3.0 brings features such as events, pages, groups, uploading video, creating/editing/deleting photo albums, uploading photo/video to any album, “Like”, commenting, notes, notifications, news feed filtering and more. The UI has had a major overhaul and overall is much more put together and easier to use. See below for some screenshots.

In brief, all your files will appear larger (the larger the file, the larger it will be on Snow Leopard). For example, a 241.2MB file on Leopard is now 252.9MB on Snow Leopard. Technically, the files have not changed at all, and the number of bytes (basic unit of measurement) is exactly the same (252,916,507 in our example). What has changed is how Apple converts the number of bytes into KB, MB, GB, and TB.

I’m a Computer Science graduate and I consider myself very familiar with computer terminology and arithmetic. I’m ashamed to say that I had never heard that there are in fact two ways to measure bytes – a power of 1000 and a power of 2.

I’ve done a good bit of math based on numbers that are powers of 2. 2^9 is 512 and 2^10 is 1024. In Leopard and anywhere else I’ve seen the conversion, to convert bytes to KB you divide by 2^10, into MB by 2^20, and into GB by 2^30. However, according to Wiki (and not my college professors) a MB (Megabyte) is in fact 1000^2 bytes. It’s the prefix Mi(Mebi) byte that is 2^20 bytes.

What does this all boil down to? First, Apple’s calculation of file sizes will line up with their definition, but not how anyone else in the world (to my knowledge) measures files. Second, users won’t be so confused when they are looking at a “Get Info” window for a file, because the math is just moving decimal places now instead of diving by strange numbers such as 1024.

One final interesting note: Apple claims that you can free up to 7GB of hard drive space by upgrading to Snow Leopard (presumably by removing all that legacy PPC code). 7GB ( 1000 ^ 3 * 7 = 7,000,000,000 bytes) in Snow Leopard is significantly less than it was in Leopard ( 2 ^ 30 * 7 = 7,526,192,768 bytes) . So, if Apple hadn’t changed it’s conversion scheme, they could have only claimed that Snow Leopard in fact freed up ( 7,000,000,000 / 2 ^ 30 ) 6.52GB. Just to put that into perspective.

Wikipedia – Gibibyte
MacWorld UK – Snow Leopard’s New Maths
Apple Snow Leopard

Note that Snow Leopard is the first Intel-only OS release. If you are running an older Mac with PPC processors (such as a G3, G4, or G5) Snow Leopard will not work on your Mac.

I’ll be grabbing my upgrade copy later this evening and I’ll report back for everyone.

From the IconFactory and DS Media Labs (IconFactory is behind Twitterific for Mac & iPhone, as well as the wonderful Frenzic for Mac & iPhone) comes Ramp Champ.  The app is essentially a carnival or fair without the warm weather and funnel cakes.  There are 4 different “games” loaded with the app, all of which are based on the simple game of flicking a ball up the ramp to knock something down and get points.  Good old fashioned carnival games.

The levels are all very distinct, with a lot of thought put into each one (and gorgeously designed).  There are goals to meet to earn trophies, and as you rack up points you earn tickets.  Then you can use your tickets to buy souveniers, and there are a ton of fun cute souvenirs to buy.  I personally love the attention to this part of the game – when you view your purchased souveneirs, there is a quaint little description with each.  And the little blurb is hilariously funny most of the time – very reminiscent of buying items in the Sims games.

The level of polish on this game is amazing.  The graphics are stunning, game play is perfect, and the sound is a great touch.  There developers were smart and made the game extensible, as there are currently two additional in-application level packs available, each for $0.99.  I already purchased one, the pack for “Molar Madness” and “Happy Place”.  So far, “Molar Madness” is by far my favorite – I’m hooked.

I highly recommend this app at the $1.99 price point, it could have easily been placed at $3.99 or $4.99 and sold as well I believe, simply because of the high quality.  I use a Mac because the software is usually better and that same philosophy applies to iPhone software – especially because iPhone apps tend to be less quality overall, by sheer volume.  Finding one that is as well put together as this is worth more money.

Check out Ramp Champ today!

Shaun’s motivation for developing Fever:

What if, instead of mentally processing hundreds of headlines your feed reader did that heavy—we’re talking pre-coffee—lifting and just told you what everyone was collectively talking about? And what if it weighted those “hot” topics and aggregated the ensuing discussions in your feeds together?

