dans.blog


The miscellaneous ramblings and thoughts of Dan G. Switzer, II

Adobe Acrobat Connect ("Brio") now free for 3 participants...

Adobe has just posted Brio—the next generation of Adobe Acrobat Connect—to Adobe Labs for downloading. The new beta version allows you to:

  • Host unlimited online meetings with up to 3 meeting participants.
  • Interact with easy-to-use screen sharing, chat and whiteboards.
  • Access your meeting instantly with a personalized, easy-to-remember URL.
  • Distribute documents and files to meeting participants.
  • Use integrated VoIP, teleconferencing and multi-point video.

I've had interest in Adobe Acrobat Connect (which is a horrible name,) but it was way out of my price range. Now that they've opened it up for free for up to 3 participants, it looks like it's time to check it out!


Using RegEx in your IDE to speed up coding...

Nathan Strutz posted a cool tip using regular expressions to speed up coding which uses a regular expression to convert a single line list of variables into something actually useful.

You have a list of values on lines and you want to want to apply some code to each:

first_name
middle_initial
last_name
phone
country
state_province
city

Select the lines, and use your IDE's find/replace tool with the regex option. In Eclipse, this is just CTRL+F and check the checkbox. Use this as the search pattern:

^(.+)$

This regex says to select any line with at least one character in it and store it in a character group.

Some code like this would be the replace pattern:
querySetCell(myQuery, "$1", "");

Replace them all and your code will be generated in an instant. The regex will drop each line's content into the $1 backreference.

That's a tip I'll have to remember.


Free icons from DryIcons

DryIcons.com has released 5 free icon sets. I'm a terrible artist, so the more free icon sets I can find, the better off I am when I'm designing an interface. Here's what DryIcons is offering:

Ruby Multimedia Icon Set - 13 High Quality Web Icons
WYSIWYG Sapphire Icon Set - 47 High Quality Web Icons
WYSIWYG Classic Icon Set - 47 High Quality Web Icons
Blue Velvet Icon Set - 86 High Quality Web Icons
Aesthetica Icon Set - 160 High Quality Web Icons