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Amateur photoshopping on iOS

During a recent trip to Singapore with my fiancé I had some time to kill sans Internet, and thought I'd have a play around with some photo apps I'd downloaded previously but not given much time to. We've taken a ton of photos on the trip, some on a samsung point and shoot and some on iPhone, and had a few which has suffered from lack of lighting. I'm very pleased with the results, and wanted to share the techniques I used. The apps are immensely simple to use and can get quick results. Before

After

Quite the difference. I'm a big fan of the final shot and sure to become my new laptop background. 1-Fixing the photo My default go to app is Camera+. This has been the defacto enhanced camera app for sometime and has gone through a number of iterations. I still find it too slow to use to take the photos (ymmv) it's a great app for fixing up crummy shots.

The 'scenes' function can completely alter the colour, brightness and other features of your photo based on a bunch of presets. For photos that are suffering a lack of light like above, Clarity or Night will normally clean them up to an acceptable standard.

Above: Before/after of another photo cleaned up with Clarity. Camera+ let's you have a lot of fine grained control too, and has all the usual Instagram style features too. If you just want a single tool for everything then this is for you. 2- Colour highlighting For this, pull out ColourSplash.

This app does one thing and does it very well. Choose your photo and it will import it in black and white. You then use your finger to trace which bits you want to have colour. It's that easy. You can zoom for fine grain detail, but it appears to be smart enough so if you roughly draw around, say, someone's face, it colours only the face and not the background. You can have hours of fun with this app, it's a really easy way to make your photos look a bit more special. I also noticed that this was being offered as a service on fiverr, so this may save you a few dollars. 3- Soft focus

Using an app called 'photo editor' it's very easy to add shaped focus, allowing you to blur out the background and really emphasise something in the photo. This app is hugely diverse; it has the same colour highlighting as colour splash, as well as filters, red eye, blemish removal and a whole host of other stuff. It's nowhere near as slick as camera+ but it has some very nice features; if you're patient the blemish remover tool is very useful. Conclusion As a complete photography novice I've been hugely impressed with what can be achieved very quickly with just a small handful of cheap apps. I think it's much easier to do this sort of manipulation on a touch screen too. Whilst I don't think pro 'togs will be putting photoshop away just yet, these tools are an adequate solution for the majority.

