I created a set of vector images of the symbol for each Lantern Corps from DC’s/Green Lantern’s “Blackest Night” event for a project I’m working on.

Maybe someone else will find them useful.

Downloads:
Green Lantern Corps
Violet Lantern Corps (Star Sapphire)
Yellow Lantern Corps (Sinestro Corps)
Red Lantern Corps
Orange Lantern Corps
Blue Lantern Corp
Indigo Lantern Corps (Indigo Tribe)
Black Lantern Corps
White Lantern

All Lantern Corps Symbols

From Wikipedia:

Emoji is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese wireless messages and webpages.

They are the tiny little pictures that gained quite a bit of attention outside of Japan once they were included in the iPhone 2.2 firmware. Sounds awesome right? Wrong.

There are 3 carriers (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank & Au by KDDI) who’ve all created they own set of emoji glyphs in differing areas of the private-use range Unicode character space. Basic emoji supports 176 glyphs plus an additional 76 for C-HTML 4.0 for a total of 252. The iPhone—which uses the SoftBank implementation—supports 471 emoji glyphs and to top it off, Apple and Google have been working on a standards proposal for inclusion in ISO/IEC 10646 which proposes 722 glyphs in total. Confused yet? Right then.

With millions of mobile phones supporting emoji & Internet connections, web developers want to take advantage of the extended glyphs in the data they send to mobile devices but in the Ruby community there doesn’t seem to be a clear library that implements all 4 standards. Hence Emoji for Ruby.

I’ve based the methods names off the Apple + Google Emoji encoding proposal (see chart) because I believe it has a fighting chance of being adopted (…and I’m biased).

Specifics

The Emoji RubyGem Project is hosted on RubyForge. You can get the source there as well.

To install the gem:

sudo gem install emoji

To create an emoji instance:

require 'emoji'

e = Emoji.create(:iphone)

Other supported character mappings include:

require 'emoji'

softbank_emoji = Emoji.create(:softbank)
iphone_emoji = Emoji.create(:iphone) #Same character space impl as SoftBank
ntt_docomo_emoji = Emoji.create(:docomo)
kddi_emoji = Emoji.create(:kddi)
au_emoji = Emoji.create(:au) #Synonym for KDDI
apple_google_emoji = Emoji.create(:google)

Returning an Emoji character

require 'emoji'

cloud = Emoji.create(:iphone).cloud
puts cloud

# Or...

e = Emoji.create(:softbank)

puts "Yo... I'll be there shortly—stopping at #{e.atm}"

I am currently using this library in conjunction with the Prowl Ruby wrapper by August Lilleaas & Prowl to send various bits of data to my iPhone throughout the day.

Ruby method to Emoji table for iPhone

It’s WWDC time again. This year my talk is titled:

Leveraging Web Content in Mac OS X Applications with WebKit
Thursday, June 11th 9:00AM-10:15AM
Mission Conference Room

With the renewed excitement surrounding Objective-C & Cocoa, many web developers are wondering how they get involved in native application development. In our session we provide some exciting Cocoa examples that leverage WebKit to seamlessly blend native applications with web technologies.

I hope everyone comes to check it out, it should be a good time.

WWDC08 is upon us, and I neglected to advertise the talk that I am giving with the very talented Jeff Watkins. We are presenting:

Session 454: Improving Responsiveness in Websites and Web Applications.
Friday, June 13th 2:00PM-3:15PM
Marina Conference Room

We have some great optimization techniques to go over with you, and we plan to talk about a real world case study involving the Online Apple Store.

Additionally, I’ll be staffing the:

Safari Compatibility Lab
Tuesday, June 10th 9:00AM-12:00PM
OS X Foundations Lab A

Feel free to come by if you have any questions, or if you’d like to chat.

I often have many external volumes connected to my laptop at any given time (network drives, iPods, external HD, etc.). It can be annoying to manually disconnect each one of them before I unplug the USB hub. Instead I use a quick AppleScript to do the job of disconnecting all of my external volumes. I bind the script to a QuickSilver trigger and fire that up before I’m about to disconnect the hub. It saves me a bit of sanity.

