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GDocsUploader 1.4 released

Jacob — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:22:32 +0000

While still in college, I wrote my first Mac OS X program to upload documents to Google Docs. The program is called GDocsUploader, and it supports drag-and-drop uploading of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and PDF files.

Today, almost 9 months since my last release, I am happy to release an updated version of the program. The new updated version will allow users to upload PDF documents, a very much requested feature.

You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.

I had been doing everything I could to get Google to add PDF uploading capabilities to their API. I even submitted an official issue, which generated 73 comments and 136 stars, making it “the most requested feature.” Last Friday, Google finally responded by releasing version 3.0 of their API which supported PDF uploading.

The entire development of this project happens in my free time, on an old iBook G4. Unfortunately, because the latest version of OS X will not run on this old laptop, I cannot ensure that the app works on Snow Leopard, nor can I fix it if it doesn’t. I’ll probably think about creating a cross-platform version of the app which would run on Windows, Mac, or Linux through Adobe Air, providing greater platform stability.

If you would like to send me a monetary thank you gift for developing this, please consider donating through paypal.

GDocsUploader 1.3 released About a year ago I started a little programming project...
GDocsUploader 1.2 released I released version 1.2 (download) of my little GDocsUploader program....
Gdocsuploader A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many...

GDocsUploader 1.3 released

Jacob — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:27:12 +0000

About a year ago I started a little programming project to upload documents to Google Docs. I wrote a little program for Apple OS X called GDocsUploader to support drag-and-drop uploading of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and photos.

Today I released an updated version of the program. In addition to bug fixes, this new version supports video uploads to Picasa. Additionally, this new version makes it much easier to upload multiple files at the same time.

You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.

The entire development of this project happens in my free time, on an old iBook G4. Donations would help me feel good about continued development of this project.

GDocsUploader 1.4 released While still in college, I wrote my first Mac OS...
GDocsUploader 1.2 released I released version 1.2 (download) of my little GDocsUploader program....
Gdocsuploader A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many...

atoi(getenv(“MYVAR”))

Jacob — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:34:05 +0000

These are mostly personal notes. I’m not sure if they will make sense to others.

I had a problem with a line of code like this:
int x = atoi(getenv("MYVAR"));

If this line was in daemon-ized code started at init level 2, it would segfault. (I’m not sure if these conditions are necessary, but those were my conditions).

getenv("UNKNOWN_VAR") == NULL
atoi(NULL) should == 0

But for some reason, things were segfaulting. I corrected the problem with:
if (getenv("MYVAR") == NULL) int x = 0; else int x = atoi(getenv("MYVAR"));

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GDocsUploader 1.2 released

Jacob — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:28:49 +0000

I released version 1.2 (download) of my little GDocsUploader program. After being published on a few websites and having over 4000 downloads, I thought it might be nice to update the app a little.

There are bug fixes, better error dialogs, a new icon (used under a creative commons license) and uploading of photos into Picasa Web Albums. A bulleted list of changes is published in the project wiki.

GDocsUploader is a small Mac OS X program that I wrote to quickly upload documents to Google Docs, simply by dragging and dropping a document icon onto the uploader icon.

GDocsUploader 1.3 released About a year ago I started a little programming project...
GDocsUploader 1.4 released While still in college, I wrote my first Mac OS...
Gdocsuploader A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many...

Gdocsuploader

Jacob — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:55:07 +0000

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

GDocsUploader 1.3 released About a year ago I started a little programming project...
GDocsUploader 1.4 released While still in college, I wrote my first Mac OS...
GDocsUploader 1.2 released I released version 1.2 (download) of my little GDocsUploader program....

Did Google just change the world again?

