Reduce Autogenerated Metadata in Flash SWF? - metadata

Some coder friends and I have challenged each other to create a working game with the smallest file size possible. I've made my first attempt in Flash with a mere 273 Actionscript bytes and a 15 byte shape, but I'm getting killed on the whopping 600 bytes of metadata on export. Anybody know if there's a way to knock that down?
The reason I mention the challenge is to make sure you know that this is probably the least important question being asked on StackOverflow atm and if someone else needs help feel free to give it to them first. :-)
Cheers!

If using the Flash IDE, there should be an option to remove the metadata.
Flash CS3 and later introduced an XMP panel in Publish Settings which allows the user to add metadata to make the .swf file easier to scan by Google spiders(as a collaboration between Google and Adobe's Flash Player team).
The publish settings should also allow you to remove/not include metadata

Related

HTTP file upload taking component for iOS

I noticed the functionality on some PDF viewer for iOS. You can actually turn phone in server and upload files there from a normal computer. I found HTTP server implementation from iOS on Google site, so implementing upload accepting functionality isn't a big deal for me. However I would like to save couple hours of my time, so if somebody could point me to ready to use solutions in sources, I will own you a bottle of your favorite beer.
It looks like I will have an extra beer this weekend. No I didn't create one, but i found one
enter link description here
Actually I found bunch of them, but this one seems has upload handling code which was my goal. If somebody found a better server solution, then do not hesitate to share with me.

Xcode Project Size problem- 72 text files

I am new to iphone sdk and creating my first application so please be nice when answering my questions.
I have following questions
Q-1. I have created a simple iphone application (not a game app, no OPenGL). My program is running fine but total xcode project size is 9 mb. I found that my xcode project size is less than 2 mb without "class" and "build" folder.
Do we upload files of "build" and "class" folder when we submit our application?
I have checked that most of iphone applications are less than 2 mb in size so I think build folder is just for me to test the application.
Can someone give me the list of all files or folders (just extension) that we need to upload in order to submit an iphone application.
Q-2. there are around 72 text files (each is 2 KB in size) in my program. Program open a text file according the selected criteria. I have all 72 text files in resource folder. I am not using SQLite as I think it is not too much data and text files are small in size.
Can apple reject my application just because there 72 text files? Is it a common approach to use multiple text files instead of SQLite?
Q-3. Do I need to add zip and unzip my text files instead of opening them directly?
Q-4. some of my text files has following five words
"sex" "sexy" "kinky" "filthy" "dirty"
For example "You are so kinky" , "I love sex" etc.
Do I need to remove these words from my files? Will they be considered vulgar? Will my application be rejected because of these five words?
I have seen some iphone applications on apple's website which shows sex positions and use words like sex,sexy,kinky so I think it should not be a problem.
Do I need to add something like "mature content. Must be 18 years old" just because I am using these five words. I think these are pretty common words that are frequently used by young people.
Many of these questions can be answered more completely by Apple's help docs in the iOS developer center and iOS Provisioning Portal (https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action and https://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/distribution/index.action - you need to be logged in to view these links)
However, here are some quick answers:
1) The build and classes folder hold files during development. The build folder holds the binaries that are created every time you click 'Build' in Xcode, if you build for different targets, there will be multiple copies of your binary in this folder. It also contains various debugging and symbol files used by Xcode.
The classes folder contains all of the implementation (.m) and header files (.h) that you have in your project. This folder corresponds to the 'Classes' group in the file organizer when you open your project in Xcode.
When you submit an application to Apple, all you submit is the compiled binary (found in the appropriate folder in your 'build' folder). It is normal for your project folder to be many times bigger than the final binary you submit. For more info on the submission process, refer to the second link I posted above.
2) If you're persisting a lot of data, I would recommend using the built in SQLite database. It's very easy to use (Google will help you with this), and quite fast. Apple probably won't reject your app for storing a lot of data in flat text files, but you have no reason to. SQLite databases are much cleaner and easier to maintain than 72 flat files.
3) No. But you should still use SQLite, especially if you're saving enough data to these text files that they need to be compressed. Reading and parsing large text files can be much slower and more cumbersome than reading the same data from a database (databases are made to handle data storage like this).
4) Again, Apple probably won't reject you for this (of course, nobody actually knows why they reject apps, so it's always a bit of a crap shoot). When you submit your app, you can choose the rating level for it (sort of like game ratings, or movie ratings) so when people download it they are aware of the level of maturity of the content. One of the ratings is 17+, which you can use if you need. I believe Apple has a document outlining it's rating system in one of the links I posted above (or it's somewhere, it does exist).
First of all you don't need to upload build folder to upload but classes will be uploaded. you have to follow a process for uploading.
No problem at all you can upload even 1000 files, 72 is very small amount. but be careful that if you project is very heavy then it app will be crashed.
No need to zip the files.
you may use all of these words you may even use pornographic contents but they should not be copy righted of any body else. You don't need to remove them, when you will be uploading your application there will be an option "Application include adult contents" you just have to check that option.

