Recently, I was working on a game with Cocos2d and keep getting this weird iOS version problem. On iOS 5, all my labels were shown as expected but on iOS 4 labels somehow kept disappearing. First I thought this is because of the retina display and point/pixels stuff. However, it was because of the fonts I was using. HelveticaNeue-CondensedBold and HelveticaNeue-CondensedBlack are available on iOS 5, but not on iOS 4 (http://iosfonts.com/).

I googled to see how easy to add custom fonts and it turned out, it is super easy.

These are the links I found helpful:

• Adding custom fonts by Dave Allanson (link)
• Using Custom Fonts by M. Arsalan Anwar (link)

If you get the fonts from Adobe, we will get a drawing problem like mentioned here. You need to follow the steps here, change the font file’s ascender property. Don’t worry it is not that scary as it seems Don’t forget to install Apple Font Tool Suite from here.

After this short happy talk, here is the code snippet that saves your UIImage to the Documents folder with its alpha channel, if there is one. The other method is for reading that image back to an UIImage instance.

-(void)saveImageToDocs:(NSString *)fileName
{
	NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
	NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
	NSString *filePath2 = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/%@.png", documentsDirectory, fileName];

	// If you use this method, the transparency will be lost
	//NSData* imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(drawImage.image, 1.0);
	//NSData* imageData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(drawImage.image);
	//[imageData writeToFile:filePath2 atomically:NO];

	// So use this one
	[UIImagePNGRepresentation(myUIImage) writeToFile:filePath2 atomically:YES];
}

-(void)loadImageFromDocs:(NSString *)fileName
{
	NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
	NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
	NSString *filePath2 = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/%@.png", documentsDirectory, fileName];
	if([[NSFileManager defaultManager] fileExistsAtPath:filePath2])
	{
		NSLog(@"image file exists");
		myUIImage = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile: filePath2];
	}
}

• Setup Paperclip plugin with Amazon S3 to upload videos in rails
• Paperclip and Amazon S3

ps. If you are having an error like this

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (5 for 4)

this is probably because you have both the aws-s3 gem and right_aws, just change the environment.rb
as in the following link

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1550708/rails-paperclip-conflict-between-aws-s3-gem-and-right-aws-gem-how-to-solve

ps2. If you are planning to deploy to heroku add the gem to .gems file, or you will get an error like this “App failed to start” — your application is missing the following gems:…”

So I changed all the groovy file locations into a new folder(package) with my application name ( by the way all these are about my latest online usability testing tool Remotespots.com project). But something weird is happened with the ImageTools plugin. Since I move the controller files, ImageTool class is no longer visible to the controller that uses imagetool. Also, there is no way to import ImageTool since it is in default package, to solve this, go to .grails folder in your home folder and locate your projects folder and change the package of ImageTool.groovy as the following screenshot shows.

further information link

Java Dergisi dagitim olarak cok iyi bir is basarmis, neredeyse her yerde gormek mumkun. Derginin fiyati biraz yuksek(9.90) ozellikle Java ile ilgilenmesi olasi ogrenciler icin fiyat biraz hedef kitleyi dusurebilir. Derginin basim kalitesini dusurerek, dergi fiyatinda biraz oynama yapilabilir diye tahmin ediyorum, cunku kullanilan kagit cok cok sacma bir bicimde kaliteli. Guzel ornekler icin, bkn Matematik Dunyasi, Wired, NTV Bilim.

Yazilar korktugum gibi giris seviyesi tutoriallardan olusmuyor, gerci burada bir denge yakalamak cok zor, onlarca dali olan java dunyasinin hangi alanina girseniz bir uzmanlik alani cikiyor. Ornegin Java ME ve Androiddin arka arkaya yazilar ile islenmesi cok hostu. Biri gitmek uzere olan, biri yerlesmeye baslamis siki teknoloji.

Teknik yazilarin disinda, birazda genel havayi soluyan yazilarin eklenmesi derginin okuma keyfini arttirabilir, ornegin bu sayida James Gosling’in SUN’dan ayrilmasi ya da Oracle’in SUN’i satin almasi satir aralarinda gecistirilmis.