Download unmount_all_drives.applescript

tell application "Finder"
	set allVolumes to the name of every disk
	repeat with i from 1 to the count of allVolumes
		if item i of allVolumes is not the name of the startup disk then
			-- Uncomment the 2 lines below if you don't want Network drives unmounted.
			-- if item i of allVolumes is not "Network" then
			eject (item i of allVolumes)
			-- end if
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

Today I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Tiger to Leopard, and I thought I would share a few of the things that I noticed or came up against.

• The upgrade took just over an hour from start to finish.
• Mail Act-On, Mail.appetizer, Letterbox View & Mail Badger bundles for Mail.app are all disabled because they fail to work with Mail.app 3.0.
• Aaron Harnly is working on a fix for Letterbox View for Leopard. (see update below)
• Quicksilver will display the QS icon in the dock even though you have that option turned off, unless you upgrade to β52 or higher. (The front page says “Download β51″, but it’s really β52)
• Tiger used to use 500MB of RAM off a fresh reboot, Leopard only uses 300MB out of 2GB.
• Running Monoligual after the Leopard install gave me 1.8GB back.
• Many non-Apple dashboard widgets have odd visual bugs, most likely due to the new Safari 3 HTML rendering.
• Dashboard (DashboardClient process) would hang after the Leopard install. I traced it down to Jud Stephenson’s Adsense Widget, it doesn’t look like he maintains it any longer. Removing it fixed the Dashboard freezes.
• Dave Nanian says that SuperDuper! 2.1.4 won’t do a proper backup on Leopard, people in the comments claim otherwise. I’m going to believe Dave on this one; seems we’ll have to sit tight for an update.
• It’s really hard to distinguish which applications are open with the 3D dock. Following this tip allows you to have a 2D dock, when the dock is on the bottom of the screen.
• AppFresh would crash everytime I started it in Leopard. Deleting ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh/PersistentStore.sqlite would allow it to start, but checking my apps for updates returns an error: “Operation could not be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error -1100.)” I haven’t figured out a fix for this yet. (see update below)
• Every user’s crontab is wiped out after the upgrade, so I hope you dumped them to a flat first (ex. crontab -l > crontab.backup)

Update: Oct 26th,2007

• The Preference Pane for MySQL 5.0 doesn’t work, start it from the Terminal with the following command: “/Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start”

Update: Oct 29th, 2007

• MarketCircle’s Billings application, which I use for to time track and bill freelance customers, has a beta build out to fix Leopard compatibility issues. The new version is 2.5.2.
• Many of the Mail.app bundles can made to work by following the instructions in this thread. I’ve gotten Mail Act-On, Mail.appetizer, Letterbox View working using the trick in the thread. Mail Badger is still very broken.

Update: Oct 30th, 2007

• Graphics and instructions to replace the 3D shelf dock with a “Smoked Glass Dock” has been release. It looks much better than the one that ships with Leopard.

Update: Nov 1st, 2007

• AppFresh works properly if you delete ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh & /Library/Application Support/AppFresh directories. Thanks to commenter, Will Kerr for pointing that out.

Update: Nov 7th, 2007

• It looks like Dane Harnett has beaten Aaron Harnly to the punch and released a leopard Mail.app plugin for WideScreen mail. It has more features than Harnly’s original Letterbox bundle for Tiger’s Mail.app.

I will add more tips and information as I come across them.

Download: itunes_sleep_timer.sh

#!/bin/bash

itunes_grep_string="/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/"
time_to_close=60 #Minutes

if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
	time_to_close=$1
fi

itunes_pid=`ps aux | grep -i "$itunes_grep_string" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
elapsed_minutes=0

if [ "$itunes_pid" == "" ]; then
	echo "iTunes is not currently running"
	exit 1;
fi

echo "iTunes pid is: $itunes_pid"
echo "iTunes will pause in $time_to_close minutes"

while [ $elapsed_minutes -lt $time_to_close ]; do
	printf "`expr $time_to_close - $elapsed_minutes` minutes remaining\\r"
	sleep 60
	elapsed_minutes=`expr $elapsed_minutes + 1`
done

osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes"' -e "pause" -e "end tell"

UPDATE: October, 4th, 2007

By request (and request, I mean the lame-asses that email me instead of posting a comment), I’ve added a ruby version of this script. It’s the same number of lines, so I’m not sure what benefit your receiving other than being able to verify that the time parameter is an integer.

