• Rotating Photo Attachments in Gmail

    08 Mar 2011

    I have 2 young kids, so it’s a given we take a lot of pictures in my house. Unfortunately i spend most of my weekdays at work away from them, but i’m thankful that my wife keeps me up to speed, emailing me pics here & there throughout the day.

    I use gmail (you don’t? i’m sorry). And i bounce between Safari & Chrome for exploring the web. Every time i get an email from home with pic(s) of the kiddies in it, here’s what i have to do….

    I click ‘View’ (or ‘View All’ for multiple photos), and watch as my browser opens a new tab with the photos in it.

    Sideways.

    So annoying. So what i generally do is drag the photo to my desktop, doubleclick it there, and check it out - in it’s correct position - in Preview (my default on OSX). Like i said, totally annoying for simply trying to view a pic of my 2 year old wearing mommy's sunglasses. And my desktop is constantly cluttered with these pics.

    I’m not positive here, but this may just be related to sending pics with the iPhone (iPhone 4 in this case). I don’t seem to notice this happening when i get photos from other means. I also notice when i upload iPhone photos to a site - such as this Wordpress site - the same is true, they are sideways. :-/

    Anyhow, i wrote a little Chrome extension that will rotate the photo(s) so you don’t have do what i do (well, used to do). My desktop thanks me.

  • Easy Reading

    01 Mar 2011

    I listen to a lot of podcasts (maybe too many), and i’m a huge fan of Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 stuff. The Dev Show - a show where he & co-host Jason Seifer provide useful development links from around the web - is what got me turned on to his stuff. On the show, Dan occasionally mentions how sites with white text on black backgrounds are a bother. I tend to agree (though probably to a much lesser extent), so i took it upon myself to mess around with writing Chrome & Safari extensions (maybe i’ll write a FF one, too) to transform a “white text on black background” site (works for any site, really) to a “black text on white background” site. I’m calling it “btowb” for obvious (=lame) reasons.

    By no means is it exhaustive (i’m sure they could be improved upon), which is why they’re up on github in case you were so inclined to fork.

    I hope you enjoy! Go get them.

  • Here goes...

    22 Jan 2011

    I’ve done it…a blog.  While there are other places i post to - twitter a bit, tumblr not so much - i wanted a place to post/talk/learn about development and code (i really hope to learn something from all of this).

    So here it is.  Hopefully i can contribute a tiny slice of something to the world.