Converts different audio file formats, including mp3, wav, m4a, aac, wma, ogg....

In the last couple of weeks I started trying IntelliJ 9.0.2 EAP on our flex source code, and intially there were a ton of RED errors.  I filed a bunch of "good code red" youtrack issues, and Maxim M. and others resolved almost all the issues.   Now, with IU-94.585, about 95% of the files are GREEN.  The only signficant source of "good code red" errors is that we have some MXML files which include ActionScript files using this syntax:

 

<mx:Script source="ComponentFunctions.as"/>

 

In some cases, the developer really shouldn't have put the actionscript in an external file. It should have just been included in the MXML file.  But we have some cases where code is being "shared" between MXML files in this manner.  I really don't like injecting actionscript from a file into the MXML -- this is the exact same problem we had with developers including JSP fragments into JSP files. IntelliJ is correctly evaluating JSP fragments in the context of which JSP file(s) they are included into, so maybe IntelliJ can do the same for MXML/ActionScript.

 

Other case where we have "good code red" is where MXML is using  fully encapsulated actionscript components; When editing the actionscript for one of these components, IntelliJ cannot resolve "flash.events.Event" class or some other core class because the actionscript class doesn't import it.  The code compiles because the actionscript class is only ever referenced by MXML file which imports "flash.events.*" already.  I could fix these by adding the import to the actionscript class, but the problem is that currently at my company everyone is using FlexBuilder for flex development, so they don't see these errors.  It would be nice if IntelliJ somehow handled this, i.e. evalulate actionscript component in context of the MXML file(s) it is included in.

 

One other comment is with the JavaScript inspections being using for ActionScript.  Some of the Javascript inspections are specific to the Javascript running inside a browser.  And there are differences between ActionScript and JavaScript.  Jetbrains seems to be patching the inspections where possible so it supports both languages. But I think to make things clear the toplevel "Javascript" inspection should be renamed as either "Javascript/Actionscript" or the base dialect "ECMAScript" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript) , and then have subfolders for Javascript/browser specfic inspections and ActionScript specific inspections.  I think there are probably alot of new inspections that could also be added for ActionScript and/or MXML.

 

I haven't done much active flex development using IntelliJ yet, so I can't comment how well completion and refactoring are working.   I'm startng the design/implementation phase of our next release, and I am going to use IntelliJ now instead of FlexBuilder for any flex work and see how it goes. Hopefully things like Introduce Variable and Extract Method are working without alot of bugs...

 

For me, it is a no-brainer to use IntelliJ for flex development since I have used IntelliJ for so many years for java/j2ee development.  But trying to convert our UI developers who do 100% flex development and have only ever known FlexBuilder is probably a lost cause.  Heck, I can't even get our java developers using Eclipse to switch to IntelliJ...

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot. Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

Invasion of the iPhoto features

As long as I’ve been using Aperture, I’ve considered it a processing application. Its photo management was troublesome here and there, and iPhoto had the best ways of showing off your shots, but I dealt with it since maintaining two separate libraries of the same photos would be disk space suicide. I’ve only used Lightroom a little bit (and a version or two back) but all my friends say that it just has a better workflow for serious photo work — importing a couple hundred shots, scrubbing through them, doing the necessary adjustments, and outputting to the necessary format. Not that I have trouble doing that in Aperture, but apparently it’s faster and better in Lightroom.

Confronted with such a fearsome opponent, Apple decided that it would be better to flank than to risk a frontal assault. Hence the expansion of Aperture’s incorporation of iPhoto features Faces and Places. I question their relevance in a photo processing application, but given Apple’s tendency towards coalescing functionality, I’m guessing that iPhoto will eventually be Aperture: Gimped Edition, and the only real choice for organizing and messing with large numbers of photos will be Aperture.

