Category: Work

Worship slides on an iPhone/iPod

I’ve been wanting a presentation program that could display on a TV or projector for my iPhone for a long time, firstly a laptop doesn’t fit in your pocket, and the new display port on my Macbook doesn’t have a TV out adapter. I thought about writing a mobile version of my Limelight application, that is a presentation management application, meaning it can handle different file types (powerpoint, text, movies), within the same application. That would be a lot of work and there aren’t any other programs out there yet. Apple hasn’t made their video out API public, so even the programs that can display powerpoint, can’t do it externally on a TV.

Discovery
I was browsing the Apple online store (as you do), and saw that the cable I have for plugging my iPhone in a TV also supported displaying photos. I didn’t realise this because it only does it when you start a slide show, by clicking the play button in a photo album. That made my mind click, and I realised I could use it to show presentations, or song lyrics.

Song lyric slides
Putting powerpoint presentations on the iPhone is discussed here, but this article will discuss how to easily create song lyric slides using Limelight. Once you’ve downloaded Limelight (available for mac or pc), and created some lyric files (just plain text files), you can simply right click a file or a set list and export images.

Sync photos
You should then have some slides exported to your Documents folder. These can then be copied to iPhoto or the folder on your computer that you synchronise your photos using iTunes to your iPod/iPhone. You’ll then be able to do something like this:

Tips and tricks
1) You need to start the slide show after plugging in the cable, otherwise it won’t show on your screen
2) You can’t normally pause a slide show on the iPhone, but you can if you’re outputting to the TV! That’s what you need for presentations! See the below screenshot.
3) You can edit the slide show settings under Settings -> Photos (I set the longest slide setting)
4) You can edit your TV out settings under Settings -> iPod-> TV Out
5) Its a good idea to turn of auto screenlock in Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock
6) You may need to reorder your photos within the album in iPhoto
7) To display your slides on a TV you’ll need a Apple Component AV Cable or Apple Composite AV Cable. On the iPhone your display resolution will be limited to 480i (NTSC) or 576i (PAL). You can find out about more about video capabilities of Apple products here.

More to come
You can probably get this working on other phones/PDAs/MP3/video players that have a video out, but I don’t have one to try it. There will definitely be more updates to Limelight in the future, including customising the layout and additional file formats like movies and powerpoint. The first update will probably be do add a view to size the images so that they are 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL) which should provide the best quality output on those screens.

iPhoto -> WordPress

Been wondering for a while if I should write an plugin to iPhoto that uploads directly to wordpress. There’s been WordPress Export for a while, but it wasn’t free, doesn’t work with the new WordPress gallery feature and doesn’t work with the latest iPhoto.

I did find though with the new Flash uploaded built into WordPress you can now browse your iPhoto library to upload files. Its not ideal, as you might upload large version of files, but its better than nothing, and in the view of doing less and not having to program every good idea I come up with it would have to do:

WordPress Bible Gateway

My latest wordpress plugin is a plugin that automatically creates links to bible gateway from reference in wordpress posts. You can get it here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-bible-gateway/

Its not perfect yet as its a modification of wp-bible, but because it uses bible gateway it has premium translations like NIV, NLT, The Message, and many more! By default it will reference which ever translation the user last looked up using in biblegateway, but this can also be specified in the options. It should handle references at least like John 3:15-16 and some others and I’m hoping to refine it further as it goes on.

Version History
1.0.4
Fix so that all links now include version, not just some
Added option to open links in a new window
1.0.2
Bible version to link to can now be specified in the options
1.0.1
Fix for bible references like John 3 verses 15 to 16
1.0.0
Initial Version

Limegreen Autoupdate

A while ago I “released” limegreen, an application template for making java applications look as good as they can, and function as natively as they can, on OS X, windows and linux.

Anyway, I use it in some of my applications, and I’ve recently added a completely automatic autoupdate feature. It will produce an ATOM file with the version in it and change history, and links for where to get the update files. I choose ATOM, because it meant with the same file I could store information that could be read by a program that needed to know if it should update, as well as allow people to subscribe and be notified of updates in a feed/RSS reader.

I’ve also released a PHP library and wordpress plugin that allows the ATOM file to be read, and version information to be automatically placed on a website. Its what I use to show this, and generated the latest download links on my website. If you’re looking for the PHP library, just download the wordpress plugin and include limegreen.php.

WordPress Backup

I run several websites / blogs powered off wordpress. In order to back them up I’ve written a unix shell script to do this. It will automatically read the database settings and do a dump of it, as well as copy themes / plugins / uploads.

There are two versions. One will copy files locally, the other allows a remote sync to another server which is compatible with Dreamhost.

The local copy version can be found here: wp-backup.sh Example usage can be seen below. The -t option allows you only to backup a single theme. The -u option allows you to skip backing up uploads.

./wp-backup.sh /path/to/wordpress /path/to/backup
./wp-backup.sh -t theme -u /path/to/wordpress /path/to/backup

There is also a version to work with Dreamhost’s free (with hosting) 50GB backup plan than can be downloaded here: wp-remote.sh

./wp-remote.sh /path/to/wordpress [email protected]:backup
where b123456 is your backup user

Limitations
1) Your wp-config file must be pretty strict in order to be read:
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘hostname);

2) The directory you’re copying to must already exist.

3) The options/order of the parameters in calling the script is very strict

App Ideas

In continuing to blog ideas that I think are cool but I need to take off my todo list, here’s a list of apps that I think could be written sometime. Feel free to write them:

Facebook Apps
Social facebook app of where to find hard to find stuff
Mac vs. PC
Virtual Time Capsule Gift app

Deskbands
World Clock
Multiple Desktop for windows XP

Widgets
Scrolling Stocks
Scrolling News

iPhone
Dos Box on iPhone, with easy to build script that incorporates it and a dos application into a new iPhone app
Penny football
Super rubber dub for iPhone
Style Diary for iPhone

Spreadsheet Widget

spreadsheetwidgetI’ve been looking for a spreadsheet widget for dashboard for along time, something to quickly blot without loading up a full spreadsheet like open office, excel or numbers. I was thinking of writing my own, but I’ve been trying not to program so much “pointless” stuff and focus on what really matters. This lead me to the idea of using Mac OSX’s webclip feature that lets you create a widget from any webpage.

I originally tried Google Docs with a public spreadsheet, but something went wrong with the javascript. A quick wikipedia and I discovered Zoho’s public spreadsheet. It worked great as you can see from the image!