Just a Memo

Woah. As if having the creative likes of Obey (Shepard Fairey), ISO50 (Scott Hansen), and Sarah Silverman weren’t enough, a couple of iPhoneDevCamp alumni volunteered to create an iPhone and iPod Touch application for Barack Obama.

You’ll have instant access to Barack’s positions on important issues, as well as local and national campaign news as it happens. Photos and videos from the campaign trail are all here, too.

• Call Friends: A great volunteering tool that lets you make a difference any time you want by talking to people you already know. Your contacts are prioritized by key battleground states, and you can make calls and organize results all in one place.
• Call Stats: See nationwide Obama ‘08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
• Get Involved: Do more. Find and contact your local Obama for America HQ.
• Receive Updates: Receive the latest news and announcements via text messages or email.
• News: Browse complete coverage of national and local campaign news.
• Local Events: Find local events, share by email and get maps and directions.
• Media: Browse videos and photos from the campaign
• Issues: Get clear facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s plan for essential issues facing Americans.

I wonder how the McCain camp will follow up on this. For some reason, every time I associate John McCain and the web, I seem to refer to Mike Davidson punishing McCain’s web team for hot linking images on John McCain’s MySpace page. Classic.

Anyways, enough of the reminiscing. I commend the iPhoneDevCamp alumni amongst the other 4 who volunteered their time to the project. It truly gives some boost and good press to the iPhone development platform and its everyday application; whether it be checking your health, to learning why to vote for a presidential candidate.

The app is available at http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/iphone

Since writing about the Adobe CS4 live web broadcast a couple of days ago, I was fortunate enough to finally view it. Enjoy!

You may view the video at a higher resolution via http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1715. You may also find other related videos on that page with regards to CS4. The ones I am interested in seeing would probably be the following:

• Photoshop CS4 Features Tour
• Photoshop CS4 Extended Features Tour
• Illustrator CS4 Features Tour
• Flash CS4 Features Tour

All I can say is that this is going to be one very nice Suite, and should be fun to play/work with.

Ever accidentally do an svn checkout instead of an export? Here’s a command-line snippet to take care of those hidden .SVN directories:

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Warning: Take great care when using “rm -rf” always.

Ever had the situation where you have synced your iPhone (to iTunes OS X) and happen to sync both the contacts from your Address Book and Google Contacts? Or, just happen to add someone’s new contact info as another contact-card? Well, here’s how I cleaned and merged duplicate contacts so that my Address Book performs like a champ.

1. Launch Script Editor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor)
2. Paste the following code snippet

   tell application "Address Book"
       set biglist to {}
       set theGroup to count every person
       if not (exists (group "Duplicate Entries")) then
           make new group with properties {name:"Duplicate Entries"}
       end if
       set the_names to the name of every person as list
       repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_names
           set this_Name to item i of the_names
           set theName to name of person this_Name as string
           if this_Name is not in biglist then
               copy this_Name to end of biglist
           else
               add (people whose name is theName) to group "Duplicate Entries"
           end if
       end repeat
       save addressbook
   end tell

3. Save your newly created script (would usually default to ~/Documents/AppleScripts/), and just open/run it

Now, the easiest way to figure out if its running or not (at least for me) was to run the Activity Monitor and sort by CPU. I simply just waited to see if Address Book would climb to the top doing 90+, and back down to nil. When this is done, you should be able to see a group called “Duplicate Entries”. From there, you may now sort through the details and delete the ones that you don’t need.

Note: You can also do a quick merge via Address Book itself from duplicate contacts. However, you won’t be able to see which contacts are being merged as its just a set-it-and-forget kind of deal. If you do not care and simply just want to get rid of those dupes, you can do so by doing the following:

1. Launch Address Book
2. Select Card from its menu
3. Then, select Looking for Duplicates… and just go through the following prompts after search results finishes

Here’s a snippet of JS code that might come in handy if you, let’s say, would like to filter out what type of content to display depending on your website user’s OS. A real-life example would be having a download link show up to user’s who have a client that was only published on Windows.

// This script sets OSName variable as follows:
// "Windows"    for all versions of Windows
// "MacOS"      for all versions of Macintosh OS
// "Linux"      for all versions of Linux
// "UNIX"       for all other UNIX flavors
// "Unknown OS" indicates failure to detect the OS

var OSName="Unknown OS";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win")!=-1) OSName="Windows";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")!=-1) OSName="MacOS";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("X11")!=-1) OSName="UNIX";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Linux")!=-1) OSName="Linux";

document.write('Your OS: '+OSName);

Note: An alternate way can be found via PPK’s quirksmode.org