Adding PDF to iBooks by code

I was recently asked if I could code a simple IPhone/IPad app that:
Checks an FTP server for changes to a PDF file (easy)
Downloads the lastest PDF (easy)
Adds or replace the file on iBooks (hmm...)
I have tried to find any code that deals with inserting/adding/updating files inside iBooks, but sadly there is very little on the subject. Is this even possible except manually through iTunes? My gut feeling says that it's just a matter of writing the file to a folder..
It makes sense if it were such an API. There are many companies that would like to keep their product portfolios up to date, or research manuals that (in theory at least) could benefit greatly from being updated automatically through an app.
Any help or comments are welcome.
My gut feeling says that it's just a
matter of writing the file to a
folder..
Unfortunately, this probably isn't the case. I'd imagine iBooks using some sort of database to keep track of books, rather than simple files.
There is a URL schema for iBooks, but it's undocumented, and nobody has found any methods that would update/replace a book (I don't know if any even exist): How do I launch iBooks e-reader programmatically on iPad?
If you feel this is something that would be beneficial to iBooks, you should consider filing a feature request on the Apple dev site.
UIDocumentInteractionController is your friend in this case

Take screenshot of audio stream

Alright, what I need is a command-line application that allows you to take a screenshot of a file's audio stream.
For example it should be run like this:
app.exe "C:/artist-title.mp3" "C:/mp3Stream.jpg"
app.exe "C:/artist-title.wav" "C:/wavStream.jpg"
It only has to be able to capture mp3 streams, other streams are a bonus.
Preferably all audio channels are listed in the image, but if all channels are combined into one mono stream it would work just as good for me.
So, is there such a application out there? So that I don't re-invent the wheel.
If not does anyone have tips on how I should go about writing such a application myself? Preferably in Java. I can handle programming pretty well but I'm not exactly an expert on the MP3/WAV formats.
Why do I need it...? Well, it's more fun to link to a file online with some sort of preview image besides the link. It gives you a hint of the audio character before you listen to it (is it loud? does it look like "bit music"? does it have any parts that are more quiet than others? etc).
Never mind, I wrote my own little application in Java.
It was a piece of cake once I found this excellent guide:
http://codeidol.com/java/swing/Audio/Build-an-Audio-Waveform-Display/
Although you can't download the source from that page (as far as I can tell, though he makes it apparent that you should be able to) he does provide some very useful key lines of code that makes it easy to puzzle together the application.
Adding a little bit of help (easy stuff). You can get a graphics object from doing so:
BufferedImage img = new BufferedImage(500, 100, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Graphics2D gfx = (Graphics2D) img.getGraphics();
And once you have drawn everything you need on the gfx you can save it to disk just by one line:
ImageIO.write(img, "jpg", new File("waveform.png"));
It's hard to get it to look very good though. Doesn't look as nice as for example Audacity. Guess they have spent more time on it than a few hours though.
The biggest pain about this is however that Java don't support MP3 import. They really should get around to that.
So to get the waveform of MP3s I first convert them into WAV using "javazoom.jl.decoder.Decoder.java", it's on their website. Very easy to use, just give the input path and the output path and it's done.
javazoom dot net (couldn't post more than one "hyperlink" on this website)
The big downside of this is of course that a huuge WAV file has to be created, and woe be unto thee if the MP3 happens to be 15 minutes or so... The WAV will be over 100 MiB (maybe even 200 MiB, haven't found out since I got a Java-out-of-memory-error, even though I gave the VM 512mb).
MP3 support in Java today please. Guess the reason they don't have it is because of copyright issues. Copyright really is slowing man down.
Also take a look at http://www.jsresources.org/
It provides a pretty good FAQ section about everything Audio in Java, and some example applications.