Fever is very different from any other RSS readers out there for several reasons.  The most interesting (and yet useful) feature of Fever is where the application lives.  To throw a buzz word around, Fever lives in the “Cloud”.  There is a relatively painless install that gets a copy of Fever on your web server.  And because Fever lives in the cloud, it can always be up to date and stay in sync no matter what device you view it on.  I could end my review there, but I’ll continue.

Installation

Installation couldn’t be simpler (unless Shaun could somehow setup a database on your server for you, which he can’t).  You register for an account on http://feedafever.com/, download a couple files and then throw them up on your server.  Then, let Fever connect to your MySQL database and make sure all is good to go before directing you through paypal and installing itself on your server.  Then you’re ready to import feeds in OPML format from your current news reader.  Seamless install for a web app.  30 USD gets you 1.x upgrades, which happen automatically I might add.  Point to take home, Shaun has set a new standard here.  I was impressed by the installation process alone.

Completely New Way of Looking at your News

I have tons and tons of RSS feeds.  And frankly, I don’t get that much out of them anymore because there is just so much to look at and I don’t have enough time in my day.  Shaun’s innovation hit home here.  First, your feeds are essentially organized into two classes, kindling and sparks.  Kindling are the feeds that you are hot about and don’t want to miss any action.  You can easily get unread counts and organize by group if you wish.  Sparks are feeds that essentially throw in duplicate data.

For my Mac news, I subscribe to several sites, which pretty much post the same thing over and over.  Before, this was a huge pain, but with Fever, it’s actually a plus.  If there are 5 sites that have posted almost the same thing, then obviously it’s important.  So it’s “hot”, maybe around 101F.  I’ll see a grouping of those 5 related articles under one heading, and I can view whatever ones I wish for further reading.  Taking that concept, I want to place feeds that “add fire” to my Kindling in Sparks, reinforcing what I really want to see.  So when I look at the “Hot” area, I see related articles grouped by temperature.  The more buzz on the internet over whatever, the hotter it will be and it will be higher on my list.  Truly remarkable thinking.

iPhone

Shaun took the time to make a truly stellar iPhone interface for the Fever app as well.  For me, this was just icing on the cake.  I have tried so many RSS readers on my iPhone and was disappointed time after time.  I mainly wanted something that would keep my read items in sync between my Mac and iPhone.  Since Fever is a hosted application online in the “cloud”, it can just keep chugging away checking for updates and when I launch my bookmarked Fever on my iPhone, I get a nice interface and get the syncing for free.

Extras

Shaun provides a nice bookmarklet that sets in your browser’s bookmarks bar so when visiting a page you want to subscribe to in Fever, just click the bookmarklet and choose a group to add it to (or to your sparks) and off you go.  Clean and simple.

There is also a beautiful icon to go with Fluid.app (now free), an application that basically creates a super simple Safari window with it’s own menu bar and icon that sits in your dock.  Nice thing about this is you get the gorgeous icon in your dock, including amazingly enough, a dock unread count.  Crazy.

And to make sure that Fever is more up to date than you are, Shaun even provides you with a short snippet to add to your server’s cron manager, so you can have your feeds update every 15 minutes with ease.  Fever will keep checking even if you’re not around and when you load the page, you’re all ready to go.  That is the last piece of the puzzle for me, I love it.

For More…

I highly encourage you to check out http://feedafever.com/ for more information.  There is a lot of great information along with a quick demo video to get you running.  This was an exceptional 30 bucks spent on my part and I hope that the web gets wind of this soon.  Shaun has a great product on his hands.

Taking that one step further, Hive Logic has a couple great posts showing off some truly gorgeous monospaced fonts.  Personally, I’m in love with Monofur, Droid Sans Mono, Inconsolata, and Anonymous Pro.

Check out the two related posts here for a total of 11 great monospaced fonts.

Top 10 Programming Fonts

Anonymous Pro: A programming font with style

You will have access to all the files on your iDisk on the go.  Features such as sharing are available, and you’ll even be able to view others public iDisk, which is a nice touch.

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/whats-new/

I’m slightly upset about this for two reasons. First off, the updated design had grown on me and I was used to it. Moving it back down to where it was in Safari 3.x ( and most other browsers, besides Google Chrome ) is time I have to retrain myself. Second, I was convinced by the initial argument. The controls ( refresh, home, stop, even the progress indicator and the URL itself ) are tab specific. They change based on what tab you are in. Therefore, it makes sense to have the tab be the top-level container element with the controls placed inside it.

All that said maybe Apple’s market research gave it good information and it was able to make the right informed decision.  Personally, I would like the hidden preference setting to have my tabs back up top again, but that option was removed in the final shipping version.

The top 3 applications winning awards in the Mac showcase category were Versions, Things, and Billings 3.  All of these apps are simply astounding.

I use Billings 3 for my freelance work and I save a lot of time and look more professional because of it.

Versions is slick, but I haven’t come around to purchasing this one as I’m handy enough with the command line to use version control the old school way.

And hands down the best Mac app around (and for iPhone too) would have to be Cultured Code’s application, Things.  If you want a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use personal organizer/GTD application, you have to check out Things.  Check out my review of Things or an interview with lead Things developer Jurgen Schweizer here.

A link to the article detailing the full list of winners can be found here.

Notebook Lineup

Apple has put itself in a very nice position with its current notebook offering.  The three sizes of MacBook Pro are all very nice machines, with great tech specs and those special features that make a Pro laptop from Apple.  With the integrated lineup and price drop across the board, Apple is making an aggressive move.

The 3 year old Macbook design is showing its age and doesn’t really resemble anything else sold as a Mac.  The iMac, Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro lineups make a cohesive design.  Only the Macbook and Mac Mini stand out still in plastic.  I expect to see somewhat updated designs to better match the rest of the Apple family, or possibly the removal of the two products altogether, replaced with something else entirely.  Maybe that will be the news at MacWorld 2010?

Snow Leopard

I somewhat expected Apple to have some killer feature that we would all want in Snow Leopard, something they had help back until the last minute to build up marketing hype right before the big preview.  However, we received no such incentive this time around.

That being said, the 29 dollar upgrade price is very attractive, and is great news for the Apple community.  A cheap upgrade price point will entice most users to upgrade and since users will make the switch quicker, developers will invest the time to make their applications take full use of Snow Leopard only technologies.  It’s a great plan that should shore up the Mac foundation for some years to come.

The refinements made to Snow Leopard certainly have come about to some extent from lessons learned developing Cocoa Touch.  QuickTime X is a prime example of rewriting a Foundation level framework into a modern and robust API – something already tackled in Cocoa Touch.  It’ll be interesting to see what advancements made in Snow Leopard might make their way into iPhone OS 3.1 or later.

iPhone OS 3.0

Stating the obvious, this is a huge update.  The developer API has seen major advancements, opening up the device to developers so they can innovate and surprise users even more than before.  The biggest news I took away from the iPhone OS announcement concerned AT&T.  Evidently AT&T doesn’t feel the need to keep up with Apple’s progress.  I’m just as annoyed and peeved as every other AT&T iPhone user out there: I’m waiting for MMS and tethering to come just like the next guy.  However, I’m almost relieved as well.  With AT&T slipping behind, surely Apple can use that as leverage in future talks and either get some cool things from AT&T this time next year, or open up the platform to more providers here in the US and get the iPhone platform really off the ground.

Conclusion

If you have any comments about the keynote, I’d love to hear them.  Personally, I’ll be picking up a family pack of Snow Leopard soon after it’s available, I’m already using Safari 4 final release to type this post, and I’ve reserved my 32GB Black iPhone 3GS to pickup on D-Day.

Turns out that if you absolutely need Java 1.6 (to use Limewire, for example), it is most likely already installed on your Mac, just not being used by default.  To set it as the default, open Java Preferences in Applications -> Utilities -> Java and drag Java SE 6.0 to the top of each table shown.  That’s it.

Of note, Apple has only release Java SE 6.0 for 64 Intel Macs.  So if you have a Core Duo Mac or earlier, you are stuck with Java SE 5.0 and earlier.

For those having trouble setting Java SE 6 as the default VM on their Intel Mac, see the comments below for a user’s trick. Involves the Terminal and I guarantee nothing.

I did this for the first few, but as it took about 3.5 hours per project, it was a pain to schedule, and there was a lot of wasted time at night that my MacBook could have been rendering, except that after the project finished, I couldn’t figure out how to get iDVD to start on a second one.

I started writing an AppleScript to automate this, and then decided to just Google for one as someone surely had thought of this before me.  Turns out there is a very nice script that allows allows you to choose the iDVD projects you want to burn, and where you want to save the disc images.  Then, away iDVD goes.

Very nice script to have.  Mac OS X Hints.com

Turns out that you can quickly enable this feature by copying a few files according to this tip from Mac OS X Hints.com.

