Neothoughts

Wouldn’t it be nice if you published a post to your blog and within seconds it showed up on FriendFeed?

After reading about FriendFeed’s proposed Simple Update Protocol (SUP) earlier today, the idea of all of the WordPress blogs around the world publishing near-instantaneous updates to FriendFeed grew too delicious to pass up. So I have created a plugin for WordPress that will assist with that.

WP SUP is a plugin that adds the SUP-ID HTTP header to your blog’s feeds and pings FriendFeed’s public SUP feed when you publish a post.

During testing posts were showing up on FriendFeed within about 10 seconds of being published.

This is my first WordPress plugin, so brutally honest feedback is definitely appreciated.

Download it here: (tar.gz | zip)

Installation instructions and other info are here.

The 3rd annual Toronto Game Jam has just been announced for May 9 - 11, 2008. If you’re not familiar with TOJam, it’s a weekend-long event where game developers and artists gather to tackle the challenge of creating a complete game in just 3 days. It’s a friendly, collaborative environment where burgeoning game creators can exchange ideas and get some recognition. You can participate as a single, in a team or as a floater, helping others out. The end result is always a slew of games that shows off Toronto’s wealth of untapped game development talent.

Things I would love to work on and/or see at the jam this year:

• non-musical re-interpretation of guitar hero/rock band controllers
• iPhone games using the new SDK (might be hard with few iPhones in Canada)
• games driven by web content sources (think Wikipedia: The FPS)
• alternate reality games

We just launched a new version of Touchpoint Gallery with a very important new Picture Source built in: Facebook. Now you can tap into the billions of photos on Facebook and use them as your screen saver and as your wallpaper.

Using the Python client library to work with the Facebook API made it easy to offer a slew of different options in this Picture Source. It’s our most robust Picture Source yet. With it, you can retrieve any of the following types of pictures from Facebook for use in Touchpoint Gallery:

• all of the pictures that you have been tagged in
• one of your albums
• all of your pictures
• all of one of your friends’ pictures
• one of your friends’ albums
• all pictures that one of your friends is tagged in
• all of your friends’ pictures

Lots more new Templates and Picture Sources coming soon!

We put out a new version of Touchpoint Gallery today. It features support for add-ons by way of a new file format, Gallery files. This means we’ll be able to release updates a lot more frequently. In particular, we’ll be pumping out Templates and Picture Sources on a regular basis. I’m pretty excited about the prospect of distributing an application as if it were a continuous stream of content.

Kicking off that stream of app-content is a new Template. We’ve received a lot of suggestions for Template ideas from users and one of the most popular suggestions is a scrapbook. Today we released the first in a line of scrapbook-themed Templates: the Floral Scrapbook.

And the cherry on the cake: Windows Vista is now fully supported.

Norm blogged about how Touchpoint Gallery is like having infinite refrigerator space for your kids’ artwork.

If you’re like me, then you haven’t been able to use the Pownce desktop application because it throws an error within seconds of running it. And it looks like I am not alone. Well, no longer.It turns out that the Adobe AIR runtime doesn’t get along well with all graphics drivers. The use of transparency in the Pownce app to give you those nice round corners and drop shadow is specifically what is causing the crash.

Rather than wait for Adobe to fix the problem, here is a way that you can disable transparency in Pownce and then use it to your heart’s content:

1. Find your Pownce installation. I’m not sure where it ends up on Macs, but on my WinXP machine that is experiencing the crash, it is located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Pownce

2. Open the \META-INF\AIR\application.xml file in your Pownce directory.

3. Locate the line that begins with this:

<rootContent systemChrome="none" transparent="true"

4. Set the transparent attribute to “false”, like so:

<rootContent systemChrome="none" transparent="false"

5. Save the file.

That’s it! The next time you run Pownce, it should display with a light blue border. But more importantly, it will not crash.

Over at Touchpoint, I wrote about all of the open source software that we use on a daily basis. It turned out to be a lot more than I imagined. It made me appreciate all of the ways open source software makes my professional life easier.

