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www.entropy.ch blog

Marc Liyanage’s weblog on www.entropy.ch


Album Artwork Assistant 2.1January 1

I released version 2.1 of Album Artwork Assistant, my Mac OS X application for finding iTunes album cover artwork on the web.

This version lets you surf the web and pick images directly off web pages in an embedded web browser. This is useful if the image search doesn’t turn up suitable results and you have to hunt down the artwork. Watch this screencast to see how it works:

Album Artwork Assistant Web Search Feature Screencast

There are also some bug fixes and stability improvements, as listed in the release notes.

For Developers

Here are some observations for Cocoa developers.

WebKit

First off, WebKit is a fantastic library, I have used it in many projects and it’s always a joy to use it.

In this case I was impressed how easy it is to get information about and interact with the DOM elements loaded in a web view when the mouse cursor hovers over them. You get a

Fedora 10 Appliance Operating System DistributionDecember 24 2008

I had to set up a fresh Linux virtual machine for my Juniper SSL VPN games after losing the old one some time ago.

Last time I used the Fedora distribution and it worked great, so I stuck with it. It’s now at version 10 and comes with a stripped-down variant called AOS, short for Appliance Operating System.

This AOS variant doesn’t have a GUI and is intended for appliances like gateways or web servers. It’s perfect for my VPN networking purpose because it is very small on disk, uses very little memory and boots quickly. In its original form it is not usable in VMware Fusion so I had to convert it to the VMware format with the virt-convert tool first.

I put up the resulting VMware files for download here:

http://www2.entropy.ch/download/f10-i686-aos.zip

I also registered it in VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace as a community upload.

Public Transport Maps on the iPhone with Microsoft SeadragonDecember 15 2008

I tried Microsoft’s first iPhone application “Seadragon Mobile” after reading about it on Daring Fireball.

I always wanted a zoomable high resolution map of Zurich’s VBZ public transport system on my iPhone. VBZ provides a vector PDF of the map, but rendering it directly on the device is too slow (but it does render, which I think tells a lot about the progress of mobile devices). If I rasterize the PDF to a bitmap in a size that keeps the text readable, the built-in photo viewer as well as third party programs don’t handle the resulting big bitmap well.

Today I tried this again with the Seadragon viewer. I rasterized the VBZ map PDF to a huge 10000 by 14000 pixel PNG file in Photoshop and ran that through Microsoft’s Deep Zoom Composer. I put the resulting 33MB Deep Zoom set on my web server at

http://www2.entropy.ch/deepzoom/vbz/dzc_output.xml

and added this URL to the application on the iPhone. Seadragon lets me start at the overview and zoom in all the way to a ridiculous magnification, as shown on the screenshots below.

Zooming in and out and moving across the image is incredibly smooth. I also really lik

rundfunk.fm Swiss Internet Radio Christmas 2008 EditionDecember 1 2008

rundfunk.fm is a great Swiss radio station that usually broadcasts (and hosts a party) in the summer, but this year there’s a winter christmas special. One of the DJs talks way too much annoying stuff, but the music is really good.

There’s also a standalone AIR based player which I prefer:

Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.0 or higher installed.

Even better than the AIR player is listening to the stream directly in iTunes. Use this URL with iTunes’ “Advanced” > “Open Audio Stream” command:

http://rffm2.streamhosting.ch:8000/rundfunkfm
Album Artwork AssistantNovember 16 2008
Album Artwork Assistant Application Icon

I just published a free new Mac OS X application. Say Hello to Album Artwork Assistant :-)

Album Artwork Assistant finds album cover artwork on the Internet and adds it to music track files in iTunes. Other tools like it exist, but none of them worked the way I wanted, or they cost too much.

Feel free to try it out if you need something like this, and let me know if you find any bugs.

Update: As noted in the comments, I should mention that the program requires Mac OS X 10.5.