% echo “source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/rc” > ~/.tcshrc
% echo “source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/login” > ~/.login
% echo “source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/logout” > ~/.logout

As far as I know, this doesn’t affect any of your settings, but I didn’t look through these provided sample shell configuration files to make sure. All I know is that I can now TAB to auto-complete and nothing else has been broken so far.

With Layers, you can create a Photoshop PSD file and then go in and manage all the layers within. Composite PNG images, or just a bunch of individual images are also possible. Support for multiple monitors, keyboard shortcuts, and a Menu Bar application make this seem like a well thought out little tool.

If you have need to dissect your website, software, or just for fun, you should check out Layers. It’ll set you back $15 USD.

Layers App

Little Snapper

The interview provides a little insight into the design process behind Things, starting your own company, and developing Mac software.  I especially found it interesting that Jürgen was a teacher and researcher in mathematics for several years, before coming back to the Mac with the introduction of OS X.

And if you haven’t heard of Things, you should check out my review here.  It’s a great application that has streamlined my work, school, and personal tasks so that I’m more productive and reliable in all aspects of my life.  One of the most polished Mac applications I’ve run across, and it’s only at 1.0 as of writing this!

Things Review

Things

Cultured Code

MacApper

The fact that I have had so many approach me, with almost the identical question raises a very valid point. Just where does one find the best documentation and sample code to get started in Cocoa development? With so many developers making the switch to iPhone and then the Mac (and hopefully Cappuccino for web), I think this post will only gain value as time goes on.

So I have compiled a list of extremely useful resources. If you spent enough time googling, you would certainly run across these sites yourself. However, I’m saving you something very precious: time. These vary in range of beginner programmer to advanced genius, so there is a little something for everyone. Keep in mind that as of writing this, official publications on Objective-C 2.0 are just barely in print, and anything for iPhone is still in the works, as the NDA keeping publishers from releasing books was just lifted a week ago.

• THE doc on the Cocoa language, from Apple, HTML or PDF
• http://developer.apple.com – Great place to start for tutorials, etc in general
• http://cocoablogs.com/ – List of all the top Cocoa developers blogs
• http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl – THE Cocoa message boards
• http://forums.cocoaforge.com/index.php – Another great Cocoa forum, more advanced
• http://inexdo.com/CocoaNav – Wonderful little piece of software for viewing Cocoa headers (information on classes and heirachy)

The finale comes with “Cocoa Programming Mac OS X 3rd Edition“. It assumes very little programming knowledge and yet contains a good 80% of what you need to know when designing a full Cocoa programming. Key design concepts are explained in great detail and it is a wonderful resource.

If you have anything to add to this list, please leave a comment on this post or send me an email!

Go through the ways that browsers tell websites what type of browser it is. Including masquerading as other browsers, the browser wars of the 90s, the Gecko/Firefox/Camino/Gnome camp and the WebKit/Safari/Konquerer/Nokia/iPhone goodness that we have today. Very interesting read and nice to know that:

And Apple built Safari, and used KHTML, but added many features, and forked the project, and called it WebKit, but wanted pages written for KHTML, and so Safari called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5, and it got worse.

Read article here.

The framing of Apple’s ads is not about either/or. Not Mac or Windows, a choice between two rival products, like Democrat/Rebuplican, Chevy/Ford, Coke/Pepsi. The framing instead is special vs. regular. Not Coke vs. Pepsi but Coke vs. “soda”.

This is a very important point to be had. While Apple is advertising a superior product that distinguishes your computing experience from the norm, Microsoft is advertising more of the same. More of the same that consumers are already familiar with. The larger picture is that if you want to be generic and blend in with the crowd and have a mediocre computing experience, then having a PC is for you. However, if you want to have that extra special product, and who doesn’t want the Sirius satellite radio or the leather seats in a new car, then the Mac platform is right for you.

I think John’s insight into the differing marketing strategies for these two companies is refreshing. Read the complete article at Daring Fireball.

Espresso is still in beta testing but is slated for a November 2008 release. I’m very excited to get my hands on this software. Web design is such a tedious process, and while Coda made a valiant attempt at integrating and relieving the stress, it still lacks the poise and elegance that I’m positive MacRabbit will deliver. If you are interested in being the first to know about more MacRabbit news, you can signup at the bottom of the info page.

Also, if you are passionate about a particular language being supported in Espresso, I would encourage you to get in contact with MacRabbit for more information on becoming a “Sugar Daddy” (or Mommy). Developers releasing plugins (called “Sugars”) adding support for a language gets the prestigious title as well as a free copy of Espresso. More details on that here.

