The many error messages of MLB.TV

By Erik | Published: May 17, 2010

The one where it says too many people are using my account was my favorite. What actually happened was the MLB At Bar 2010 app totally froze my iPad. I had to reboot the thing. I then got this message. I couldn’t get it to work on my computer, either, probably for the same reason. That HELP button you see? It’s not any help AT ALL. The HELP button on the “blackout check” error was no help, either, unless you didn’t know what the blackout restrictions are. And don’t even get me started on blackout restrictions. People in Eugene, Oregon can’t watch Giants games. That makes a LOT of sense.

I’ll post a more thorough rant about how horrible MLB.TV has been this year at a later time. I’ve got lots of video samples I shot that show just how frustrating it can be to try to watch a baseball game using this service that cost me $115 (plus $15 for the iPad app).

If you are having problems with MLB.TV, please leave a comment below.

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Dear Steve

By Erik | Published: May 11, 2010

I know I’m way late to the game here, but I just watched the video of the Apple event where you announced iPhone OS 4.0. It makes me want multitasking, it makes me want folders, and I was really impressed with the sample ads that you showed for iAd.

Regarding iAd:

  • If those things were made with HTML5, why haven’t I seen a single example of an HTML5 page that has that level of polish and interactivity in the real world? I want to. I really do. But, alas, I have not.

  • You made a point of mentioning on more than one occasion that the ads and the widgets in the ads were “very easy” to make. Are they based on templates that someone (Apple?) is providing? If not, I call bullshit on that one. I know you are bent on making Flash seem like the worst thing on the planet and you want people to think that HTML5 has been carried down from heaven by God Himself, but please stick to facts.

  • You do realize that not every one of the thousands of iPhone developers out there is also a top notch HTML5 developer, right? Cocoa Touch/Objective-C and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS are totally different skill sets. The chunk of iPhone devs who (A) know HTML5/JavaScript/CSS well enough to make a top-notch iAd ad and (B) have the aesthetic sense to create an interactive ad that doesn’t look and act like poop is probably very, very small. Point being, I have no idea why you tried to draw a straight line from iPhone developer to iAd developer.

Love, Erik

P.S. The iPad is, in fact, a very nice product. Thanks.

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CollectingFaces.com

By Erik | Published: April 12, 2010

Have I mentioned yet that www.collectingfaces.com is starting to take form?

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The Adobe/Apple Brouhaha – My Thoughts

By Erik | Published: April 12, 2010

Flash CS4 is a bit of dog. I’ve documented a few of those issues. When I first heard that Adobe was adding the ability to create iPhone apps with Flash CS5, I rolled my eyes and thought, “Why are you working to add this major feature, the ability to make shitty iPhone apps, when you should be FIXING the Flash IDE?”

So, while I think it’s a shady move for Apple to ban the ability to write iPhone apps using tools like Flash, I also don’t really care that much. And there are probably some good reasons for it. I really didn’t have any interest in using Flash CS5 to make iPhone or iPad apps. My gut tells me that you won’t be able to make top-notch apps with Flash CS5. If you want to make a really solid iPhone app, you’ll need to create it with the native languages. This partly comes from my experience with Adobe Air apps. I gave up on them pretty quickly because they were pretty laggy and generally gave a poor user experience. This had as much to do with the nature of the technology as it did with the developers. Meaning, it isn’t really the developer’s fault that Air apps are slow and laggy and just don’t feel like native desktop apps. But, since Air apps look and feel different from native apps because they aren’t written created with the native frameworks for the OS, they are automatically NOT going to feel right.

By the way, the whole concept of “write once, deploy everywhere” is an idiotic pipe dream. Making something for a 3-1/2 inch touch screen is not the same as making something for a 10” touch screen which is not the same as making something for a 24” desktop PC. You can do it (most websites only exist in a single version that runs everywhere) but at best it won’t be ideal and at worst it will make people want to punch you in the face.

Oh, Flash CS5 does have some cool new features. The most exciting to me is the uncompressed XFL format, which will make Flash source files (FLAs) play nicely with version control systems. Score.