There are some kinks to be worked out. Faces plainly doesn’t work. After it spent literally five hours going through my photos (about 1000 per hour), this is what it has come up with:

No, it didn’t have a lot to go on (I hadn’t “trained” it much yet) but really now. After giving it a few more pointers on what I looked like, it still mistook a three-year-old tow-headed girl, my friend Monica (who is Indian, and in a wedding dress), some E3 booth babes, and Casio president Kazuo Kashio for pale, bearded, Devin Coldewey. The cork board background is jarring and the interface for going through your shots is terrible. I realize this is a technology still being perfected, and that is why I am wondering: what is it doing in my RAW editing program?

Places is useful if you have a geotagging camera (still rare) or want to spend a few hours dragging and dropping stuff onto the map. It can be fun, actually, if you take a lot of pictures of your friends, and want to drag and drop this or that night onto the location you went to; it’s like creating a different kind of album (“Linda’s Tavern”), and indeed you can make a browsable smart album from locations. If you’re like me, you won’t feel complete until the photos are more or less where they were within the city, and not all grouped in a single pin, smack in the middle of the city. This could have some promise, but with a backlog of several thousand shots, getting a library up to date in Places is a task I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

It’s a mistake to judge Faces and Places by simply saying “well we were fine before them,” because it may just be that we found ways of working in the old system of organization (Project>Folder>Album) that approximated what these new features do. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say they just don’t really do much, and feel out of place to boot. You have to work at them, or shoot for them, in order for them to really be worthwhile. Still I have to give credit where credit’s due: if you just consider Faces and Places new columns to organize by (like rating or date) then they’re worth their salt. As flagship features, though, they’re duds.

Lastly, the slide show thing. It’s like finding a trout in the milk. Not that it doesn’t work — it works as well as iPhoto’s thing, and I suppose it’s better to have than not. It’s just a little weird to have a sort of… aftermarket feature popped in there next to the serious editing tools. Its little presets are, like in most Apple programs, 25% solid, 75% fluff. Who in the name of all that is holy is going to pick “Shatter” as their slide show transition? It’s ghastly.

The new features are very well explained in little videos accessible through the “Welcome” screen, which will be handy for new users — if they can find the screen after they close it (it’s in Help>Welcome to Aperture).

The good stuff

So if the iPhoto features are icing, the actual cake is the RAW editing, adjustment tools, and user interface. Let’s start with what I would say is the best new feature: Brushes.

You can see a pretty thorough overview of the feature at Apple’s site, but the gist is that it allows you to apply certain effects in limited areas using a brush of adjustable size and intensity. That’s great! I can’t count the number of times I’ve vacillated between two versions of a photo where an adjustment necessary for one part ended up blowing out another, or I just wanted to bring out the color in the eyes but not in the background. A lot of fiddling could usually approximate the effect I wanted, but it would be so much easier to just use a brush. I’ll be using the hell out of this feature, and it’s perhaps the only real step Apple took against Adobe in this update.

(combination Brushes and Help Video screenshot)

The brushes are non-destructive, like any of the dials and curves you can play with in the adjustments panel, so you can feel free to experiment, layer, and try out different effects. One thing I often have to do when shooting review shots is emphasize the color of LEDs, but if the subject is well-lit, the LEDs are going to be barely visible. No problem; make a little brush, add in a little contrast right there, bump the saturation just in the one area, and boom, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Brushes are useful for lots of little things like that.

The new full-screen browser is handy but not really a revolution. They’ve added the ability to get around your library a little more, which is nice, but it’s not as streamlined as the regular browser, which is always accessible by a single keystroke. The fullscreen presentation has definitely been improved, however, and when showing off photos to friends or clients, it’s a better option than either the plain editing window or a slide show.

The preset adjustments, I think we can agree, are being blown way out of proportion. These are the same kind of “professional adjustments” that you have been able to apply on cheap point-and-shoots since the beginning of time. There are a few quick adjust things like high-contrast black-and-white or exposure +1 that are nice to have previews for (the live preview window is handy), but let’s be honest, these are just filters. I’d like to be able to say that they’re carefully adjusted so you won’t see weird color effects, blackouts, or blowouts, but the fact is every one I tried looked cheap and overdone. The others, like white balance and so on, seem pretty redundant considering the actual controls for adjusting those aspects are mere pixels away in the same window.

