switches

My house was built in 1960 and we purchased it from the original owner’s son.  One of the things I like about my house is the ‘flavor’ that came with it.  Case in point, the light switches.  Here is a collection of the unique styles we have.  Notice, only one of the switches in this collection was provided by me ( the fuzzy red one ).

collection of light switches

the switches I hit in my house

Five screencasting options for OS X

I recently asked for some screencasting advice and wanted to put this list up for future reference.  I ended up using Jing Free for my particular assignment, but typically use screentoaster.com since it’s free, cross platform, and web based.

ScreenFlow

Price : $99.00

URL : http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/

Notes : ScreenFlow looks freaking amazing.  If I had to do regular screencasting, I would spend the $99 to get this application.  It appears to do, save, and export everything.  This is the best solution for any professional screencaster.

Snapz Pro X

Price : $69.00

URL : http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Notes : If I was going to pay money for a screencast app, it would be ScreenFlow.  However, I do use Ambrosia Soft’s Wiretap Studio, so I know they make great software.  If $30 is enough to effect your decision, I would highly recommend looking at this before ScreenFlow.

Jing Free

Price : free

URL : http://www.jingproject.com/features/

Notes : Jing Free is pretty sweet, but only captures a maximum of five minutes of video.  For my assignment that ended up being good so I could keep my videos short.  The pay service looks really helpful for sharing captures ( images, videos, etc ), but I just can’t justify signing up for this yet.

Silverback App

Price : $69.95

URL : http://silverbackapp.com/

Notes : This capturing app is geared towards taking videos for usability studies.  This is a really cool application that I’d take a closer look if I wasn’t such a server side programmer.  Be sure to watch the demo, it’s a really cool application, just not good for what I was doing.

Screentoaster.com

Price : FREE

URL : http://www.screentoaster.com

Notes : This is a free web based screen recording service that I use fairly often.  You can’t beat free, and this will run on your MAC or PC since it’s browser based.  Definitely worth a look if you need something quick and want to sharing capabilities.

eMpower2

This piece is called eMpower2 and it was free handed on my MacBook Pro’s magical trackpad.  The application used was Mr.Doob’s Harmony drawing tool.  It’s the sweetest open source HTML5 drawing tool I’ve seen yet.  I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of HTML5 based drawing tools soon.

I'm reliving a favorite project from my past

The past repeats itself, stay true to your game and yourself

Upload to ASP.NET from HTML, Flash, or Flex clients

File uploading has been a hot topic during my time as an internet programmer.  In the classic ASP days this was a bit of a task to build and get correct.  Nowadays both Adobe’s Coldfusion and Microsoft’s ASP.NET both have built in file uploader tags ( server controls ) that handle this with ease.

This is great, but what happens when you have a mixed bag of clients that all need to upload to the same location?  Sometimes I work with completely ASP.NET or CF web apps, but more often than not I’m dealing with Flash clients as well as HTML clients.

Recently I ran into this upload scenario and built this simple ASP.NET uploader script.  This feels a bit old school since it uses .NET’s built in Request.Files collection, instead of a fancy new ‘all in one’ server control, but I actually prefer this method.

Here’s all you need :

    // Check for posted files
    for (int xx = 0; xx < Request.Files.Count; xx++)
    {
        // UPLOAD FILE
        HttpPostedFile _file = Request.Files[xx];

        // create full save path for uploaded file
        var full_file_path = Server.MapPath( UP_FOLDER ) + "\\" + _file.FileName;

        try
        {
            // save file to server
            _file.SaveAs(full_file_path);
        }
        catch (Exception exc)
        {
            var emsg = "Unable to upload file : " + exc.Message;

            Response.Write( emsg );
            Response.Flush();
            Response.End();
        }

        // show result
        Response.Write( _file.FileName + " uploaded! <br>" );
    }

That’s all there is to it codewise. Before using this code you will need to give the NETWORK SERVICES user write permissions to your upload folder. Other than that, that’s all she wrote!

Here is a zip of all the code for you to download.

Inside this zip you will find :

  • flashclient.fla – Flash upload client ( *be sure to update the upload path before building )
  • flexclient.mxml – Flex upload client ( *also update upload path before building )
  • uploader.aspx - ASP.NET file upload handler
  • uploadform.html - sample HTML upload form ( again, update path )

Hope somebody finds this useful.