C. Thomas Payne II A glimpse inside.Life::Software::Politics

My friend and designer of nearly every application I develop, Darrin Stephens, had his comic Aliens vs Ninja vs Samurai accepted into Zuda’s February “Zuda Contest”.  If he wins he’ll land a contract with DC Comics for 52 pages of the comic which they will print and sell in a trade.  This would be Huge for Darrin, so, I’m doing what I can to help him with social marketing, gadgets, and whatever else we can come up with.

I got to looking at the results page, here’s a place where a little bookmarklet might come in handy.  This one:

Sort by Results (drag this link to your bookmark bar)

allows you to sort the results page: http://zudacomics.com/competition/results by the number of views each has had.  While this doesn’t indicate that an individual entry is winning, I would estimate that the ones with the greatest traffic will be in the top of the competition.

Once again, this isn’t much, but it was fun to do.  Darrin mentioned that the one thing that really sucks about Zuda’s website: http://zudacomics.com/node/1714 is that you can’t see the strip on the iPhone.  While the HTML5 vs Flash argument has been played out by many smarter than me, it still sucks that the iPhone, and the future iPad will never have flash.  So, I made this one:

iPhone-ify (drag this link to your bookmark bar)

While it too is pretty simplistic, it does add a bit for the iPhone.  It replaces the flash <object> tag with two div’s and an <img> tag.  The image’s URL is set, dynamically, to the first image of that entry’s comic.  the div’s have a previous and next button to navigate the pages.  Once again, simple, but effective.

If anyone uses these, it’d be nice to hear about  it in the comments.  Have a good one.

About 2 months ago, I started playing with TweetMyMac, and enjoyed how easy it was to remotely manage my computer using Twitter.  I can send a direct message to a Twitter account setup for my mac and have it open/close programs, send screenshots and iSight camera snapshots, and pretty much anything else I care to write an AppleScript to do.  The only real headache was the task of repetitively typing in whatever the commands were to get a snapshot or kill Adium from my iPhone’s Twitter client… That was before I saw that TextExpander had released TextExpander Touch and Tweetie 2 had integrated it into their client.  Now, I can type in 4 characters (it could be less, but.. meh) and have the text replaced instantly with whatever the command i needed… (typically closing adium after I leave in the afternoon)

Wcca poof’s to “-d computer_twitter_account close Adium”

Wcss poof’s to “-d computer_twitter_account iSight”

There are quite a few more, these are just the ones I use most frequently.