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iSync Plug-In MakerBack in 2007 Nokia started releasing iSync plugins. Also back in 2007 I read a similar Sony Ericsson announcment.

The slight difference: Nokia iSync plugins actually exist.

As every project needs a kick-off… here it is.

  • There is a great tool called iSync Plug-In Maker (it’s included in the Apple Developer Tools)
  • Apple already has many Sony Ericsson plugins included in iSync (so it’s easy to diff Apples plugins with the plugins you exported via iSync Plug-In Maker)

And finally:
We crafted a Sony Ericsson K800i plugin via the iSync Plug-In Maker. It’s 100% compatible to the plugin provided by Apple. As it is not possible to modify “exported” plugins via the iSync Plug-In Maker, we are providing the dot ppdoc “source” file here as a free download.

@ Sony Ericsson:
We’d provide more samples, but since we just have this old and shabby K800i we had no chance to througly test other plugins (but it looks like our K770i plugin works as expected, so far noone complained). Of course donations are very welcome. What about a nice new K850i? :-)

Maybe you should also add an iSync section at developer.sonyericsson.com where developers upload iSync plugins for your review (of course you should offer some incentive for uploading).

@ All:
Your welcome to modify the plugin and build plugins for new phones.

  • Probably the documentation at developer.sonyericsson.com (-> Docs & Tools -> Phone Specs -> Whitepapers) will be helpful (looking up SyncML specs etc).
  • Use the automated tests of iSync Plug-In Maker.
  • Have a look at the iSync plugin introduction at thetaoofmac.com
  • Read Apples iSync Plug-In Maker userguide.
  • If there already is support for a similar phone, use FileMerge (also included in Apples Developer Tools) to check for differences between your plugin and the existing plugin.

Of course donations are welcome, too 🙂 If you blog this article, please add ???U0UtaVN5bmMh??? (SE-iSync! base64 encoded) to your title and your tags. We???d like to track the spread of this article. If it spreads like hell, probably Sony Ericsson will more likely offer iSync plugins in the future 🙂

via open.source.mac

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As I might be getting into developing Adobe AIR applications in HTML, CSS & JavaScript for an upcoming project, I’m testing a few of Adobe’s showcased applicaitons. I’m posting this via “Bee”, which has a nice interface and quite fast Flickr integration.

Stay tuned, there’s probably a lot more to come on that topic! 

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Since I really enjoy watching Youtube videos while zoomed in on my MacBook, using Ctrl + two fingers on the touchpad (or a scrollweel on an external mouse), I created Blacktube.

Blacktube lets you watch any video on a completely black background so you are not distracted by the text and other colors on the original page. All you have to do is copy the following bookmarklet to you bookmars bar and click it while on the video’s Youtube page.

  • In Mozilla, drag this link to your link toolbar or right-click and bookmark it: Blacktube
  • In IE, right click the link and then click “Add To Favories.” It will give a security warning, but this bookmarklet is safe to use. Choose a folder – if you have the links toolbar visible and choose the “Links” folder, it will be added to the toolbar: Blacktube

The resulting page will extract the movie you wanted to watch from the HTTP referer URL and display it on a black background leaving you with a completely quiet watching environment which is – in my opinion – very convenient for zooming in 🙂

Please give me feedback in the comments, on what to improve or if any bugs occurred, while using it.

UPDATE:
The blacktube.no-panic.at Domain and the bookmarklet aren’t active any more.
I’ve mirrored the code here for you to look at: http://stuff.no-panic.at/src/blacktube.phps

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First make sure you’re collaboratively editing the same document.
Preferably on different positions in a very long (and unbelievably ugly coded) file.
Let the fun begin:

  1. Open up a multi line comment and never close it.
  2. Repeatedly press Cmd+A to highlight _everything_ so the screen for all the others starts to flash in your editing color
  3. Simply paste in A LOT of blank lines so the functions, the others are currently working on, scroll out of their view
  4. Sneak in some nasty syntax errors and wait for someone to save the file to test their newest edits

Some more ideas? 🙂

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Log4Twitter is very similar to an idea Herbert an me had a couple of years ago, to use a Jabber messaging framework to get distributed logging and alerts from several servers/applications.
It is a Java class that allows you to “log” to Twitter. This would easily allow you to set up an application that sends messages to a private Twitter Account that you can subscribe to. Retrieving those messages should then be possible by IM or even SMS, seems like a perfect set up for me.

Using Log4Twitter is as easy as the following:

Setting Classpath
Add log4twitter-1.0.jar to your application’s classpath.
Note that log4twitter-1.0.jar has to be loaded by the same classloader that will load the logging framework.

Setting Logger
Edit your logging framework’s configuration to enable Log4Twitter.
The fully qualified class name of log4twitter is “log4twitter.FRAMEWORK_NAME.TwitterAppender”.

See the Log4Twitter page for some examples.

Now who’s got the time to code a Linux syslogd replacement or supplement, so I can receive important log messages via Twitter? 🙂