a g i r i l e y . c o m

I was supposed to do an FMTouch Demo for some user group near Frankfurt, but since they decided to not chip in my plane ticket, I decided to not do it. So now, I’m officially on vacation… first time in countless years. Well, you know, going to Hungary to visit friends and family doesn’t count as a vacation. I’m visiting a dear friend whom I met back in New York, well Jersey to be quite exact. He’s an opera singer, currently working for the National Theater in Mannheim, Germany.

The flight was eventless not taking the 2-hour delay to take off into consideration. No screaming children or annoying Hungarians whining their way through. What a bliss. The plane was fairly new: every seat’s headrest had a built-in screen with entertainment, so you could chose from a variety of movies to television shows to games. It became very useful, since I, again managed to sleep 0 minutes.

Landed in Frankfurt, where, unlike other large airports, we had to walk our way to the baggage pickup area. Got to the car rental and I was told that unfortunately, they ran out of small cars, so they have to give me an Audi A4. What a pity! Navigation worked, drove downtown to look around a bit, or maybe that wasn’t downtown but strangely no stores: none. I was going to go to a drug store to pick up some stuff, but not a chance. So then I rerouted myself to Mannheim and off I was. The Autobahn provides a nice driving experience, especially a 2.0 L Turbo Diesel Audi.

By the time I was halfway to Mannheim (aka 30 minutes later) I was starving, so I stopped at a gas station to get some food: “Wurst, Kartoffeln und Kraut” or something like that in German. Was quite yummie for a roadside stop. I was sitting outside under large umbrellas and it was surprisingly quiet. Cars were driving by and even and ambulance went by and I could barely notice. Same goes for Mannheim… well until this morning, when I had woken up for 6 fire trucks arriving to our building: no worries, they left without even seeing a fire.

Yesterday I drive around and walked around a bit. Took some photos with my iPhone 3GS. I will take some more photos today, especially if we’re going to see some castles.

I’m amazed by my friend, Wayne. Apparently, a year ago he didn’t speak any German and now he’s fluent. And his accent is nice, too. He’s a very sweet guy, too. I really appreciate him putting me up.

So, I had some initial findings here and I thought I’d quickly jot them down. I’m originally from Hungary; I’ve been living in the US for exactly 10 years this month. It’s nice to revisit differences. Keep in mind, though, you cannot compare NY to Mannheim: the population is around 300, 000 here.

1. As I said it’s very quiet here, even though this is a city. I’m sitting here typing with the balcony door open. Even int he store people were quiet.
2. The roads are much smaller. The Autobahn was continuously under construction and driving at high speed I even had trouble getting off quickly to the gas station. Now, try driving into a parking garage with an American car: I had to inch back and forth and the Audi A4 is not even a large car. I don’t know whom they built these places for.
3. The city of Mannheim is very clean and neatly manicured.

I will add to this list later, but now it’s time for day two.

Agnes Riley

There’s a really nifty apple Dashboard Widget called Reminder. That’s exactly what it does: you tell it what you want to be reminded of and when and it will remind you. 2.0 only runs on Leopard, but they have a 1.0 version for Tiger users.

Agnes Riley apple, Leopard, mac, OS X, reminder

One of the features that has made the Blackberry (among others) the ultimate business device was the ability to create and edit office documents right on the handheld. (I’m not going to get into the differences between Palm and Blackberry. Having had multiple versions of both devices, the Blackberry is superior to me for a lot of reasons.) Then came the iPhone. With its lacking business capabilities, a lot of companies and IT departments had to wait to upgrade because it would not meet today’s business needs. We are officially one step closer. According to ZDNet, Quickoffice will be demoing their new office suit for the iPhone at MWC. They already have office products for the Symbian, Blackberry and Palm OSs, and now they are expanding their offerings for the iPhone. They already have one iPhone app: MobileFiles.

Agnes Riley iPhone, MWC, quickoffice

LONG BEACH, California — Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and Internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.

The technology’s use is endless. I already love the idea of going to stores and checking out products. Although, reading reviews on everything you buy can significantly slow down shopping. The thought of knowing everything about a person you’re just about to talk to might be daunting. On the other hand, knowing the person you’re just about to leave your kids with is not a sex offender is priceless.

Agnes Riley MIT, wearable computing system

I tend to think of myself as a forward thinker. Having worked in technology for many years, I have the latest gadgets, and even if I don’t have them, I try to to follow technology, so I know what I’m missing.

I’m not a fan of too much control. I know people need to learn things from their own mistakes, even though I try to prevent the foreseeable. All of these new social media concepts and applications are great if you are into educating yourself, want to see what’s hip, who’s doing what, who’s eating what, etc. I haven’t decided if this is scary or a good idea.

