root all of the things

So here I am. I have spent most of my spare time since April developing zingberry.com. Finally, we have a working version that we were satisfied with launching. I am now a person that has Co-Founded a company and launched a product. I am very proud of my team and all that we have accomplished on the zingberry project, and we are just getting started!

So far, I have already learned many things.

- What it really means to develop a project that will actually be put into production.
You start to pay attention to detail. Every step of the process has to be planned out. From a list of functionality to where every button and click on the page ends up going. If you dont know where you’re going, you’re just coding in the dark.

- How to work with a team.
One of the most valuable things you can have is experience working with a team. How to cooperate and compromise are very important skills to have. Also realizing that everybody has something to contribute to the project.

- Real world programming techniques.
I can’t stress this enough. Think Modular. Reusable and extendable code makes for a better and more efficient program.

- What i really want to do.
I want to work on ideas. I want to take this raw form of an idea, and bring it to life. Make that concept a reality. From inception all the way to deployment.

- How versatile you have to be to work on at start-up company.
I had to fix problems I didn’t even think could exist and configure applications i never worked with before.

- What “un-paid” actually means.
And it doesn’t mean “you get nothing from working on this project”. I means you get something that can be even more valuable in the future. EXPERIENCE.

These are just some of the main things I could come up with off the top of my head. There are many others, and definitely many to come in my future. Thanks to everybody on the zingberry team for getting us to where we are today.

-Brandon

So ive ben neglecting my blog for months now and i guess i havent been doing anything exciting, but now i got good news!

I have just recently joined the fine team at ZingBerry.com
They have a great concept and a solid team and i look forward to working with them on this great project

In other related news, since one of the team members uses a MacBook, most of our team documents are in the iWork format (.pages). After a google search, i found that .pages files are actually .zip files with a standard structure:

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QuickLook/Thumbnail.jpg
QuickLook/Preview.pdf
buildVersionHistory.plist
index.xml

So basically you acn extract the Preview.pdf and that is the equivalent of converting the .pages file to .pdf
But i didnt want to do this by hand -____-
So i made a bash script to do it recursively starting with the specified directory.

Below is the source code. the convert function is where the magic happens. it unzips the Preview.pdf out of the .pages file to the current directory, then it renames it to the name of the .pages file. Pretty simple. Although it is a real pain in the head that apple decided to make its own file type without at least an option for opening it on a windows machine >.<

waytogoapple
–Brandon

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#!/bin/bash
 
#set the internal feild seperator to newline
IFS=$'\n'
 
function usage {
echo "This is a script to extract the Preview.pdf out of a .pages file"
echo "recursively through all subdirectorys"
echo "Syntax:"
echo "./pagestopdf "
 
}
 
#unzips only the PDF preview from the .pages file and
#renames it to the name of the .pages file
function convert {
echo "------------------------------------------"
for i in `ls -1 *.pages`
do
unzip -j "$i" "QuickLook/Preview.pdf"
echo "Renaming to \"${i%\.pages}.pdf\""
mv Preview.pdf  "${i%\.pages}.pdf"
echo "--------------"
done
}
 
#Executes the convert function recursively through directorys
recursive () {
first_directory=$1
cd "$first_directory"
for directory in  `ls -d */`
do
recursive ${directory%/}
echo :::: Directory : `pwd`
convert
cd ..
done
}
 
#start the program
if  [ ${#1} -gt 0  ];
then
cd "$1"
echo :::: Directory : `pwd`
echo "------------------------------------------"
convert
recursive $1
echo "Extraction completed..."
else
#print usage
usage
fi

Just looked through my folder with all the ideas pertaining to my old project, evaluated the status of the project and re-drafted the list of features still to be implemented before some type of closed beta release. Still need a Graphic designer and an Android app developer to get things moving, but this is a start in the right direction.

As far as building a LAMP(LinuxApacheMysqlPHP) server for my friends company, i just need a decent box. It turns out with 2 garbage boxes i still cant make a decent box =/ In a couple days i should get a decent box from one of the guys so i can get started on that.

And now to get  working on that looong list of features with a little help from Deadmau5 and Kaskade.
Fuel the MIND.

-Brandon