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Tag: app

  • DMG DarkRoom // GB Camera Companion App

    As ridiculous as the Game Boy camera may be, it is also strangely charming.

    Outside of its obvious limitations, one of the big challenges has always been how to get your pictures off the camera in a usable format, since it was obviously never designed to shoot, store, or transfer images via SD card.

    Various clever methods have been developed by the community over the years, and often involve extracting the images from the camera’s save file. There are some great tools available for this, but their feature sets are often fairly limited. While I liked the whole GB Camera a e s t h e t i c, I also didn’t want to spend ages in Photoshop afterwards, upscaling and stylising them every time. So… after rediscovering the format when I bought an Analogue Pocket, I thought I would put the development in AI technology to use… to build a dedicated Game Boy Camera image extractor and processor. Hence: the DMG Darkroom.

    DMG DarkRoom: GB Camera Companion

    The concept of the app is simple: You load up a Game Boy Camera .sav file, or save-state via a connected Analogue Pocket, From there, you can then view, edit, and export the pictures with a variety of different options that are specific to the lofi nature of the beast.

    The features include…

    • SAV & SD card loading – Open Game Boy Camera .sav files directly, or auto-scan your Analogue Pocket SD card
    • Photo grid – Browse all 30 photo slots with adjustable thumbnail size, solo view, lightbox, and fullscreen presentation mode
    • 100+ colour palettes – DMG, GBC, SGB, Lospec community palettes, plus a custom palette editor with import/export
    • Stackable filters – 12 lo-fi effects including CRT Scanlines, LCD, Dot Matrix, Phosphor Glow, Chromatic Aberration, Vignette, Noise/Static, and VHS Ghosting
    • Per-filter controls – Each filter has its own collapsible parameter panel — tweak scanline weight, bloom radius, echo offset, and more
    • Tone controls – Brightness, contrast, and split toning with adjustable shadow/highlight colours and balance
    • Per-photo settings – Palette, filters, and tone can be set globally or overridden individually per photo
    • Transforms – Rotate and flip photos non-destructively
    • GIF export – Build animated GIFs with a drag-to-reorder frame strip, per-frame palette, bounce mode, and adjustable frame delay
    • Batch export – Export all photos as PNGs, or generate a contact sheet in one click
    • Project files – Save and restore your entire session — photos, settings, and all — as a .gbcp file
    • Effect presets – Save and recall favourite filter combinations

    What’s more… all of this runs right there in your browser – available completely free as a web app over on dmgdarkroom.allmyfriendsarejpegs.com.

    For those of you curious about how things work, or if you want to build and host your own version, you can. Everything is open-sourced over on GitHub.

    For a long time, I’ve been able to use and enjoy my Game Boy camera thanks to the work put in by other folks in the community to keep them alive. Hopefully this project… with all of its added features proves just as useful to someone else.

  • Productivity Apps: Bookmarking with Shiori

    Shiori

    Bookmarking

    Bookmarking. It’s something I’ve always struggled to find a good solution to. The in-browser features don’t really make it easy to quickly find common URLs, and I’ve tried to use other websites in the past, but they just didn’t seem to stick in my mind.

    What I’ve Tried Before

    The closest I’ve come to finding an answer is in Alfred, which I’ve blogged about before. There are a few different ways you can bookmark with Alfred, but I didn’t quite find that any of them matched what I was looking for.

    First, I tried using the ‘web search’ feature to associate bookmarks with particular keywords. The problem with doing this though, is that you need to remember the exact keyword to call up the site you want. As as a result, it isn’t all that great for keeping track of lots of different locations.

    Another solution was to use the Alfred Snippet Manager. This could be a really good solution, as you would be able to search by the title and description that you enter, as well as the content of the actual URL itself. However, if you already use the Snippet Manager for predefined replies – more like a clipboard manager – then having a large number of bookmarks in there could pollute the results, increasing the time it takes to find the things you need effectively.

    I set out to find an alternative, and made use of my old Delicious account to create a workflow that could search through my bookmarks by making use of the private RSS feed. It worked, but was a bit clunky, and not as intuitive as I’d have liked. That meant that I didn’t ever really make use of it.

    The real solution came in the form of a different app altogether…

    Shiori

    I stumbled upon Shiori completely by chance, and was surprised I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.

    Both the website and the app itself are beautifully simple, and easy to use. You simply set it up to connect to a Delicious (free), Pinboard ($11 annually) account, or both. Personally, I use the latter – as Delicious keeps making changes to their service which break things. The $11 is worth the money. Call up the interface with a hotkey, and you can search through all of your bookmarks in an interface that is awfully similar in feel and operation to Alfred.

    shiori_main

    The similarity isn’t a criticism, as Alfred is amazing. You can search via tag, words, or even abbreviation. Like Alfred, the more you use the app, the smarter it gets – picking up on the type of searches you use most commonly to find particular bookmarks. Because it uses your login details (and doesn’t just pull it from the RSS like my hacky method above), it’s really fast too.

    There’s also a hotkey that can be set to bookmark new websites quickly from the browser. If you have Keyboard Maestro installed, Joseph Schmitt has created a pretty sweet workflow which you can assign to an additional hotkey. It takes the highlighted text and automatically adds it into the ‘notes’ field. More on Keyboard Maestro in a later post.

    This type of bookmarking is often called ‘social bookmarking’, as they are largely designed to be public, to share with friends etc. I’m not really into that, and prefer to keep my URLs private. Shiori makes it easy to automatically tag new bookmarks as private, to avoid having to do it manually yourself every time.

    You can add in certain domains (if you want to keep particular – ahem – websites – private), but if you stick in an asterix, it will capture them all.

    Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 13.23.14

    In summary, I love Shiori. The design is as nice as Alfred (and it works just as well), it arguably works better for bookmarks, and it helps keep things compartmentalised. Snippets are now assigned to one hotkey, Alfred another, and Bookmarks another.

    Where can I get it?

    You can download Shiori for free (yes, completely free) here.