But then I remembered that it also has an impact on my personal life. Lately I’ve been really enjoying an open source game called Frets on Fire, which is a clone of Guitar Hero that you play with your keyboard. It lets you create your own playable songs and also supports all the songs from Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II. You can even use the Xbox 360 Guitar Hero II controller to play it.

As well, Xbox Media Center is perhaps the open source software that I value most. It turned my dull old Xbox into a media powerhouse, and has gone on to rule my living room. Praise be to XBMC.

PyDigg is a Python toolkit for the Digg API. It provides an object-oriented interface to all of the available endpoints of the API. It is offered under the MIT License.

Download it here: (tar.gz | zip)

Over the years, I’ve used Python for various purposes. I’ve always found it to be a great language for just about anything, from a batch file alternative to web applications to scripting a real-time 3D application. It was therefore my pleasure to write a Python toolkit for the recently released Digg API.

Full documentation is coming soon, so in the meantime here are some guidelines for using this toolkit. I’m assuming that if you read past this point, you’re familiar with the Python programming language.

The toolkit is contained in one module (’digg.py’), made up of one class (’Digg’) with several nested classes. It depends on the standard Python libraries ‘urllib’ and ‘xml.dom’.

You will only ever have to instance the root class, ‘Digg’. From there it’s a matter of using that class instance’s methods to retrieve instances of nested classes such as ‘Story’, ‘User’, ‘Comment’, etc. The ‘Digg’ class contains all methods necessary to access data. Each nested class, such as ‘Story’, contains convenience methods that redirect back to the methods in “Digg”.

The following example outputs the titles of the latest stories submitted to Digg:

from digg import *
d = Digg(APPKEY) #insert your own application key string
stories = d.getStories()
for story in stories:
print story.title

In the above example, the Digg.getStories() method returns an instance of the ‘Stories’ container class, which contains n number of ‘Story’ instances. All response data from the Digg API is accessible by class properties. For instance, the ‘User’ class has the following properties: name, icon, registered, profileviews. I tried to align my naming conventions with those of the Digg API wherever possible.

Please send me links to anything you use this for. Also, if you’re interested in contributing to the PyDigg toolkit, feel free to contact me or join the Google Code Project.

Happy Programming!

The Smart Digg Button extension for Firefox places a button in your status bar. It uses the newly released Digg API to determine if the web page you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg.

If the page you are viewing has been submitted to Digg, it displays the current number of Diggs the page has. Pressing the button takes you to the submission.

If the page you are viewing has not been submitted, pressing it takes you to Digg’s submission form where you can submit the page to Digg.

Compatibility: Firefox version 1.5 - 2.0.0.*

Install Extension Here

Note: When installing, be sure to click “Edit Options…” if it pops up to allow neothoughts.com to install add-ons for Firefox.

As some of you know, about a year ago I quit my day-job to focus on a software startup that I co-founded with some friends. We’re called Touchpoint Studios.

Our work came to fruition recently as we have just released our first product, Touchpoint Gallery. It’s a desktop application that enables you to collect digital photos from various sources (your hard drive, a camera connected via usb, Flickr, rss, etc.) and showcase them in Templates (which are 2D or 3D environments). You can also use it as your screen saver and to automatically set your desktop wallpaper.

Computers are getting increasingly powerful, but their power is used less and less as more applications are moved into the browser. Applications such as Touchpoint Gallery take advantage of the computer’s resources (such as graphics processing) while also delivering the benefits of the web-based applications.

Now that the initial release is live we plan to produce a lot more Templates and Picture Sources. High on our list of Picture Sources to support is Facebook.

As the sole developer on this project, it has been a wild ride so far. I can honestly say I’ve never been so proud to be associated with a company or a product. There were countless times during development that I found myself distracted by the fun features of the application while I was working on it. And now that it’s out in the wild, it just makes it more exciting.

Be sure to check it out to experience your digital photos in a way you never have before. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Screen shot courtesy Flickr.