I kept looking though, and found Pandoc. Now you’re talking. This can output your markdown text as html, LaTeX, DocBook, and can do some conversions between those formats, too. It extends markdown with its own custom markdown too, but I think I’ll leave that: the whole reason I went down this route was to avoid the all the extra work of tagging, and stick just to the creativity. So that’s how I’ll write for a little while until I can tell whether it’s a method that works for me.

He wanted to create a little animation to present a brand concept to a client of his, and was presenting on a Macbook, so thankfully I had the exact dimensions of the screen it would be presented on. I started out with a quarter-sized version: half the width and half the height of his screen. His screen is 1280×800, so I did a test animation 640×400. The trouble was, it was looking a bit pixellated when blown up to full screen. No problem.

I did the rest of the visual at the full 1280x 800. Then came the moment to export to a quicktime file, so I could email it off to him. Right, so I clicked export movie to quicktime… and that was where the problem started.

The exported movie was rubbish! Even on a Core 2 duo machine, it was stuttering and stalling. It wasn’t the playback – but the encoding that was the problem. It was time consuming to work around the issue. I exported the movie as an image sequence. Then using ffmpeg, transcoded that image sequence into a .mov file. It worked fine. This left me feeling let down by Flash’s exporter engine. Why couldn’t it simply render each frame out in its own sweet time rather than just bowling along assuming that things could be encoded real-time? I don’t know. All in all, it would have saved me a lot of hassle.

Oh, well. Lesson learnt. When creating high-def animations with motion blurs and transparency in Flash, export to frames. I wonder if that knowledge will be useful to me again? Perhaps it’s useful to you.

As you can see, although it doesn’t present the biggest problem in the world, it’s a little effort each time you need to catch up on what was said by whom and when, and you’ve got to remember if you’ve made a separate not about phone calls.

A solution? Well, I’ve been using Backpack from 37Signals for a little while, and they offer another product that seems to be very well-received. It’s called Highrise. It’s a simple CRM tool that works verey simply: just BCC a special dropbox email address when you send an email out, and forward email received and it automatically attaches it to the relevant contact. So, for example if I send an email out to John Johnson with a quote, that email is attached to John Johnson in my Highrise account. If he doesn’t exist in that account, Highrise automatically creates him. Then, he replies to me, so I forward that email to Highrise. That email is attached to him too, allowing me to follow my conversation with him. I can add timed notes, and group contacts by company. Tagging functionality is included too, so it’s a very versatile system. I’m going to give it a go for a little while, and see how it works for me. I’ll report back later.

Yes, Safari is now available on Windows.

Brilliant. I’m not some kind of Apple junkie, so I’m not praising it because I’ve always wanted to use it as my browser, but by God it makes my life easier. No more scrabbling round to a Mac to look at a development version of whatever site I’m building at the time. No need to fire up VM Ware with KDE just so I can get a Web Kit rendition of a site to check for bugs. No. Now, it’s just a click away, on my main development machine. Absolutely marvellous.

Thank you Apple!

Technorati: Web development browsers safari

Right, so then I started Googling around. And still no joy. So… any chance you can put the terms on your website please Microsoft? Ta.

Technorati: Web tools

Technorati: HTML, Web tools

Now I don’t use C#, but I know there are many out there who do, and some of you may find the ability to code Flash without learning a new language handy. Here’s the link.

Technorati: flash, csharp, dotnet

It’s called haXe. It’s a language. But the interesting thing about it is that it’s cross-platform. Not in the Java sense: it compiles to Flash, JavaScript, Neko (server-side language currently available for Apache) and desktop executables. Syntactically, it’s “between Java and ECMA”, so it shouldn’t require a massive re-train.

I’m excited by this. It’s a new, fresh-for-2006 language that at least on the face of it could be hugely useful. Imagine building a web app where you can use the same language for the server-side processing, the front-end (AJAX or whatever), and any Flash elements. Then imagine you could easily port it to the desktop using the same language.

So, the enthusiasm is there. Now I’ve just got to find the time.

Bugger.

What this means is that I can clearly see which files I have modified since last committing changes to the repository, and performing most tasks in Subversion is as simple as right-clicking. Genius. As ever, more on Subversion and my attempt to make it work for me, later.

But this simple article was enough to make me stop the burning and start the learning: I’ve now just started using Subversion. Hopefully I won’t end up deleting all my projects thus leaving clients no choice but to assassinate me. I’d rather find it a revelation. More on this later, then.