Still about an hour left of July 4, but the fireworks stopped when the rain started so the sky explosions were brief and sporadic through the evening. Very unlike my July 4ths in Arizona, where the weather is always hot & dry and the whole valley tries to burn the city down for a week straight. My recorder is still in storage, so no audio remix for the Correspondence Series. It would have been not especially exciting anyway.
The past few days I’ve been working with Joel Berger, noodling over mechanics for improving his brand-new FigureShift program. It is in version 0.7.0 as of today, after he added a QR Code Machine Tag generator that allows you to generate a printable image with your Typewriter’s photo, a QR code to the TWDB listing and description text – perfect for printing out (I use a Phomemo Thermal receipt printer) and attaching to your letters or using as a hang tag to attach to the machine or case.
This fun little tool was a feature request from me because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do on TWDB, but a webserver isn’t really suited for extensive graphics manipulation, so I much prefer to see it be part of a locally-run application, such as FigureShift. That’s a bit of the “candy” intended to entice you to download and use this program. (:
The other part of the “candy” is the fact that this software is intended for Typewriter Hunters to prepare galleries they want to upload locally by tossing your high-resolution photos into a named directory straight from your camera, phone or scanner and having FigureShift organize them, crop, resize and orient them to be TWDB-friendly, pre-fill out the submission form for you (based on the directory name) and upload the locally-created gallery to TWDB. How does that sound to you? Sounds great to me!
*WARNING* CURRENT VERSION IS INTENDED FOR USERS WHO *HAVE NOT YET* UPLOADED ANY TYPEWRITER GALLERIES! The software currently as of version 0.7.0 *DOES NOT* have any way of importing your existing TWDB Galleries, and if you try to re-create them locally YOU *WILL* CREATE DUPLICATE ENTRIES, which you’ll have to manually delete from the TWDB web interface, and then it gets messy fast. DO NOT DO THAT, PLEASE! It also has no way of knowing if you’ve already uploaded a gallery image, so you can *easily* duplicate those as well. EARLY ADOPTERS USE WITH CAUTION, or maybe wait until we’ve addressed those issues in a near-future version.
Yep, that means I’m working with Joel to implement API tools to allow for duplicate entry prevention, and maybe other things if we think of them. We’re noodling over the mechanics and he’s implementing them in FigureShift while I work on the server-side API on TWDB. FigureShift is the first software out of the gate that’s complete and stable and we’re working on mechanics to make it “idiot-proof” as well as extremely handy, and those mechanics will be available to other similar software packages, should they appear, making it easier for users not accustomed to photo editing or who want the added features FigureShift offers. It’s moving fast, so stay tuned!
Oh, and there’s also another project I’m working on with Jon The Shy Typospherian, who has spent at least the last 5 years collecting, scanning and organizing material for a Bible for his favorite Brand of typewriter. Here’s a teaser…