As a developer I find I am gathering more and more information from blogs and other resources from the web. Whether it be tips on configuring Drupal on IIS7 or tips on using the Entity Framework I find I am looking for a way to capture and organize content from the web. I also would like to be able to edit and annotate content to be able to add my own notes and remove add banners or any other content not related to what I am capturing.
When I used Windows OneNote seemed to fit the bill but I have recently moved to Mac OS and I am looking for an equivalent software package. I could run OneNote in a VM but would prefer to have a Mac OS native app. Here are some of the things I am looking for ..
Native app rather than web based. Because a web based product could go out of business and my collection could be lost.
Ability to organize and handle a large amount of data.
Good web clipping ability. So much of my content comes from the web.
Thanks for any suggestions!
I figured I would answer my own question with information on what I found. There ws no shortage of good apps on the Mac for note taking, web clips, and information storage.
Native Mac OS apps
DEVONthink (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/)
This is the application I decided to go with. It is expensive ($150 for Pro Office) but I really liked how it used the file system as it's storage medium and not a single database file. The fact that it has an nice iPhone and iPad app (DEVONthink 2 Go) make it my number one choice. Tagging and folder hierarchy was something I liked and really nice search capabilities. Also, built in OCR.
YoJimbo - http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/
Very nice application with nice interface and nice reviews. I just didn't like how all content was saved to a single database file. Nice iPad app also.
Eagle Filer - http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/
Very similar to DEVONthink (minus the OCR) but the price was very affordable and it used the file system to store files in native format. I would have chose Eagle Filer if it had a companion iOS app.
Together - http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/
I thought Together had a really nice interface. I thought it was very similar to Yojimbo but no companion app (which YoJimbo has)
Curio - http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/
This was an awesome (but expensive) application. In the end I found it to be more suited to creating content rather than storing it. I might look into this as a solution to brainstorming and content creation and use something like DEVONthink to store the content. Very generous trial period.
VooDooPad - http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/
VooDooPad got a lot of nice reviews. However, I wasn't too fond of the interface.
Circus Ponies Notebook - http://www.circusponies.com/
I personally didn't like the interface of Circus Ponies Notebook however this is a subjective thing. I did not like how a clipping service had to be created in order to import content.
Web Based Tools
Though I prefer a solution that ran as a native Mac OS app, I came across some nice web based applications.
ZoHo Notebook - http://notebook.zoho.com
Mnemonic - http://www.memonic.com/home
SpringPad - http://springpadit.com/home
Evernote - http://www.evernote.com
UberNote - http://www.ubernote.com/webnote/pages/default.aspx
MediaWiki - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Related
I've been trying to work on a proof of concept (POC) where I can embed a UE4 project into an existing application (in my case NativeScript) but this could just as easily apply to Kotlin or ReactNative.
In the proof of concept I've been able to run the projects on my iPhone launching from UE4 pretty easily by following the Blueprint and C++ tutorials for the FPS. However the next stage of my POC requires that I embed the FPS into an existing NativeScript application, this application will manage the root menu, chat, and store aspects of the platform in the POC.
The struggle I'm running into is that I cannot find how to interact with the xcode project generated from the blueprint tutorial and the C++ tutorial generates a xcode project that i'm unsure where the actual root is that I need to wrap.
Has anyone seen a project doing this before and if so are there any blogs or guidance that you can point me to? I've been Googling and looking around for a couple weeks and have hit a dead end. I found a feedback post here from April of 2020, that was referring to a post in January 2020 that talked about how Unity has a way to embed into other applications additionally a question from 2014 here. But other than that it's a dead end.
A slightly different approach
Disclaimer: I'm not an UE4 developer. Guilty as charged for seeing an unanswered bounty too big to ignore. So I started thinking and looking - and I've found something that could be bent to your needs. Enters pixelstreaming.
Pixelstreaming is a beta feature that is primarily designed to allow for embedding the game into a browser. This opens a two way communication between a server where the GPU heavy computations happen and a browser where the player can interact with the content - the mouseclick & other events are sent back to the server. Apparently it allows some additional neat stuff, however that is not relevant for the question at hand.
Since you want to embedd the Unreal application into your NativeScript tool(menu of some kind if I understood correctly), you could make your application a from two separate parts:
One part would run the server.
The second part would handle the overlay via the pixelstreaming.
This reduces the issue of embedding the UE4 into an application to the(possibly easier) issue of embedding a browser into your application. (Or if your application is browser based - voila, problem solved.)
