Archive for the 'Articles' Category

Scripting The Hard Way

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

I’ve been working on iTunes integration for FlexTime. My model for this feature is roughly approximated by GarageBand’s “Send To iTunes” feature, which packages up the current song into an M4A format, sends it off to iTunes, starts playing it, and makes sure the playlist into which it was added becomes visible in the iTunes […]

A Glance Back

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

Have you ever noticed how faulty the brain’s mechanism for detecting “freshness” can be? If you’re anything like me, you find yourself foolishly clinging to the belief that something is new, long past its certain staleness. For instance, I still think of The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love as “their new song,” almost fifteen years […]

Random Length FlexTime Activities

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

A FlexTime customer recently asked me if there was any way to set up a routine such that each activity in the routine would take a random period of time. His interest was in having FlexTime remind him at irregular intervals to stay focused on the task at hand. Unfortunately, the short answer is “no.” […]

Resolution Independent Fever

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Resolution independence is the notion that all graphics on a computer display should be zoomable to an arbitrary multiplier without losing quality. If you know even the slightest thing about computer graphics, you’ll understand that in a resolution independent world, bitmaps are out and vector graphics are in. Vector graphics can scale gracefully to an […]