Joachim Fornallaz

Joachim’s Log

 

Introducing PDFKitTool

January 24th, 2010

PDFKitTool is a simple command line interface to Apple’s PDF Kit framework.

With it, you can manipulate PDF documents. It can combine several documents into one or burst multipage documents into multiple single-paged documents.

Examples

Combining multiple documents and storing the result to disk:

./PDFKitTool load one.pdf load two.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Bursting a multipage document into multiple single-paged documents:

./PDFKitTool load multipage.pdf burst output bursted.pdf

Availability

The tool is 100% open source. The source code and the universal binary are hosted on GitHub. PDFKitTool requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. Enjoy!

Size Comparison: new 27″ iMac vs old 24″ iMac

October 21st, 2009

It’s intresting to see that the new 27″ iMac is nearly as tall as the old 24″ model.

iMac size comparison

RedLaser Barcode Scanner

October 18th, 2009

It’s just astonishing that the RedLaser app can recognize barcodes using every iPhone, even the old models (original iPhone and iPhone 3G) which have no autofocus camera and produce blurry images like this one:

IMG_0004.PNG

I’m surprised the app was accepted in the App Store — it obviously accesses the live video feed for which there is no public API available.

SiteCapture 1.2 Released

June 7th, 2009

I just released SiteCapture v1.2 and made it Freeware!

New features include:

  • Full-size captures now contain the full height of a page.
  • When multiple URLs only differ in their query string, the file names of the images won’t collide anymore.

Grab it at www.sitecapture.net.

Adobe AIR Pollutes the Keychain

March 21st, 2009

Why does every Adobe AIR application need a separate Keychain? I don’t understand.

airkeychains.png

Android Detail Bashing, Part 1

February 15th, 2009

What happens when you connect the charger after the “Please connect charger” message appears? Nothing.

connectcharger

Big StopWatch

February 14th, 2009

The iPhone App Big StopWatch just got updated to version 2. Although I don’t understand much of the release notes, the App itself has an english translation. Most of the new features are  visible after changing the settings. I’m wondering if it would have been better to get the orientation from the sensors instead of setting it manually.

bigstopwatch2update bigstopwatch2settings

Twidroid – The first Android app I like

February 13th, 2009

Why? It has visible (discoverable) toolbar buttons and doesn’t use the Menu button:

twidroid

I hate the Menu button on Android phones, the hidden buttons are so not intuitive.

iWork – On a Diet

February 2nd, 2009
img-0075.jpg

Numbers ‘09 – Convert to Header Row

January 31st, 2009

One of my favorite new features of Numbers ‘09 is the contextual menu item “Convert to Header Row”:

ConvertToHeaderRow.png