Probably the most notable changes are to seyDoggy.com. It’s no longer a portfolio site for past work since we don’t actually do client work anymore. It’s now just a calling card, if you will, or a hub I guess.

Also, the seyDoggy blog has been moved over to this blog. All of the original posts have been maintained so all the posts on RapidWeaver tips, AppleScripting, browser hacking, etc, are still available.

And last but not least, I’ve brought the Merrifield Photography blog over here as well. There are some pretty old stuff in there that I didn’t want to let die.

So there we are… my web-life is a little tidier, a little cleaner, a lot simpler. Now I just need to give the layout here a little tender loving care.

Related posts

• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• From pixels to paper, we're getting noticed (0)
• 3 Quick AppleScripts to Save You Time (0)
• Use RapidWeaver's %pathto()% syntax in javascript files (0)
• To be Strict or not to be (0)

I pulled out my 1984 50mm f1.7 Minolta lens earlier this week and have kept it on ever since. I love that old lens. I love how at f1.7 you can shoot with just about any available light and get a decent shot.

This one is a nice, contemplative shot of my son who is with us for the holidays. He’s really growing up fast.

Related posts

• Water like glass (0)
• The sumac fall fate (0)
• How the Time Goes By (0)
• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)

Sunday morning is a time for mom and dad to tackle some chores and projects but it only takes a little sun and childish wonder to get me to pause and enjoy what Sunday means to the girls.

Bathed in Sunday morning light, the girls enjoy a self chosen snack of BearPaws.

Related posts

• You in there Mr. Camera Guy? (0)
• Working with beauty (0)
• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• Water like glass (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)

Years ago a bunch of bunnies managed to get free of their pen at the Waterloo Park. For quite some time after (and I am sure still today) you could find the bunnies — now feral — roaming about many of the public green spaces within a few kilometers of the park. Quite used to humans being around, you could often have these critters chewing grass at your feet while you ate your lunch on the city hall lawn.

This was shot in May 2004 on Fujifilm NPH 120.

Related posts

• You in there Mr. Camera Guy? (0)
• Working with beauty (0)
• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• Water like glass (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)

I enjoy solving process streamlining needs on my own with AppleScript and I am not one to keep good things to myself so here are just 3 little scripts I would like to share. You might have a use for them and they might just make your day easier.

Toggle apps on or off

If you’re like me you might have one or two apps that do all that you need them to just by turning them on or off. So why leave them running in the background all the time? Two apps that I can think of in my list are Nocturne and Isolator. I use them from time to time but not often enough to keep them in the menu bar permanently. Activating their features requires me to select their icon from the menu bar and selecting the option that toggles their behavior on or off. Or if you just leave their behavior toggled on then quit and restart the app, it has the exact same effect. Quitting the app turns the feature off (obviously) and starting the app turns the feature on…

Sounds like a job for AppleScript:

-- replace "YourAppName" with your app
set yourApp to "YourAppName"

-- leave the rest to us
if appIsRunning(yourApp) then
    tell application yourApp to quit
else
    tell application yourApp to activate
end if

on appIsRunning(appName)
    tell application "System Events" to ¬
        (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning

By changing the name of “YourAppName” to the app you want to toggle on or off and then setting yourself a keyboard shortcut for the script, you can then activate the app and it’s only desired feature with a stroke of the keys.

Download

Get your fresh copy of “On-Off_AppToggle” from CodeCollector.net

Simple Web Search

Do you remember when a query to a search engine was a simple string that looked like http://www.google.com/search?q=this%20or%20that? Now-a-days search strings tend to include all sorts of information like the source of the search, encoding, language, client, OS… and ends up like and unreadable bunch of garbage like this http://www.google.com/search?source=qsb-mac&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=this%20or%20that&client=qsb-mac&ie=UTF-8. I for one don’t need every one of my queries to be counted so I wrote a simple script to pose that basic string once again. For your own purposes you can change the search engine and browser to suit your needs.

set userQuery to text returned of ¬
    (display dialog "Google search:" ¬
        default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} ¬
        default button 2)

set httpArray to ¬
    {"http://", "www.", ".com", ".ca", ".net", ".org", ".info", ".us"}

set httpBool to false
repeat with httpAny in httpArray
    if userQuery contains httpAny then
        set httpBool to true
        exit repeat
    end if
end repeat

if httpBool then
    tell application "Safari" to open location userQuery
else
    tell application "Safari" to open location ¬
        "http://www.google.com/search?q=" & userQuery
end if
tell application "Safari" to activate

When you launch this script you just enter your search query and press return.

Edits

r4 10-29-09 09:43 – It would be handy if you could use this script to open known urls to, so I’ve edited the script to do so in a basic manner. It’s not perfect yet as I need to write some regular expressions to really detect proper TLDs and such. But it will do for now. So, perform a query and Safari will open that query in as a Google search. Or, enter a URL and Safari will directly open that website.

Download

Get your fresh copy of “Google_Search” from CodeCollector.net

Launch apps by task

My days, weeks and even months can often be broken into many different tasks. I wear a lot of hats as a small business owner. One day I might be providing support for the RapidWeaver themes I make and the next day I will be knee deep in code making the latest greatest product. One minute I am social networking and the next I am designing something shiny.

Each of these tasks involves a unique set of apps to be open which can make changing gears a time consuming — if not confusing — process.

