Mobile blogging

My last post was composed and posted from the normal blogger interface via Safari on my phone, not the most elegant solution. With that in mind I had a quick look in the app store to see what blogging apps were available.

I've already got the Wordpress app for updating my main photography blog (blog.lewiscraik.co.uk), although I've struggled to get that working, probably due to the settings on my Wordpress install, so I was after something similar. Blogpress lite seemed like the best bet, but it won't let you do anything until you enter the details of your Google Picasa account, which I do not have and am unable to set up from the iPhone (I understand you need to download software for it, great).

So, I've decided to simplify things and use the email to blog feature on blogspot, hopefully this has work!

There may be an app for everything, but there are some times when an app isn't needed!

Facebook iPhone App

I had a bit of a panic this morning, went to fire up the Facebook app on my iPhone and as soon as it had updated my news feed it exited. Not good! This continued a few times, even with force quitting the app and restarting the phone.

Luckily the next step in the iPhone app trouble shooting routine worked, the good old uninstall and reinstall! This also had the added bonus ofspeeding up the app, where before any status comments etc locked up the app for about 90 seconds, after the reinstall these actions were almost instant, just as they should be! I think there must be some sort of caching issue in Facebook's code, as this had been present in all of the releases since v3.0 of the Facebook app, hopefully they can do a v3.1 release with w fix implented (and maybe background notifications too?).

My advice to anyone that is experiencing the slowing down is to uninstall and reinstall the app.

Google seem to have snuck in some fixes to their calendars

I've been moving my life over to Google Apps/the Google cloud for a while now.

The last time I'd looked at moving my calendars over fully there were issues with syncing multiple calendars to both iCal on my Mac and my iPhone, it seems that Google have now fixed these.

The first fix I noticed was the fix for the iPhone, previously the only way to sync multiple calendars had been with Google Sync, their Exchange sync service, but now they have added the ability to do it with CalDAV, all you need to do is visit a webpage (from any device, so not only your iPhone) and check what calendars you want to sync. Full details here.

The fix for iCal isn't quite as neat, as for some reason they haven't offered this service for iCal. The standard way of doing this is for all calendars other than your default calendar to be displayed as "delegates" this isn't ideal, and is made worse by each calendar name being one delegate, sharing one calendar, so the calendars are nested 2 levels down, which looks very messy. There are a few workarounds available online, which show you how to create an account for each calendar, which is better, but still not ideal. I have contacted Google pointing out that the iPhone solution is much better and asking if they would consider offering it for iCal also, I will post if I get an update.

Lightroom SDK and Lua

Well, it's been a few days since I downloaded the Lightroom SDK and progress hasn't been as quick as I hoped, mainly because it's been ages since I've done anything in a language that doesn't closely resemble c (and feeling all bunged up with cold). I've pretty much got my head around the syntax now though and how tables can fit within tables.

The bit that really got me was the function-context call needed for the property table, this is to make sure that the resources can be released and helps with error handling, the code needed doesn't really match up with the explanations in the SDK documents, so you need to read through it a few times.

I've been writing my scripts using the Smultron editor for Mac OS X, I did try to use Eclipse, but neither of the Lua plugins worked reliably, so I went back to Smultron, which helps by highlighting quotes, comments etc and matching up brackets. I may give Eclipse another go when I am a bit more used to using it for PHP etc, as I've not used it for a few years now and the whole plug in architecture has changed a lot, but for anyone looking for a free, platform independent IDE for most languages it is well worth a look!