Son olarak, derginin Java dergisi olmasi illaki Java programlamasi ile ilgili olmasini gerektirmez. JVM ustunde calisan diger dillerden de bahsedilmesi (jruby, jython, scala, groovy) ve bunlari kullanan frameworklerin tanitilmasi da bence onemli bir katki olur.

Umarim dergi yeterli satis rakamlarini saglar ve surekliligi saglayabilir.

And finally, my resolution for the next year is to have a couple of Android apps on the market (maybe a game who knows).

Keywords — that I took note during the sessions

• Google Web Elements — http://www.google.com/webelements/

• Data Liberation Front — http://www.dataliberation.org/

• Google Ajax APIs — http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/

• KML Tutorial — http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kml_tut.html

• Google Maps js API V3 — http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/

• Spring Roo –  Framework from VMWare that can easily be integrated with a GWT frontend — http://www.springsource.org/roo

• Google Chrome Web App Store — http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/chrome-web-store.html

• WebM is an open media file format designed for the web.  — http://www.webmproject.org/about/

• http://www.openclipart.org

• Lots of things start or finish with enterprise enterprise enterprise (boooring…..)

• Draconian Future (from Keynote Day 2 — referring Apple and Steve Jobs I guess — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draconian

• Go ANDROID — Froyo 2.2 — 18 months — 180.000 developers — 50.000 applications on Market

• V8 Javascript Engine — http://code.google.com/p/v8/

• Sunspider javascript benchmark — http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

• qik — video sharing site — well, I have heard qik before, but when you use it, with live streaming and instant sharing stuff, it really is amazing

• Dalvik VM — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_%28software%29

• VP8 — video codec — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8

• What is Android? — http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html

• What is OpenGL ES ? — http://www.khronos.org/opengles/

–
Sessions I attend

The following three are from the Bootcamp which is one day before the io. I was fast enough to register for the event, that I can enter. This was like a warm up for the actual thing.(Bootcamp Schedule — https://sites.google.com/site/iobootcamp/schedule)

• Introduction to Google App Engine

• Mapping in 3D: Tips and tricks for Google Earth API and KML

• The Big Picture and How to Get Started

–

And these are from the session in io:

• Ignite Google I/O (http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/ignite-google-io.html) — the ones I like the most are,

• • Matt Harding (Where The Hell Is Matt?
  • Bradley Vickers – How to Row across the North Atlantic, Ration Food and Not Have Your Teammates Eat You

• Casting a wide net: how to target all Android devices (http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/casting-wide-net-android-devices.html) — way to technical for me, I am not an Android developer (yet). Also next room, there was another session of Paul Graham, it was full next time pg

• Architecting GWT applications for production at Google (http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/architecting-production-gwt.html) — Presentation smells like enterprise which I am far from interested. Also, I am not sure about all these code generation stuff for DTOs (Spring Roo), also Vmware&spring is not my favorite source of inspiration (although I play with Grails lately)

• HTML5 status update (http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/html5-status-chrome.html) — Last session of the i/o 2010. Two product managers of Chrome made a good summary of HTML 5 features and their perspective on the spec.

Keynotes that I can not attend since I was sleeping at that time

• Day 1 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a46hJYtsP-8&feature=player_embedded#!

• Day 2 — they haven’t put a full version yet…

Day One After Party
This was a real nerdvana. a 8 leg giant spider that you can literally drive, pac man, food (like a lot), beer (free as in a lot free), huge screens with geeky videos, a toy like thing that you can control it with your mind and try to fly a ball by focusing sth sexy!, robots that play football, Tesla (sexy electric car), beer, remote control robot that try to demolish balloon with its tail, red wine…

Toys, Food, Drinks, T-shirts

Nexus One, HTC EVO, t-shirts, lots of Pepsi, Starbucks Coffee

Step 1. Get a Twitter account and create a Twitter application from http://twitter.com/apps (don’t forget to check in browser and enter a  valid callback url.

Step 2.  Download twitter4J add the library (in my case twitter4j-core-2.1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar) to project and update classpath

Step 3. Create a web application (I assume you have the Google plugin for Eclipse )

Step 4. Add the following servlets and update your web.xml. First servlet will handle login part. It will create a RequestToken which will create the magical aggrements between the consumer(your application) and provider(twitter). First servlet save the  token and secret token since we will need them later.

