Rob Allen's DevNotes – Developing software in the Real World

Creating collections with the Lightroom Classic SDK

I currently organise my photo library in Lightroom Classic with one folder per day for my images and then I extensively use collection sets, collections and smart collections to manage the photos that represent an "event", regardless of whether the project is a single day, such as a family BBQ, a multi-day event such as a conference or a multi-month thing such as my Project 365 or mainline railway photos. The nice thing about using… continue reading.

Posted on 15 January 2020 in Lightroom, Lua Leave a comment

Writing a Lightroom Classic plug-in

As part of my migration to Lightroom Classic from Photos, I needed to recreate my folder and album structure. In Photos, folders container albums (or other folders) and albums contain photos. An album cannot contain a folder. This maps directly to Lightroom Classic which has "collection sets" for folders and "collections" for albums. To transfer the folder and album information over to Lightroom Classic, I wrote an Apple Script for Photos that added a keyword… continue reading.

Posted on 6 January 2020 in Lightroom, Lua, Photography Leave a comment

2019 in Pictures

As we reach the end of 2019, I again get the opportunity to look back at my year through the photos that I took as I have done every year since 2009. I have been doing a Project 365 for a good few years which acts as a diary too, so I have the opportunity to appreciate what happened this year in my life. January Early in January, I spent an afternoon taking photos with… continue reading.

Posted on 31 December 2019 in Me, Year in Pictures Leave a comment

Migrating to Lightroom Classic from Apple Photos

I recently moved over to Adobe's Lightroom Classic from Apple's Photos in order to have more flexible non-destructive editing features – in particular local brushes. Rather confusingly, there's also another Adobe product called Lightroom which is a new build for cloud-based storage which doesn't (yet?) have all the features of Lightroom Classic. In particular, the lack of virtual copies and smart collection sets make Lightroom feel like a step backwards from Photos, while Lightroom Classic… continue reading.

Posted on 30 December 2019 in AppleScript, Lightroom, Photography Leave a comment

Routing in Slim 4

Routing in Slim 4 works pretty much exactly the same as in Slim 3. They are used to map a URL that the browser requests to a specific handler that executes the code for that particular page or API endpoint. You can also attach middleware that will only be run when that route is matched. The route in the slim4-starter looks like this:

$app->get('/[{name}]', HomePageHandler::class);

1	$app->get('/[{name}]', HomePageHandler::class);

It is made up of the method, the pattern and the… continue reading.

Posted on 18 December 2019 in PHP, Slim Framework 4 View all 2 comments

Keyboard shortcut to mirror displays on a Touch Bar Mac

One feature of the 16" MacBook Pro that was new to me is the Touch Bar. This thing replaces the F-keys with a touch pad that adjusts itself to the app in use in order to provide useful shortcuts you can just touch. This is all well and good, but when presenting, I use the cmd+F1 keyboard shortcut to toggle display mirroring. A useful Stack Overflow answer tells me that I can use cmd+{dim brightness}… continue reading.

Posted on 13 December 2019 in Computing, Keyboard Maestro, Software Leave a comment

My JetBrains IDE shortcuts

In the JetBrains IDEs, the "Default for macOS" keymap isn't doesn't feel very Mac-like to me, especially for keyboard navigation in particular. Apple provides details of the keyboard shortcuts you can expect to work in a Mac application, so these are the changes that I've made to make PhpStorm and PyCharm feel more at home on my Mac: Open Preferences and select Keymap from the left hand side. Then select "Default for macOS", click the… continue reading.

Posted on 11 December 2019 in Software Leave a comment

Dark and light mode blog images with MarsEdit

As dark mode is more popular than ever now that the iPhone supports it, I've been working out how to get the browser to render a dark image in dark mode and a light image in light mode. It turns out that the way to do this simply is to use the <picture> element like this:

<picture>
    <source 
        srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-dark.png"
        media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)"
    />
    <source
        srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png"
        media="(prefers-color-scheme: light), (prefers-color-scheme: no-preference)"
    />
    <img src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png" 
         alt="Description of example image here"
         class="border" loading="lazy" />
</picture>

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<source

srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-dark.png"

media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)"

/>

<source

srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png"

media="(prefers-color-scheme: light), (prefers-color-scheme: no-preference)"

/>

<img src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/example-image-light.png"

alt="Description of example image here"

class="border" loading="lazy" />

</picture>

As I use MarsEdit to write my posts, I created a Media Markup Template that does the heavy… continue reading.

Posted on 4 December 2019 in Computing, MarsEdit, Software Leave a comment

Cannot find zlib headers on macOS 10.15 Catalina

My new MacBook Pro 16" comes with Catalina and while setting up Python to develop rst2pdf, I discovered that Pillow wouldn't install.

    Running setup.py install for pillow ... error
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:

1 2	Running setup.py install for pillow ... error ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:

Looking through the long list of red text I came across:

    The headers or library files could not be found for zlib,
    a required dependency when compiling Pillow from source.

1 2	The headers or library files could not be found for zlib, a required dependency when compiling Pillow from source.

Aha! The way this was solved on the previous version of macOS (Mojave) was to use the macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg installer to set up symlinks to header files from the old place to the new place. This doesn't work on Catalina, so… continue reading.

Posted on 27 November 2019 in Python, rst2pdf Leave a comment

Changing an SQL Server primary key in Doctrine Migrations

I recently came across a rather weird quirk when trying to change a primary key in Sql Server using Doctrine Migrations: you need to use two migrations to get it to work. This is incredibly minor and I'm only writing it up as it confused me for a while so I thought that I'd document so that I'll find this article if I run across it again in the future! This is the migration:

final class Version20191023125629 extends AbstractMigration
{
    public function up(Schema $schema) : void
    {
        $table = $schema->getTable('page_category');
        $table->dropPrimaryKey();
        $table->setPrimaryKey(['page_uuid', 'category_id']);
    }

    public function down(Schema $schema) : void
    {
        $table = $schema->getTable('page_category');
        $table->dropPrimaryKey();
        $table->setPrimaryKey(['page_id', 'category_id']);
    }
}

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final class Version20191023125629 extends AbstractMigration

{

public function up(Schema $schema) : void

{

$table = $schema->getTable('page_category');

$table->dropPrimaryKey();

$table->setPrimaryKey(['page_uuid', 'category_id']);

}

public function down(Schema $schema) : void

{

$table = $schema->getTable('page_category');

$table->dropPrimaryKey();

$table->setPrimaryKey(['page_id', 'category_id']);

}

Posted on 20 November 2019 in PHP Leave a comment