Download: itunes_sleep_timer.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

itunes_grep_string = "/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/"
time_to_close = 60 #Minutes

if ARGV[0].to_i != 0
  time_to_close = ARGV[0].to_i
end

itunes_pid = `ps aux | grep -i "#{itunes_grep_string}" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
elapsed_minutes = 0

if itunes_pid == ""
  STDERR.puts "iTunes is not currently running"
  exit 1
end

puts "iTunes pid is: #{itunes_pid}"
puts "iTunes will pause in #{time_to_close} minutes"

while elapsed_minutes < time_to_close
  printf("%s minutes remaining\\n", time_to_close - elapsed_minutes)
  sleep(60)
  elapsed_minutes = elapsed_minutes + 1
end

`osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes"' -e "pause" -e "end tell"`

When going the graphical button route, you can simple use a background image and have the browser text display on top, but we decided that we wanted fully graphic buttons so that the text could be styled to a greater detail. This necessitated building each button by hand in Photoshop, something that is rather painful and tedious when you have multiple buttons to create because of all the text on the various rollover states.

Instead, I decided to create a image with all the valid characters on it, slice it up into those various characters (as shown above) and save the pieces in a folder. Then leveraging the wonderful command line applications in the open source project ImageMagick I created a small ruby script that stitches the individual pieces back together, creating a button based on a string parameter.

Essentially, the script does some error checking on the string, sanitizes it based on business rules, then generates and issues the following command to the ImageMagick binaries:

	
convert +append left_cap.png s.png _a.png _m.png _p.png _l.png _e.png space.png _b.png _u.png _t.png _t.png _o.png _n.png right_cap.png sample_button.png
	

After the script is you done end up with a complete button that was created in a fraction of a second but still retains the benefits of using a graphical element. Please be sure to use accessible HTML with graphical buttons so that screen readers can “view” the site properly. A good example would be as follows:

	
<button type="submit" title="This is a sample button" id="sample_button_id"  class="btn_sample_button"><span>Sample Button</span></button>
	

With the following CSS to hide the text when the browser is rendering CSS, but to show a valid button when it is not:

	
button span {
	display: none;
}
	

Taking this concept a bit further, you could most likely use the same method I describe in combination with ImageMagick to create button assets on the fly. I fear that the overhead of creating such assets on the fly wouldn’t be enough to outweigh the benefit of being able to cache static assets on a large enterprise site, thus the reason I haven’t fully explored it. If someone does end up going that route, please drop me a note in the comments and let me know about it.

Below is the Ruby script I wrote to generate the buttons from the image slices, this could easily be done in a bash shell script or any of the other various options:

	
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# make_button.rb by Ryan Orr

if ARGV[1] != nil
  puts "You have multiple arguments, this means you probably forgot to put \"\" around your button name. Please try again."
  exit 1
elsif ARGV[0] != nil
  # Buesiness Rule: Buttons should start with a capital letter, and
  #                 the only valid characters are A-Z, a-z, (space),
  #                 (comma), & and ?
  button_text = ARGV[0].capitalize.gsub(/[^A-Za-z ,?&]/,'')
else
  puts "You need to pass in a string"
  exit 1
end

counter = 0
string  = "convert +append left_cap.png "
filename = ""

until counter == button_text.length
  b = button_text[counter,1]

  case b
  when b[/[a-z]/]
    string += "_#{b.downcase}.png "
    filename += "#{b.downcase}"
  when b[/[A-Z]/]
    string += "#{b.downcase}.png "
    filename += "#{b.downcase}"
  when "?"
    string += "question_mark.png "
  when "&"
    string += "ampersand.png "
  when ","
    string += "comma.png "
  when " "
    string += "space.png "
    filename += "_"
  end
  counter += 1
end

filename = "#{filename.gsub(/[^A-Za-z_]/,'')}.png"
string += "right_cap.png #{filename}"

