Makes No Sense At All » Software

Katoemba uses Twitter

Berrie — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:38:59 +0000

Short relevant updates about the Katoemba Software will be posted on Twitter from now on: http://twitter.com/#!/katoemba.

MPaD screencast

Berrie — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:15:18 +0000

Here’s a screencast of the current state of MPaD, which is MPoD’s bigger brother for iPad. Let me know what you think.

By the way, this is a flash movie (Jing is the only proper free screencast solution I could find) so you can’t view it on your iPad.

Now available: TeamTweet

Berrie — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 20:52:57 +0000

It’s been quiet here for quite some time, and one of the reasons for that is that I’ve working on a new iPhone application, which is now available from the AppStore: TeamTweet.

TeamTweet is an iPhone application that makes it possible for anyone to create live reports from sports events, so that fans, family and friends can follow what’s going on, wherever they are. It does this by combining a specialized user-interface for sports-events with the power of Twitter.

When you have installed TeamTweet on your iPhone, you start by setting up a Twitter account on http://twitter.com for the team for which you want to create reports. Next you setup the team in TeamTweet, add the teams players, and attach the twitter account to the team. You’re then set to go.

Prior to the match you create it in TeamTweet, which will send out a first tweet with the name and date of the event. The match appears in the list of planned contests, on the day you start the contest in TeamTweet and you enter relevant events as they occur. Events are specific per sport, currently the following sports are available in TeamTweet:

Baseball
Basketball
(American) Football
Hockey
Running
Soccer

Events can be either time related (for example start of period, end of match) or about things that happen (for example goal, yellow card). TeamTweet always presents the list of events that are relevant for the current state of the match, and with a few clicks you specify what exactly happened. Examples are which player scored a goal or the reason why a player got sent off. TeamTweet takes care of the timing and score.
The events show up in the live match report and are immediately sent to the Twitter account of the team, so that all followers can get the updates within seconds.

TeamTweet maintains a full history of match reports, and you can send out match reports by e-mail. This provides you all the key information when you want to create a full match report afterwards.

iPad: popup view out of another view

Berrie — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:59:13 +0000

For one of my projects on the iPad I wanted to popup a detail window out of an existing image view, using some animation while popping up. CoreAnimation was the way to go, but I was facing difficulties to:

a) find out how to do it and
b) get it working.

The animation should combine movement (from the location of the clicked image to the location where the popup is shown), scaling (from the image size to the popup size) and rotation (for a nice effect). Google searches delivered bits and pieces, the best sample I found was MFFlip from Mike Lee. This didn’t include scaling and movement like I wanted it, so I added this and then packed it up nicely into a single class ViewFlipper with a single factory method that takes 2 views as parameters and does all the calculations and animation. The ViewFlipper class can be included without further dependencies into any project, except that you need to include the QuartzCore framework.

I’ve created a little sample iPad program around it that you can download here. I’ve put some documentation in the code that describes the what goes on inside. I hope this is useful for others who are struggling with this too.

Note: initially I kept having trouble with all of the examples I found, it turned out this was caused by the fact that I had one view with 3 subviews: a UITableView covering the entire view, the imageView and popupView (which were shown above the UITableView). I managed to solve this by moving the imageView and popupView onto a view of its own. I gave this extra view a transparent background, so that the underlying UITableView was still visible. This extra view also has the advantage that you can catch touch events on it which you can use to popdown the popup.

MasterDrive (Ritmeester) now also available in English

Berrie — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:48:13 +0000

Today a localized, English version of MasterDrive has been released. Masterdrive was originally developed for the Netherlands only (dubbed Ritmeester), targeting owners of lease-car who need to keep a registration of their car usage for the tax authorities. Over time functionality was added to also maintain a registration for professionals who want to keep track of car usage for commercial purposes, e.g. to invoice customers. The logical next step was to make the application available to a much wider audience by localizing it into English, a step that is now completed with the release of Masterdrive.