#geek

My First Hackathon

This is a picture of me on hour 30 of 37 with no sleep. Mild hallucinations, lots of shouting at my laptop and volumes of coke zero. No, this isn't a new interrogation technique, but Hong Kong's first hackathon. Angelhack is a US Company that specialises in hackathon and hackcellerators and runs events globally (and often, simultaneously). The concept is simple; Bring yourself, maybe a team, an idea and your laptops, maybe some hardware, and in 24 hours go from no code to fully fledged working app. This hackathon was mobile oriented, with the focus being on new apps (although not necessarily for phones; a smartwatch company had brought a bunch of their android based watches for people to hack). You must bring NO CODE to the event with everything must be written fresh which will be checked for the victorious (somehow). Libraries are allowed so you could probably do most your work as a lib before and wire it at the event, but that's not really in the spirit. When I’d first seen the hackathon online, I signed straight up and then pretty much didn’t think about it again until the night before the event (caveat: I had been drinking when I signed up) when I started to do a bit of googling around it. The only similar event I’d done before was HK Startup Weekend and I’d been expecting a similar setup. Oh how wrong I was! Moreso, I was surprised by how little was available information wise about what the angelhack experience is actually like, which is why I wanted to write the experience up for future victims and to blunt my rose tinted glasses next time I want to apply. First point of order: this is not a social/networking event like Startup Weekend where you create your teams on the day, do a lot of mingling and exchanging name cards, and come out with lots of new contacts and friends. At Angelhack most people arrive as a pre-arranged team with an idea. There’ll be a few stragglers (like me), and you’re able to hack solo or form a team on the day (like me), but I’d probably encourage you to go in with people you know and an idea you believe in. I was lucky enough to meet and pair up with someone, come up with an idea, and not end up killing each other. Registration in the morning was terrible at this event, run by a HK Startup EventXtra whose systems kept crashing which meant everyone going through the system multiple times which was very slow. This was mitigated somewhat by the Starbucks breakfast inside (my stomach dictates my mood, or at least has a significant influence on it). After an hour of general shmoozing time & strategy planning (and stealing the best tables), and 2 hours (!) of sponsor presentations we got around to pitches. Pitches are an opportunity for individuals and teams to pitch their idea and find people to join their groups. It's fairly poorly organised and as most people are pre-organized i’m not convinced anyone picked up new team members from this. As mentioned before, go with a team organised beforehand if you can! Then comes the hacking. It really is just 24 hours of coding the crap out of something and using as much brute force and hacks to get it (to look like it is) working. I’ll go into detail what we built and the tech behind it in another post. Elevator pitch- it's a push-to do list so you can nag other people. Use case: fiancé reminding me to take washing out the machine after she's gone to work. It was a hell of a learning experience from both a technology perspective and as an individual. I’m proud of what we managed to put together in that time frame compared to how much I managed to get done when coding personal projects normally. Most the teams didn't code thought the night, with a number of people passed out over tables or on the supplied bean bags, and some people even just went home and came back the next day. But for the true experience, stick it out. You won’t regret it after you've recovered (which took me about a week). At the end of the hacking came the presentation. I can safely say that whilst I wanted to do well my enthusiasm was waining as I was feeling immensely broken. There were something like 24 teams presenting, so there’s a lot of waiting around. At ours, we got 3 minutes to present to a panel of 4 judges. I think this is one of the most disheartening things I’ve ever been through; after 24 hours with no sleep busting my nuts, with mad dash sprints to get little beautiful features working, to then get just 3 minutes to show it is nowhere near long enough and is quite an affront to how hard some of the teams worked. It's a very different mentality from a group like startup weekend where everyone is encouraged to present no matter what state they got to. Hopefully it's something they can look to improving in future iterations The judges narrowed down the running to 9 teams (of which one went MIA), who presented to the whole room. By this point I’m very tired and very frustrated from all the waiting around, and desperately in need of some proper food and sleep. Delirium had definitely set in, with the stupidest and simplest of jokes setting me and my programming partner off laughing uncontrollably for minutes at a time. Then, more waiting! Judges make their decisions and announce, prizes handed out, big group photo and then FREEDOM! A lot of the groups had piled out of the venue when discovering they weren't in the running to win, meaning the eventual group photo was lacking a lot of the attendees. It's now some months down the line, and if the opportunity to do this again came up I think I probably would. It’s a huge learning experience, and an opportunity to actually churn out some software. We’re planning on finishing the app, although I went back into the codebase a week after and it’s a mine zone, which is to be expected really. Top Tips if you’re going to/thinking of going to a hackathon:

Definitely go. I was on the verge of bailing because I was in one of my unsocial “I can’t be bothered to talk to other people” modes. I always inevitably end up enjoying it when I go so I forced myself, and even though I was being grumpy, managed to find a great team mate and project.

Bring subtle entertainment; whether it be a kindle or your pocket backlog or whatever. There’s a lot of procession and rubbish before you actually get to do any development. Also sit at the back so you don’t get called out for not paying attention to the sponsors

Bring layers! As you can see in the photo, I look utterly ridiculous like a hobo Where's Wally, but the aircon was maxed out and so I had to throw on all the layers I had. Bring gear for any occasion

Speaking of gear; bring lots! Cables, phones, tablets, adapters, routers etc. You never know what you’re going to need.

Set your expectations; sure, there’s a grand prize of getting into an accelerator, but you’re probably not going to win. It’s incredible the stuff that they turned out at our hackathon. The winning team built a personal eBay with instagram filters, Facebook and twitter AND PAYPAL integration, in a slick, working application. Another team built a working multimeter which had hardware that plugged into the audio jack. I didn’t even know what a multimeter was. People are good at this. Go in with the aim of having fun and learning something.

Hope that sums it up. Whack a question in the comments if there's anything specific anyone wants to know.

#geek

Fighting Information Obesity

Hi. My name's Sam, I'm addicted to information and suffer from information obesity. I've always been a big fan of information, but I'd say I only started to gorge myself in the last year or so. My brain is overweight with the volume of information I'm putting in it. I don't even enjoy it anymore but I couldn't stop. However just recently I've been kicking the habit, and you can too!

Firstly, you need to know the symptoms of Information Obesity so you can self diagnose. Do you

Wake up in the morning, turn your alarm off, and read your email/facebook/twitter straight away?

Spend all of your public transport journeys immersed reading social networks/feedly feeds/the interwebz?

Open your email/social push notifications AS SOON AS YOU SEE THEM

Constantly check your phone so you can open your notifications AS SOON AS YOU SEE THEM

Feel like your brain is constantly slightly fuzzy?

Chances are you're suffering from Information Obesity. I too was suffering this, but don't worry. You too can be cured.

