Category Archives: general

Vacation!

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On Friday I’ll be leaving for Europe for 2 weeks of wandering around with a big backpack and sleeping on trains. So if you send me e-mail after Friday, you probably won’t get a response for a couple of weeks.

If you have SWFObject questions, try posting them to the SWFObject list, there are a few hundred people on there that have plenty of experience using it and can probably answer any questions you might have.

Nokia E70 and iSync OS X

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I just got a new phone yesterday – a beautiful Nokia E70. I’m completely in love with this phone.

Anyway, after hours of searching, I finally figured out how to make iSync work with the phone (it’s not supported by default).

I’m sharing this info in the hopes that other people will find it useful.

Here’s what you do:

1) Edit your MetaClasses.plist file:
– Open a Finder window and press command+shift+g and paste in this line: 

/Applications/iSync/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns
/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/

– You may want to make a backup of this file (just copy + paste it into the same folder)

2) Open the file in your favorite text editor, and add this info for the E70:

<key>com.nokia.E70</key>
<dict>
  <key>Identification</key>
  <dict>
    <key>com.apple.cgmi+cgmm</key>
    <string>Nokia+Nokia E70-1</string>
    <key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>
    <string>Nokia+Nokia E70-1</string>
  </dict>
  <key>InheritsFrom</key>
  <array>
    <string>family.com.nokia.serie60v2.3</string>
    </array>
  <key>Services</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>ServiceName</key>
      <string>com.apple.model</string>
      <key>ServiceProperties</key>
      <dict>
        <key>ModelIcon</key>
        <string>NOKE70.tiff</string>
        <key>ModelName</key>
        <string>E70</string>
      </dict>
    </dict>
  </array>
</dict>

NOTE: I copied the icon for one of the other phones and renamed it to “NOKE70.tiff”, but you don’t need to do this if you don’t want to, just pick one of the existing tiff files in the same folder as the .plist file.

3) Save the .plist file and restart iSync.

4) Add a device, it should find your E70 and allow you to sync using the built in sync software on the phone!

* NOTE: I ordered my phone from europe, so it uses the “-1” in the identification string (Nokia+Nokia E70-1) – when the US model comes out, this will probably change to “Nokia+Nokia E70-2”

UPDATE: I noticed that this wasn’t adding the alarms for my meetings at the right time – they were all set without the timezone offset they should have had, so with some further digging, I figured out how to fix this:

1) Open Finder, hit command+shift+g and paste in this path:

/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/PhoneFamilySync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/

– Find the file PhoneConduitv2-serie60-SyncML.plist and make a copy of it for backup purposes (in the same folder is fine)

2) Open the file (not the backup copy) in your favorite text editor, and search for this node:

<key>hasTimeZone</key>
<false/>

and change the ‘false’ to ‘true’ so it should look like this:

<key>hasTimeZone</key>
<true/>

Save the file and relaunch iSync, and all your meeting alarms should now be the correct time. Since I had already synced, it wouldn’t resync all the events I already had, so you may need to remove the meetings from the phone and resync, but be careful, as removing the events from the phone will remove them from your calendar next time you sync! (I’m not sure of a good way to get around this, so if anyone has ideas, lets hear them)

Enjoy!

Notes:
– This only seems to work when syncing from the computer to the phone. If I choose sync in the phone, it tries to connect but then just disconnects without syncing or a warning.
– If all of this is too much for you, or you can’t figure it out, you can always just buy this plugin from NovaMedia for €10

UPDATE: I took some pictures of it so you can see the size of it – not the best pics (my room is kinda dark) but they should give you an idea of the size and feel of it.

UPDATE (6-27-2006): OS X 10.4.7 was released today, and it appears that the update breaks this functionality (there were some updates to iSync). The new update does not appear to support the E70 yet, so you’ll have to re-implement this change after you update to 10.4.7.

10 years of Flash

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This month marks the 10 year anniversary of what used to be known as FutureSplash Animator. Back then it was just a little animation tool, and has a pretty interesting story behind it, including being turned down by Adobe.

As it grew close to shipping time, we changed the name of our software to FutureSplash Animator to focus more on its animation capabilities. We also were growing tired of running a company that didn’t have much money to spend, and began trying to sell our technology. After an unsuccessful pitch to Adobe and turning down a bid from Fractal Design, we shipped FutureSplash Animator in the summer (May) of 1996.

So how do you celebrate 10 years? Well, there were a few things happening on Monday that are pretty big news: We saw one of the biggest US Television networks go online and offer streaming versions of their shows. This was exciting for me because Schematic designed the UI for the ABC player, and acted as a Technical liaison (with our VP of Multimedia stuff Robert Reinhardt heading that side up). A while back I was asked to help out with a motion test/technology demo for the 3D rotating images, and after a few hours of messing around with Andre Michelle’s the excellent DistortImage class by Thomas Pfeiffer (based on Andre Michelle’s code), we had a nice little working prototype running. It’s very basic, but you can check it out here if you want to see how the animation progressed as the ABC folks built the actual player.

Then Adobe redesigned their site — killing Macromedia.com in the process. At first I thought ‘sure another website, blah blah,’ but then I looked under the hood and noticed that they are using SWFObject to embed the Flash movies on the site(!). It’s a customized version, but the base functionality is all there, and they even left in my namespacing, so if you search the js file for ‘deconcept’ you’ll see the code show up. Pretty cool.

There’s one other big project that was launched on Monday but I’ll save that for another post.

What the hell am I doing?

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It’s been a while since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to lately, so here goes:

About 5 months ago I left The Chopping Block and started as a Senior Software Developer at Schematic. I’ve been working on a few really cool projects, including some work on Vongo, and a Windows Media Center site for GameTap. There’s a ton of other awesome projects in the works that we’ll be launching soon, so watch this space. Also, we’re always looking for good AS2.0 developers, so if you or someone you know is looking for work, or even just more fun work, drop us a line.

I’ve also started teaching a class on XHTML and Flash at The Cooper Union, which I’m very excited about.