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iPad multitasking *would* be nice

By Erik | Published: April 5, 2010

I just got my first real urge for multitasking on the iPad. I was watching a game on the MLB At Bat app, during a commercial break, and I wanted to check my email. Or Twitter. Or RSS. Or look up something on the web. But it takes too long (read: 15-30 seconds) to open the MLB app and get the game streaming again. So it doesn’t seem worth it. Usually closing an app isn’t a big deal because it’s fast and easy to open it back up. Not so with this MLB At Bat app.

I, and the rest of the tech world, will be flabbergasted if OS 4.0 doesn’t add 3rd party multitasking. I’m just wondering how it will work. How will you leave an app but keep it open? How will you close an app? Will the default Home button action change?

My interest is piqued.

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Getting videos onto the iPad is hit and miss

By Erik | Published: April 4, 2010

One of the first things I did when I got my iPad was try to get some of my paid video tutorials onto it. I’ve got a couple of screencasts from Peepcode. I’ve got a screencast series from Pragmatic Programmers. And I’ve got a ton of videos that I’ve downloaded from Lee Brimelow’s goToAndLearn site. Some of the videos were gobbled up by the iPad immediately without any problem. Some were rejected. But I think I figured out an easy way to convert the videos that don’t get loaded onto the iPad.

I’ve got “Meet the Command Line” and “Meet Mercurial.” Now Peepcode is nice enough to give you iPhone ready versions (640×384) of the files along with higher res versions (1000×600) that are meant to be played on your computer. The iPhone videos naturally load right onto the iPad. But I’ve got a 1024×768 screen on this thing and I want the high res versions! The formats of the two desktop videos appeared identical to me. But only the Mercurial video was accepted by the iPad and the command line video was not. This is still a total mystery to me. But I seem to have found a solution that works. Using Quicktime X, you can “Save As” and use the HD 720p preset. As long as the video’s dimensions are under 1280×720, it won’t resize the clip. It just re-encodes it in a different format. However, it might give it a slight gamma shift, making the video appear a little bit lighter. I can live with that in this case. But the important thing is that you end up with a video that loads onto the iPad. I should also note that, now that I’ve done this conversion so I can watch the 1000px version on my iPad, the 640px version works just fine for a screencast that consists of mostly command line input.

The high res videos from Pragmatic Programmers didn’t load on, either. Those guys are only 800×600 and running them through the Quicktime X HD 720p conversion did the trick. The only goToAndLearn video that I tried to load onto the iPad worked without a hitch.

So I can’t give you a reason why some worked and some didn’t. Having one Peepcode video work and the other not work really threw me off. I don’t know if there is a way to glance at the video’s info and know for sure if it’ll work without a conversion. At least I know how to fix things if they don’t work straight away.

Another weird thing with how iPad handles chapters in the video files. First, you can’t access chapters as quickly as you can when viewing on the iPhone. That raised an eyebrow. And if you’ve got the video classified as a TV Show in iTunes, you can’t access chapters at all on the iPad. Weird. Hopefully Apple will address that issue in the next OS update.

Posted in General Geekery, iPad | 2 Comments

It’s true

By Erik | Published: April 2, 2010

The iPad does in fact come out tomorrow.

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Why does Parallels insist on handling certain file types?

By Erik | Published: April 2, 2010

I noticed that a .jsfl file was suddenly associated with Flash CS4. Not my Mac install of Flash CS4, but the Flash CS4 demo that was installed in Windows Vista running in a Parallels virtual machine. I have no idea how that happened.

Next, and more troubling, I noticed that when I run my “Test in Flash CS4″ command in TextMate, it tries to test it in Flash ON THE WINDOWS VIRTUAL MACHINE! I can’t really blame Windows for this. Parallels somehow screwed things up. But I figured going into Parallels to remove my expired Flash CS4 demo from Vista would fix things.

No such luck. When I edit my ActionScript class in TextMate and then try to build the SWF with Flash using my handy TextMate command, it tried to load Flash CS4 in Windows, which doesn’t even exist any more.

This sucks. Windows somehow figures out a way to bite me in the ass.

UPDATE

I found a fix.