`#{string}` # Run the command that we've built
	

Email replies are one of the aspects of email management that I struggle with. The problem isn’t that I don’t known what to say in response, but rather there is too much for me to say and the task of replying to 20, 30 or 40 emails a day seems like a daunting time-suck. Taking a proactive step towards better email productivity, I have been experimenting with some advice from a Guy Kawaski post dated a year ago:

How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

The advice is simple and seems logical, but it doesn’t necessarily seems realistic at times. I’ve used the 5 sentences rule off and on for about 6 months and I’ve started to notice that people sometimes regard the email as curt in tone resulting in an unspoken misunderstanding. Along comes five.sentenc.es, created by Mike Davidson as a URL to place into your signature file, politely explaining the 5 sentences rule to your recipients.

I haven’t yet put this into play, but I’d imagine it’ll cause some confusion at first; in due time people will come to expect clear concise responses, at least I hope.

If you’ve never read Getting Things Done (also know as GTD), I’d highly recommend it. It’s a short read and most of the information is common sense but it reaffirms some of the productivity processes that you might already be doing, while giving you ideas about how to improve others.

I’ve been using a hybrid of ideas from GTD and Merlin’s InboxZero for quite some time now to deal with the insane amount of email I receive every week. One of the frustrations I have heard from people about GTD is that they understand the concepts, but are unsure of the actual action flow that one would use. Though, it’s a personal preference how to apply the GTD concepts to managing your email inbox down to zero, I thought I’d provide a run through of how my process works and maybe that’ll give someone an idea of where to start.

I use Mail.app as my client of choice, because it’s quick, easy to use and comes with OS X. On top of that I use 2 mail bundle add-ons. Mail Act-On and Mail Badger to accomplish sorting and reminder of tasks.

Setup

In my mail client, I have a folder called GTD. Under that, there are 5 folders: Archive, Defer, Delegate, Do & Respond. These represent sorting receptacles when I process my inbox.

I have a few Mail Act-On rules configured to help me quickly sort the email in my inbox when it is processed (see above image). With the rules in place, I can use the following key commands when sorting:

	^A = Move message to the "Archive" folder
	^D = Move message to the "Do" folder
	^F = Move message to the "Defer" folder
	^L = Move message to the "Delegate" folder
	^R = Move message to the "Respond" folder

Additionally I have two rules that color code messages so I can quickly identify if they are relevant to me or if they are part of the collective email noise that bombards my account daily. The first highlights the email in red if I am in the “To:” line (rule shown above), and the second highlights the email in orange if I am in the “CC:” line. I’ve found that 90% of things that I am not directly on the To: or CC: line are irrelevant to me, and I can quickly archive them.

I use Mail Badger to give me a reminder on the Mail.app dock icon. The number of messages in my inbox is the red circle and the number of messages in my Respond folder is the green circle.

Processing my inbox

I try to process my inbox 3 times a day: first thing in the morning, noon, and before I leave work. This is an ideal situation, but I’m not necessarily able to keep my email client closed for such long stretches of time.

When I do process my inbox I start at the top, filter through every email in order and decide what the next action is on the email. I break it down like so:

For the majority of e-mails it’s quite easy to decided where they should be sorted. If I am able to Do or Respond to an e-mail in less than 2 minutes, then I take care of it right then and there, anything longer is sorted. The Defer folder is the only tricky one; if you are going to place emails in this folder you need to be regiment about checking the folder daily so it doesn’t become the black abyss that your inbox used to be.

Get Things Done

Now that my mail is sorted I can handle tasks one at a time from the Do folder. I usually reserve an hour at the end of the day to plow through the responses folder in order to clean it out so I don’t get behind. This should provide you with enough information develop your own GTD system for dealing with email or have a look at Merlin’s InboxZero talk at Google: