Remove some pages from PDF and other PDF-editing operations

adminother0 Comment
4 min. reading

Acrobat Reader is a free program, but does not contain nothing around editing (with small exception). So operations like removing some pages, rotating some or all pages, converting PDF to other format, extracting pages to graphic format like JPEG, merging two and more PDF files etc. are not available in Acrobat Reader. For these you have to either purchase a paid, full version of Adobe PDF or seek for some other tools or options.

This post discuss a variety of ways and methods of removing certain pages from PDF document and doing some other editing operation on such docs.

Read More “Remove some pages from PDF and other PDF-editing operations”

Getting iCloud (me.com) emails to Gmail

adminApple1 Comment
3 min. reading

I’ve got an iPad Mini. It looks great (at some points — even fantastic)! But due to my current situation, I’ll stay with my Android and Gmail and will treat iPad as additional toy. At least for a while. Since I still had an empty slot in Gmail to add one another external mail server, from which I want to get all emails, I tried this trick with my iCloud / me.com / Apple ID mailbox. And failed.

If you’re looking for a quick answer to question “How can I sync my iCloud / me.com mailbox in Gmail“, the answer is quick, but you’re not going to like it: You can’t. Fortunately, there’s a workaround to this problem.

Read More “Getting iCloud (me.com) emails to Gmail”

Downloading Google Play applications directly to your PC [updated]

adminAndroid0 Comment
4 min. reading

Yes, it seems, that with a little bit help from Vietnameese developers, there is a fairly easy way to download Google Play applications to your PC. Why you would like to do this? There are at least few reasons.

It is a faster way, that does not require Internet connection. You copy a bunch of *.apk files from your PC to your Android-based device, and install them directly from there, without touching Google Play.

If you have ever read this article before then read it again and notice extremely important security update.

Read More “Downloading Google Play applications directly to your PC [updated]”

Self-adapting images in responsive design

adminCSS, HTML, JavaScript0 Comment
5 min. reading

In my humble opinion, responsive design is a future. One layout, carefully designed, will look beautiful and by user-friendly, no matter, which device user will use to view it. Of course, you can craft responsive designed website by hand, but the easiest way is to use some framework. But what about non-framework elements, like for example images? How to style them, what size should they have, to be responsive and look exactly like other, framework elements, on any device?

There are at least few approaches to solve this problem, among which one or two are not that famous.

Read More “Self-adapting images in responsive design”

Application compiled with PhoneGap fails to update, but can be re-installed

adminCordova0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

If you ever encounter problem, that you can’t update (on your mobile device) applicatation compiled with PhoneGap or PhoneGap Build, first what you should do, is to try to uninstall it and then perform fresh install.

If that succeed, any following updates should run without problems.

This is caused, by PhoneGap version change (either manually, if you’re building by-hand, or automatically, if you’re building using PhoneGap Build). This is one of documented bugs in PhoneGap and hasn’t been fixed as of writing this article.

Convert NTFS to FAT32 without losing data [updated]

adminMicrosoft, other0 Comment
9 min. reading

Many people on many forums and websites claims that this or that piece of software is able to convert NTFS partition to FAT32 without losing data. In most cases this turns out to be only a blunt lie and results in a huge time waste on installing software that is only able to achieve such conversion by formatting partition.

Here you have the only known to me method of getting your drive from NTFS to FAT32 under Windows, while keeping your data safe.

One small note. Before I was really able to perform NTFS-to-FAT32 conversion without losing data I wasted hours on installing and uninstalling crappy software which was expected to be able to do such conversion, but eventually turned out not. This irritated me a little bit, so expect (and please, forgive me for) a harsh language in this article.

Read More “Convert NTFS to FAT32 without losing data [updated]”

PhoneGap Build’s apps fails to open links in external browser

adminCordova0 Comment
4 min. reading

Ever since PhoneGap 2.1.0, every application build with PhoneGap Build always opens all links in WebView on Android. No matter what configuration changes has been done. This is a reported issue, but though we already have PhoneGap 2.4.0, nothing has been actually done around this.

Details and some workaround follows.

Read More “PhoneGap Build’s apps fails to open links in external browser”

Catch back button and exit PhoneGap application

adminCordova, JavaScript0 Comment
3 min. reading

This article shows an example, how to respond, when user of your mobile application taps on Back button and how to exit application, after getting user confirmation, that he or she is willing to do so. It also explains, why you shouldn’t do it at all, if you plan to ship your application to multiple platforms, including Apple iOS.

Read More “Catch back button and exit PhoneGap application”

Very simple alternative to jQuery

adminJavaScript, jQuery0 Comment
2 min. reading

Often, in many small or very small projects, you include jQuery only to have a conviniend DOM-selectors access via $(selector) and except this, you don’t use jQuery at all. In cases like that using neither jQuery nor smaller Zepto.js isn’t pretty wise.

Here is an example on how to achieve same effect in pure JS with querySelector and querySelectorAll.

Read More “Very simple alternative to jQuery”

Icon and splash screen sizes for PhoneGap applications

adminCordova0 Comment
12 min. reading

Since PhoneGap is used to build mobile applications for many destination platforms, out of one source files package, and since each platform contains many mobile devices, with different screens sizes and orientations, it is fairly hard task to design set of mobile application icons and splash screens to suit all needs.

This post is meant to help you with solving this problem, but it is nothing more than a bunch of links to an external sources plus some comments.

Read More “Icon and splash screen sizes for PhoneGap applications”

Hiding splash screen in PhoneGap application

adminCordova0 Comment
3 min. reading

There are various things you have to consider, when developing a PhoneGap application, if you want to control when and how your application’s splash screen will be shown or hidden. This post summarizes all my knowledge in this area. Most information presented here are obvious to more experienced PhoneGap developers, so this post works more like memo to myself.

Read More “Hiding splash screen in PhoneGap application”

Developing PhoneGap applications on Windows

adminCordova0 Comment
9 min. reading

When I first time checked PhoneGap I immediatelly felt in love with it. That was something just amazing and nearly impossible. Use well known HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to build mobile applications with direct out-of-the-box support for eight different mobile apps platforms? No Java, no Objective-C? Hard to believe!

But it was true… Then I moved to famous Getting Started Guides and actually died! Oh, my f*king goodness! Eclipse? Insane number of SDKs? And then PhoneGap Build has been born and my soul has been saved! :]

Read More “Developing PhoneGap applications on Windows”

Fixing graphic problems in Diablo I and Diablo II

admingames, hardware0 Comment
5 min. reading

I’m so sucking and low player that actually for past fifteen (!) years I’ve been playing in actually four games: Diablo I, Diablo II, Civilisation and Transport Tycoon. The first two caught my heart so deeply that I even try to run them (Diablo I!) on Windows 7. And… I actually managed to do this.

Since, this involved a lot of googling and asking, here is a summary of my findings.

Read More “Fixing graphic problems in Diablo I and Diablo II”

Delphi TreeView with checkboxes

adminDelphi and Free Pascal4 Comments
6 min. reading

Delphi’s TListView supports checkboxes out-of-the-box. You just have to set Checkboxes to True and iterate through TListView.Items to find, if particular item have Checked property set to True. You can even enable your own OnCheckboxClick event (not available by default) — I wrote about it here. But very similar to TListView‘s TTreeView does not support checkboxes by default at all.

So, you have to craft entire solution yourself.

Read More “Delphi TreeView with checkboxes”

ListView’s OnCheckboxClick event

adminDelphi and Free Pascal0 Comment
3 min. reading

Unfortunately, the TListView object does not have a specific event fired, when the Checked state changes for a TListItem (an item in the ListView). If you need to react in such situation, you have to mimic this behaviour yourself. Here are some tips on this.

Every Delphi’s Guru will probably think about subclassing and catching windows messages here. If you’re one of them — at delphi.about.com you’ll find an example. But, there’s an easier way to achieve the same.

Read More “ListView’s OnCheckboxClick event”

Read and write ID3Tag in Delphi without any extra components [updated]

adminDelphi and Free Pascal0 Comment
8 min. reading

There’s an (probably very) old About.com Delphi’s article on how to build simply MP3 Player using only TMediaPlayer component available in every Delphi edition. Since powerful XAudio is no longer offcially available to Windows developers and other MP3 players or components are quite expensive, when it comes to pay for the license, then this could be a good alternative. But, this article catched my attention for a completely different reason — reading and writing ID3Tag v1 in MP3 files, without using external libraries, just the pure Delphi code.

Read More “Read and write ID3Tag in Delphi without any extra components [updated]”

XAudio SDK for Delphi

adminDelphi and Free Pascal0 Comment
5 min. reading

XAudio SDK probably is (or at least was) the most powerful, yet freeware Software Developer Kit for playing MP3 files in Delphi. It offered outstanding possibilities. Let’s say that fifty (!) events, you could use to write any MP3-related software in Delphi is enough good mark. And there’s more. That is why, it was really pity to me to discover, that this library is no longer available neither to Windows nor free. And finding replacement is really hard, if not impossible.

Read More “XAudio SDK for Delphi”

Convert string into key-value array

adminPHP0 Comment
2 min. reading

I was looking for a function or solution, that would convert a string into associative array, i.e. respecting both keys and values. To be successfull, such function would have to operate on two delimiters. One for separating each key-value pair from surronding one. And second — for spliting keys from values. Which is, where PHP’s build-in explode function fails. Lucky I am, my two favorite uncles — Uncle Google and Uncle Stack Overflow — helped me in this case as well.

Read More “Convert string into key-value array”

Automate compare in folder sync tool in Total Commander

adminother, software0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

To automate compare phase (first step) in folder sync tool you should:

  1. Set the parameters as you need them.
  2. Click on the folder button in the top left of the sync dialog to save these settings.
  3. Create a button with the c:\totalcmd\totalcmd.exe /S=S:=backup command.

The := instead of just /S=S:backup causes an automatic start of the comparison.

Of course you must adjust path to reflect your location of Total Commander.

Currently you can automate the compare step, not the copy step. It is considered to risky to be automated.

Over hundred cool icon sets for your website or application

adminCordova, HTML, other0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

Here you have three different pages, each holding links to 25+ beautiful icons sets:

There are 109 total icons sets presented on these three webpages. Most of them are free. Some of them are devastating beautiful, some have medium quality. But, put together, makes a strong icon sets compilation, in which nearly anyone should find something interesting for his or her current project.