The Digital Flapjack Blog

EmberExporter for Aperture released!

Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-02-24 18:00:19

Digital Flapjack is pleased to announce version 1.0 of EmberExporter for Aperture!

We've long been huge fans of Ember, the online design scrapbook by Realmac Software, and we're also huge fans of Apple's Aperture photo management software, but we've been frustrated that there was no way to directly get images from Aperture to Ember. Until now!

EmberExporter is an Aperture plugin that lets you select one or more photos in Aperture, and then export them directly to Ember. Along the way you can modify attributes like captions, privacy settings, and tags, so that your images are as you want them the moment they arrive on Ember.

EmberExporter for Aperture is available now for just $10. You can also download a trial version to test it out before you buy (the trial version isn't time limited, but will watermark any uploads).

EmberExporter is compatible with both Aperture 2 and 3. However, as Aperture 3 was just released as EmberExporter was in the final stages of development, there is no 64 bit support for Aperture 3 yet - you'll need to switch Aperture 3 to 32 bit more to use EmberExporter. We plan to address that in the future with a 1.1 release.

Upcoming things

Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-02-14 12:13:25

We've got multiple things on the bake at the moment, but one little project hatched out of our trip to NSConference, and bumping into those nice chaps from Realmac Software. It's in testing now, and we'll be sure to shout about it when it's out, which should be Real Soon Now :) For now, you can take a sneak peak at the work in progress screenshot :).

NSConference 2010 Photos

Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-02-04 18:24:41

I've spent the previous three days at NSConference 2010, a Mac and iPhone development conference. To call it a conference is a bit of a misnomer, as it's as much about getting the community together over coffee and beers as it is about learning during talks.

It was a total blast - I learned lots and got to meet lots of interesting people and old friends. I plan on writing up some more detailed thoughts, but that'll take a little longer. But for now I've just uploaded all the pictures I took whilst at the event.

Making the web easier in Cocoa

Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-01-20 17:56:43

Having come back to Cocoa in this last year from having spent a few years writing Python, I’ve taken a much more holistic approach to writing Mac and iPhone code. Where as before, having come from being a C hacker, I was writing lots of low level code myself (and to be fair, six or seven years ago, or whenever it was I wrote things like osx2x, there wasn’t a huge alternative) now I find myself looking around to see what libraries exist to help me get on with the interesting bits. This is one of the really great things about Python – it’s library support, both in terms of the standard libraries and what’s out there in the internets, is fantastic, and now the same applies for Objective C.

So, I thought I should post about a couple of the more useful ones I’ve been using recently. As a full on webhead these days, a lot of the client code I write is to interact with web services (as Nik Fletcher said recently, it seems like writing a Twitter client is the new “Hello, World!”). I’ve been using two libraries to help me here: one to make the requests, and the second to help decode them.

First up is ASIHTTPRequest from All-Seeing Interactive. This library makes it really easy to start firing off requests to web services without having to worry too much about the code. It comes with very good documentation with examples, and has lots of advanced stuff I’m yet to take advantage of, such as automatically updating progress indicators in your UI, talking to S3, etc. I’ve been playing with the form request functionality, which makes it very easy to do an authenticated POST of data to a web service as part of an API. If you’re talking to the web and you’re using Cocoa’s standard libraries for network interactions, you really should give this a look.

The second recommendation is json-framework. JSON is becoming a fairly common marshalling language for web APIs to talk – it’s less verbose than XML, it’s still human readable, and it’s easy to code with. The JSON framework simply adds categories to NSString to generate NSArray or NSDictionary objects from strings containing JSON, and to NSArray and NSDictionary to generate an NSString containing the JSON encoded data. Very easy to use, and I’ve used this one lots with no issues.

There you have it, two very useful libraries that work well on both Mac and iPhone, that I highly recommend if you’re doing any web API work.