Chris Morrell » Philly

Another SEPTA App

Chris M. — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:42:00 +0000

So I have a problem. Most of the time I bike, but every once in a while I need to catch a bus or hop on the el to get where I’m going. Inevitably, I get there just as the train is leaving, or I wait 10 minutes in the cold ’cause I left too early. This is usually because I don’t want to waste my time finding a schedule when there’s a chance those 3 minutes will make me miss the bus.

So my idea was a single page that had the upcoming times for all the public transportation I use. You’d enter the routes you take (in my case the 5 and 57 buses, southbound, and the Girard blue line stop, westbound), and the page will give you a quick list of when the next trains/busses will arrive. I’ve also thought it’d be really cool if you could put in the approximate time it takes you to get to any given stop, so if it takes me 7 minutes to get to Girard station, it will only show me trains that will arrive in 7 minutes or later).

I wrote a schedule parser this afternoon and put a little bit of interface this evening. The parser seems to work, but I’ve done VERY minimal testing. I know the iSepta folks said that getting 80% of the parsing done is easy, and the 20% takes some work, so I don’t know if this is a project that will ever go further than running locally on my desktop, but if there’s enough interest I’ll try to clean it up and make it live somewhere.

Here’s a quick screenshot of what I have set up right now (click to see full-resolution):

Feedback? Is this something that other people would find useful? Post in the comments or let me know via twitter.

Advanced Tech Meetup

Chris M. — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:10:34 +0000

I’ve been thinking lately about starting an “Advanced Tech” Philly meetup. The idea is to do a quarterly meetup that discusses topics that are particularly advanced in various fields. The proposed topic for the first meetup:

Photoshop

I’ve been using Photoshop for over 12 years, and at least once a month I discover a new technique or tool buried somewhere in the software. Most people use such a small subset of the software that there are often whole classes of tools that they never use (adjustment layers is a good example). I think it’d be really interesting to get 5-10 people in a room, and each present a few concepts that it took them a long time to discover/master (20-40 minutes each).

Topics might include:

Non-destructive techniques (adjustment layers, smart objects, vectors, etc) — this could probably be the topic of an entire meetup
Masks (vector masks, layer masks, clipping masks, quick mask mode)
Layer effects
Blending modes
Channels
Layer comps
The brush engine
Filters (going beyond the lens flare!)
Layer locks & links
The list could go on forever…

So, two questions—1) would you be interested in attending? 2) would you be interested in presenting (and if so, what?). If we can get at least 3-4 other people to present, I’ll start looking into a date and a venue. You don’t have to present something from the above list, but it should fall somewhere under the umbrella of “advanced” (whatever that means to you).

E-mail me (see left sidebar), comment below, or get in touch via twitter to discuss.