Foto: Zutphen

View of Zutphen's old side of the city. I took this photo with Pano on my iPhone 3G and enhanced it with Preview.
More panorama's by me : Panoramio.

Reading comics and self-scanned books on iPhone or iPod Touch

Today I switched my comic book reader on my iPhone from ComicZeal to MyComics to ComicReader Mobi. I found that the last one has the same functionality as the other two + a lot more. No conversion of files, no separate uploader - you can use any FTP-client, simply upload your folders so you have the same arrangement as in the Finder (yes, I use a Mac).

I use Transmit as the FTP client and created a favourite to my iPhone, then dragged the favourite to my books folder so it's accessible from there.


The only thing with ComicReader Mobi is that it doesn't handle files with special characters in the file name (yet) : é, è, etc. simply block the ftp transfer. On the forum I read that an update which addresses this issue is on its way.

A comic book reader is nothing more than an image-viewer which views images stored in a ZIP-file. This simple fact means you can read any book with a comic book reader as long you do not OCR your scans into a text document. For example, I am scanning De Saint pocket books. The scanned images are named in sequence : IMG_0000.jpg, IMG_0001.jpg, and so on. The folder name is the name of the story. Thus, when I zip the folder and change the extension in .cbz (ComicBookZip; so a zip file doesn't get opened with the standard zip-utility), I can read the book in any comic book reader, also those on iPhone or iPod Touch! The advantage of not OCR-ing pocket books is that these kind of books have small pages and can therefore be read quite good on an iPhone or iPod Touch in landscape mode, and you also retain the layout, page numbers and possible images in the book.

ScreencastsOnline

Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline made a great show this weekend on the new Services-setup in Snow Leopard. Check it out here. BTW, Don has a lot of good podcasts on Mac software - a must-view for Mac users! Very useful tips for those, like me, who rarely use the Services or Automator!
 

At the Lasso Developer Conference 2009

From october 1 thru 4, the Lasso Developer Conference 2009 was held in Amsterdam. For me, this was the first time because a) it was in Amsterdam and b) Lasso 9 would be introduced and c) at last I would meet quite a few fellow Lasso-ers in real life.
There were some round-tables and workshops presented by Lasso-ers themselves, where some interesting topics were discussed and great solutions to returning questions were offered.
LassoSoft picked a real cool location: Spaces at the Herengracht. You can see some photo's of it here.

It was great. Thanks Lassosoft and everyone for this opportunity!



LDC09 Video's :
YouTube - LassoSoft's channel

Here are some links to LDC09 material :
LassoTech
At_begin URL-handling and REST
Version Control Systems
L-Migrator presentation
itPage presentation
Lfor presentation
Encoding and Character-sets
File permissions
jquery Week calendar

Check out the lively Lasso community at LassoTalk
And Brian's blog-post