With iPhone HDR, originally uploaded by irishstu.

Without HDR

No iPhone HDR, originally uploaded by irishstu.

Your Ghost, originally uploaded by irishstu.

If I walk down this hallway, tonight,
It’s too quiet,
So I Pad through the dark
and call you on the phone
Push your old numbers
and let your house ring
til I wake you ghost.
Let him walk down your hallway
it’s not this quiet
slide down your receiver
sprint across the wire
follow my number
slide into my hand.

It’s the blaze across my nightgown
it’s the phone’s ring.

I think last night
you were driving circles around me.

I can’t drink this coffee
til I put you in my closet
let him shoot me down
let him call me off
I take it from his whisper
you’re not that tough.

Interactive narrative was a major part of my master’s course – I would have loved to develop something on one of these.

Included below are some illustrations I did for an interactive narrative flash piece in college

It would be great if imdb.com had a stripped-down version if their site for the iPhone, but what would be even better is an iPhone app with the following features:

- Sound detection: just record a bit from a show and it would find the epsiode or movie, just like Shazzam and Midomi do for songs

- Barcode scan: snap the barcode from the DVD box to pull up the details.

- Storage: remember what you’ve looked up and tag it so you remember if you’ve seen it.

- Facial recognition: snap a picture of an actor from the TV and it will tell you what you know them from.

- Sharing: so you can annoy your friends with your awesome taste in movies and TV

Anything else you’d put in an imdb.com iPhone app?

What you’ll need

• A Mac (PC owners can get Rainmeter or Samurise)
• Geektool
• Lynx (for doing the weather)

One I Made Earlier

Once you have Geektool and Lynx set up, you’ll need to add a few different lines to get something like the setup below:

The Interface

First, open Geektool in System Preferences (it will be in the Other group). To make the big clock, click:

• New Entry
• Select “Shell”
• Type date "+%H:%M" in the box
• Change “Refresh” to “60″ so it updates every minute
• Select “Colours and Fonts”
• Click in the “Font” box to change the font to something really big
• On your desktop, the object will be a light blue box – drag the bottom right corner to resize
• Click “Text” to change the colour and opacity of the text

To add the day (e.g. Saturday) add a new “Shell” entry with the command date "+%A". To add the date, add a new shell entry with the command date "+%d %B %Y" .

To see more date options have a look at Unix Date Command for the various parameters

Tricky Bits

Geektool can be a bit fussy – here’s some issues I’ve found with it.

1. Nothing is showing! – Make sure “Enable Geektool” is selected on the preferences pane, and that “Hide output” is NOT selected under “Command”
2. Fonts and colours won’t change – Each time you want to change an item’s font or colour, you have to be sure to click “Colors and Font” and then “Text” to bring up the specific colour selector for that object
3. Reopening Geektool resets a load of stuff – this is just a pain in the arse.

The weather

This is why you need Lynx installed as well – it outputs the weather from an external site into Lynx and then to Geektool.

For the forecast add the following Shell Command code

lynx -dump http://printer.wunderground.com/auto/printer/global/stations/03969.html|awk '/Cond/ && !/Fore/ {for (i=2; i<=10; i++) printf $i " " }'

For the temperature add the following Shell Command code

lynx -dump http://printer.wunderground.com/auto/printer/global/stations/03969.html|awk '/Temp/{printf $2, ": "; for (i=3; i<=3; i++) printf $i " " }'

This gives you the weather forecast for Dublin - if you want it for your own city:

1. Go to The Weather Underground
2. Search and find your town or city
3. It will appear on the left of the page as a link under "Recent Cities"
4. Click on this link - it will bring you to a page with a URL that ends in a number (e.g. 03955.html is Cork)
5. Replace 03969 in the two examples above with the code for your city
6. Style as you wish

Adding Images

You can also link to images with Geektool - for example to get today's weather as an image:

1. Make a new Geektool entry and select "Picture"
2. In source, paste in the following image URL - http://www.met.ie/weathermaps/nat00_weather.png
3. This will pull the latest weather image from the homepage of Met Eireann and place it on your desktop
4. Note this only works with static URLS

• Open “Photos” app on your iPhone
• Tap “Albums” in the bottom tab bar
• Tap “Edit” top right
• Tap “Add” top left
• Enter a name
• Tap “Done” and that’s it

To move photos into an album (from your Photo Stream for example)

• Tap the actions icon, top right (looks like an arrow escaping a box)
• Select the photos you want to move by tapping them
• Tap “Add to” bottom tab bar
• Tap “Add to Existing Album” (or make a new Album)
• Tap the destination album
• Done!

Pre iOS 5 – the old and horrible way

Have you ever wondered how to add more Albums to your iPhone when you click Photos? Normally you’ll have two albums – a Wallpaper one with the default wallpapers, and another one called Camera Roll. But wouldn’t you like more for Maps, Screenshots etc.? Here’s how… and the trick is – you do NOTHING on your iPhone! You’ll need to open iPhoto and iTunes for this trick. I’ve tested in a Mac but it should be the same for PC.

Step 1 – iPhoto

Create a new album by pressing the + symbol on the bottom left of iPhoto to create a new album. Call it whatever you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Smart Album or an ordinary Album.

Here I’ve made a new album called iPhone Wallpapers.

Step 2 – iTunes

Connect your iPhone to your computer and then select it in iTunes (it will be in a list on the left-hand side.) Now click the Photo tab, and tick Sync photos from: and select iPhoto. Choose Selected Albums from the radio list. Now tick the album(s) you want to appear on your iPhone when you click Photos. Now click Sync (bottom right).

I’ve picked the album I want to appear in Photo Albums on my iPhone.

Step 3 – iPhone

Once it’s all sync’d up, just click on the Photos application (the little sunflower) and your new album should be in there!

My new album in the Photos application on my iPhone.

Edit – changed title because, well, how to add albums could mean music albums, and that doesn’t need a blog post to explain!

Screen 1

Geektool Screen 1, originally uploaded by irishstu.

I’m using Geektool to add content to my Mac desktop. (A similar tool for PC is called Rainmeter)

I run a two-screen setup: A 24inch iMac with an 8inch touchscreen attached (see here for a look). The 24inch screen shows uptime, the date and time, and what’s using up my resources.

The second screen shows a calendar, and also pulls in a weather image from www.met.ie.

Screen 2

Geektool can display: unix commands (such as cal and date); images stored either local on online; and the contents of text files (such as logs). It can also be used to run AppleScripts, which is next on the agenda, but this allows you to show album art and track info from iTunes by pulling that information into a file via AppleScript.

I am also using DragThing as a container for my shortcuts on my touchscreen, in case you were wondering what the tabs are on the top of screen 2.

Street Art Berlin ("don’t forget…"), originally uploaded by epoxy _.

I can tell by the pixels! Via lecraic

Just like Minority Report. via Lifehacker.

10,000+, originally uploaded by taptaptap.com.

I heart iPhone Apps. View it full size to see all the apps.