this)
3. Install MySql from DMG then add a password to root install.
4. Get Mysql Going ( you have to change the .socket setting in php.ini)

— FTP Server
1. Download the source from here
http://www.pureftpd.org/project/pure-ftpd you will need to compile it and this is why we got xcode.
2. Now you gotta compile it basically: ./configure; make; make install;
then start it with “/usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd &” more info here http://download.pureftpd.org/pub/pure-ftpd/doc/README
3. Then simply get this http://jeanmatthieu.free.fr/pureftpd/index.html it allows you to create FTP only accounts http://jeanmatthieu.free.fr/pureftpd/index.html

— Mac Ports
Great to install a few things.

To much time.

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:26:29 +1200

OmniGraffle ROCKS! “Drawing a diagram with OmniGraffle is as...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:41:42 +1200

OmniGraffle ROCKS!

“Drawing a diagram with OmniGraffle is as easy as breathing; everything just works the way it should.”
Matt Neuburg - TidBITS

I don’t say this about many products. But what an amazing product. Their support is even better.

OmniGraffle (5.1) is a vector drawing application very similar to Microsoft’s Visio and even supports importing Visio documents. What they didn’t say is how good it is and how easy it is to use.

Currently I am using OmniGraffle for all my iPhone prototyping, design and icons.

What’s So Great?
The best thing is the stencils. There are 3 iPhone stencils that are very awesome for quickly dragging and dropping iPhone shapes onto the page. I bought an icon stencil for $10 bucks but you can use anything including include images/bitmaps.

Drawing is simple and quick, everything can be done on one layer, you can also quickly add further layers and even pages (hello Freehand).

Vector shapes are awesome and the big thing is that once you set the corner radius you can resize the shape without destroying the look (think photoshop and flash sometimes).

There is a huge selection of primitive shapes, stroke weights, fills and gradients with very precise control to get those awesome gradients.

The inspector tabs can also be locked for stroke or fill by simply double clicking that tab until a green lock appears, this way you can have stroke and fill on the same window. (Support told me how to do this).

Exporting and saving images is really good. One neat to trick is to exporting drawings as a PDF then importing them again. This way when you resize say an icon strokes and outline’s will scale proportionally. PNG images are very very crisp and look great on the iPhone. You can also just select one element or a group of elements on the screen and simple export these objects (love this).

What I dont like.

The basic version does not have guides (support said simple draw a box or line as a guide, fair enough).
I found it a little difficult to change the page from inches to pixels but that is pretty simple now.
Once you have draw a complex shape with curves and lines, I could not find out how to add extra points to the shape. That was a little annoying but not a killer.
Don’t drop photoshop yet. OmniGraffle wont allow you to edit bitmap images, so for any complex image editing you will need Photoshop (eg isolating images and getting you assets ready to place).

The Best.

Support! I emailed support to say I really do love this product and it really has speed up my development time and prototyping time and listed my issues. Took support 30 minutes to reply to ALL my questions and provide solid answers. Thanks Paul Palinkas, Support Ninja.

The cost for Standard is $99.95 USD and Pro $199.95 (Visio, guides, notes, SVG, Advanced Text?)

My new super crap iPhone ringtone. Download the m4r ringtone...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:42:00 +1200

My new super crap iPhone ringtone.

Download the m4r ringtone file here. files.me.com/sponno/cifjza

Bluespark's Top 11 New Zealand Twitters

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:36:00 +1200

@nzben
General gadget news and TV show boy, has taken to blogging a lot lately.

@mitch_olson
Co-founder of Smallworlds.com always has some great links for anyone running a business.

@barnaclebarnes

General rants and oracle of worldly knowledge.

@PolarBearFarm
Loves kicking the s**t out of Apple products and tools because they dont work they way he wants them. A great read and things would work a lot better at Apple if Layton was running the show.

@segdeha
Notorious twitter, posting dozens of updates a day. Replies to many and always has something interesting to say. Generally hates every product once using it, always thinks the next product around the corner will be better from reading reviews.

