NP2 version 2 contains the changes required to support the Santa Photo Events for 2014 in The Bayshore Shopping Centre and Les Promenades Gatineau.

My nearly perfect submit percentage with Apple continues as this upgrade was weirdly approved by Apple within 3 days.

Here are some screen shoots.... 

 I followed my own advice and removed all use of imagemagick calls in my latest mac app. I am now doing all the image manipulation natively with cocoa. It slowed me down a day or two but was worth it. Makes for a much more robust app in the end. All my image manipulations - thumbnails/multilayer christmas cards/gift tags/wallet sets/text annotation/cd image etc for a typical 4 session photos seems to take only 5 seconds, whereas imagemagick was 10X+ longer. Now I don't care about making imagemagick work across operating system upgrades anymore!!! 

Finally updated my primary router on my home network from a second generation Airport express to the latest generation version. Download speed is much quicker. Hopefully there will be an upload speed increase from my server as I am often disappointed with the delays on "OTAOttawa","WordAMaze" and my various web sites (which were down this morning - and I don't know what happened).

The neat thing about the upgrade was the ease, as I expected it would take at least 20 minutes of me mucking around. However when I plugged in the new router, after it did a quick scan, it asked me if I wanted to replace my old one with the newer. I said yes and it was done in 2 minutes. Even as a faithful Mac user for many years, this did surprise me.

To add text to an image in cocoa I ended up starting with a PNG image and ending with a PNG.  Note: I used cocoa instead of imagemagick annotation command due to an odd decoder issue with fonts. Also it is always best to use native code when available.

----sample code
NSDictionary* attributes = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
[NSFont fontWithName:@"Times" size:42], NSFontAttributeName, nil ];


NSImage *cdimage = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:cd_image_path];
[cdimage lockFocus];
[pword_msg drawAtPoint:NSMakePoint(55,90) withAttributes:attributes];
[cdimage unlockFocus];

 //create a NSBitmapImageRep
NSBitmapImageRep *bmpImageRep = [[NSBitmapImageRep alloc]initWithData:[cdimage TIFFRepresentation]];

//add the NSBitmapImage to the representation list of the target
[cdimage addRepresentation:bmpImageRep];

//get the data from the representation
NSData *data = [bmpImageRep representationUsingType: NSPNGFileType properties: nil];

//write the data to a file
[data writeToFile:cd_image_path atomically: NO];

Addendum : see new post - Cocoa Native Image Manipulation

For the last ten years I have ran my event server software using my PERL based server. Every year I have lovingly upgrading this software. I upgraded the client side from browser based to IOS app based three years ago. This year I am totally rewriting the server software once again. It will the first year (sadly), I will not be using Perl. Every OS upgrade, I seem to have some issues with Perlmagick and since my goal is to productize the event server software, I decided to try to write it as a 100% Mac App. First I tried cocoa photo manipulation routines - too basic. Next I discovered SIPS. Cool but still not flexible enough. Then the obvious hit me why not just use a basic install of ImageMagick (not perlmagick) with the Mac app. The iPad client app communicates with the server app using Bonjour as opposed to calling perl scripts  and receiving XML back like last year. It simplifies the IOS app immensely. So far so good, should be finished within a week. After Christmas I will make a marketable version that will work with both advanced photo lab printers such a Noritsu or standard event printers such as a DNP DS40.  

For the third time I reinstalled Mac OS X Mavericks on one of my minis that I use for my Santa projects. I had to reinstall as I had installed wordpress as a test. Wordpress worked but it wrecked all my normal goodies I use with the apache server.

I installed Yosemite on a second partition - more on this later.

Thus I had to reinstall imagemagick. Here are my install instructions.Your install may be different. I installed it like this:


1) I first install x11. Get x11 from here as recommended by apple and install.
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/
2) Make sure you have Xcode installed and the command tools for Xcode also installed

xcode-select -p
if you dont

xcode-select --install
and follow the install instructions if appropriate

3) Next get homebrew by doing this:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go/install)"

tested it with these terminal commands
brew doctor
brew --version
Next I install using homebrew
brew install imagemagick --with-x11
4) I had my imagemagick install folder from before so I just used the same version (ImageMagick-6.8.7-1), already tarred. I reinstalled imagemagick with the commands below:

cd ImageMagick-6.8.7-1
./configure -with-perl
make
sudo make install
and it "magickally" worked.

I am a little fed up with the latest version of the Apple Server Wiki that I am using for my web page, so I am testing Weebly. Web Design Purists scoff at web site creation pages such as Weebly. But so far it looks good as I don't want to out design anyone in that space just have a quick portfolio of my apps and achievements.