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22 November 2011
by Matteo Papadopoulos
0 comments

Illustrator: howto use bitmap as pattern

I wonder how difficult has been to use a raster image (as .jpg and .png) as a pattern to fill shapes in Abobe illustrator.

Obviously I googled to find the answer but the web didn’t return the results I was looking for. Just tutorials on vector patterns, not on rasters.

It’s a long time I don’t use these kind of software as I work in web development or dtp with Photoshop and Indesign and I nerver loved AI too much. But I defenetly agree with whom says that it’s unusable and less intuitive for such basic things. I used to build vector graphics with Corel Xara that was so simple as amazing in ’90s… and was so easy to do a pattern with bitmap…

Well, 3 simple steps (when you know them!):

  1. drag your image to AI
  2. select the image and click on “embed” <- this is the trick
  3. go to edit menu and click on “define pattern”, named it and click on “add to swatches”
  4. now you can create our custom shape and drag your raster swatch on it. It will be filled with your btmap. Take care of resolution ’cause you cannot resize or distorce it (or I didn’t found how)

Hope this can help

Thanks to Luca Bonfiglio from @teamcantiere for his help on this issue!

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Schermata 2011-09-07 a 16.35.42

7 September 2011
by Matteo Papadopoulos
1 Comment

[Solved] Osx tricks: how to find file by extact extension

Ok, this sound quite easy but I have to admit that I didn’t know how to do it with osx finder.

Using “find” command on a shell is the hard (and better!) way, but sometimes you can’t. I’ve got to find an exact kind of file extension into my Time Machine backup.

I wanted all my .AI files. So, I’ve tried to find “.ai” as document name in the search bar of the finder. Sometime it could be enough, when the extention has no variants. But in this case I’ve got the problem that Osx is plenty of .AIF audio file and those are most of the results of my search.

As I said, it has been easy: “.ai” -aif

That’s all, hope this can help others.

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1 September 2011
by Matteo Papadopoulos
0 comments

RailsYard CMS released and growing up daily!

Scenario

We are Ruby on Rails developers (Silvio Relli and Matteo Papadopoulos) sharing the same office at Cantiere Creativo. As often happens in web agencies, for small or medium websites projects, the boss wanted a quick tool to setup a website, manage contents, reduce development time and costs.
Rails is our favourite framework but the admin interface is a big missing and build it from scratch all the time can take a while.

We didn’t want to use WordPress (max respect for this piece of software!) or others php based CMS.
Django could be the solution but we did prefer to use our favorite framework as we are more confident with it.

So, at the end, the solution is always the same: build your own CMS! Aaaarrrgghhh!!!! And we have done it! :)

We love to be part of the community and we absolutely wanted to share this project; we wanted Railsyard to be free and everybody can fork it and gives his contribution (or not!).

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17 June 2011
by Matteo Papadopoulos
3 Comments

SOLVED: Rails uninstall gem rake 0.9.2 from rvm

Again some time wasted to resolve a little problem with gems

I wanted to use the rake gem in it version 0.8.7 but in my rvm was also installed a 0.9.2 version.

I tryed to uninstall it with no success and the gem ask to run the

gem list -d rake
 rake (0.9.2, 0.8.7)
 Author: Jim Weirich
 Rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rake
 Homepage: http://rake.rubyforge.org
 Installed at (0.9.2): /Users/spleenteo/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p330@global
 (0.8.7): /Users/spleenteo/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p330

wtf is that @global? so, the only way to remove it is:

$ rvm use @global
$ gem uninstall rake
$ rvm use ree

this worked fine for me.