I recently discovered two new ways of getting info about your neighbors:

1. Klick, an iPhone app to show you can pictures of your neighborhood from flickr (and your neighbor’s kids)
2. nearbytweets.com, as the name suggests, tweets of your neighbors

If you have nothing better to do with your time, you can certainly be a voyeour without leaving your armchair. Let’s just hope sex offenders won’t find smart ways of collecting and analyzing the data to fit their needs.

Agnes Riley flickr, iPhone, klick, nearbytweets, social media, tweet, twitter

Are you managing your friends websites or are a professional developer managing tons of websites? Do you find it difficult to remember their FTP log in database access, which MySQL table their data stored in? I have just some across this handy application called DomainBrain that will do just that for you and even more. It can even tell you (through a WHOIS query) when you need to renew the domain.

The image below will tell you what type of information you can store in DomainBrain. Then with a mouse click on the arrow icon next to the URLs, it will launch your FTP program (Fetch, e.g.) and log you in automatically. Now, I know, we all have our login information stored in our FTP programs (rather in our Keychain App), bu having everything centralized is worth the exploration.

With the free version you can manage up to 4 domains, or if you have more to handle you can have unlimited domains with a mere $14. It is Mac ONLY.

Agnes Riley apple, domain, domainbrain, FTP, mac, store

After reading several articles on Google one would think it’s a horrendous task to get all your feeds from Google Reader to NetNewsWire. But, really, it isn’t. Export your feeds from Google Reader, then import them into NetNewsWire. It’s that simple. You’ll get a folder with the freshly imported feeds, then you can just do a little organization. Then you can sync your feeds with NewsGator and read them on any computer or your iPhone. It’s that simple!

Download NetNewsWire

Agnes Riley apple, google reader, iPhone, mac, netnewswire

Someone sent an email to our FileMaker group to request information about importing RSS feed into FileMaker. Since I have done this and it’s actually quite easy, I thought I’d post the method here.

Ingredients

1. FileMaker (8.5 or later);
2. A FileMaker DB ;
3. An XSLT style sheet;
4. A web host where you can post the XSLT file;
5. An RSS feed that actually works with this (e.g. Yahoo);
6. A script that pulls the info (which now can be run on server if you have FMS 9 or 10);
7. A table in your DB for storing the RSS feeds;
8. A portal on your layout that shows the list of RSS feeds;
9. A web viewer in your database that can display the resulted web page;
10. A script that tells the web viewer to show the requested article.

Directions

1. Create a new table called ‘RSS_Feed’ in your solution (since this only works in FM 8.5 and later, there’s no need for a separate file). Create the following fields: ID, Title, Description, Link, PubDate, SelectedLink;
2. Link the new table to your preferred table (Global, Solution, etc.) by showing all records (’x’ symbol);
3. Create a new layout in your solution, place a portal on it showing the records from the RSS Feed table (link and description fields, minimum). Place a web viewer next to it. Name your web viewer object “article”;
4. Create a script similar to this example to refresh the feed (you can run this script from a button on your layout or at certain intervals from the server):

Go to Layout [ “Layout Name” (Table Name) ]
Enter Browse Mode
Show All Records
Delete All Records
[ No dialog ]
Import Records [ XML (from http): http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/stocks; XSL (from http): http://www.website.com/folder/rss2fmp.xsl ]
[ No dialog ]
Go to Layout [ original layout ]

5. Create a script for showing the article:

Set Field [ RSS_Feed::SelectedLink; RSS_Feed::Link ]
Set Web Viewer [ Object Name: "article"; URL: RSS_Feed::SelectedLink ]

6. Turn your title field on your portal into a button and link to perform the script above.

This is most likely not the only method; it may not be the best method either. It is, however a working method.

Any questions, suggestions, feel free to respond.

Agnes Riley filemaker, RSS, XSLT

Having a little fondness for design, I always feel like I’ve just eaten lemon when I look at somene’s hard work in coding, and the design was just an afterthought. One of these areas that are usually lacking in database development is icons. You can buy icons or download free sets that never really communicate the point. Or you can design your own, but it’s a it of work. Now anymore! I just found this beautiful application for drawing: DrawIt. I will certainly buy it, especially now that the Euro is affordable. For all of those who cannot afford $37 (with today’s conversion rate of 29 Euros), there’s a DrawItLite version for free.

The company’s other application is Fontcase that let’s you view fonts like you’ve never seen them before, preview paragraphs, tag your fonts and even share them on your network, sort of like songs with iTunes, but it let’s you preview and download fonts from another vomputer on the same network. Currently on sale for 35 Euros.

Agnes Riley apple, drawing, fonts, icons, mac

Envato has been a great place to find all design-related resources. The have given us the psdtuts.com, vectortuts.com, flashden.com for tutorials and free graphic downloads, themeforest.com for downloading beautiful themes (see my website: www.zerobluetech.com)  and now they have launched appstorm.com, a Mac Apps Blog. They introduce you to new and exciting apps, and you can follow them by RSS or on twitter.

Agnes Riley apple, applications, mac, reviews