Adobe Portfolio

My photography website had been hosted with Photoshelter for a number of years, but decided to leave late last year due to a combination of having scaled down my photography business and a big price increase - mostly related to the $ to £ exchange rate after the brexit vote.

I looked at various options, mainly similar to Photoshelter, but realised that I didn’t need something as powerful and that Portfolio was included in my Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. My choice was confirmed when I learned that it played well with Lightroom online albums - which I use to sync some of my Lightroom catalog to my iPhone.

The set up was really easy, with 8 layouts to choose from - I chose “Lukas” which was introduced as “ideal for photographers”. It also helped that the colour scheme was what I had in mind. I was then able to tweak the contextual settings to link my social media accounts, set the header etc. The trickier bits were selecting the photos for the portfolios - my previous website hadn’t been updated for a few years, so wanted to freshen it up. Even more difficult was writing the “About me” section, we brits aren’t too good at that sort of thing.

The only problem I discovered during the process is that the templates all seem to be designed around landscape images, the problem being that I also wanted to include some portrait images. In the end I tweaked my image selections to ensure I had an even number of portrait images in each of my portfolios and paired them up in Photoshop to make landscape images comprised of 2 portrait images.

With the content populated, all I had to do was tweak some more settings to finalise to look. Then point my domain name at it. My previous portfolio used a CNAME record, however Adobe need an A record, their instructions are for www., but it also works for subdomains, such as photo. in my case.

Other than the issue with portrait images, I was really impressed with Adobe Portfolio, the process of setting up the portfolios, the navigation and other pages was really quick and easy. I’m pleased with the result, and most importantly it is saving me a decent amount of money each month!

Clearing up iTunes

I've recently got an iMac, which has a much bigger hard disk that my old MacBook, so I decided it was time to fully sort out my iTunes account and folder. iTunes is fairly easy to sort out itself, you just let iTunes sort out the music folders, find duplicates etc. However, I did get into a bit of trouble when deleting some music from my library, I was sure that iTunes usually asked you if you wanted to move the files to the trash, as well as removing them from iTunes, but this time it didn't, I'm not sure if it was how I was deleting, or a change to iTunes I didn't notice until it was too late. This left me with the annoying (to me anyway) situation of files in my iTunes folder that I didn't want and that weren't in iTunes, after some searching on apple.stackexchange.com I came across the Music Files Not Added v2.0 script at dougscripts.com where there are loads of other helpful scripts for tweaking iTunes, so if you're having trouble with your iTunes library, or just want to tidy it up a bit, check it out.

Also I can't say enough good things about the Home Sharing feature added in version 9 of iTunes, it makes managing libraries on multiple computers almost seamless.

Invisible shield

I've had an ZAGG Invisible Shield on my iPhone 4 almost since I bought it, as I'd heard good things about them from a few people and from the hype around them, they seemed to be the best screen protector for any given device.

Initially I wasn't too sure about the feel of them, they made the glass almost feel sticky, which was strange at first, but I got used to it. The instructions supplied were the best of any screen protector I've bought, the application fluid was also a nice touch.

The problems started with the Invisible Shield after a few months when the top corners of the front shield started to come unstuck, possibly triggered by me taking the phone in and out of cases (more on this later), eventually the problem became worse, as the corners got dust under them and wouldn't stick back down. This came to a head last weekend when I was down in London, the front shield managed to stick itself to itself, rather than my iPhone. In the end I just took it off, and was instantly reminded of how nice the glass screen on the iPhone 4 felt, even though I was slightly paranoid about scratching it. It may have been superficial, but I'm sure that the screen seemed sharper/brighter too.

When I got home I decided to fit one of the cheap eBay screen protectors I'd bought in anticipation of the iPhone arriving, but them I remembered that I'd got a free screen protector with the Cygnett Molecule Silicon Case I'd bought at the same time as my ZAGG Invisible Shield, but not used due to the "superior screen protector", so I fitted this one. It wasn't as easy to fit as the Invisible Shield, there are still a few small bubbles, but wow - it feels almost like the naked screen and I couldn't see any difference in the image quality. I still have the Invisible Shield on the back of the iPhone and it doesn't feel quite as good, so when time comes to replace the screen protector I will look for one that comes with both sides and ditch the Invisible Shield for good.

Some may be wondering why I feel the need to use both an Invisible Shield and a case, but it all honesty I'd rather just use a case, as when I'm in my car, the iPhone is in the centre console, so it can be hooked up to my car stereo and with the nature of my car (MX-5 with race suspension) it gets chucked around a fair bit. I'm also a little bit clumsy and even the best film protector won't protect from me, but I can't use my alarm clock dock with my phone in a case and sometimes cases are too bulky with certain trousers.

HelloWorld - Apple tutorial

After reading all the pre requisites for the "Your First iOS Application" guide on the Apple Developer Center, which was actually quite dry reading, I felt it was about time to crack on with the tutorial, on the basis that the theory may make a bit more sense after I've applied some of it.

The guide itself was a lot more complicated than the one I followed from the Stanford University course on iTunes U as it used a view controller for the GUI, rather than just adding the GUI elements to the background of the application. It is a lot more work on such a simple application, but I can see how it will benefit more complex applications.