Espresso

CSSEdit

Coda from Panic Software

Mac Fanatic Coda Review

In the iTunes toolbar, there are three buttons. From left to right: List View, Grid View, and Cover Flow View. If you want to see your album artwork while in List View, in the very top left of the list, there is a small “disclosure” triangle that almost looks like a “now playing” icon on the iPhone and such. Click this and the album artwork displays inline with all your songs in List View.

It’s the same functionality as the previous view, just better implemented as far as I can tell. Can be useful at times, because you can still see your album artwork and have the list sorted by Date Added, for example. You cannot do that in Grid View because all the songs per Album, or Artist, etc, are grouped together.

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: 64-Bits

Flickr user Balakov likes to take photos using Lego figures.  And not just any photos, Balakov actually recreates famous paintings, photographs, and scenes in painstakingly detail.  The attention to detail in his work is truly amazing and the result is wonderful.  I especially love the recreations of Star Wars scenes and the way Balakov has even went past the series and created scenes such as one depicting a Storm Trooper with a brief case, after the fall of the Empire.  Wonderful and truly unique work.

Lego Album on Flickr

This service looks to directly compete with current market offerings such as Meebo, which allow users to login to multiple chat services through a web interface, without installing software.  Sadly, because AOL has built the AIM application using Flash, it is not usable on the iPhone or iPod Touch.  I recommend either Meebo for a web based application, or using MobileChat or AIM as an application for the 2.0 iPhone Software from the iTunes Application Store.

AIM on the web

Meebo

MobileChat for iPhone/Touch

AIM for iPhone/Touch

SearchMe.com

I had put my camera in USB mode a few months ago and placed photos on there using the Finder, so I could take the SD card somewhere with me and have the photos with me.  When I was finished, I used the camera’s built-in “Delete All Files” option and everything seemed fine.  However, when importing subsequent pictures in iPhoto, there was empty boxes after all the pictures I had taken, when looking at the camera.  And after iPhoto was done importing the pictures, it could not delete those empty blocks.

I had just lived with this, until today.  I was looking online on how to format an SD card, and had a wonderful idea: I would try Apple’s own Image Capture utility already on my Mac.  Sure enough, I launched the application, clicked the ‘Download Some’ button to actually see the photos (noticing that the filenames started with an underscore, probably the root of all this evil) and easily deleted them from within the application.

I’d imagine using the Terminal to view the hidden files and deleting them would have worked as well.  Nothing showed up in the Finder, but that was probably related to the weird filenames as well.

Hope this quick tip helps someone!

Create a document with your text layer. Duplicate that layer and flip that vertically, pulling the duplicate layer down so it is a reflection under the first. To feather this second lower layer out to make this effect more impressive, use the Square Marquee utility, with a feathering setting of 10px, to select the bottom half of the second layer and then hit delete. This effectively removes most of the reflection, and you can now play with the opacity of that layer to fine tune the effect even more.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this approach and it makes it so much easier to accomplish this task.

Sebastian Sulinski Design

However, unlike Latitude, Mecca is being developed by the guys who make Fluid, the Mac app that lets you save web pages as individual ‘apps’ to click and run from your Dock. If you’ve been paying attention, Safari 4 will have this exact functionality built right in. Seems like the guys from Fluid have decided to take their product another direction to stay ahead of Apple.

Check out the Mecca teaser.

Check out the Latitude teaser.

I’ve already touched on the biggest impact for users: interface improvement. 280Slides looks and acts just like a real desktop application. All the standard keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste and undo/redo are supported right within the web app itself. Take a minute to tour the application and see how it compares to other online presentation applications. It feels more like Apple’s own Keynote, right?

Developers have even more reason to be excited. The whole Javascript/HTML/CSS design process to manipulate the DOM is abstracted to a higher layer with the introduction of Objective-J. The Objective-J language allows developers to write code in a style more like writing for traditional desktop applications. The developer doesn’t directly interact with the DOM or style the page with CSS. Instead, Objective-J itself manages all the views and drawing the objects to screen. More so, the Cappuccino framework provides functionality that is traditionally lacking from other Javascript frameworks, such as:

• copy/paste
• undo/redo
• document management and archiving
• vector graphics
• animations

This is a tremendous advantage for developers, allowing focus to be placed on the unique aspects of the web application itself. Cappuccino will be open-source and available soon, so keep a lookout at the Objective-J website. I think that we will see some amazing applications begin to rise in the future and this might possibly fuel a new era of apps on the web.