Somehow certain file types got associated with apps installed in Windows. You can change these on an file type by file type basis, but since I NEVER WANT A FILE TO OPEN IN WINDOWS BY DEFAULT, I could just remove that functionality from Parallels. “Parallels > Virtual Machine > Configure… > Options” and uncheck the “Share Windows Apps with Mac OS X” box. Problem solved.

I need to mention that I first went in to the SmartSelect Associations and saw that a bunch of files were associated with Windows apps. Ahem… I meant to say that they were associated with Windows apps that I “uninstalled.” And when I say “uninstalled” I mean “apparently just sort of removed from the Windows virtual machine.”

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Mercurial and FLAs

By Erik | Published: March 31, 2010

I’m starting to play around with Mercurial and wanted to see how well it handled FLA files. Mainly I wanted to know how much the repository would balloon as your revised and committed the FLA. So I did a simple test where I made an FLA, committed, added a big image to it, committed, made some other changes, committed, etc. Based on this very quick, simple and unscientific test, Mercurial does a pretty good job storing FLAs efficiently.

Start with empty FLA:
FLA is 57K, .hg is 53K

Added a single image to the FLA (+ the .hgignore file):
FLA is 381K, .hg is 274K

Embedded a font in the FLA:
FLA is 385K, .hg is 283K

Added another image to the FLA:
FLA is 1.1MB, .hg is 1MB

Converted image to MC, added to stage, blurred it:
FLA is 1.1MB, .hg is 1MB (977K)

Changed the blur on the MC:
FLA is 1.1MB, .hg is 1MB (989K)

Made another MC, added to stage, blurred it:
FLA is 1.1MB, .hg is 1.1MB (1010K)

So essentially Mercurial is storing 7 different versions of the same FLA and the repository is only 1.1MB (it’s actually smaller than the FLA it’s been tracking).

Just thought you might like to know.

Posted in ActionScript, Flash, General Geekery | Leave a comment

TaskPaper for iPhone sync bug

By Erik | Published: February 19, 2010

I’m liking TaskPaper for iPhone, but have run into a problem with syncing via SimpleText.ws

First, a little background:

I use Notational Velocity on my Mac. It stores its documents as plain text files in a folder on my hard drive. That folder lives in my Dropbox. That folder is also the folder I use to sync with the SimpleText.ws service (graciously hosted by Jesse Grosjean). I also use WriteRoom on my iPhone, which syncs to SimpleText.ws. Thus, I have access all my text docs on my Mac and my iPhone and they stay in sync nicely. As an added backup, those files are backed up via Dropbox. The final piece of the puzzle is TaskPaper for iPhone. It also syncs with SimpleText.ws so my todo.taskpaper file, which lives in my text doc folder, is on my computer, iPhone, and also web via SimpleText.ws.

Is your head spinning yet?

The problem I’ve run into is that when I open TaskPaper on my iPhone and start editing my todo.taskpaper file, I’ll sometimes get errors. This is what happens:

  • open TP on iPhone
  • start adding a new task
  • new task gets wiped out OR the app crashes

Why does my new task get wiped out? Because I have TP on my iPhone set to automatically sync with SimpleText.ws. So when I load TP and I edited my task list WHILE TASK PAPER IS SYNCING, it will result in either my edits being wiped out or TaskPaper for iPhone crashing when the sync completes.

So my options are to either turn off autosync and revert to manual syncing. Or when I open TaskPaper, I just need to wait for it to finish syncing before I edit my document. Neither of these is ideal. I don’t want to worry about syncing. I just want it to happen automatically. And waiting for sync to happen can take more than a few seconds on a bad cellular connection.

I don’t know nearly enough about how Jesse’s SimpleText.ws service works, so I won’t offer technical suggestions. All I’ll say is that rapid capture is so so so important to me. It’s probably the most important habit I picked up thanks to David Allen. I can capture things pretty quickly with TaskPaper: Open the app, double-tap on my “Inbox” project header, start typing the new task. For my purposes, this is equally as good as Things Touch, where I can open the app, hit the + button on the bottom of the screen, and start typing the task info. BUT, if I have to wait for TP to finish syncing before it’s safe to enter a new task, it’s a drag :( Hopefully I’m not the only one who has this problem and Jesse will have a fix on the way.

(fingers crossed)

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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