If you don't want to handle the remote communication, just have the server-side run on the localhost.(With the nice sideeffect of saving bandwidth.)
Alternatively, if you are feeling adventurous, you could go and write your own WebRTC support on the application side to bypass the need for the browser alltogether. It might not be worth the effort though.
Side note: The first of the links you provided is a feature request which hints at the unfortunate fact that UE4 doesn't support embedding. This is further enforced by the fact that one of the people there says somethig along the lines "Unity can to this, it would be nice if UE4 could as well."
Yet a different approach:
You could embedd and use a virtual display to insert the UE4 part into your controller - you would be basically tricking UE4 into thinking that the desired display device is a canvas inside your application.
This thread suggests a similar approach:
In general, the way to connect two libraries like this would be through a platform dependent window handle, e.g. a HWND under Windows. Check the UE api if you find any way to bind the render target to a HWND. Then you could create a wxWindow in wxWidgets and tell UE to render into that window. That would be a first step.
I'm not sure if anything I've listed will be of much help but hey, at least I tried :-). Good luck with your game.
At the same time, the author suggests to:
Reverse the problem:
Using the UE4 slate framework and online subsystem. You would use the former to create the menus you need directly in the UE4 and then use the latter to link to the logic you want to have outside of the UE4. However that is not what you asked for so I'm listing it only for the completeness sake.
I need to start developing an app to publish interactive magazines for the iPad. However I don't have any idea how I can make the reader. I've been using web views to display normal pdf's, however now I need to use magazines created using Adobe Indesign. Have been looking all over and haven't found anything besides businesses that already provide their own apps for publishing.
If anyone can point me somewhere I can start, I've already looked at a very good tutorial to set up the store and possibly the library:
http://ios-blog.co.uk/articles/tutorials/how-to-make-a-magazine-app-in-ios-part-i/
but i don't think QuickLook is what I need for the reader.
Take a look at this PDF rendering library:
http://pspdfkit.com/
We used it in a similar app, and were very pleased. Peter Steinberger (the author) also gives great support and is very helpful. Previous to purchasing this library, I wrote my own PDF renderer, and I can guarantee you that it's MUCH cheaper to just buy Pete's library. Otherwise, you will spend months to optimize it enough that it runs on iPad 1.
This is kind of a dumb question but I've aware of classic style JDE development for Blackberry but I've never tried using WebWorks. BB website says that it's possible to build applications for both smartphones (OS 6.0+) and tablets - sounds fantastic, but what's the price?
Is here anyone using WebWorks on a daily basis and capable of describing pros and cons?
Thanks in advance
I would suggest using it if you build webOS applications before hand. It make porting to the blackberry a breeze.
Use WebWorks if you know html5, Css3 and javascript over Java and C++.
I haven't ran into any issues with the webWorks, ported two applications without running into any issues. Its your standard html5, css3 and javascript you love with blackberry APIs
WebWorks is a good development choice, particularly as it allows easy migration from earlier BB OSes to BB10. It's mostly standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, etc.) and the team seems focused on making it perform well (e.g. hardware accelerated WebGL graphics) while at the same time providing BlackBerry-specific APIs to make WebWork apps capable and with good UX (e.g. you can make it look like a native app).
For native apps, you should look into Cascades. This is a modern development environment with good tooling, accelerated graphics, and APIs for building snazzy apps. It's the one that will most be a "BlackBerry app".
AIR remains an option, but I would recommend WebWorks over AIR, as even Adobe is migrating from Flash to web technologies. Likewise, you can develop Android apps on BB10, but unless you are keen on Java programming, you will get more cross-platform support from WebWorks (or even AIR) so there's no particular reason to go the Android route.
WebWorks API is limited, for example it does not have socket, so you cannot port a VNC (UltaVNC, tightVNC ..) to it but you can do it with JDE.
For UI, WebWorks allowed me to write UI of acceptable quality quickly and easily, a thing that I have never succeeded with JDE.
Still on the UI side, I can make use of multi-touch (PlayBook), I don't think this one is possible with JDE.
So depending on your needs you should go either WebWorks or Native, having heard that Java may not be supported in BB10, and Air may not be future proof (Adobe favors HTML5 instead of Flash). Android appli has some lag on start up when it is run on PlayBook, some customers are sensitive to the initial even just one time slow response time.
I'm a huge proponent of Webworks. Ever since I've started using it, it quickly became the default option for my apps going forward. Especially for someone like me who is just writing a few apps on the side, I don't have the time to do it in c++.