Jacob — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:19:42 +0000

While Google is perhaps one of the most innovative web development companies out there, sometimes I am slightly disappointed because they fail to meet my exceedingly high expectations. Google has developed and released very few applications that I would consider as world changing. The short list includes Search, Gmail, Maps, Spreadsheets, and Calendar. That isn’t to say that Google hasn’t purchased and developed other emerging technologies which might also been revolutionary–Blogger, Picassa, Writely, Keyhole, and YouTube–but those applications got their start outside of Google. That also isn’t to say that Google hasn’t developed other standards and technologies which have greatly furthered the Internet. I’m simply making the point that Google has developed, from the start, only a few applications that most Internetizens would consider life-changing.

There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.

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Great open source OS X applications

Jacob — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:30:53 +0000

Here is a quick list of apps that I frequently use on OS X. I believe all of them are free and open source. many of the applications are development tools that I find useful.

Adium – Instant messenger built with libpurple.
Firefox – Web Browser
NeoOffice – OpenOffice.org port
Smultron – a nice, simple code editor. Integrates well with Cyberduck.
Cyberduck – A SFTP client. Please read my full review.
Quicksilver – a fast application launcher
Komodo Edit – my new favorite small code IDE
The Gimp – graphics editing program that requires X11
Platypus – packages python/perl/php/shell scripts as double-clickable OS X applications.

Those are my favorite, most used apps. You should also check out this list of mac apps, some of which I’ve used either on the mac or other platforms, others I plan on trying soon.

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Leapord iCal Server to support Outlook?

Jacob — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:12:33 +0000

With the latest release of OS X Leapord being released soon, I thought I would take another look at some of the features of Leapord server. One of the things I’ve been anticipating is the new calendaring server. Apple says that the new server “works well with others,” but maybe not as well as they were first saying. It seems that Apple who was once touting Microsoft Outlook compatibility is now being quite hush about it. Consider this sentence from their old iCal Server features page:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler, and Microsoft Outook.

The same sentence recently changed to omit any reference to outlook:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, and popular CalDAV clients from Mozilla, Open Source Application Foundation and others.

So what does this change mean? Seeing as Outlook interoperability was one kick trash feature, the fact that it is now omitted from the features page probably means that it isn’t going to happen. Which is way too bad. We can only wonder what bounced Outlook out of the release party. Was it too hard to develop or support an Outlook plugin? Or were there patent or other legal issues? We can hope, however, that maybe we will be delivered Outlook interoperability in some future release.

If you want a calendar for your organization, you could try Google Apps for Your Domain. It includes Google’s calendar product, and any user with a modern web browser can use it. The user interface is really quite excellent. It doesn’t, however, provide excellent connectors to and CalDAV calendar clients.

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Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2

Jacob — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:53:56 +0000

About 9 or 10 hours ago, Wordpress 2.2 was released and announced. Wordpress is free, open source software which used to create blogs, like this one, but can also be used as a simple content management system, like how I used it to create my mom’s business site.

I’ve briefly looked through all the pages of the new Wordpress version, and visually, not a lot has changed. One major addition though is the concept of widgets. However, because I’m using my own custom theme, widgets can’t be used on my blog yet. I’ll have to spend a little bit of time later upgrading my custom theme to use widgets for the sidebar. I’m really excited about widgets, because I think at least a couple of the custom Wordpress plugins that I’ve written really could take advantage of the widget framework.

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Cyberduck

Jacob — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:58:24 +0000

Despite having a pretty cool name, Cyberduck is a pretty cool program. It is an FTP/SFTP program for Mac OS X. I like using it to upload files to my webserver using SFTP. It integrates in with my Mac operating system pretty well, and best of all, it is open source. Being open source means that I’ll never be charged for it, and I can copy and redistribute it as much as I want. I can even change part of the program if I want. Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out and applaud those who have worked on Cyberduck and say, thanks.

Like I said, Cyberduck does a great job at integrating with the rest of the OS X system. It has plugins for Growl and Quicksilver. It seamlessly integrates with a good set of editors. It takes advantage of Bonjour, Spotlight, and the OS X keychain, and can use iDisk for synchronizing bookmarks.

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