Alkitab Bible Study 0.9

May 21st, 2008

We just released Alkitab Bible Study 0.9. Alkitab Bible Study is open source and free desktop based Bible Study tool. It features rich and user friendly Bible study tools. Alkitab supports parallel view, commentaries, lexicons, dictionaries, glossaries, and daily devotions. It also come with powerful search capability. Alkitab is an alternative front end to the JSword project. Alkitab also build on top of Netbeans Platform

What’s new:

  • Add Sword AugmentPath and DownloadDir
  • Add Strongs and Morphology User Preferences or Options
  • Add Source Viewer
  • Various UI Improvement
  • Various Bug Fixes
  • [Installer] add options to install some books:
    KJV, StrongsHebrew, StrongsGreek, Robinson Morph

This release improve the stability a lot, it fixes many bugs. The next release will be 1.0 final, so if you find any bugs, questions, etc please do not hesitate to drop me a note, it help me a lot to stop the bugs before 1.0 final.

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Standalone Module Branding tips

May 8th, 2008

Just a simple tip regarding module branding splash during development or debugging.

If you build a “standalone” module for your Netbeans RCP based application, during development you will notice that it will display the original Netbeans IDE/RCP splash screen rather than your branded application splash screen.

To enable your own branded splash during development you can add the following on the module project properties

# replace the token with your own branding token
branding.token=alkitab
branding.dir=none

Note: it is tested on Netbeans 6.1

Citra FX Photo Effects 2.5 Released

April 3rd, 2008

KIYUT just released Citra FX Photo Effects 2.5, a photo filter effects for digital photos or images. It allows anyone, regardless of experience, to turn digital images into unique artistic looks. Creating impressive photo effects have never been this easy and fun. It is well suited for everything from simple to advanced digital photo or image filtering.

  • Many Photo Filter and Photo Effects.
  • Easy, simple, and fun to create impressive photo effects.
  • But suprisingly powerful.

What’s new:

  • Add Crop Tool
  • Add Selection Resize Tool
  • Add Zoom (ctrl-key) and Pan (shift-key) with MouseWheel support
  • Add Handle Size Options Preferences
  • Add Menu - File - Revert
  • Add Menu - File - Save As
  • Improved Rotate Tool (shift-key)
  • Improved Canvas
  • Other bug fixes and enhancements

Citra FX Photo Effects Information

Product Page
http://www.kiyut.com/products/citra/index.html

Features Page
http://www.kiyut.com/products/citra/features.html

Screenshots Page
http://www.kiyut.com/products/citra/screenshots.html

Netbeans Platform Ant based build system trick

February 18th, 2008

If you build an application on top of Netbeans Platform, you probably already know that it is using Apache Ant as the build system. Thanks to this flexibility of Netbeans Platform (ant based build system), this system allow us to do various trick to automate stuff. For example

This time the trick is how to override build-zip ant target to add your own files eg: license file, properties or configuration files, etc

Basically it is just

  1. zip as specified by the build-zip target
  2. unzip the result of build zip
  3. do your stuff eg: copy, move, delete, etc
  4. zip again
<!-- step (1) see depend suite.build-zip -->
<target name="build-zip" depends="suite.build-zip">
  <property name="nbdist.dir" value="dist"/>
  <property name="release.dir" value="${nbdist.dir}/${app.name}"/>
 
  <!-- step (2) unzip the result  -->
  <unzip src="${nbdist.dir}/${app.name}.zip" dest="${nbdist.dir}"/>
 
  <!-- step (3) do your copying stuff here, check the ant doc for copy, move, etc file -->
 
  <!-- step (4) zip again -->
  <zip destfile="${nbdist.dir}/${app.name}-updated.zip">
      <zipfileset dir="${release.dir}" prefix="${app.name}"/>
  </zip>
 
  <echo message=" "/>
  <echo message="cleaning and finalizing release" />
  <delete dir="${release.dir}"/>
</target>

Netbeans Platform localization and branding trick

February 13th, 2008

This is the second part of Netbeans Platform i18n and localization trick. The first part is available at Netbeans Platform i18n and localization.

This approach is using branding trick to override the Netbeans Platform default localization. I think this is a HACK, use with caution. The proper localization should be following Netbeans Localization Project. Please see

So for example, you want to localize Menu - File - Exit to Keluar (Indonesian localization for exit), this could not be done with layer.xml trick because that Menu Action is not localized through layer.xml, it is using NbBundle.getBundle instead. So what you need to do is using the Netbeans Platform branding feature to localize that Menu Action.