The apps I'm writing revolve around home automation. They are client/server based from the get go.
Here's why I like it:
First and foremost, native API support. I can very easily create my own active frames, import invocation from other apps (think camera, stuff like that). I can export portions of my webworks app as an invocation card! Which means I can write say 3 unique apps (in this case home automation, lights, thermostat, security cameras). And I can very easily pull features from each app into the other. Maybe I want to turn my lights on in the living room, I can also import the camera card from my IPcam app and view the results, without having to add that code into my lights app and maintain two separate code lines.
Rapid design. Since I've been dabbling in html since I was a kid, it's now very easy for me to whip up an appealing UI in little time. Because web engines these days offer good performance in terms of graphics capability, I also can make apps that behave very fluid.
Considering the time to make something beautiful, it's hard for me to leave webworks and go for something in c++. Also the big plus is often these apps I'm making are intended for multiple devices, namely an app on my phone and being hosted on my personal website. By maintaining two slightly different css files, most of the time I need no code changes, just load a different css depending on if it's a phone or a pc. (Exactly what you'd do if you were developing a regular old website).
For that matter, I actually don't put my code on the device, I host all of my html and javascript, images etc on my server. The webworks app is just the config.xml pointing it's source to my server, and an icon. A glorified website bookmark on the homescreen, only difference is I can use native API and there's no browser bar in the app.
Also, this way I can still continue to edit the same single codeline on my server, and instantly apply changes to the in-browser app and the on-device app.
This is especially cool if you're designing an app where all of it's data is out in the "cloud", say you work for a publication and you want to write a magazine app which pulls content from your servers on the net.
I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.
I need to create a photo gallery for a website running IIS 4.0 or IIS 5.0 (im not sure which). It needs to display a low resolution version of the gallery to anyone, and it must show both the low and high resolution images for "priviledged" users. So I need access priviledges, photo albums and once the site is complete, the person I am doing this for needs to be able to upload their own images to the gallery. It also needs to have a minimal interface as it needs to be integrated into an existing website.
So I need some advice on this with the direction I should approach it.
Does anyone know if their is a customisable gallery out there that can do something like this, such as Coppermine or Jgallery or something. The alternative is to use a web framework like Ruby on Rails, CodeIgniter or Sproutcore (each which require learning a new language). The framework would be more work, but the existing galleries may not be customisable enough. The important bit is the user privileges in an admin panel.
I am relatively new to "web programming", although not new to normal/games programming. I have a few years experience with C/C++ OpenGL and Java. I have also read up on MVC etc, and did hello world with sproutcore, so I kinda get the idea. Although learning a framework is a much heavier investment.
What are your thoughts?
If you don't want to re-invent the wheel you could use Gallery2 (requirements here). It runs on IIS -- you'd just need PHP and a database. It's very configurable (including user accounts), has lots of plugins, and its open source if that's not enough. Also, the development and support communities are large and active.
you could always go the route of Dotnetnuke and then use Ventrian's Simple Gallery module (http://www.ventrian.com/Products/Modules/SimpleGallery/Demo.aspx)
Using DNN offers a ton of functionality, including the security you need, and it would save you from doing any web development.
If you are a bit more adventurous, try Smaltalk based Aida/Web and specially Aida/Scribo CMS (currently still in beta), which include Gallery so called scriblet as well. Scribo scriblets are otherwise web components which you can include directly into a text. You therefore add a gallery directly into a surronding text. See for instance a presentation as a Gallery for example.
I would recommend my own but... If it weren't for the low/high resolution thing with permissions I think it would fit the rest of your needs. I'm going to leave a link just in case you want to take a look at it:
nzFotolog
It's also open-source (although the license is not the best) and you can change it at will if you want. The code itself is clean and self-explanatory. The downside is that I haven't developed it for some time now :(
Having faced a similar dilemma myself I have to say that I found Gallery2 and Coppermine both far too all-encompassing and difficult to customise to the degree I would have wished. I ended up rolling my own using straight, procedural PHP with various bits of jQuery for the GUI fancy bits. At the same time I was able to bake in some e-commerce and data gathering for my wedding photography clients, ending up with something which exactly matched my needs. Certainly, the gallery aspects of this project were, for a complete programming (although not HTML) neophyte, the least challenging - it's exactly the sort of thing PHP is made for.
I'm now taking my first faltering steps with CodeIgniter for my next project (photoblogging software) and I can already see that the framework would make a gallery project very quick, simple and secure.
Flickr.com and their API may be suitable from what you described.
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/