To address this I wrote a script that launches (or quits) a particular set of apps based on the task I need to do. For example:

• If I am busy with support, I want to launch:
  • Mailplane
  • Safari
  • TextMate
• If I am networking I will use:
  • Safari
  • Adium
  • LimeChat
  • Mailplane
  • TweetDeck
• If I am designing I want:
  • DigitalColor Meter
  • LittleSnapper
  • Photoshop
• Or if I am developing a new theme:
  • RapidWeaver
  • Safari
  • TextMate
  • MAMP

And so on… As mentioned, I can use the script to either launch these sets of apps or quit them and I can do so with a single keyboard-shortcut. This saves a lot of time and helps keep the clutter to a minimum. You can fill in your own task sets and your own apps to suit.

-- define the sorts of tasks you wish to activate multiple apps for
set taskArray to {"Surfing", "Media", "Designing"}

set taskName to ¬
    {choose from list taskArray with prompt ¬
        "Pick your process:"} ¬
            as string
set toDoArray to {"Launch apps", "Quit apps"}
set toDoResult to ¬
    {choose from list toDoArray with prompt ¬
        "Would you like to launch or quit these applications?"} ¬
            as string


if taskName is equal to "Surfing" then

    -- define the apps you would like to open/close
    set appArray to ¬
        {"Safari", "LittleSnapper", "Mail"}

    runTrue(appArray,toDoResult)
else if taskName is "Media" then

    -- define the apps you would like to open/close
    set appArray to ¬
        {"iTunes", "Last.fm", "DVD Player"}

    runTrue(appArray,toDoResult)
else if taskName is "Designing" then

    -- define the apps you would like to open/close
    set appArray to ¬
        {"Adobe Photoshop CS3", "DigitalColor Meter", "LittleSnapper"}

    runTrue(appArray,toDoResult)
else
    display dialog ¬
        "Something is wrong! Please check your array values."
end if

-- runTrue function
on runTrue(appArray,toDoResult)
    repeat with appName in appArray
        if toDoResult is "Launch apps" then
            tell application appName to activate
        else if toDoResult is "Quit apps" then
            tell application appName to quit
        else
            display dialog "Houston, we have a problem!"
        end if
    end repeat
end runTrue

Download

Get your fresh copy of “LaunchTaskApps” from CodeCollector.net

Go play

I hope you can make use of these scripts in your own daily workflow. I know I would be lost without them. Do have any scripts of your own you want to share? Feel free to comment and let me know.

Related posts

• Scripting LittleSnapper… Slight Return (0)
• YourHead launches Stacks 1.0 (1)
• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• The Little Know Clipboard App That Can (2)
• The beauty of RapidWeaver meets the power of TextMate (0)

The iPhone has become my mobile portfolio, my flickr uploaded, my on-the-fly image editor and my insta-shot camera. But I am not the only one who has tapped into the power of the iPhone as a photographic assistant. Photography Bay recently published a list and mini review of some of the hottest photography related iPhone apps. Whether you have an iPhone or not, this list will certain make you hungry for the photographic possibilities.

Related posts

• Jade 1.2 Digital Image Processing for Mac OS X Leopard (0)
• HDR imagery demystified (0)
• You in there Mr. Camera Guy? (0)
• Working with beauty (0)
• Tot in the woods (0)

Back in April, the GRCA called me and asked me if they could use this image in a clean air promotion. Which they did here. Today I got another email from them showing how they used the image in their annual report (as seen above). Pretty cool.

© Grand River Conservation Authority/Grand River Conservation Foundation

Related posts

• You in there Mr. Camera Guy? (0)
• Working with beauty (0)
• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• Water like glass (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)

This is from a fairly old shoot, 6 or 7 years ago, on film, couple of strobes and umbrellas. I am about to embark on a massive reorganization of my image library and I am taking stock, if you will, of the images I have, old and new. In doing so I am coming across some old stuff I’d forgotten about.

It’s interesting to look at this stuff again and see how my style has or hasn’t changed since then. I know one thing for sure, I miss the certainty I had of film, knowing just how it would respond in just about any circumstance. Knowing how many stops latitude you had with negative vs. color transparency, to push one while pulling the other, the grain on T-Max vs Tri-X… all the stuff that just catalogued in your brain after a while.

Digital is a bit more of a mysterious beast to me still. Sometimes it behaves like slide film, and sometimes like negative film and then in the end it can all be changed in post processing. I guess it’s what keeps our minds sharp, always something new to learn.

Related posts

• Water like glass (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)
• Turkish Delight (0)
• Tot in the woods (0)
• The sumac fall fate (0)

My second born child shown here on the day she was born (nearly 6 years ago). It’s looking back on images like these that make you realize just how much changes in such a short amount of time. When I think to back to this moment, I was working as a quality technician at a tool and die shop, programming a CMM, I was shooting weddings on weekends, my son still lived in town, I still lived in the first house I ever bought, I was hand coding websites using tables and some css, I was still using film…

I could write a whole book on the stuff my family has been through in just the last half decade. I dare not think of all that’s changed since my son was born 12.5 years ago.

Related posts

• Welcome to the new RW Updates (0)
• The spring dusting (0)
• Water like glass (0)
• Turkish Wedding (0)
• Turkish Delight (0)

There are some things about traveling with small children I will not miss, like bladder control. With older kids they can wait until you get to a more reputable rest station. But the little ones have to go when they have to go.

If the sink, who is occasionally graced with soap, looked like this, you can imagine what the other fixtures looked like. Thank god we travel with sani-wipes in the van. My daughter and I got a full cleansing after this truck stop visit.

Related posts

• Let them be goofy (0)
• What is success? (3)
• The sumac fall fate (0)
• The new Wedding portfolio (0)
• The Kids (0)