I highly recommend reading this Gizmodo article on turning your smartphone into a dumbphone; it was the inspiration for my experiment. I genuinely just found that at any given moment I already had my phone out checking for facebook updates or twitter posts or emails. God forbid I let an email go unread for several minutes! So I decided to try out a dumbphone diet, although not quite as extreme as Gizmodo.

All push notifications were switched off, except for messaging apps (whatsapp etc)

All social type apps (fb, twitter, email) moved to the last screen on my iPhone

No checking any of those things on the phone; only on proper laptops

I set off with the goal of managing a week, and I'm now punching over 2 weeks. And it's such a relief! I encourage you to give it a go. Things I have discovered

On the first day I really, really struggled to not check my email. Addiction level difficult (ex smoker preaching here). This went through the roof when I saw I had over 20 or so emails on the little red notification on the mail app (by accident). I managed to make it till 5PM at which point I gave in. And my biggest discovery was that not a single one of those emails was of importance. I'd been lucky enough to have been retweeted by Scott Hanselman after promoting his email list (which is epic, btw), hence the massive (for me) dump of emails.

And so with that, I realised that life goes on without me. No email needs answering desperately within 6 hours. It became easier. I moved email off to another screen to reduce the chance of accidentally looking at it, and it makes for fairly smooth sailing

I assigned time in the morning before work to sit and read/reply to emails. This was really cathartic, and meant I actually responded to emails as opposed to letting them hang around for a week and started the day clean. Pro Tip! I read somewhere on twitter about starting the day with a glass of cold water (supposedly better than coffee). Can highly recommend it.

I'd also sit down after work to go through what's going on. Confining my email and socials to these period allowed my brain to breath

Commuting is really interesting without being locked into a smartphone. It allowed me to think. As cheesy as it sounds, I'd gotten to the point where I was so busy reading the entire internet, I didn't get chance to think about the day ahead, and to just let my brain go free for a bit. It's brilliant!

I have to admit after the end of week 1 I've not been as stringent on these rules, but things are definitely better now. I miss a lot of twitter reading, but it's nothing I can't live without.

So, if you think your brain is fat and overweight with the volume of information you're taking in, why not put it on a diet? Try it for a week!

#geek

Stormfly; PC on your wrist

I'm a huge fan of the kickstarter concept. As well as allowing technologies to exist that may not have without it, it allows me as a geek to get in on the ground floor. I've backed 2 things so far; My Pebble, which is fantastic but was incredibly infuriating to wait for, taking well over a year, and Stormfly, which I backed about 4 months ago in March.

Stormfly's slogan is "Like a PC on your wrist". In effect, it's a wearable USB which you plug into a mac or windows PC and boot from, giving you access to a linux OS and all your files. There's a bunch of nice value adds such as a back up and 24h replace service.

There's a bunch of reasons you'd want something like this. Perhaps security, so you don't keep yourself logged onto friends machines. Maybe you're a big traveler and stay with friends. My personal reason was simple; When I travel with work I have to take my work laptop (locked down to the max and so useless for personal stuff) and my own laptop, for email, Facebook, videos, maybe a bit of development. My hope was I could boot Stormfly up on my work PC before all the encryption and lockdown shenanigans, meaning I could just take my work PC and still have a personal machine.

The Stormfly cost me $74 including shipping (yet another kickstarter shipping from China that charges more to send to HK than the US!), which was a fairly pricey bet that this would work.

I was really suprised to come home and find my stormfly had arrived having had no shipping notice, nor a kickstarter update to say they were shipping. That said, this was a nice surprise, and I'd rather it be this way as I'm far too impatient when waiting for shipping. The box is fairly small, basic cardboard so lacking a bit of shiney but sufficient for the job.

It comes with some basic instructions (namely, how to boot in mac/windows to stormfly) and has a QRcode for the website if you want more information. I dug straight in for the test.

My test machine for this was an X200 IBM Thinkpad. Plugged in Stormfly, held the thinkvantage button and prayed.

Hey presto! It works. The installation process is fairly painless; as with everything these days there's a sizable download update. The OS is basically Ubuntu with a couple of extra apps thrown in related to Stormfly so it can back up for you to the cloud. I'm pleased by this as some of the earlier updates implied it might be quite heavily customized; and whilst it might be under the hood, in appearance it's just Ubuntu. All the updates are direct to the USB, so I can now take that and plug it into my Mac, my friends computers etc. and it will be my personal environment.

I was lucky enough to get an email directly from Stormfly a few minutes later. I'm the first Kickstarter backer to register their Stormfly, so it's a big milestone for the company (and a little geek victory for me). No word on whether they'll throw in a t-shirt or some free subscription to congratulate me ;).

I've played with it for most the night, managed to get Java and IntelliJ up; I forgot how terrible Linux is for getting most stuff installed and working. It's really very nice and nippy. Will it be worth the cost? I think that will become clear over the next couple of weeks as I head out on holiday, followed by work travel, and I'll be leaving my regular laptop at home in favour of Stormfly. If you've got a corporate laptop and are fed up of carrying 2 around, I highly recommend you purchase one.

#geek #stormfly

Technology & Innovation- The Future of Banking Conference

I was fortunate enough this week to attend the "Technology & innovation- the future of banking" conference held at the renaissance hotel in Wanchai by FST media. The conference consisted of about 10 or so booths with a variety of technology companies and a host of speakers, primarily from the banking industry. As with any conference there were both good and poor presentations, but overall it was a fantastic day. The main buzzwords for the day were mobile, innovation and customer. The first 2 are fairly standard at the moment, but it is the latter, "customer" which I think is the most interesting one. A number of the big APAC banks were showcasing big new products or streams which put the customer front and center, making it as easy as physically possible for a customer to do a transaction with them. The best example of this was Citibanks funky new double touchscreen ATM which is now in 3 regions and coming to HK; customers can request a loan via their mobile with almost instant approval and take it to from the machine; they can apply and be approved for a credit card at the machine, and the card will be printed and provided there and then. Lost your bank card? A thumb print is all you need to get a new one. I think for all the fancy gadgetry, the ability to apply and recieve a credit card in a matter of minutes is going to be a massive winner for them. People are incredibly impatient and lazy, and will always follow the path of least resistance. Going to a branch, getting forms, filling them out, posting, waiting 2 weeks is far too long for a generation expecting 24 hour access to a full suite of banking services. Standard Charter also continues to echo the customer first mantra and showcased a huge sweeping change to their client facing technology. A fully responsive website has been built that looks beautiful on all screens, and a new mobile app which has been designed to be intentionally as simple as possible; Very apple, and very refreshing to see a bank innovate and have a true direction and opinion when it comes to design. The first speaker panel of the day through up some very interesting insights and quotes that show where the industry is heading. (Quotes may be paraphrased due to my less than sterling memory) "Bring your own device (BYOD) isn't an optional thing' it's here and people expect it. We have to have it in place. We now have to backtrack and get it working as quickly as we can." - Ian Rae, head of technology for ANZ bank "We haven't done the financials and put a business case together for Byod as its just demanded of us; our competitors use iPads, we look behind the curve. The main benefit of BYOD is staff retention, it's something people want, and that's hard to measure"-Micky lo, global head of technology, China, Deutsche Bank. My personal favourite insights came from Minerva Tantoko, head of client facing finance technology at UBS. They've introduced hackathons (under a corporate name) in the US. The difference to other banks is that the winning projects get funding. In her area they've just launched a new and strategically important iPhone/ipad app in the US which came from the first hackathon. That's a hell of an incentive for staff to participate and a great way to attract talent. Some of the other banks commented they gave extra annual leave away to the victors. The other interesting UBS concept is that of "social coding". Minerva didn't elaborate more than to say they had Social Coding and anyone anywhere could look at and comment on code. I've followed this up with an ex colleague who's there and he's confirmed they're now using GitHub enterprise. Very cool indeed.

One of the final speakers of the day was Ian Rae from ANZ. In a time when other banks are rapidly contract, saving costs and taking the austerity approach to handling the financial crisis, ANZ are investing to win. They're rapidly expanding the bank to cover a multitude of new sites in APAC, with a long term view to expanding globally. They're "hiring selectively"and putting their technology and innovation to the forefront as they expand (yet again with the "customer first" concept). It must be a really interesting challenge to expand rapidly, but without being weighed down by the legacy systems of traditional big banks.

Overall, a really interesting and thought provoking day, even if I didn't win one of the iPad mini draws!

#geek #innovation #banking

Dipping my toes in node.js

Having played around a little with Node before in hack projects at work, I wanted to have a proper dive and get my hands a bit dirtier. As a result, I'm midway through another increment of http://lastband.in, this time with a node backend. Here's some things I've discovered so far

Use Express 3.0 and persist with it

I started out wanting to do a slightly different project connecting facebook to some other bits and pieces. When you sign up with Facebook it offers to kick you off with a basic project in Heroku, which is a very nice feature; If you don't know Heroku, it's a great place to deploy stuff for free when starting out and offers a lot of nice tools.

The basic app uses express as it's HTTP mechanism. If you google there's a few "roll your own" solutions, then express and connect.

I wanted to use handlebars as my templating library which should be easy enough, but I instantly ran against a ton of issues, mostly because I was ignorant to the ways of express; When Express went from Express 2 to 3 a lot changed, and it seems a lot of the internet hasn't caught up yet. All of the mixed documentation got me in a faff so I switched over to use connect. DO NOT DO THIS! It's very very difficult to google, there's very little documentation on the main site and the internet has very little to offer.

On the other hand, express is as close to a standard as you can get in node land, and once you wrap your head around it and find some reliable articles, it's actually quite usable!

How to use Express 3.0 with Handlebars

I was going to post the server up here but instead I've whacked it up on my github at https://github.com/samberic/express-handlesbars-starter.

Node.js is still very immature

Whilst node is undeniably awesome, very easy to use, and just a lot better for quick projects and fast progress, it's still at the very early stages. A number of the projects I tried using in npm just wouldn't work at all. Want to profile your app on a mac? Not a chance. All very frustrating, and would certainly be a blocker from using it in the enterprise.

You're not in the browser any more

For lastband, it worked in 3 tiers; first, find the band on last.fm, render a handlebar template. Then, find artists with that name on bandcamp, render a handlebar template. Then, for each artist, get their discography, and render a handlebar template, then add them all together with a bit of jquery.

This was the easiest way to do it in the browser (I thought at the time), as I was dealing with 3 different API calls. When porting to node I spent ages looking at JQuery replacement libraries (most of which are based on jsdom and are terrible/won't compile; If you're going down this route I recommend Cheerio) at building the html up in this incremental fashion.

I got this working, but it was slow, the code was fugly, and it just didn't feel right. As a result, I switched it up; after playing with JS for a bit I realised I could just append each API JSON result to the previous one, resulting in one massive JSON doc; Combine that with 1 single handlebars template, and voila! Now my template is clean and very obvious what's going on, and my code is to.

#geek #nodejs #express #connect #javascript #lastband

Mixtape 2

Guitar+: Guitar based songs with more bits. by Sam Atkinson on Mixcloud

Mixcloud

So a friend, after a discussion about mixtapes in the digital age, came across Mixcloud, a site for uploading old school mixtapes to.

My first mixtape is up here or embeded at the bottom of this post if the HTML gods are on my side.. It's got some crackers on there, if I do say so myself.

Sambamix 1 by Sam Atkinson on Mixcloud

#music

Corkboard: Online image pasting/collage making

So this weekend inspired by a project a couple of friends are doing I decided I fancied hacking around with the HTML5 paste API. This quickly and rapidly turned into Corkboard, which you can see at http://pastey.samatkinson.com. Here's a corkboard of some of the photos of me playing recently to satisfy my massive ego.

All in all I'd guess it's probably taken somewhere between 6-8 hours, of which most was due to my inability to RTFM and the fact Javascript hates me. Most of the project is just mashing up a bunch of pre existing ingredients.

STRd6 imgpaste plugin

When googling around for how to do it, most of the stackoverflow esque threads had been jumped on by STRd6 to point to the plugin he wrote, and I salute him, because it works a treat. You can find it at here. It binds to the paste command, checks it it's an image, and if it is calls your callback with the file and the img encoded as a dataurl (particularly awesome/handy). In no time I was pasting images to the top left of a blank page with a bit of jquery append() fun.

JQuery UI draggable and resizable

You can find these here and here respectively. They should pretty much work out the box which is nice. However, I wanted more than just images; If you mouse over an image you can remove it from corkboard. This was some CSS/JS magic lightly stolen from a friends project, but meant wrapping the image in a div. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the img resize at the same time as the div. If you RTFM you'll discover this wonder:

$pasteimage .draggable() .resizable({ alsoResize: $pasteimage.find('img'), aspectRatio: true } )

Pay special attention to alsoResize. This is the key to the gold.

To avoid manually generating the HTML at this point I created a simple template in handlebars.

Bootstrap

So now we can drag and resize images, but it's fugly. Along comes bootstrap, the HTML5 UI starter package from the folks at Twitter. HIstorically I've always used foundation for making my sites pretty, but I wanted to branch out. I've not done anything advanced, just a nav bar with drop down and a little form; The form inside nav bar situation is hard to do in foundation, so I was relieved to see it's built in in bootstrap. I had my usual pebcak issues of incorrect ordering/import of CSS and JS, but once up and running, it was very easy to use, and I think overall looks nicer than foundation.

Save as an image

So one of the nice features about corkboard is that you can save it to your local machine as an image. This was a mashup of 2 plugins; HTML2Canvas and Canvas2Image. The first traverses the DOM of whatever element you pass it and renders it out as a Canvas; I imagine this may have issues if you're doing anything very funky in your code but it worked out the box on this. Canvas2Image then gives you a whole bunch of images for turning a canvas into an image, and for downloading it. Both plugins worked seemlessly, pretty much first time. Very impressive.

html2canvas($('#theFunStuff'), { onrendered: function (canvas) { Canvas2Image.saveAsPNG(canvas); } })

And that's basically the whole thing. There's tons more I want to do (being able to raise/lower layers, rotating, persistance), but that's for another day. There's also some issues on HTML2Canvas2Image depending on where the images are when the save happens I need to look into.

#geek #html5 #html2canvas #canvas2image #foundation #bootstrap #STRd6 #imgpaste #jquery #draggable #resizable

samatkinson-blog

I’ve been doing some iOS coding using phonegap and JQuery Mobile. It’s a great combination and means I can develop for iOS without having to touch ObjectiveC, a language frankly made of evil.

Wanting to be able to do push notifications, a quick google pointed me to this post on using urban...

#geek

samatkinson-blog

Spring Integration is a great little framework for taking the sting out of working with JMS, particularly if you like programming in XML ala Spring. Whilst it does have a comprehensive guide, and forums, if you dare to spread out from the Path Of Happiness, then you can often get into trouble.

A...

#geek

samatkinson-blog

Android: Am I connected to the internet?

Easy way to find out!

private boolean connectedToInternet() { ConnectivityManager cm = (ConnectivityManager) getSystemService(Context.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE); NetworkInfo activeNetworkInfo = cm.getActiveNetworkInfo(); return activeNetworkInfo != null && activeNetworkInfo.isConnectedOrConnecting(); }

#geek

samatkinson-blog

One of the most common things people need to do in Android is to call remote services. It’s not a particularly difficult task, and one of the few things that actually has some documentation around it!

However, for those who don’t want to look massively into this, I thought I’d provide my utility...

#geek

samatkinson-blog

So, Threading; Fairly sensible you’ll be wanting to do some of it in your app if you’re doing anything vaguely complex. Turns out you definitely need to do it when doing complex stuff, so as not to hog the UI thread.

As someone who doesn’t come from a swing background, this hadn’t been as...

#geek

samatkinson-blog

I’m currently working on a personal Android project. Like many, it relies on a web API, which returns data in an XML Format. Traditionally, to build a translator I take an example XML result as stub data, then create a translator for it. This allows quick easy testing without worrying about the...

#geek

BlockUI is broken!

I've been revamping my site, http://lastband.in. It looks utterly terrible at the moment, and since first writing it I've learnt a LOT about javascript (or more specifically, the legions of libraries that exist). One of my requirements was for a modal pop up (for a loading screen). Whilst there are tons of options the most comprehensive is the BlockUI jQuery plugin (http://jquery.malsup.com/block/#demos). However, having plugged it in, I kept hitting this issue:

'Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'blockUI'

After a bit of debugging via commenting out, it turns out that it's due to a clash with Zurb Foundation. If you've not tried foundation, it's a fantastic way to quickly get good looking sites up and running. The fix? Move the import to after the foundations import!

And voila. Pretty modal boxes working.

Even managed to close out a JQuery bug with this!https://github.com/zurb/foundation/issues/1392

#geek

How to fix greyed out Sample Editor on bounced midi samples in Logic Pro 9

One of the biggest frustrations I keep hitting in Logic Pro 9 is that the sample editor is greyed out when I go to use something like reverse.

I particularly get this when I've bounced audio from a software instrument, like a glockenspiel.

The reason for this is due to certain software instruments being Surround; Surround sound doesn't let you play with all the fun functions in sample editor.

To get around this, all you need to do is convert your original midi to be Stereo before you bounce your audio.

Select the instrument, and in the instrument view in the bottom left, long left click "Surround" (under the blue Tuned Percussion in the below shot).

And select stereo output.

Now you can "Bounce Regions" to get a stereo audio file which will work with the sample editor.

To be sure you've got it right, bounced stereo will have a little linked rings symbol on the top left; stereo will have a star/snowflake:

Top track is Surround; Bottom track is Stereo.

#geek #logic

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