Oscar Trelles

Being today my first ‘official’ day as a Mac user, I was prepared to experience some annoyances. The first one was realizing that the “Home” and “End” keys seemed to be completely useless.

I later learned that, in fact, they just worked completely different than expected on a PC, which didn’t bring any closure. On a PC, the “Home” and “End” keys take you to the beginning and end of a line, respectively. On a Mac, they work at the document level. This is particularly annoying for me because I am keeping my PC keyboard, since I am using both the new Mac and my old PC at the same time.

Fortunately, there’s a work around.

As explained in this article at LifeHacker, it is possible to create a key bindings dictionary file that will make the “Home” and “End” keys work “correctly.”

Thanks to Mark Llobrera, a friend and co-worker at Domani, for finding this for me.

Now, on to fixing navigation through words… actually, it seems to work with the Alt key, instead of Ctrl.

Got a lot of key re-mapping to do.

I just updated the bus tracking with a few enhancements and additions.

• Added a header and a border around the map area.
• Made dates format more user-friendly.
• Added a different icon for visited cities.
• Added a link to pictures for each of the past events.

ToDo:
- Right now clicking on the bus shows only the last picture taken. I want to make the last 10, or something like that.
- Legend is still missing (do we need one anyway?)

I was doing some research on the Google Maps API for an upcoming project. Even though I am not going to do the mapoing part myself, I wanted to have an understanding of the basics of the Google Maps functionality, as I have never had the opportunity to play with it. So, here’s my first attempt to do a mashup, using the location feed from the onAIR Bus API.

It is still an alpha version, but I wanted to make it public (beyond my tweets), for people to see and comment.

ToDo:
- Add a header
- Add a legend
- Normalize event dates
- Mark visited stops
- Maybe make icons for stops a little bit smaller

John Grden has a released a long awaited set of components that allow users to use Papervision 3D right within the Flash IDE. As it stands, the Papervision 3D API is very straight forward and probably all ActionScript power users need, but it lacks (at least the last time I checked) detailed documentation, which may represent an obstacle for other segments of the expanding user base, and that is why this release is so important.

This are the features, extracted from John’s blog:

• Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE
• 3 Material types supported – BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial
• Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera
• Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]
• Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]
• Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around
• Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]
• New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-time

For more details, downloads and examples, head over to John’s post. Enjoy!

Another major annoyance is the sudden obsolescence of hardware components. I “lost” a network card and my old and my old faithful Radeon 7500 to the Vista upgrade. Granted, my Linksys NIC was old for a network interface, so I was prepared to put it to rest. However, I am going to miss having 2 dual-monitor video cards in my computer, and being able to connect 4 monitors to it.

To be honest, I never used more than 3 at a time: 2 LCD screens and my 42″ entertainment screen, but I was considering (although at the same time fighting the impulse) to add a third screen to my desktop. Fortunately I decided to postpone the acquisition of the new monitor, otherwise I’d have been really really pissed off.

Now I understand what people meant when they said you would need a new computer to run Windows Vista on it. Even though my workstations have always been “ahead of the curve” in terms of key hardware components, they have always been the result of recycling some of the older ones.

Some of the things I love about reformatting my hard drives and installing a fresh copies of the latest version of the operating system, is backwards compatibility: new OS installers will most likely contain updated versions of my drivers, and that would make it easier and faster to get started once the computer was operational. That’s not case with Windows anymore.