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Geekery ahead.

I really love Adobe’s new social app, kuler, built around creating, tagging, and sharing color themes. The interface is gorgeous, and the ability to download themes into Photoshop and Illustrator is a great feature.

However, as a social app, kuler is not very social. It exists completely as a Flash application, and there are no features that allow the sharing of information created in the kuler space with anything outside it. At the least, I wanted an RSS feed of my themes that I could aggregate on DELICIOUSLYMETA.

Based on some information gleaned from a blog comment by a kuler employee, I installed the excellent network tool WireShark (née Ethereal) and started watching the traffic between the Flash app and Adobe’s servers.

Sure enough, kuler uses a REST-style API based on http calls t the server that return XML documents representing the data. I’ve first wrote some PHP code to test it, and then started documenting the API at http://deliciouslymeta.com/kuler/. I’ve only got the basics documented yet, but over time I’ll get more of it down. At some point I hope to be able to offer RSS feeds for a user’s themes.

My goal in this project is not to “hack’ Adobe’s cool new app, but to show how the API model they use is actually a great foundation for a social app. Hopefully they will publicize and document the API in the near future and this experiment will be obsolete.

Collibri is a poor-man’s (read Windows-user’s) QuickSilver, which I use on my Windows machine at work. It’s got few prefs to speak of, can’t find half my apps, but it’s better than nothing.

So anyway, version 17a is out.

it’s the end of the world as we know it

I find it comforting and appropriate that there is an R.E.M. quote in the Frontier source code.

UPDATE: in other R.E.M.-as-software news:

everybody hurts sometimes

this one goes out to the one i love

shiny happy people

Mac OS X Mobile:

First, a necessary disclaimer: there is no Mac OS X Mobile. It’s a fictional version of OS X designed for PDA devices, which I’ve just made up and which I’m going to discuss in this blog post, since I’ve been thinking about PDAs a lot lately. Once again: this is all theoretical and just for the purposes of discussion.

Via Matt Gemmell

Oh, but what a fun discussion.

Camino is a web borwser for the Mac that wraps a native OS X interface around the popular Gecko rendering engine. It’s fast, and renders 99.8% of sites exactly like Firefox. After 1.0 came out, Idecide to try it out as my main web browser.

End result? I liked the interface a lot, but two things brought me back to Firefox:

• Find-As-You-Type (FAYT): I had grown completely dependent on this before moving to Camino as my main browser. Even after a month, I was typing to find stuff. Muscle memory is hard to change.
• Also in the muscle-memory category: Camino does not focus the address-bar when creating new tabs. My shortcut for a new Google search (a surprising percentage of my “new tab” activity) was Cmd-T-tab. I simply could not get my fingers to do Cmd-T-Cmd-Shift-F.
• Visual irritations: In the dock, I could not seem to stop clicking on that bright orange-and-blue globe. The click-area on the Camino icon seems smaller, and the blue icon blends in with about 8 other deep-sky-blue app icons.

I still detest the form elements in the Mozilla strain of Gecko. But apparently my fingers care more than my eyes do in this case.

~stevenf wrote a post about how he’s using VoodooPad to store information on his Treo. Very neat. I’ve become a VoodooPad junkie as well, and — while it’s not as neat as Steven’s trick — I have a little trick I’ve whipped up to export a voodoopad document as a singel bookmarks page that I use as my browser’s homepage.

I hacked the template and stylesheet of the included GMDC Blog plugin, so that all the pages that are linked from the document’s index get included in the home page (the original plugin does this) but I stripped it down so that the blocks of links wrap to the page width.

Then I wrote an Applescript that lives in VoodooPad’s script menu that exports the document to /Library/WebServer/Documents/, using my plugin. Now whenever I want some new link available, I drop it in bookmarks.vdoc, and exportBookmarks. Easy.

Oh, I also mark all my stuff up as Markdown, and export the content as such (a setting in the export window).

Download the plugin: GMDCHack

My export script: exportBookmarks

OMG. Why did I not see this before? OnLife.

No time to write more, but if you like OnLife and spend time in VoodooPad, I created a scriptlet for VoodooPad. Unzip and put the files into ~/Library/Application Support/OnLife/Scriptlets/. Restart OnLife to see the new source in your list.

Update 01/23/2006: I’ve put up a page for my OnLife hacks. Enjoy.