Note: This is tested on Netbeans 6.0.1

Step 1: Find out the localization location

You need to know where it is localized and the name of jar, in this case it under
org.netbeans.core.actions.Bundle
with key Exit=E&xit
jar name = org-netbeans-core.jar

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Java Web Start Application

January 18th, 2008

Finally, we just build Java Web Start for Sketsa SVG Editor and Citra FX Photo Effects. Last time, we disabled Java Web Start due to the Netbeans Bug: 96928 which is now fixed. However, there are another Java Web Start related bug which is not fixed yet:

For us the above bugs effect the external web browser module, so we just disabled this external web browser module for our application web start.

Now, you can try our application as Java Web Start (no installation required)

Note: this is still experimental

If you have any feedback, please do not hesitate to drop me a note.

Deploy Netbeans Platform based Application using IzPack Installer

January 2nd, 2008

So, you just finished creating Netbeans Platform based Application and ready to deploy it to the users. You might be interested to check IzPack Installer.

IzPack is an installers generator for the Java platform. It produces lightweight installers that can be run on any operating system where a Java virtual machine is available. Depending on the operating system, it can be launched by a double-click or a simple java -jar installer.jar from a shell. The most common use is to distribute applications for the Java platform, but you can also use it for other kinds of projects.

This is what we used in Sketsa SVG Editor and Citra FX Photo Effects. Just change the values in the example below to fit your needs.

Note: this is tested on Netbeans 6 and 5.5

Update: this is based on the following folder/file structure

[your-suite-project-folder]
    - [branding]
    - [installer]
        - [icons]
        - [izpack]
            - izpack-install-script.xml
            - Win-shortcutSpec.xml
            - etc (other required izpack resources
                    eg: image, executable file, etc)
        - readme.html
    - [legal]
    - [nbproject]

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SVG Animation Editor Feedback ?

December 6th, 2007

Sketsa SVG Editor 5.0 just released, Now by popular request we are going to develop SVG animation plugins module for the Sketsa. We are stuck at how the UI will flow, do you like the way Adobe Flash Editor, Jasc Webdraw, or you prefer new ways for doing animation editor, etc ?

So we are looking for feedback regarding how the SVG animation plugins will behave (UI Flow), do you have any preferences how things should be done.

Things to consider:

  • Since SVG allows deep nested <g> element, how does it will look when you select multiple elements which under different <g> and try to use the timeline editor ?
  • Same as above, how do you expect the timeline to behave when you try to re edit the timeline when there are multiple selections with different timing.
  • Which one you prefer the SVG animation editor as a plugin for Sketsa or totally different product (because the UI flow is different) ?
  • What do you think of proprietary namespace to help the editor ? Currently we are not adding any proprietary namespace at all
  • Timeline based or no timeline based ?
  • etc, anything to add here ?

Note: UI Flow means editor UI (workflow UI), not the resulting SVG output.

Note: If you like to show screen cast of your favorite features of the existing animation editor, you could use Wink (Free), camtamsia, or screenshots, etc, so we could see it better, sometimes is hard to express things in writing right :)

If you like to write the feedback in your own blog or webpages, please add the link to the comment section, so we could easily find about it.

Any feedbacks are very appreciated and help us a lot in developing this SVG animation editor.

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Sketsa SVG Editor 5.0 Released

December 5th, 2007

Just a quick note, yesterday we just released Sketsa SVG Editor 5.0, a cross platform vector drawing application based on SVG.

What’s new:

  • Add command line open options
  • Add basic marker support
  • Add basic pattern support
  • Improvement on Selection Tools
  • Improvement on Rotate Tool
  • Improvement on DropperTool
  • Migrate to Netbeans 6
  • Change to NbPreferences
  • Fix RotateTool when canvas zoom change
  • Fix some under/redo artifacts
  • Fix SaveAs bug
  • Other bug fixes

For plugins developer, in this release we also add and expose SVG Animation Engine Class

/** Returns the SVGAnimationEngine for the document or null.
 * @return org.apache.batik.bridge.SVGAnimationEngine
 */
VectorCanvas.getAnimationEngine()

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Experience

November 28th, 2007

Finally, I received my Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon DVD plus 5 DVD of Ubuntu 7.10 Repo for local installation. This 5xDVD Ubuntu Repo could save my time downloading all the required package :) (Internet Connection is still slow in my area)


Installation

Installation was easy, basically just follow the wizard, *attention* during partition part, because I was using Linux since ~5 years ago, so I already have my own separate home partition. However, after install finish and run ubuntu, I could not login, it throw some error regarding xsession and going back to the login screen. It seem Ubuntu does not like my home folder which contains various settings from Fedora Core 6 eg: .gtk .gnome, etc. Just press ctrl-alt-F2 delete those settings, ctl-alt-F7 login again, now everything is running. Lesson learned: Ubuntu Gnome does not like my existing Fedora Core Gnome.

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