Ringce blog

Slammer 1.0.1 Released

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

Slammer 1.0.1 was just let loose. The most important addition is the detailed user guide accessible through the Help menu. I have a really interesting feature set in the works for Slammer 1.1. So stay tuned.

Here are the release notes for 1.0.1:

New Features

Uniform Grids

Uniform grids now allow the number of columns to be changed. Slammer adjusts the section size based on the number of columns.

User Guide

An extensive user guide with an example workflow is now bundled.

Tweaks

The Add (+) popup button now offers four options instead of one for adding overlays. You can directly create Uniform, Fibonacci, Golden or Harmonious sections.

Bug Fixes

The crosshairs now respect the “Show Crosshair” setting when “Lock Crosshairs to Mouse” is unchecked.

P.S I will update the styles to make this readable (fingers crossed). Until then the Atom feeds are your best friend.

Slammer 0.9.6 Beta

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

Slammer 0.9.6 Beta is out. A few bug fixes. But what I want to talk about is the new feature.

Slammer 0.9.6 beta contains an experimental new feature. You can command+click(not right click) and drag to measure the distance between two points. If there is an elevation, it will also give you the angle, base width and height apart from the distance. Neat, isn’t it?

But why is it experimental? Apart from the fact that the drawing itself needs a lot of polish, I am still figuring out how to make this accessible. Command+Click is not that great because if you drag the mouse in a hurry before command is pressed the window will move. There are a few options I am toying with including a “measurement mode” that puts Slammer in a locked state where all mouse actions are used for measurement. If you want to get back to your layers or crosshair, you release it using a menu command or keyboard shortcut.

Hopefully, I’ll make up my mind soon and release it as a regular feature with 0.9.7. Oh, 0.9.7 will have certain other nifty cool features which will also reflect on the ringce.com website. So stay tuned.

Slammer and The Grid System

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

In the same vein as the previous Slammer release, here is the grid system grid replicated.

Here is the Slammer template for the grid system grid. Enjoy.

Download The Grid System Template

Slammer 20 Questions - Part 1

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

What is Slammer?

Slammer is a layout tool. You can make blueprints by sectioning your canvas using grid systems, fibonacci series, golden sections or harmonious sections. Slammer can be used as an overlay on top of any application while you are tweaking your design. Slammer also has rulers, a magnifier and a color picker to help you further.
Why did you develop Slammer?

Once upon a time, there was a blacksmith. He loved sculptures and wanted to make them. He had too many responsibilities to drop everything and go learn sculpting. So he decided to make a chisel as way of learning sculptures while being productive.
Wasn’t this a free program?

Yes. I added a whole bunch of features to it, working almost every conscious hour of the past few months with the intention of selling it. Slammer 0.9 Beta can be used without any limitations for 30 hours. After 30 hours you will not be able to save, import or export your layouts. You won’t be able to use the Clickthrough mode either. I’m fairly certain that you’d decide to buy it long before the 30 hours are over.
All design tools have grids and guides built in, don’t they?

Yes they do. They are very basic. They draw lines at specific intervals. Their scope is limited to object placement and alignment. They are not tools for exploratory layout.
Can’t I just create an image file and use it? Lots of free grid generators let me download a grid.png file.

While an image file can support complex layouts, they are not interactive. Most grid generators provide just one form of the distribution supported by Slammer, the uniform distribution. The nice thing about Slammer is you can grab the complex layout you created as a composite image.

Slammer 0.9 Beta

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

After what felt like an eternity, Slammer is finally out. There is still a whole bunch of features I need to add before it reaches 1.0. But in day to day use, it has already become an absolute necessity for me to do any design / layout work.

Don’t forget to watch the Slammer movie.

Slammer Presets & Multiple Grids

2009-03-25T16:58:53Z

Slammer 0.3 Beta is out. The main feature update is the ability to import and export presets. Here is a preset to kick off sharing cool grids as well as demonstrating Slammer’s different usage scenarios:

Download thegridsystem.org Preset

Built in grid from thegridsystem.org

Grid generated by Slammer

Hyde Goes Beta

2009-02-28T06:26:49Z

A really quick update to let everyone know that hyde is officially in beta.

Installing Py on Leopard

2000-01-01T00:00:00Z

Installing py on Max OS X Leopard is really easy. It’s as easy as sudo easy_install py, if you have the latest version of setuptools installed. py requires a more recent version(0.6C8) of setup tools than the one thats available in System Frameworks(0.6C7). Well, thats not too bad, we can just upgrade setuptools.

However, there are a couple of problems associated with upgrading setup tools:

easy_install installs its packages to /Library/Python/<version>/site-packages
The easy_install command itself is dependent on setuptools and this points to the older version under System Frameworks

After some google time, I was unable to find an easy way to upgrade setuptools. So I went into hack mode and got it to work. I really hope there is a better method than this:

Upgrade setuptools

You can do this either by downloading the latest setuptools package or using the sudo easy_install -U setuptools command.
Find the easy_install executable script.