String token = requestToken.getToken();
String tokenSecret = requestToken.getTokenSecret();

• Home servlet
• Login Servlet

Step 5. You forget to update web.xml didn’t you, update the web.xml

Step 6.  Enable session by adding

    <sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>

to appengine-web.xml.

You can see my version from http://90.latest.denemekaya.appspot.com/login

ps. don’t forget to set the callback in Twittter to the url of the servlet for callback.

Links:

• http://www.pakzilla.com/2009/10/03/tutorial-java-based-twitter-app-on-google-app-engine/
• Explain the same procedure with Grails — http://blogs.bytecode.com.au/glen/2009/12/08/log-into-your-grails-app-using-your-twitter-credentials.html

1. Form yaratirken iki kolonlu tasarim yerine, dikey tasarim kullanin, cunku kullanicilar formu yukaridan asagiya tarayarak doldururlar. Bir diger noktada form’daki aciklama yazilari koyu renk (bold) olmamali.

2. Kullanicilar yuzlere odaklanir. Eger yuz bize degilde, ekranda baska bir yere bakiyorsa, yuzden sonra kullanicilarin bakacagi diger nokta, bakis dogrultusudur.

3. Tasarimin kalitesi, guvenirliliginizi arttirir. Okurlar kitabin kapagindan kesinlikle etkilenirler, bu web icinde gecerli. Eger  tasarimdaki yerlesim, tutarlilik, tipografi, renk, still uyumluluk gosteriyorsa, bu ziaretciler uzerinde olumlu etki yapacaktir.

4. Kullanicilar scroll kullanmazlar. Kullanicilarin %77 scroll arayuzunu kullanimiyor, bu yunden sayfanin yuklendiginde gorunen kismi cok onemli.

5. Linkler icin gecerli renk MAVi.

6.  Arama kutulari icin ideal genislik, 26 karakter.

7. Beyaz alanlar algiyi arttirir.

8. Sadece 5 kisiyle yapacaginiz kullanilabilirlik testi, sitenizdeki kullanilabilirlik sorunlarinin %85′ini cozecektir.

9. Urunleriniz icin bilgi acisindan aciklayici sayfalar hazirlayin, sadece kisa bir sure bakacak olan ziyaretciler icin bile daha gecerlidir.

10. Kulanicilarin cogu reklamlara (ya da reklama benzeyen ogelere) karsi kor gibidir.

Bu sene etohum 20 Ocak’ta yeni tohumlari duyuracak, inaniyorumki etohum bu sene daha da etkili ve basarili olacak. bu sene geçen seneki gibi girisimcilere 4 günlük bir kurs verilecek. 2009 yilinda bogaz manzarasi esliginde yapilan kurs, bu sene akdeniz sahilllerine tasinmis bir de incubator acilldi, bu sene etohumcular için harika geçecek sanirim. ilgili etohum linki‘de budur.

Anyway, for some time I consider turn back to good old J2EE, then wander on the land of some other Java enterprise frameworks (Spring MVC, Wicket, Struts 2, Hibernate etc ) then Google App engine Java with its in progress full stack framework like environment. Then I decide that all the ones mentioned above has steep learning curves and without feeling complely comfortable with them, It is imposible to develop sth quickly.

Then the obvious direction was rails. First give a try to Django, then read some about  RoR but both of them somehow scare me out. I need to learn a new language (which Django tutorial specificly warns about looking a good python tutorial before devlde into Django), on the other hand, Grails (my love!) just start the sentence with “don’t worry about the groovy, you can learn it along the way”.

Obviously, Grails is relatively new compared to two other alternative and it has (or used to have) to many bugs for a relaible product.

But trust me, it is easy to just start and kick the first alfa version of sth out is a joy.

–

Ok this post is suppose to be a yet another introduction to Grails tutorial, so…

Steps to Get Started

1.  install Grails (there is nothing I can add here — http://www.grails.org/Installation)

2. open command line and create a project with grails create-app Yeap

3. Go to the created directory cd Yeap

4. Type grails run-app

That’s it!

I’m currently using Apache Shiro plugin (previously JSecurity), Gwt plugin, Postgresql, Eclipse for the development, More posts related to these will be here soon (I hope)