Also be sure to check out a newer article about SproutCore, a similar Javascript framework already released and in use in Apple's MobileMe platform.

Objective-J website

280Slides Application

Ajaxian Interview with 280 North team

[Pictures from MacWorld]

Cool features such as placing a link to a picture or easily inserting your current location with a single tap of your finger, will make the iPhone version very pleasant to use and I easily agree with Dan from MacWorld in predicting Twitterific for iPhone being the single most sought after app from the AppStore when it launches later this summer.

Read more at MacWorld

However, we should take this time to mourn the loss of a very dear friend: iCards.

iCards was introduced with the introduction of iTools (the precursor to .Mac) back in 2000, in the OS 9 days. The service has remained practically the same, and has always been my favorite way of sending cards to all of my friends and family online. MobileMe will see the discontinuation of iCards. Everyone should take a moment of silence to commemorate the passing of an age.

My simple question is whether I should upgrade to the v2.0 release that’s been out for quite awhile now? It has a few features, mainly an iPhone pepper, which I would like, but is there any other compelling reason to fork over the money?

I’d just like to hear some thoughts from other Mint users out there. 1.x seems to be suiting me just fine as it is.

Latitude is a powerful, content-centered browser for Mac OS X Leopard and above. Its core functionality is designed to make your browsing experience as straightforward as possible, without the limitations and rusty mold of existing browser conventions. Today, we don’t parse hypertext, but watch videos, keep tabs on news, slide through vacation photos and much more. Latitude is geared towards providing you with the tools to finally make the best of the wealth of content that is the World Wide Web. No manual required!

Latitude first came into being as a concept and list of features from Sebastiaan, on the Cocoia Blog. Sebastiaan detailed a list of features for the next generation browser and provided mockups for a working interface design. The idea sparked great interest in the Mac community and shortly thereafter development began in earnest on the project.

For more information about the Latitude browser and the team, visit the Latitude website. For updates on Latitude’s progress and other ramblings from Sebastiaan himself, visit his blog, Cocoia.

Read the interview with the Latitude development team, exclusive to Mac Fanatic, on the full post, here.

Everyone: First off, how do you use a browser? Are you a facebook junkie, casual surfer, or YouTube insomniac?

Team: Practically everything, thats part of the idea behind Latitude. All of the current browsers offer a flat experience not tailored to any of the new features of the internet. We want to change that.

Everyone: Can you safely say that you’ve tried just about every Mac browser available today?

Leo: No, I haven’t tried camino or Shiira.
Seb: I have tried them all except icab.
Danny: Same as Seb I have used them all bar iCab and omni web. But I’m sticking with Camino until Latitude is out.

Everyone: Do you feel that My Dream App has or will influence the development of Latitude? The whole process so far seems very similar. A mockup was made and developers are onboard to create the next big thing.

Team: No, we intend to build an application that you can use at the end of it. We aren’t a competition of any kind we are merely keeping the design process relatively open.

Everyone: Do you believe the Gecko engine to be a viable development option on the Mac today?

Danny and Leo: No not really. Webkit makes it so easy to create a fast, accurate, and standards compliant browser, that Gecko doesnt really come into the equation.

Everyone: Do you believe in a plug-in design for a browser, such as Firefox, or do you think a browser should provide most user’s needs exceptionally well and leave it at that?

Team: While plugins are great in some contexts, they shouldn’t be necessary for a properly designed application. For Latitude, we are completely open to suggestions but at the moment the only plugin support will be browser plugins (like flash) and input managers (such as 1password).

Everyone: Do you believe that the project will gain enough momentum to be a long-term success? The Mac browser market seems fairly saturated already. Also, the key to keeping a great 3rd party Mac app seems to be innovating features quicker than Apple can adopt them in their own applications.

Team: While we agree the market is completely saturated for old style browsers we think we can open up an entirely new one with a revolutionary browser. This, we believe, will be our key to long term success. We disagree that having a great app is just about iterating faster than apple, the key is simply having a great application.

Everyone: What is your primary browser? What would be your favorite feature from this browser and how would you integrate it into Latitude?

Danny: Camino, I genuinely don’t have a favorite feature, hence the need for Latitude.
Seb: Safari, its simplicity and straight forwardness. We will try to keep this the same in Latitude while adding more functionality.
Leo: Safari, (jokingly) the bookmarks bar. This will make an appearance in Latitude’s sidebar.