Click to see it larger. You can’t really tell here, since this photo isn’t very high contrast, but in several of the other shots I tried this on, the vintage look was really purple, cross-processing was really green, and toy camera pushed the contrast way too far. Subtle adjustments these are not.

The good news is that people new to the program might try a couple, see that they were created by dragging curves and color bars around, and then make their own. I’ve had my own “base” adjustment for years now, which was just as easily accessible and just as customizable. Putting together a “look” for a shoot using this feature might be easier now than before, but it’s still just a toy at this point.

The ability to have multiple libraries is nice; splitting work and personal stuff would be my move, so that if a meteor crashed into TC HQ (or, more likely, I’m fired for insubordination), I could free up a couple gigs in one clean sweep. It’s also convenient for backing up and sharing; “here’s my whole ‘wedding’ library, feel free to do what you like with it” rather than “here’s a folder full of RAW files.”

A quick note

Just a PSA: installation of Aperture 3 took ages. Plan on losing at least a working day to 100% processor usage as it converts your library, searches for Faces, and reprocesses your RAW files with the new profile. I’m not holding this against Apple (it’s a LOT of data to sift through) but it’s just something to be aware of.

Conclusion

Aperture is still a great program, in my opinion, and the budding photographer would be a lot better off with this than with iPhoto if they’re planning on doing anything more than collecting snapshots. I’ve gotten used to Aperture’s workflow and they haven’t changed it much in 3, in fact they’ve provided a couple serious improvements with Brushes and potentially Places and Faces — you know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The trouble I see is that Aperture, once a rather single-minded program, is being diluted with features that have nothing to do with its core functionality. Why not have a new program, called “Collection” or something, that hooks into all your libraries, allows for creating robust slide shows, exporting directly to Facebook, and all that sort of thing? Putting all this junk into Aperture is doing to it what Apple has done to iTunes: once a sleek and straightforward program, it has now grown bloated beyond comprehension; it’s a bit like seeing a once-great fighter gone to seed. I have more of an attachment to Aperture than to iTunes, but if Aperture 4 continues along the vector indicated by Aperture 3, you can consider me a Lightroom conversion.

Give Aperture 3 a 30-day trial for free here. $199 to buy, $99 to upgrade.

Last month we wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.

CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online.

CrunchBase InformationCrocodocInformation provided by CrunchBase

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are  a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/.  24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion…   too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

Movavi Video Converter 2.5.1Movavi Video Converter... Try this powerful yet easy-to-use video & audio file converter especially designed for Macintosh. Convert video & audio on your Mac. Save videos for watching on your portable device. Extract soundtracks from video. And much more...

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Free Audio Converter converts different audio file formats, including mp3, wav, m4a, aac, wma, ogg. Each format is provided with a corresponding profile kit and a preset editor in order to make a personalized preset. So you can create new presets, delete and edit the old ones (change the current parameters).

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Free Audio to Flash Converter convert audio files to flash (SWF) for your web site or blog with Free Audio to Flash Converter. Add a complete "Flash MP3 Player" with one click. Supported audio formats: mp3, ogg, wma, m4a, aac, wav. The program contains no spyware or adware. It's clearly free.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

MikeChino writes "Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that a mix of zinc oxide crystals, water, and noise pollution can efficiently produce hydrogen without the need for a dirty catalyst like oil. To generate the clean hydrogen, researchers produced a new type of zinc oxide crystals that absorb vibrations when placed in water. The vibrations cause the crystals to develop areas with strong positive and negative charges — a reaction that rips the surrounding water molecules and releases hydrogen and oxygen. The mechanism, dubbed the piezoelectrochemical effect, converts 18% of energy from vibrations into hydrogen gas (compared to 10% from conventional piezoelectric materials), and since any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sygic has finally announced the public availability of Sygic Mobile Maps with Turn-by-turn navigation for the Nokia N900 Maemo devie. It’s available for purchase for around 60 euros and you need to download around 1.8 Gigabytes of maps data to your phone !