With Masterdrive it is very easy to maintain a administration of the drives made with your car(s) on your Mac. It supports drive templates with all the relevant information for much used drives, to make data entry as quick as possible.

Per April 21 the iPhone companion application version 1.1.2 is available for all countries through the AppStore.

Ritmeester 1.2.2 available for download

Berrie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:41:14 +0000

Today version 1.2.2 of RitMeester has been released. In the Netherlands, when you have a lease-car the tax authorities will add up to 25% of the car value to your gross salary. If you use your car for personal travel less than 500 kilometers per year, you can get a ‘Verklaring geen privé gebruik’ from the tax authorities. Condition is that you maintain detail records of all car travel. Ritmeester is the first Mac based program that helps you to keep a detailed and consistent administration, with minimum effort.

In dutch, deze versie bevat de volgende wijzigingen en probleem oplossingen:

Extra gegevens per auto: eigenaar, sofi nummer, in gebruik van/tot.
Nieuw afdruk formaat volgens belastingdienst richtlijnen uit 2010.

Get your copy of MPoD version 1.4 now

Berrie — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:44:23 +0000

MPoD version 1.4 is available from the AppStore. New features and fixes in this release:

Directly browse the mpd structure. This was the most requested feature for MPoD. As result you now have to option to either use the local cache, or get data directly from the server.
Use local cover art that is shared through http. By sharing your music folder on the MPD server over http, MPoD can pick up cover art from the folder of the currently playing track. This is in addition to the Amazon based cover art;
Improved streaming (on-the-go mode) through the use of the RadioKit SDK from Stormy Productions. Stopping and pausing of a stream works better, plus there is visual feedback on when MPoD is connecting/buffering;
Simplified streaming settings;
Show information on current bitrate;
Fix cover art problems for timezones far away from GMT;
Some small bugfixes.

RitMeester v1.1.2 available for download

Berrie — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:31:25 +0000

Today version 1.1.2 of RitMeester has been released. In the Netherlands, when you have a lease-car the tax authorities will add up to 25% of the car value to your gross salary. If you use your car for personal travel less than 500 kilometers per year, you can get a ‘Verklaring geen privé gebruik’ from the tax authorities. Condition is that you maintain detail records of all car travel. Ritmeester is the first Mac based program that helps you to keep a detailed and consistent administration, with minimum effort.

In dutch, deze versie bevat de volgende wijzigingen en probleem oplossingen:

Mogelijkheid om te filteren op rit type (Privé, Zakelijk, Beide).
Totalen van zakelijke en privé kilometers voor de gefilterde ritten.
Automatisch zoeken naar updates.
Initiële synchronisatie met iPhone werkte soms niet, dit probleem is opgelost.
Synchronisatie van speciale karakters zoals ë werkte niet goed, dit probleem is opgelost. Hiervoor verschijnt ook nog een update van de iPhone applicatie.
Kilometer totalen werden niet correct getoond na het toevoegen van een rit, dit probleem is opgelost.

MPoD v1.4 – unexpected problems

Berrie — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:39:52 +0000

Functionality wise v1.4 of MPoD is ready. This version has 3 major improvements:

use local cover art that is shared through http;
directly browse the mpd structure;
improved streaming (on-the-go mode).

Unfortunately the move I made to SDK 3.0 has made the application unstable, and it crashes a lot all of sudden, looks like its due to memory shortage. I’m thinking about how to handle this, but it at least means that it will take more time before the 1.4 version can be released.

New MPoD version now available

Berrie — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:26:09 +0000

MPoD version 1.3.3 is ready and available through the AppStore as of today. Fixes and features include:

support for larger song databases (tested with 30,000+);
use of directory names when mp3 tags are missing;
bugfixes in the preference screens;
new button to trigger db update from the iPhone;
view artist info from last.fm for the current song;
first stop will stop the music, second stop clears the playlist.