Everyone: What do you believe to be the strongest trait in OS X today? And how will that influence the development of Latitude?

Danny and Leo: The new improvements in cocoa such as Core Animation, these will feature heavily in Latitude.
Seb: The finder sidebar.

Everyone: What is your current Mac and how long have you been an Apple user?

Danny: I run a Core Duo Macbook at the moment as Im saving up Seb’s rig, and Ive been a user for 1 year 7 months, so Im a bit of a switcher.
Leo: MacBook Core Duo as well. And about 2 years.
Seb: Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Powermac G4, MacBook CoreDuo…. *at this point Danny and Leo hang up the skype call*, I have been using for 2 years.

Everyone: Just for fun, what will be the first iPhone application you will place on your phone?

Danny: Frenzic.
Seb: Candy bar mobile.
Leo: I don’t have one, thanks for rubbing it in. *laughs*

Sebastiann: When I first saw your post about Latitude, I imagined this to be just another mockup of an app that was never to be. Did you feel the same way, or did you expect development to begin in earnest?

I just expected it to communicate to the people who make browsers in the hope that it would give them some decent ideas. I never expected a dedicated app to start being built so soon.

Sebastiaan: In an interview on Browsersphere, you mentioned that the Flock interface is too busy and Shiira doesn’t add any new features. However, a lot of the suggested features seem to be existing ones, only implemented in a more clutter-free way. Are there features that don’t exist in any form being developed, or is the focus of the project to modernize the Mac browser?

Both, there are lots of features that will be augmented but there are other, new, features that are simply required to give a better user experience.

Sebastiann: In the same interview on Browsersphere, you drew a few comparisons with iTunes. I love iTunes just as much as the next guy, but do you ever feel that maybe Mac developers spend too much time trying to imitate the iTunes interface?

Yes I think a lot of developers try to mimic the interface and simply do it badly by trying to force too many concepts. For our application it makes perfect sense.

Sebastiaan: When do you expect the official Latitude website to be live?

Now! latitudebrowser.com

Sebastiaan: Is the project going to open-source?

No, but the design process will be fairly open and we welcome any help. But thats more of a question that you should be asking Danny and Leo.

Sebastiaan: How can Mac Fanatic readers get involved?

By sending us lots and lots of money . In all seriousness you are welcome to get in touch with the team through the website latitudebrowser.com, about any talents you can offer, but please don’t get in touch just to say you can test the app. We are no where near that stage. But stay tuned.

Pangea’s Brian Greenstone says:

My only concern is that everyone and their brother is jumping on the iPhone app bandwagon, so it may make it difficult to market a product when there are a zillion others coming out at the same time.

I think that Brian brings up an excellent point. There will be a ton of apps available relatively close to the iPhone OS v2.0 release, and customers will most likely be flooded with choices and some great apps will be temporarily lost in all the fuss. However, it will be a perfect time for bloggers, such as myself, to create “Top 20 new iPhone Applications” articles.

However, someone was thinking at Apple and created an easy way for site administrators to set a custom icon to appear when users bookmark their page. You can read more into the details here, but basically you create a png image (some sources say 158×158 is much crisper and still works) at 57×57 and upload it to your root directory (of the web documents, not of the server itself) with the name “apple-touch-icon.png”.

So now if you add a bookmark to your home screen for MacFanatic.net (or any other page), there will be a distinctive glassy logo (the rounded corners and glassy effect are applied by the phone, so the image above isn’t exactly what it will look like) to help you out!

I might as well start off by discussing the single largest announcement during the keynote: the MacBook Air. I personally have been very unimpressed with ultraportable computers in the past and didn’t see Apple trying to get a piece of this market, even though there had been a lot of speculation about a possible release. However, after seeing this beauty, I simply want one.

The MacBook Air is beautifully designed. That’s a good start in and of itself. What gets me excited about this beauty? It weighs just 3lbs vs the 5lbs for my first generation MacBook. The battery life is rated at 5 full hours. The screen is the same 13.3″ widescreen in my MacBook, but it is LED backlit and therefore brighter and quicker to turn on. The keyboard is backlit and the same as the wonderful one found on the MacBook and iMac. Need I say more?

One feature that warrants closer inspection is the larger, multitouch trackpad. I’m immensely curious as to see how well this works and how easy it will be for developers to support this feature in their applications. So far it looks very promising, but I won’t truly know until I play with a MacBook Air myself.