It’s probably at /usr/bin/easy_install
Edit the file and update all the references of setuptools to point to the latest version. s/0.6C7/0.6C9
Now sudo easy_install py should just work.

Hyde Moves Ahead

2009-02-02T14:45:45Z

Between my first post introducing hyde and now, hyde has moved further along, although not as much as I expected.

The following features have been added since the last post:

Atom 1.0 support
Breadcrumbs
Previous / Next support
Better Page Listing
Built in cherrypy webserver
A half-decent default site template
Google sitemap generator
Folder flattener post processing plugin to support gitsubmodules or svn externals.

I am currently working on incremental/continuous generation support. This would allow us to make changes to the site, save, reload the page to get the changes as opposed to calling hyde -g to generate the site. I am also working on creating better documentation for using/extending hyde building upon what is now just a Readme file on github to include the above features.

While the default template is usable, the source for this website is still the best reference for building a complete website with Hyde.

Please do fork the repository if you’d like to add features. I also created a google group for developer discussions.

Introducing Hyde

2009-01-29T00:56:20Z

The beginning

About a week back I wanted to open source a few jQuery plugins that I use for one of my projects. After going back and forth several times, I decided on github because of the bigger community. GitHub’s pages feature also made it easier for me to make that decision.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a really nice static website generator built by one of the git-hubbers. I started using Jekyll only to find that Liquid, the templating language used by Jekyll was not to my liking at all.

Granted, I have been severely spoiled by Django, which is incidentally the original inspiration for liquid.

Looking for Djekyllango

So I started looking for the best of both worlds and came across three options:

Roll my own: I found this nice article on how to run Django components in a standalone mode.
Static Generator: Static generator is a clever Python class for Django that creates static files for performance.
Aym CMS: Will Larson had a similar need and had started and got a CMS working successfully. Unfortunately, by the time I found out about this, I had already started going down option 1.

The Roads Not Taken

Hard ones first, option #2 was out. This option meant either I hack the code to force generate the site or make http requests to generate the static pages before hand. This seemed to be more complicated than the other options.

Aym CMS seemed complete and was successfully doing the site generation. So I started using it. But I did find a few issues:

No extensive multi directory support. I am a OCD code organizer. If files are not grouped I cannot think.
The site generator and site were essentially the same. Understandable since it was just a single build file. Again my OCD played up and I wanted to change that.
The odd bug: There was a weird glitch where my css files were being ignored. This was probably because I was mucking around with the directories.
No page context: This is actually a Django issue. I cannot provide my base page parameters. Aym-cms has a global context which is populated and accessed sequentially based on the Django template loading scheme. There is no page context where per page there could be some variables that are avilable to the entire template hierarchy of the page. For dynamic websites this is a non-issue, since you can always make a database call to get what you need. But for static generators, this is a deal breaker. This significantly ties down the all powerful Django template hierarchy.
I also wanted to generate site navigation, listings etc.

All in all, while there was a lot of value in aym_cms, it was not right for me as it stood.

Hyde born

So with my tongue firmly lodged in my cheek, I christened my new project Hyde. Since I was going to be using some of the aym_cms code, template tags, clever css, yui compressor, I thought the right thing to do was to fork the project from aym_cms.

An aside: This is my first foray into the world of open source. If I am breaking any unwritten rules do let me know.

This is the feature set I targeted three days back:

Page Context
Separation of generator from the site
Modular design with plugin hooks
Site templates
Per item processing(required for #6)
Run as daemon / web server polling for changes and auto deploying on save.

Today, I am happy to say that items 1 - 4 are complete and the site you are looking at has been generated using Hyde. Over the next few weeks I will try to get 5 and 6 done, while improving the performance of the application.

Sample

I have also open sourced the code for this website in order to be lazy and work on the default site template later.

Next Steps

There are quite a few plugins and services I would like to create / integrate including the ones mentioned on the aym-cms site:

Typogrify
Github
Disqus
Get Satisfaction / User Voice
Twitter

I also want to get cherrypy integrated so that a webserver can be spawned to test the site urls.

Fork me over

If this project fills your need and would like to contribute please do fork and push your changes on github.

Ringce blog

Slammer 1.0.1 Released

New Features

Uniform Grids

User Guide

Tweaks

Bug Fixes

Slammer 0.9.6 Beta

Slammer and The Grid System

Slammer 20 Questions - Part 1

What is Slammer?

Why did you develop Slammer?

Wasn’t this a free program?

All design tools have grids and guides built in, don’t they?

Can’t I just create an image file and use it? Lots of free grid generators let me download a grid.png file.

Slammer 0.9 Beta

Slammer Presets & Multiple Grids

Hyde Goes Beta

Installing Py on Leopard

Hyde Moves Ahead

Introducing Hyde

The beginning

Jekyll

Looking for Djekyllango

The Roads Not Taken

Hyde born

Sample

Next Steps

Fork me over