I make marvelous shit for your internet. These are my thoughts, advices, ramblings, and references on the world of software engineering and web development.
By Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Product & Engineering,
Communications
Since
unveiling one of the biggest Flickr redesigns in history just over a month ago,
the positive reactions, comments, Tweets and Facebook posts from our members
and media have been astounding. The overhaul across desktop and mobile that we
brought to our community of more than 112 million photographers resulted in 4X
as many mobile uploads, and we have broken our previous single-day upload
record by 3X.
The Verge
said, “Flickr redesigns web and mobile
apps to create a powerhouse in online photo storage,” and Forbes wrote, “Overall, this is an extremely impressive
upgrade. Probably the biggest in Flickr’s history making the tired old photo
service up-to-date and ahead of the competition.”
We want
to take a moment to say “THANK YOU” to all our members - from those who have
been with us since the beginning to those who joined us since the most recent
launch!
You’ve
told us how much you love the new Flickr and we wanted to spotlight your top 5
favorite features.
1) Auto-Uploadr: Never delete a photo or video again with
automatic backup, new and old, freeing up precious space on your phone. Also
try the new Mac or Windows Uploadr for the desktop. We maintain the original
photo quality and automatically remove duplicates.
2) Swipe to share: Simply swipe to select photos and videos
and click to share via email, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and more.
3) Editing on the go and on the desktop: From basic to advanced photo-editing,
Flickr offers the editing tools you need. And for the first time on mobile,
editing is non-destructive so you can always revert back to the original image.
4) Magic View: In the new Camera Roll, Magic View intelligently
identifies the content in your photos, using Flickr’s image recognition
technology, and automatically organizes them across more than 60 categories
(including screenshots, landscapes, animals and more).
5) New powerful search: Quickly find the photo you’re looking for
not only from your own photos and albums but also from the people you follow on
Flickr and photos from the entire Flickr community. Also, filter by color (try
more than one), size, orientation and more.
We’re committed to protecting a free and open Internet, and fighting to ensure that our users continue to enjoy online content and tools — without disruption.
Life Hack: Attaching Evernote notes to the real world
So I’ve been using Evernote for everything lately and this morning I got to thinking about how cool it would be to attach notes to real world objects. I’m fully aware of how nerdy it is, but I’d love to have a code on each of my apartment’s appliances that brings up the manual PDF, a description (and expiration reminder!) for every container of leftovers in the fridge, a link to Amazon on my razorblades so I can order them as soon as I’m on the last one.
A little bit of googling turned up a couple examples of people using QR codes to accomplish this, but I wanted to post how I went about it. If you want to follow along, you’ll need an Evernote account, a label printer (like the Brother QL-750), and a mac.
First, a quick note about the technical details. Evernote’s desktop application comes with some AppleScript support, so we can access some of the application’s state and behavior programmatically. This will allow us to get the application-specific URL to a note. The second step is to create a QR code for this URL, which I described in the previous post. Finally, we’ll pipe the generated graphic directly to the printer and bob’s your uncle. A custom Automator Service will do the heavy lifting.
First, open up Automator and create a new Service.
Then, create the workflow described below:
Choose Evernote as the application for this service and make sure it receives no input.
Create a Run AppleScript action with the code from the gist below.
Create a Run Shell Script action with the other code from the gist below.
Make sure the Run Shell Script action receives its input as arguments.
That’s about all there is to it. Now, in Evernote, select a note and go to Evernote > Services > Print QR Code to Current Note to print out a physical link to your note!
NB the URL for the note is user-specific. Even if you’ve made your note public, only you (or someone logged in as you) will be able to use these QR codes. If you want QR codes to your public notes that anyone can access in a browser, simply get the share URL of your note and pass it to the qrcode program in the previous post.
Here’s a quick little program that will print a QR code for any URL. It uses Google’s image charts API to render the QR code (which has been deprecated but is supposed to work until April 2015). The graphic is sized to print perfectly on my Brother QL-750 Label Printer, but you can easily change the dimensions if you have a different label size.
My apartment is going to be plastered with these things and my girlfriend is going to kill me.
Debugging content on Mobile Safari used to be a nightmare, but as of iOS6 you can fire up the inspector on your local Safari and poke around that WebView.
First, open up Safari on your local workstation and enable Show Develop menu in menu bar under Safari > Preferences > Advanced.
Next, on your iDevice, go to Settings > Safari > Advanced and enable the Web Inspector. Also make sure that Private Browsing is turned off.
Finally, connect your iDevice to your workstation via the USB cable. Navigate to any page in Mobile Safari and it will show up under the Develop > [Your Device] menu in desktop Safari. This technique even works for debugging WebView content from the iOS simulator!
Ever since my friend Scott introduced me to the concept of approval tests, I’ve been finding all sorts of uses for them. In case you’re not familiar with approval tests, here’s a quick overview:
Overview
An approval test is, by definition, an assertion, just like any other assertion you may make in your tests. The approval part, however, is made up of several assumptions:
The subject under test has a measurable or observable state.
The subject’s state can be snapshotted and compared.
The test is that the subject always arrives at a certain “approved” state.
If the test puts the subject in a different state, the test is a failure.
But these sound like assumptions we already make with nearly every test we write, approval or otherwise; what’s the difference?
When I’m developing a strictly static site, I try to use middleman because it’s so close to my familiar rails toolset and conventions. With static sites, it’s sometimes necessary to include your assets inline, for instance when coding up a custom tumblr theme (hence this first post). I found a couple ways that people tend to do this around the net, but here’s the right way.
These helpers make use of sprockets the way it’s meant to be used. This way, your dependencies and context will be honored. This was tested with middleman 3.0.14.
