I just wanted to let everyone know that I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth quite yet. I’ve been extremely busy with school related stuff and work and getting ready for spring break! However, I do have an episode in the works that I hope to have ready by this weekend, if not sooner. I’ll be discussing Tubular, an awesome YouTube client/converter that has been in the beta stage for quite some time now and just saw an update this week.
Thanks to all of the regular listeners and contributers to the site. It’s great to get emails from everyone and feedback, so keep that coming. I also hope to be posting a few articles from listeners that have wrote in with awesome ideas, applescripts, automator actions, etc. Those will be going up once I type and edit some more, asking for approval of my changes, etc.
Of further note, if anyone is a member of a student organzation on any campus that is Mac oriented or if you have been involved in any MUG (Mac User Group) before, please send me an email so we can talk. I have contacted my campus’s Apple Representative and finally receieved a response that there is no such group available on my campus and we’ve been talking a bit, with the possibility of me heading one up. I’d just like to get some feedback and ideas from anyone else if they have went through anything similar before.
Okay, so this video is absolutely stunning. The guy does beatboxing, but also plays the flute at the same time. And not just barely playing the flute, but really well. So the combination is freakishly amazing and very entertaining. Well worth a couple minutes to witness this guy’s talent and tons of hard work.
In this episode I talk about four major applications for getting the most out of iTunes and your iPod. By all means, there are several more applications available than I could ever cover in this episode, but these are some applications that I really felt were important.
GimmeSomeTune is a very basic notification and playback control application. Visit website here.
TuneBar is unique because of the three playback applications I talk about here, this is the only one I know of that lets you search your library and select songs based upon more than just prev/next keys. Visit website here.
CoverSutra is by far the most beautiful of all of these apps and has a very nice feature set. Visit website here.
Tangerine is a program that lets you generate playlists based upon criteria such as length of the playlist, “generation pattern”, beats per minute, and beat intensity. Perfect for workout or studying playlists. Visit website here.
First off, let me apologize as I haven’t had time this past week to prepare for a podcast and won’t be getting one out until this next weekend at the earliest. Because of that, I’m going to post some of the news from this past week to keep everyone up-to-date.
Lionsgate has released several movies on iTunes this week. Some pretty popular titles such as “Terminator 2″ and “Basic Instinct” are now available. Read more here.
Interesting article about crashing an in-flight Tetris game. Very funny read. Basically the guy noticed that there were 4 levels to Tetris, he was able to set it to 5 by using another button pad and because of bad coding techniques (explained in the article), he was able to increment the level number to 127 and beyond, crashing the app because of some basic number representation theory ( adding one to 127 will go to -128 in a one bit signed char ). Read here.
A 66 year-old man freed his grandson from an anaconda. Wow. Read here.
Steve Jobs in deeper trouble because of back-dating stock options at Pixar, when he was still involved with that company. He was working at two separate companies and both are now involved in SEC investigations dealing with the stock options. Read here.
I found a widget this week that allows you to easily create torrent files. Basically, you just drag a folder, file, or group of files onto the widget and it will place a torrent on your Desktop for you. Extremely easy! Read here.
Once again, sorry for the lack of an episode this week, but be sure to check back next week when I plan on talking about several applications to enhance your iTunes experience on the Mac.
I haven’t tested this in other browsers, but from the error page I was directed too, this problem should affect ever Intel Mac user. Basically, Adobe claims that Shockwave Player hasn’t been ported to Intel yet, so you have to quit your browser and launch it again in Rosetta to be able to install and then use Shockwave. That’s ridiculous!
If anyone knows of any other way to accomplish this, I’d love to hear it. I need to use an interactive website for one of my classes and this method sucks since I have to quit and change settings just to use it and the browser eats up a lot of memory and is slower under Rosetta.
I wrote this C based program for my Data Structures Computer Science class this last fall as our last assignment. By far the most difficult program I’ve designed and coded to date and I’m very proud of it. At an overview of the program, you provide text files that have information about your music files. The text file is labeled something like “Depressing.plist” and every song in that file is in the “Depressing” genre. From there the program will match every song with the Boolean search you use. This can get extremely complicated, but a very basic example of ” 50 A Billy” would return a list of songs up to 50MB that are from an artist with the word “Billy” in it somewhere.
For those that aren’t comfortable using the Terminal, you won’t want to use this. However, for anyone else a little more technically inclined, you could very well use this program for its intended purpose. Basically, you have to provide a plain text file with a “.plist” extension ( I know this is reserved for preference files on Mac, but get over it - playlist is what it’s standing for here) that contains some basic info in a given order.
There is more information available in the PDF I’ve attached to this post, as it’s the same thing I had to write the program from. This program would be great for anyone interested in learning a bit more about data organization. The code is heavily documented showing how to use doubly-linked lists, red-black trees, hashing, and much more. And if you’re motivated, you could always read the program description and code one yourself, them compare with my code and executable. Sample input files are included.
There are a few podcasts out there for Mac developers, but the one that I’ve listened to before, Cocoa Radio, was horrible. So, when I heard about a new podcast for experienced developers that wanted to learn all there is to know about Cocoa, I was pretty excited.
Late Night Cocoa has just released its third episode detailing the use of web services with Cocoa. Overall this is an awesome podcast so far, getting support from major developers in the community as they guest on the show to talk about a specific subject that they are really knowledgeable about.
I apologize for being very rude and not backing up my comment with more reasoning. I had listened to a show or two almost a year ago and didn’t care for it. I have since listened to a few more episodes to make better judgement. While I still don’t care for the show as much, that should not stop anyone from listening on their own account. CocoaRadio has very pertinent information.
I took some time this afternoon to formally post more sample code online. There will always be more discussion about the code itself when I create an individual post here on the main part of the blog, but for those just looking for the code itself, I have added it under the software section. I hope to add more projects from my past Computer Sciences classes. The data structures I dealt with were pretty intense, at least for right now in my educational career, and I’m sure there are plenty others out there who would like to see some examples of AVL trees and all that. Anyway, a project for another day.
This application has just seen a 2.0 release and looks well for it! The company provides this basic description of Billings:
Billings 2 is an easy-to-use time and expense billing application for the Mac. With Billings, you can create and send great looking invoices or estimates in less than 5 minutes. Billings’ timesaving features include seamless integration with Apple Address Book for efficient use of existing contact information, quick and simple posting of task information to iCal for project scheduling, beautifully rendered, fully customizable PDF estimates and invoices, customizable fields for capturing and tracking information specific to you and your customers’ businesses, and automated tax calculations for 120 regions globally. A full featured, 21-day demo version of Billings 2 is available at www.billings2.com.
Basically, this application lets you easily and professionally keep track of all your tasks associated with projects and clients, and deliver beautiful invoices and estimates. That is a bit of a summary, but this is a powerful application. If you manage your own small business of any sort and don’t have this, you need it. Billings will help you improve your operation’s appearance and give much needed importance and credit as well. Impressions matter!
I have been reading the Harry Potter books since I was very small. Turns out that this summer, the final book, detailing Harry’s last year (essentially a senior in high school), should hit store shelves on July 21.
The book is entitled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’m really excited about the release and can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Let me know if you are a Harry Potter fan as well and what you’d like to see in the last installment of this amazing series.
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