[NSBlog date:@"4 January 2010"].comments = 0;

For all new posts, articles & release visit my new blog at kswizz.com.

This blog shall remain up as a archive of my old articles and releases, though.

The Azure License: meaningful attribution

[NSBlog date:@"27 October 2009"].comments = 0;

Open-source licensing can be a real nightmare. Some licenses are nearly impossible to decipher, while some (namely – the GNU GPL) are just pure evil.

I have been trying to find a software license which, like the Creative Commons Attribution license, would let the licensee do pretty much anything with the software, except it would require attribution in a meaningful way. That is to say, documentation and/or credits of any derivative work.

The MIT license came closest to this, and it is the base on which the Azure License was written.

A good way to give attribution, as required by the license, would be a friendly “Contains code by Copyright Holder [linked]” or “Special thanks to Copyright Holder [linked]” in the about box.

Without further ado, the Azure License:

The Azure License

Copyright (c) {year} {copyright holders}

Attribute to {individual or group name} - {link}

You (the licensee) are hereby granted permission, free of charge, to deal in this software or source code (this “Software”) without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and/or sublicense this Software, subject to the following conditions:

You must give attribution to the party mentioned above, by name and by hyperlink, in the about box, credits document and/or documentation of any derivative work using a substantial portion of this Software.

You may not use the name of the copyright holder(s) to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THIS SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THIS SOFTWARE.

http://seoxys.com/azure-license/

Plain text Azure License

The Sorry State of Apple Developer Relations

[NSBlog date:@"23 September 2009"].comments = 1;

iLaugh disappeared from the App Store about a week ago. My contract expired last week.

I had been trying to renew the contract through the Apple Store for over a month now. However, I initially signed up through the Swiss Apple Store, and that is the only store it will let me use.

The French Swiss store is broken, and will not work at all. The German Swss store works, but will only accept a Swiss credit card. Thankfully, I do have one, but for some obscure reason, it throws an “unexpected error” every time I try to use it. It won’t let me use my US Bank of America cards at all.

I’ve called and emailed Apple’s support team many times. Yet all they tell me is that they’ll forward it to some other team, which will (after waiting another week) email me proposing that I try “emptying my browser’s cache.”

I’m kind of unsure about what to do now. With every day that passes, I miss out on a substantial amount of money. Not only that, but not having the App in the Store causes many other problems, such as breaking links from my website, and more…

ATTemplate: Simple Templating System in PHP

[NSBlog date:@"1 July 2009"].comments = 2;

Let me say this first: I do not believe in big bloated MVC PHP frameworks. I believe in having custom code that runs as fast as possible. For recurring useful functionality, such as templates, I believe in using simple, efficient and flexible dedicated standalone modules.

For the past several years, I have been using a home-grown templating system that functioned by parsing template files which would have a dedicated / invented syntax. It would replace, for example, %TAG%, with a value. It had several more advanced features too, such as conditionals, recursion, embedded PHP, and more.

And while it functioned just fine, it implemented a custom parser, and required templates to be written using a non-standard syntax. But, after having used Ruby on Rails, I was inspired to design something better.

ATTemplate is the result of this. The main idea behind ATTemplate is that PHP in itself is already a parser, so why reinvent the wheel?

ATTemplate is very lightweight and relatively simple, but it’s very powerful without being bulky. It allows for everything the other templating systems can do, including loops, nested templates, recursion, conditionals, etc.

How to use

Here’s how you’d use ATTemplate:

<?php

// Include the ATTemplate class
require_once 'attemplate.inc.php';

$template = new ATTemplate();

// Optionally, you can give it properties, like so:
// $template = new ATTemplate($property_array);

$unread_messages = rand(0, 20);

// Sets property 'unread_messages' to 10.
$template->set('unread_messages', $unread_messages);

$template->set('title', 'ATTemplate Test');

$property_array = array(
    'first_name' => 'John',
    'time' => date('H:i:s'),
    'friend_requests' => array(
        array('name'=>'James', 'followers'=>rand(0, 200)),
        array('name'=>'Josh', 'followers'=>rand(0, 200)),
        array('name'=>'Aaron', 'followers'=>rand(0, 200)),
        array('name'=>'Eric', 'followers'=>rand(0, 200)),
        array('name'=>'Mike', 'followers'=>rand(0, 200))
    )
);

// This pushes the content of $property_array into the properties
$template->push($property_array);

// Prints the parsed template
echo $template->parse('index.phtml')

?>

And here’s what your template could look like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

    <title><?php echo $title; ?></title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Welcome, <?php echo $first_name; ?></h1>

<?php if($unread_messages>0): ?>
<h2>You have <?php echo $unread_messages; ?> unread messages!</h2>
<?php endif; ?>

<p>You have received friend requests from the following people:</p>
<ol>
<?php foreach($friend_requests as $friend_request): ?>
    <li><?php echo $friend_request['name']; ?> (has <?php echo $friend_request['followers']; ?> followers)</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>

<p>The time is <?php echo $time; ?>…</p>

</body>
</html>

License

You’re free to use the code in whatever you want, commercial or not. Modify it, redistribute it, do whatever you want with it.

The only requirement is that you need to give me credit.

Also, please do shoot me an email if you use this in your project.

ATTemplate by Kenneth Ballenegger is licensed under the Azure License.

Download

Download ATTemplate!

Meet iLaugh 2.0 – Social Jokes

[NSBlog date:@"16 June 2009"].comments = 0;

After months of hard work, controversy and perseverance, iLaugh 2.0 is finally launching.

iLaugh puts a database of over 50,000 jokes in the palm of your hand. Vote on your favorite jokes, compile a list of your favorites, share jokes with your friends via Twitter and Facebook, and most importantly, have a good laugh.

With iLaugh, you have complete control over which jokes you want to read. The Categories feature gives you the ability to only read the jokes that interest you. Additionally, you can filter out adult jokes or jokes voted down by the community.


(click on the image to go to ilaughapp.com)

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