So it should come as no surprise that the first application I chose to submit to the App Store was one of those filter apps — because there’s nothing I like better than wasting my time rewriting what already exists, only a little better and with less commercial success.

Anyway… it’s three in the morning and I didn’t write my announcement in advance so as not to jinx it, so it’s going to be a mess. The application is called Snap Filters, and the main reason I made it is that I can’t get CameraBag to save a single image without crashing; so Snap Filters is supposed to crash less (it will still quit on you once in a while, because every photo app does on the iPhone, but I’ve found it much more usable in the real world), and it’s designed to give you more flexibility on the filters you’re applying to your pictures, with a fast enough interface that you shouldn’t resent playing with it.

Snap Filters lets you quickly page through three color effects (from least saturated to most contrasty) in nine tint variants each, and two black and white effects (regular or contrasty) with simulated color filters (it doesn’t look like much, but lets you choose the black-and-white effect that makes your details pop most). Plus several levels and styles of vignetting, and the choice of cropping the picture to a square or not. All the while being pretty responsive (until you save the final picture, which obviously needs to take a few seconds).

Most of the photos I’ve posted here in the last couple of weeks have been made with Snap Filters, and I’ve set up a Flickr page where all of my example photos will be. You can also check out the information page for more details but, more importantly:

You should download it right now (iTunes link), because it’s free for a while it’s discounted until I have enough reviews to go to $1.99.

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I can’t believe there still isn’t a simple, widely adopted way for RSS readers to display them, by the way.

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After:

Yeah, it’s pretty generic, but the previous layout — which I hadn’t managed to improve on for quite a while — didn’t work at all with the variety of contents my blog sports; it’s pretty hard making something good with the succession of short tweets or links and long posts, and the Tweetie layout struck me as perfect for it.

There are still some adjustments to be made, I have yet to make pretty headers and backgrounds for the different domain names, and I haven’t taken care of IE6 compatibility (which must be awful with all the PNGs I use), but I’m having a very hard time focusing these days, so the final touches might have to wait a bit.

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Monsieur Bozzi ? C’est le livreur d’UPS, pour… votre Xbox 360, c’est ça ?

Pas si efficace, le coup de la boîte blanche anonyme, Microsoft.

Vous êtes chez vous ? Ah. (Déception audible.)

Heureusement que je savais qu’il devrait passer vers cette heure (la même heure qu’hier quand il a laissé un avis de passage dans ma boîte aux lettres), je ne réponds pas aux numéros inconnus, normalement.

Ben quoi, faut pas avoir peur des escaliers quand on est livreur UPS dans Paris, hein.

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garoo.net

Okay, time to go live with my latest waste of time: I’ve finally found the courage to dive into Cocoa and Objective-C and learn how to get rich by making iPhone applications. After I programmed my first mobile web browser (for Web Is Pink), I got frustrated with waiting to have enough money to register as an iPhone developer (well, that costs one week’s worth of food!) and decided to move back to the Mac and tackle an old idea I’d had for a while: make my own Quicksilver.

I know, right? Why make something new and unique when you can rewrite from scratch an existing application that hundreds of thousands of people rely on, knowing that I’ll never be able to replicate its entire functionality and people will never switch?

Well, you know what they say: scratch your own itch. Do something that you wish existed. And I wish there was a more streamlined Quicksilver on my Mac. Plus, it’s as good a way to learn Cocoa as any.

So here it is: the first public release of my own Quicksilver, with more graphics, less functionality, but also different design choices that I think make more sense (because it’s always easier when you’re starting out with a complete functional design in your head rather than adding bits and plugins as you go along). It works, I’ve been using it instead of Quicksilver for a few days, and it doesn’t seem to leak.

Download and more information.

Oh, by the way, I’ve also found (or been given) the perfect idea for my first iPhone app. It’s not going to be very productive, but it’ll be pretty, and a bit fun. More teasing later.

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I know I look scary when you read my blog, but everybody who knows me will attest that I’m very nice and polite in real life.

I can read and write English as well as French, whether in technical or creative domains, I master the technical and usability aspects of webdesign and I’m not too bad on the visuals themselves (as long as you don’t ask me to design a big all-Flash website, and Flash is evil anyway), I have enough critical thinking to replace Steve Jobs, and I’m super efficient at work provided you don’t ask me to show up at eight in the morning — and I’m poor, so I’m cheap and easy.

So where are the job offers of all types I should be inundated with?

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Wow. (Thanks to Romain B.)

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» somethingpositive.net

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As much as I’ve always dreamed of launching a great web 2.0 community site with a long, exclusive private beta phase that would generate a lot of buzz on blogs, but it appears that it would not be the ideal way to launch a cruising site.

All of the essential functionality is in place, so it’s time to move to the public beta: you can rush right now and without wasting a single second to www.webispink.com (among many domain names; they were free with my server, and I’ll only regret it when the time comes to renew them) to see the best gay site ever designed (and currently being designed before your very eyes).

