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I was playing around with jquery and I wanted to see if it was possible to generate a cheat sheet of all the fonts on your system. Its also a good run through of how to load a SWF with a callback.

View a demo (Though, its possible it might not work)

The steps I used to generate this are:

• Load SWF
• Javascript calls to Actionscript fonts() method via ExternalInterface
• Get the list of system fonts in Flash via Font.enumerateFonts(true)
• Curse Flash for giving you a list of font names, where half of them are garbage.
• For each font name, in javascript, create a test which adds a DOM element temporarily with a fallback font family set. For example, font-family: 'Apple Garamond Pro', 'Times New Roman';, where Times New Roman is your fallback.
• Then check the actual width (via offsetWidth). If it does not match the offsetWidth of the fallback font, then we know it rendered ok. (The original idea is from http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect)

The only caveat is, if the actual font width and the fallback font width do match, then you would have a false negative. So its not bulletproof.

The actionscript to enumerate the fonts and call back out is pretty simple:

Expose the method in the constructor using ExternalInterface:

FontList.as

I used swfobject to load the SWF. Also be sure to enable allowScriptAccess.

The javascript to test the fonts is at: font-detect.js

You can use it by including:

In the end, I don’t think this is useful in practice, but I thought I would share anyway. Its on github too.

Updated: Now uses call straight to actionscript, doesn’t marshall JSON first so its much faster, and other refactoring.

I’ve been looking for an Amazon S3 client for the Mac for awhile, that had a couple key features that seem to be missing from apps like Cyberduck or Transmit. Mostly I wanted a better way to manage permissions and make it easier to share files with my friends, and I needed something to throttle my bandwidth so I can leave beefier transfers running without nuking my Gears of War latency.

You can download it over at: http://s3hub.com

And, also, its an excuse to do some Cocoa again now that Objective-C 2.0 is out. Garbage collection, declarative properties, and fast enumeration help remove a lot of cruft and let you focus more on making things work. Also there are alot of new and really nice API’s in Leopard like NSOperationQueue.

A major feature I don’t have yet is sync’ing (syncing is hard); but I think that should come in the next version hopefully. I have some ideas about generating rss feeds or some way to track new files which I think could be really useful. If you have any ideas or find any bugs, leave a post on the group.

I ported the time_ago_in_words helper for to a category (mixin) for NSString. Its nothing profound but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Update: Moved to github and is part of GHKit. You can find this helper: GHNSString+TimeInterval.m