A few problems and concerns I have about this lovely laptop: there is no user replaceable battery. I’m not concerned about having to take the baby in to an Apple Store and getting a new battery in 2 years (I’m hard on batteries, I’m on the computer way too much). What does disappoint me is the fact that carrying around an extra charged battery is no longer an option. That’s my only complaint there. I’m also slightly sad about seeing the optical drive go. I understand that it was a necessary design option, but I would have liked to have seen the $99 Apple External SuperDrive bundled with the computer, not packaged as an optional accessory. And while we’re talking about the external drive, does it strike anyone that for $99 you can get a SuperDrive now? I’m hoping that it works on just a regular USB port and that the one on the MacBook Air isn’t a special powered port. I can see buying one of these as a cheap and wonderful upgrade for older Macs. Or for having a second optical drive on my laptop.

The January iPhone update is fairly disappointing in some respects. If Apple hadn’t have included multiple recipients for SMS messaging, I might have went crazy. However, there is still no MMS support (texting pics or vids), as well as a huge long list I posted in my MacWorld 2008 Wishlist. I’m just disappointed and can only hope that yet another update will make the phone more unusable. And of course the iPhone SDK is exciting in and of itself.

iTunes Movie Rentals is a nice addition, albeit not exactly the scheme I had been hoping for. However, 2.99 for Library title rentals and 3.99 for New Release rentals is very competitive. You have 30 days to begin watching the video and 24 hours after starting to finish it. I wish that the 24 hour window was about a day longer, but I imagine that this was a stretch as it is. Also of note is that the Apple TV is the only way to get HD rentals and they can’t be transferred to your Mac.

There were a few other smaller announcements, such as Time Capsule which is essentially an Airport base station with a built in hard drive for network backups, the updated Apple TV, updated iPod Touch and more. Overall, I don’t see why investors would be upset with the announcements as Apple simply can’t keep topping the previous keynote every time. Looking back at my predictions, there was no updated Mac Mini, Cinema Displays, new Mac PC commercial, or a Leopard Docks area added to the Mac Downloads page.

Anything I miss?

Fast Enumeration

Cocoa now implements a foreach() type of loop, which cleans up code tremendously. Iterating over an array or dictionary is pretty common stuff and being able to condense code from:

NSEnumerator *e = [myArray objectEnumerator];
id item;
while ( item = [e nextObject] ) {
NSLog(@"%@", [item printSomething]);
}

to a more elegant:

id item;
for ( item in myArray ) {
NSlog(@"%@", [item printSomething]);
}

Properties

Properties are a wonderful addition to Cocoa and essentially eliminate writing basic accessor methods for your objects (setters and getters).

@interface Song : NSObject { 
NSString* title; 
Artist* artist; 
NSDate* dateAdded; 
} 
@property(readwrite, copy)NSString* title; 
@property(readwrite, copy)Artist* artist; 
@property(readwrite, copy)NSDate* dateAdded; 
@implementation Song @synthesize title, artist, dateAdded;

The ObjC 2.0 compiler gives you extreme flexibility with properties, beyond just the basic use of accessors here. You can specify a property to be readonly instead of readwrite, or to retain or assign instead of copy.

@dynamic title; -(NSString* )title { }

The above would require you to implement the method yourself, letting the compiler know you are handling that.

NSTreeNode

Not a feature of the ObjC language, but certainly a nice addition to help using NSTreeController. NSTreeNode is a wrapper object which aids in creating trees. Just create a NSTreeNode and add other NSTreeNode objects to the -mutableChildNodes array and you are on your way to a tree. Binding this tree to a NSTreeController is relatively simple as well. Of note, remember that if you are using NSOutlineView delegate methods, you receive a NSTreeNode object now, so you must use -representedObject on “id item”.

A further note, when using the “selection” controller key on a NSTreeController, the controller returns an array of NSTreeControllerProxyObjects. Either call -self on the NSTreeControllerProxyObject or when using bindings (binding a second NSTreeController to the “selection” of the first one) remember to use “selection” with model key path of “self”. I don’t believe this is documented anywhere, but using “self” clears up a whole world of heartache and gives you the actual NSTreeNode instead of the NSTreeControllerProxyObject.

Interface Builder

It took some getting used to, but recall that you have to drop a NSObject (blue cube) from the IB Library and set the custom class to initiate an object in IB 3. The old method of “Initiate Class” or whatever from the menu isn’t available. