Wallpaper and its progress

Posted on 07. Feb, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

I have been working on Wallpaper a lot this week, and there has been a lot of progress. If you followed my twitter, you also know most that has happened, otherwise here is a little recap.

• Wallpaper now has a new source for wallpapers. TheWallpapers.org
• Wallpapers are now searchable, by their tag and name.
• Not only iPad resolution wallpapers are available now, also larger images.
• Working on new in-app graphics
• External images can now be used
• Removed portrait mode from the application
• Brought back memory usage with 50%

Features which still need to be added:

• Ranking wallpapers (and share them with TheWallpapers.org)
• Uploading own wallpapers
• See stats of the wallpapers, resolution, download count, ranking, tags, etc.

The startup screen has been reworked, to express our thanks to our supplier. (click to enlarge)

Attached Files:

• Screen shot 2010-02-07 at 17.43.08

Reading a RSS feed with the C# XmlReader

Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

Today I needed to parse a LARGE (1.9GB) XML file and extract some information from it. Loading it in a XmlDocument (my favorite .NET way of handling XML) wasn’t really a possibility, because that would cause Out of Memory errors the minute I would try it.

I am using a XmlReader for this and I noticed that there arent really many usable examples on the internet about this, so here is just a small example I created to show how you could read a RSS feed.

Sample after the break… (more…)

WallPaper iPad Edition

Posted on 28. Jan, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

I am currently working hard to get the iPad edition of WallPaper up and running. This not only involves rewriting the application, to use the new media server I got up, but also getting a whole new library of wallpapers up there.

I am glad I decided to make my media server support multiple resolutions.

EDIT: Uploaded another screenshot.

Screenie after the break… (more…)

Attached Files:

• Screen shot 2010-01-28 at 21.32.54

• Screen shot 2010-01-30 at 10.42.56

Resizing an image in C#

Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

For a project I am working on, I was looking for a good way to resize images in a few different ways. I have done image resizing before, but it really feels that I am re-inventing the wheel every time I do this. So now I decided to write a nice static method which can resize an Image to certain dimensions and outputs an Image object again.

The method requires 3 parameters:

1. An image object. I hope you know how to load a file in an Image object (hint: FromFile).
2. A Resolution object, being nothing more than a small class I created, which also contains the width and the height.
3. The mode you want to use for resizing the image. I explained the modes in the enum listed below.

It probably isnt the neatest code you’ve ever seen, so if you have any comments, please let me know. Code and more explanation after the break… (more…)

Updating my blog a bit

Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

Currently my blog is under development (again). I will update it more often the upcoming weeks, but also the style will change the longer I will be using it.

I am still not completely satisfied yet, but its getting better..

Management of your pictures/videos etc.

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Wim Haanstra.

I have (just as so many people probably) been struggling to keep my digital photo’s and home-made videos manageable. I tried so many photo/media management tools that I actually lost count and they never satisfied my needs. They always kept my library as messy as it now, which is a HUGE directory, with files which have names like ‘2009_1225_183025.jpg’. Since a couple of weeks I also shoot HD movies with my camcorder and those files are already stacking up also.

I have been thinking about what could actually help me solve this problem and I think I came up with a solution to my (own) problem. I am currently making a tool with the project-name “Media-Manager”. The tool extracts all meta data from my media files and stores it nicely in a data source (e.g. SQL Server, XML files). In my tool I can specify events which happened on certain date’s (or a longer time-span) and it automatically filters the photo’s by those event. (more…)

Using jQuery Dialog with ASP.NET

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I have been playing around with jQuery a bit lately and I wanted to use the nice dialog boxes on my new project. The problem with the dialog boxes is, that they do not create a postback when one of the buttons is clicked. Also the values of any controls inside the dialog are always empty, when using the dialog box.

I just will be posting my code here, to let you see how I solved the problem. (more…)

Mount network drive before starting an app

Posted on 25. Jun, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

On my Mac Mini, I have SABNZBd+ installed. I wanted to make it download my usenet downloads straight to my NAS.

So I made my Mac automaticly mount a drive on the NAS on boot, and I also put SABNZBd+ in my login items. But that gave me a problem, sometimes SABNZBd started before my network drive was mounted. SABNZBd then created a directory called /Volumes/Media. After that, when my NAS was mounted, it mounted to /Volumes/Media-1. So that sucked. I could not find a way to change the order at which startup programs ran, so I decided to create an AppleScript application which first mounted a network drive and then runned SABNZBd.

Here it is:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

set Media to "smb://myUsername:myPassword@192.168.1.1/Media"
tell application "Finder"
	activate
	mount volume Media
end tell
tell application "SABnzbd"
	activate
end tell

MusIQ is available in the AppStore now!

Posted on 18. Jun, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Since the release of iPhone OS 3.0, MusIQ was available in the AppStore.

The description from the AppStore:

Play MusIQ and test your music knowledge! MusIQ plays songs from your own music library and you have to guess the song playing. Four possible answers are given and speed is of the essence, since precious points and time are ticking away.

There is also an ‘Unlimited Mode’, which lets you guess songs, until you fail a round. That way you can just keep playing, as long as you know the right answers.

MusIQ takes advantage of the new features of firmware 3.0, so make sure your iPhone/iPod is up to date with the latest firmware from Apple.

Make sure you have at least 40 songs on your iPhone/iPod.

New corporate website went live!

Posted on 05. Jun, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

My new corporate website just went live!

Check out : http://www.wimhaanstra.com.