Official Press Release Below

The first turn-by-turn voice guided navigation application for Maemo phones has just got available for European Nokia N900 users at Sygic web e-shop. With the full set of navigation features, multiple user settings, fast route calculation, user-friendly operation and the latest maps situated on-board of the device, Sygic Mobile Maps turns Nokia N900 into a full-featured personal navigation device, and provides for superb user experience and reliable navigation.

The first available region, launched today, is EUROPE. It costs EUR 59,99, it has no time limit on use after purchase, and it includes countries of Western Europe and Eastern Europe as follows:
- Maps included: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Vatican.
- Maps with transit roads only: Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus, Moldova, Montenegro, Bosnia -- Herzegovina, Romania, Ukraine.
Further regions will be added and announced gradually. Sygic Mobile Maps navigation application for Nokia N900 Maemo OS phones features Navteq maps.

Product description
Sygic Mobile Maps is a turn-by-turn voice guided navigation software that converts mobile phones into full-featured navigation devices. It is fully operable on hundreds of mobile phones and smartphones running major mobile operation systems, incl. iPhone, Symbian, Maemo, Android and Windows Mobile, incl. Windows Mobile 6.5. It also supports various PDA, PND and MID devices based on Windows CE, Windows XP/Vista or Linux. Sygic Mobile Maps uses latest maps located on-board of the device, which means that the use of the navigation is not conditioned by mobile network signal availability.

Features and benefits of the Mobile Maps:

• All latest maps are with you on your phone.
• Speed cameras, speed limits and railway crossings warnings provide safety for you and others.
• Signposts help you to head in the right direction.
• Lane assistant informs you about the correct lane to be in.
• Automatically adapts to horizontal or vertical view with
• Automatically or manually adjustable color schemes for day and night use.
• User interface and voice guide speak your native language.
• Search for millions of restaurants and other points of interest, with an option to call in, find parking, and navigate to.
• Design your trip with multi-stop route planning before you head out.
• See the summary of your trip before you set off.
• Avoid a roadblock with a single click.
• Save and organize favorites according to your needs.
• Customize what you want to see on the navigation screen.

Download Sygic Mobile Maps for Nokia N900 from: sygic.com/maemo

Similar Posts:

• Sygic Mobile Maps for Nokia N900 Coming Soon
• Nokia to Offer Free Turn By Turn Navigation
• ROUTE 66 Mobile 7 for Nokia Series 60 Mobile Phones Launched in North America
• Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition Cheapest Navigation Phone
• Sygic AURA Real 3-D GPS Navigation Coming Soon

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A tight budget and unanticipated safety problems are threatening to kill plans to convert an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota into a $750 million deep underground science and engineering laboratory.

Authors: Adrian Cho, Lauren Schenkman

Wikipedia is one of the most amazing knowledge resources on the Internet, featuring millions of articles and images, but it sorely lacks a certain (very important) type of content – video.

For this reason the Open Video Alliance is launching a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The central site for the project is Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia, featuring a tutorial on how to post videos to Wikipedia as well as a gallery of some of the recently posted videos.

There’s also good news for those who were struggling to convert videos to Theora, which is the open video format used by Wikipedia. The makers of Miro are testing a free utility for converting videos to Theora; it’s not ready for launch yet, but it will be very soon. From their blog post:

“Shhhhh. If you look around that site, you’ll notice a reference to a new Miro product that is in a usable beta form but not quite ready for a full launch. Look for a launch announcement very soon.”

The project’s Facebook page is here, and you can also follow the Open Video Alliance on Twitter.

Reviews: Miro, Wikipedia

Tags: community, social media, video, wikipedia