@matthewbuchanan
Matthew Buchanan likes to keep his finger in the pulse and the other hand tapped into the internet 18 hours a day. If there ever is any decent movie to see you will find it via Matthew.

@beattieboy
Actually writes good blog posts and contributes a lot to the web development community. Gets involved in a good Twitter scarp some times.

@sneak
Coffee addict. Also the creator of some fun twitter tools.

@jarred
Gadget, flim, photography, tumblr.com, design and internet geek for Wellington, definitely on the up.

@simianaudio
Good links and active in twitter conversations with pretty good feedback.

@elliottkember
x-kiwi, he will be back, currently working in the UK. His generally musing are generally on the money and now he has quite a lot of followers he creates more thoughtful posts.

Author: @sponno

How to rename project in Xcode 3.x

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:56:11 +1200

How to rename project in Xcode 3.x:

So you built a project in XCode and decided to change the name. Well its a small pain to do this. 6 simple steps - how to rename the project and target executables.

iPhone Anti-Pirates

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:07:38 +1200

NSBundle *bundle = [NSBundle mainBundle];
NSDictionary *info = [bundle infoDictionary];
if ([info objectForKey: @”SignerIdentity”] != nil)
{
/* Looks like this is app is pirated */
}

Save screen captures into a Stack in Leopard - awesome

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:45:47 +1200

sneak:

I use the built-in OSX screen capture tools a lot when I’m working. By default, when using the Command+Shift+3/4 options, these captures are saved to the desktop — which gets messy fast when you use them often. A number of months ago I found a great tip on changing the default save location of these screen captures, and so now I have them saving to a folder in my Documents and have put that folder into my dock as a Stack, making them easily accessible but out of the way.

To change the default save location, open up Terminal and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Screenshots

Obviously you would change the path to match whatever folder you want the captures to save into. You will need to log out and back in before you will see the changes. Once done, go to the new save folder and drag it down into the right-hand side of your dock. Now whenever you save a screen capture it will automagically appear down in your Stack :)

Of course, if you don’t need a saved copy of the capture you can also add the Ctrl key to the mix when taking it — this will save the screen capture onto your clipboard rather than saving a file, and you can then paste it directly into a document.

Mini Mortgage Manager icon displayed in the Austin Texas Apple...

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:52:08 +1200

Mini Mortgage Manager icon displayed in the Austin Texas Apple Store. Awesome.

Dog signs in parks are always a bit funny

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:07:08 +1200

Dog signs in parks are always a bit funny

H2O PHP TEMPLATING ENGINE / LIKE DJANGO Wow finally I found...

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:26:34 +1200

H2O PHP TEMPLATING ENGINE / LIKE DJANGO

Wow finally I found something that really makes me like PHP so much more. Recently I have been trying to do every new project I start in Google App Engine. Simply I love the Django templates that allows me to quickly build up the project in a tiny amount of code.

After a quick search I found H20 templating system which is port of the Django system.

http://github.com/speedmax/h2o-php/tree/master

The documentation is quick and excellent, setup is simple.
To get started code is simple as this.

*in your template*

*in php*

$person =array(
‘name’ => ‘Peter Jackson’, ‘age’ => 25
);
$h2o->render(compact(‘person’));
?>

OK, so that was easy. But you can also get your template to inherit your layout or base template which means it will automatically write into pre-defined areas of this template.

Since using this, it has turned 2-3 pages of pretty messy code down to 3-4 pages of super tiny simple code that is extensible.

OFFICIAL WEB09 INTRODUCTION

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:33:17 +1300

Tilda the dog aged about 6 weeks. Boy puppies are cute.

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:05:04 +1300

Tilda the dog aged about 6 weeks. Boy puppies are cute.

Skatebowl to footpath traverse. Super awesome

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:19:34 +1300

Skatebowl to footpath traverse. Super awesome

My AT&T SIM card collection from the old jail break days.

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:13:39 +1300

My AT&T SIM card collection from the old jail break days.