Product idea/approach : Folder based disk organization

Sweet..I bought myself a 1TB portable harddrives this week. Don't you just love how much data you could store on one of these disks? The fact that I could store my bluray rips on to my portable harddisk and that my lg lcd tv can do HD rips right from the drive - that's amazing practicality right there! However, life it seems, is never so simple. I have 100s of movies unorganized in one huge folder, which is exactly what I needed to annoy myself while browsing the same on my tv to play a single movie. That got me thinking...
What if I had an automated way to organize movies into folders such that my folder-browsing-on-a-lcd-tv-or-a-comp would make my life a little easy?
I started thinking about this... I browsed a little in this context and I realized that if only I could "tag my movies somehow and create folders on-the-fly based on tags using hardlinks", I would have addressed my problem. I googled a bit to find software that works in the above fashion, only to find none.
A few more days of serious thought (as you know by now.. I think a lot.. and I guess this question is starting to sound like a blog rant/post of sorts...), in the interest of humanity, I thought I should come up with a generic way to address this: What if someone wanted to organize photos... organize music.. organize software?!
Turned my grey cells off for a while and here is an approach I came up with to solving my what-if scenario.
Tag / Group tag individual files (rely on a slick GUI to do it fast and do it good) - Adobe Flex/Eclipse RCP to do this?
Create hardlinks to each of the tagged files.
The first point is self-explanatory. The second (coz I am talking windows here), refers to making use of mklink.exe.
Consider a scenario where I have 2 movie files: I have a movie file "Transformers.avi" tagged as "english, action, bluray, sci-fi, imdb-top-50, must-watch-with-kids" and another movie file "The Specialist.avi" tagged as "english, bluray, thriller, adult". Here are a few of the possible locations I want to see my Transformers to be found:
[root directory]->all-tags->english
[root directory]->all-tags->bluray
[root directory]->all-tags->english->all-tags->bluray
[root directory]->all-tags->bluray->all-tags->action
[root direcotry]->all-tags->english->all-tags->action->bluray->all-tags->imdb-top-50
Given that windows has a limit of 1024 hardlinks to a single file, I probably would be allowed 7 unique tags per file. Each sub-folder will have an "all-tags" folder. Having it named "all-tags" makes it more accessible when order by name.
I believe this approach when automated to let you configure tags you want and where the hardlinks are created for you, helps you organize stuff effectively.
I don't know if there are better things out there. I would like your inputs on this approach and other possible ideas. I would like to gather inputs here and release something to sourceforge for everyone to use in a couple of weeks. I am sure, I can count on your positive response as always.
I believe hardlinks are not a good approach. Reason? A standalone player won't play them, and I wouldn't like a program who's made for tagging to tell me to stop making so many tags because of a Windows limitation on hardlinks (remembering each tag will increment the number of links exponentially).
Plus, "help" is not a good tag.
And I've had an idea once that I'm still planning to make some day to sort my own files - put the files in a big storage each below a GUID foldername (filename untouched) and store metadata in a sqlite database to be used by a smart file browser.
I was considering doing something similar to this with music for detecting duplicate songs and auto-organize funcationality.
For your application, I wouldn't recommend using any shell programs through Java. Exception handling becomes difficult, and your application becomes bound by the shell interface and implementation (i.e. windows versions or installations affect your application behavior).
I would use a database with a few tables: Files, Tags, and an association table.
The Files table would list the physical location of each file, the filename, and a unique identifier. This way, you can maintain information about each file without having to modify it for every tag association.
The Tags table would list each tag, and any metadata you want to store for each tag.
A third table, maybe 'FileTags' would store the assocation between tags and files. When adding tags to the stack, you would add a statement to the WHERE clause, and the list of files with all of the tags would be returned. This structure would also allow open your codebase up to other designs, such as include/exclude (autocomplete with X buttons), or possibly search.
If implemented in Java, your app would be platform independent, and would allow a very large number of tags and files. You can then use the system default application for opening the media file, and the user can make the selection in their native OS.
Reiser4?
...
(I mean nevermind Hans, but the tech...)
[disclaimer: Not a hacker. I know nothing of programming/coding, never mind filesystems & databases. I can barely code decent HTML even, if at all. Hey y'all! :D]
[footnote: does plain HTML5 work here? Too lazy to close my tags hehe :p]