Author: paschmann

Printing Stickers

paschmann

I recently purchased an Epson ET-8550 and a Cameo 4 for printing some fun stickers for myself, kids and friends. Here are a couple of things I have learned and some process related information I have been using.

General Process Flow:

Design in Illustrator, add inner and outer cut lines (on separate layers), ensure the border color has a bleed (if needed) -> export as SVG.

In Silhouette Connect, import SVG, Add registration marks, print out on sticker paper (Hide the cut lines layers). Apply any over laminate to the sticker sheet and load it into the Silhouette. Unhide the cut layers. And run the cutting using the Send function.

Cutting depth and force are very specific to the sticker paper and over laminate, so it’s a lot of trial and error.

Helpful Links: read more

Building a Passkit App

paschmann

Building an Apple PassKit app has been an interesting endeavor. Internally at SAP we recently built a small Business Card application which allows employees to create a digital business card, and subsequently generate a individual and customized wallet pass, allowing them to quickly retrieve it, without having to find the app, and open it on their device. Having a wallet pass lets users simply double tap the lock button, authenticate and see a collection of their passes.

Creating a pass has a unique requirement in that an application cannot simply create the pass directly on the device, or in the app. A pass needs to be generated server side, and signed with the appropriate signing certificate. In our case we utilized a small Typescript Node.JS server, which has a single API endpoint which accepts the information needed to populate the business card pass. The API then returns a signed .pkpass file. A .pkpass at its simplest form is simply a zipped bundle of assets and JSON files which describes the key fields and their respective values. read more

Open Source Project: Reach SDK

paschmann

Over the past few years I have found myself re-implementing and re-writing basic features of server, web, mobile or service components. Registration, Login, Forgot Password, Notifications, Search, Help, FAQ, Contact Us, Maps are just a few I can think of, where half way through the development everything seems familiar and I have a case of deja vu. No doubt I have written or implemented a library or service which performs this specific function.

While developing the Changd app I found myself in one of the deja vu moments while writing the email notification service, and decided to pause development, and fix the root cause. After multiple Github issues to support a variety of notification providers, I came across Apprise, a python library which supports multiple notification provides. Since there was not a Node.js implementation, I decided to use Apprise as inspiration and influence for a Node.js library which I aptly named “Reach”. read more