One thing did continue to confuese me though with interface builder. I was using the handy blue dotted lines in interface builder to line up all my UI elements, the text field was showing as having a margin to the status bar at the top, however, when I ran the app in the iPhone emulator, the text field was butted right up against the status bar. This really confused me, as I double checked all the code, which was correct and couldn't imagine that Apple would show the status bar on the interface builder, then have it not accounted for when positioning the UI elements.

When I had convinced myself that I hadn't made some sort of school boy error, I consulted Google and came across a thread on the iPhone Dev SDK forum and saw that at least I wasn't the only person to have discovered this issue and that the following code needed to be added after the display has been drawn:

self.view.frame = [[UIScreen mainScreen] applicationFrame];

Subversion

Version tracking is something that I have yet to come across in my professional career, but something that has always seemed like such a no brainer and something I wished to add to my skill set.

After some research on Version tracking I decided that Subversion (SVN) seemed to be the best bet, as it is the most common and also open source.

There seemed to be a choice to make, host the repository on my local system, or use a hosted system. As I like offsite backups (and as a photographer have a hard drive full of images) I decided to go with a hosted system. The website svnhostingcomparison.com proved useful, it allows you to choose the features you want and filter the packages available on these features. Using this tool I decided to go for the free package from Assembla.

After having set up the server I needed to link it up with my code, Xcode, the Apple IDE I have been using for OSX and iOS development, has SVN support built in, which makes things easier as did the following tutorials:
http://maczealots.com/tutorials/xcode-svn/
http://www.uchidacoonga.com/?tag=assemblacom

I was set up fairly quickly and with the painless integration with Xcode I was able to import my existing projects, then due to the peculiar way SVN works check it straight out again and continue working on it. My next steps with SVN will be to link it in with Eclipse, although that may not be as simple as using it with Xcode.

First iOS app

After installing Xcode and the iOS SDK I decided to reacquaint myself with Xcode, so followed the "Tour of Xcode" tutorial from within Xcode, although my tip would be to read it from your browser so you can use fast app switching easily. The guide was a useful refresher and you end up with a "Hello world" Cocoa application, which in my case was the first time I'd written specifically for OS X.
A little bit bored of reading and armed with my refreshed Xcode knowledge I decided to jump straight in and follow the tutorial from the first session of the Stanford University iPhone Application Development course on iTunes U and made a basic app that uses a slider to change the value of a label:

My next step will be to follow the "Your First iOS Application" from the Apple Developer Center, however that appears to be a bit more in depth and requires a bit more reading of their documentation, which although a bit boring I'm sure will be worth it in the end.

iOS Development

I have decided to give myself a kick into action and get back into writing software, seeing as my day job seems to be more paper pushing than coding these days.

After my experiment with LUA/Lightroom failed last year, I wanted to do something that would be both useful in the real world and most importantly, would keep my interest. My initial thought was to really brush up my XHTML/CSS and PHP (this will probably be my next project) but iOS development has really caught my attention. I am a fan of Apple products, especially the iPhone, my iPhone 4 hardly ever leaves my side, so I went over to developer.apple.com and signed up to their developer program, albeit just the free one for now and installed XCode and the iPhone SDK.

I am familiar with Xcode, having used it to do some C programming when I was at uni, but the language used for iOS development, Objective-C, as well as the COCOA framework are new to me. Objective-C is an object-oriented language, which is something which I haven't touched on since uni, however the Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C guide on the iOS developer centre was quite helpful in refreshing the basics.

In addition to the Apple supplied learning material, I am following the Stanford University iPhone Application Development course on iTunes U, which does actually feels like I am being taught, rather than teaching myself.

My next steps are going to be more reading and hopefully creating a basic "Hello world" app over the next few days...

Apple Time Capsule Fail

When the Apple announced the Time Capsule I thought it was great, all the benefit of Time Machine, without having to have a hard disk attached to your Mac, so I bought one.

Since then it had been sat in my living room quietly(ish) backing up my Mac, storing photos and connecting wifi devices to my network, until I noticed that my iPhone wasn't connecting to the wifi and my Mac had connected to a different network, further investigation showed that the Time Capsule was indeed dead. A quick Google brought me to The Time Capsule Memorial Register, it appeared that I wasn't the only one left with a dead Time Capsule. Further searching uncovered that Apple are aware of this issue and were replacing faulty units. I wasn't holding my breath when I called Apple Care, as my Time Capsule was well out of warrenty, but after a quick chat with a nice Irish guy at Apple I now have a "new" Time Capsule heading over to me FOC!

Now all I need to do is see if I can recover my back ups from the old Time Capsule hard drive...

It's the little things that make the difference

Ever since I switched to OS X (3 or 4 years ago now) there was one thing that bugged me about Safari, the fact that searching in the Google box took you to Google.com, rather than giving you a choice of which version of Google. To me this seemed like Apple were forgetting their international customers. There were hacks to get around this or plugins, but nothing officially supported by Apple or in my view didn't have the potential to compromise system stability.

Then yesterday, whilst Googling The Electric Cinema I ended up at Google.co.uk. It seems that Google has set up a redirect from Google.com to Google.co.uk, as just entering the URL in the address bar triggers the diver too.

I am pretty chuffed that pretty much the only niggle I have with OS X/Safari has been sorted, even if it took Google to sort it out, I just hope that they keep this.

PS: The Electric Cinema is a great place to see films, a refreshing change from the multiplex cinemas that are pretty much the only option around here. We saw Exit Through The Gift Shop, the street art film by Banksy, which was informative, thought provoking and very funny.

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!