Since I realize I didn’t get into much detail in the previous post, let me show you the site’s functionality right after this commercial:

• bilingual English/French right away (other languages will be introduced after the next Euromillions)

• Facebook-style homepage that displays changes and updates from the profiles you’re following (I know, it’s stalkerish, but it doesn’t do anything you couldn’t accomplish by refreshing those profiles every day)

• friending and hotlisting profiles notifies them automatically (I had a fancy “you only see someone hotlisted you if you hotlist them back” system on GayAttitude, which in retrospect wasn’t a good idea)

• detailed user search (under construction, it isn’t a priority until there’s a lot of people) that displays contacts and hotlistings, and possibility of associating personal tags to profiles and then using them in searches

• Google Maps integration, and search by distance (displaying the results on a map will come later)

• detailed profile with a personal public URL (nothing new compared to GayAttitude), and you can choose the base domain name from a dozen

• Tumblr-like blog, with WYSIWYG editor (not homemade, I’m not insane — for now it’s TinyMCE, and I’m not a fan but it works well enough), with easy integration of images, videos and links

• Twitter-like (or Facebook-like) status updates on the profiles

• two profiles per user (or maybe three, I’m not quite sure yet), entirely separate as seen from the outside, but managed conveniently from the same account (a couple of French gay sites have a very inconvenient system that lets you login from different front doors with separate profiles)

• pie-in-the-sky attempt to mix sex-oriented and more social chat on the same platform and with no segregation, with options (in construction) to choose where you want to appear, and who you want to talk to

• no frames (that’s not a political choice, just what worked best this time), an optional detachable chat popup, but the entire chat can function without ever opening a popup window (except for detailed profile display)

• iPhone version, and generic crappy mobile version soon (WAP might come later if there’s demand for it)

• and lots of little details that don’t amount to much in a bullet list, but contribue to general usability and must be experienced first-hand

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Migration was more seamless than I expected, but I could have done without waiting an hour while iTunes had to redownload the 2.1 firmware.

Not that I’d complain about finally having the opportunity to unpack a virgin iPhone at home, but I’m surprised the salesman didn’t even offer to transfer the SIM card himself.

I absolutely hate the new screen color balance, but I guess you’re supposed to get used to it quickly. Ah, and I forgot I needed to buy the dock separately.

There’s a time-limited upgrade offer for buyers of the original iPhone, and they ask you to send copies of the receipts of your first iPhone and the new one, along with the signed contract update and your bank account information. All of which those assholes already have on file, obviously.

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Once upon a time there was a garoo who dreamed of being a webdesigner, or a podcast host, or a lottery winner, or George Lucas, only with talent, or maybe even without, and in fact he dreamed of being anything at all but a webdesigner; he just happened to be good with PHP and passable with Photoshop so he had no choice but to use his Gods-given talents to earn some money and occasionally pay his rent.

Since he was a very bad salesman, and he hated people, and both of those things were obviously quite linked, the life of a freelance wasn’t that ideal for him, but the life of an employee was even less so, and as a result it was rather hard for him to actually earn money and not waste the aforementioned talents; and waste them he did. He opened blogs by the dozen to let them wither and die, launched community sites without an inkling of a strategy to make money or anything out of them, and spent the better half of each day reading news blogs and forging for himself an incomparable knowledge of all things technical out of which he would never get to produce anything.

He didn’t know what to do with his time, and less yet how to transform it into money, so he was willing to try anything and invest himself into any project that seemed the most remotely liable to earn him a score of euros over ten years, as long as it didn’t entail looking for clients and working for them anymore, and that’s how he ended up developing yet another gay cruising site, because whenever he wasn’t working he was hunting on the virtual land, and he knew the market well, and he knew there wasn’t a single existing site that wasn’t fucking crap, and lo and behold he created the website that was to kill them all, and he named it web is pink because finding an available domain name is the single hardest thing you can endeavor to do nowadays.

In short, I just couldn’t help myself. After I gave up on GayAttitude — either cowardly or heroically, your choice — mainly because its co-creator and I couldn’t agree anymore on how to make the site evolve, I tried to resist the temptation for a while, but couldn’t: I spend quite a bit of time logged onto various gay sites, and it’s particularly painful for a web developer to have to spend time on poorly-designed user-hostile websites.

Web is pink intends to be the most accessible, convenient site on the web, without skimping on functionality. At least that’s the goal. For now there’s a homepage inspired by the new Facebook, complete profiles, a simple and visual search interface that I think and hope to be more convenient than any other, a blog system of course, and a lot of little details to be discovered (and more yet to be added).

The site is in private beta right now, because that’s how I understand you’re supposed to generate buzz these days, and because I’ve got a couple of things to tie up before I can launch it publicly (and I’ve got to find some more money, too); in the purest tradition of marketing 2.0, I figured I needed to play the limited-invite card, so here’s a code that will only work for the first ten people who use it: click !

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So I decided that “garoo.net” was more appropriate to stand for “garoo network” than as a blog, and I needed a new, more original name for my personal blog. And I also needed to merge the visual design and object design blogs, because I regularly had trouble deciding where a particular link would fit. And I, like, totally needed to buy a new domain for my TV/movie/book reviews — so that the personal blog one would be appropriately empty, I guess.

So here’s what’s new:

• garoo.net (rss) publishes individually every article that I write on one of my blogs, plus daily digests of my Twitter postings and the occasional Flickr photo

• underachievementunlocked.com (rss) is my personal blog, mostly devoid of content (and, yes, I’m super proud of a pun that one reader in a thousand will understand, even though it results in a domain name that my French readers will never be able to type)

• regardelafin.com (rss) hosts my reviews for, basically, anything that has a story (I’m currently in the process of going back through ten years of archives to transfer the matching posts from my personal blog)

The rest of the network is still here:

• ff00aa.com (rss) for tech news and reviews

• bewarethefrog.com (rss) for gaming news and reviews

• regardelecran.com (rss) for all kinds of pretty pictures and videos

• regardelaroute.com (rss) for things with wheels

• regardelemec.com (rss) for things with balls

When I get around to it, cedric-bozzi.com will be dedicated to my portfolio, and I’ll probably buy yet another domain name for my photo galleries. Because it would just make sense. Considering.

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Brace yourselves for my train ride back to Paris tomorrow night.

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Because separate designs were unmanageable; and it’s all the same blog spread and sliced over different topics, so they might as well really share the layout.

Some backgrounds are semi-temporary, and I have to re/do a presentation page (which will be linked in the top menu of garoo.net), the unread mail / current iTunes track displays (in a Dock on ff00aa.com — that’s why the current header looks so empty) and the personal diary, which will only be available in RSS.

I know, it used to be prettier, but now it’s more functional.

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More information on #FF00AA.

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The reason I’m reopening my blog network is that having to publish everything on garoo.net was paralyzing me: every time a news article or an image captured my attention for ten seconds (which is pretty rare, statistically), I asked myself: “Can that be of interest to people who read garoo.net?” And the answer was always “No,” so I ended up posting a link only one tenth of the time, just so I could tell myself the blog wasn’t completely dead. But, if you replace “garoo.net” with “#FF00AA” or “Beware The Frog” in the question, the threshold to publication is much, much lower.

Now what’s to say I’m not going to close all the Garoo Network blogs again in two months? Well, nothing. That’s how blogs work, anyway. But I’ve changed the odds: instead of having a database and a set of PHP scripts per blog (only the Regarde tumblelogs shared a code base; I’m not that big at factoring), this time everything’s using the same base as my personal blog — so I get to use the same shortcuts to publish a link or photo in a couple clicks.

If you’ve subscribed to the garoo.net RSS feed, you’ll get an entry each day summarizing everything I’ve posted on the other blogs, just like I already aggregate all my Twitter entries; if you want to subscribe directly to a specific blog whose topic you’re interested in, just go to the site and click the RSS button. (If there’s no RSS button, then you’re using a prehistoric browser and you should update. But is there anyone using an RSS aggregator yet running IE6?) The old thematic RSS feeds should redirect smoothly to the new addresses.

By the way, what is the Garoo Network?

• #FF00AA (RSS): technology, a lot of Macintosh, and some web 2.0

• Beware The Frog (RSS): video game news, with a slight bias toward the Xbox 360

• Regarde La Route (RSS): pretty cars

• Regarde La Vitrine (RSS): pretty objects and design

• Regarde L’écran (RSS): pretty images, CG, photoshops

• Regarde Le Mec (RSS): pretty boys

• Regarde Le Clown (RSS): funny stuff

More will come later. Or maybe not.

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Nothing really interesting; it’s just always fun to see your body of work distilled into a bunch of nice bar graphs.

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Même le dimanche, Apple est très occupé à rejeter l'application Web is Pink. Demande de clarification en cours. #
 

Est-ce que quelqu'un ici a installé iTunes 8.2 béta ? #
 

Favrd:

@chartier sez: RT @jordanmitcheld 90 people get swine flu, everybody wants to wear surgical masks. 1 million people have AIDS, nobody wants to wear condoms #
 

You can get my writings live from my Twitter page or in its RSS feed.

I wanna eat pancakes. #
 

Tweetie 1.1 broken. Ooh, didn't know you could save searches on the Twitter home page. #
 

Tweetie 1.1.1 works. Like the new highlight for the selected tweet. #
 

I've got a new idea to redesign my blog. Kill me. #
 

Favrd:

@nacara sez: C'est un peu glauque, une gare, la nuit, quand même. #
 

You can get my writings live from my Twitter page or in its RSS feed.

Dormiiiir. #
 

I need "Make your OS X application AppleScriptable" for dummies. Documentation's obtuse, as always. #
 

Was the DM interface on Tweetie Desktop always this stupid? Click the DM tab, and then click the updated — unmarked — conversation? #
 

‘Twas not a bad day, for once. #
 

Trois tubes de gel Durex ? Y'en a qui prévoient de s'amuser ce week-end. #monoprix #
 

I don't hate black licorice so much anymore. Damn, my tastebuds are old. #
 

Favrd:

@texburgher sez: Drinking green tea cures your health problems like using XML fixes your data issues. #
 

You can get my writings live from my Twitter page or in its RSS feed.

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Ca ne se voit pas avec le contre-jour, mais les grilles peintes en bleu sont vraiment moches.

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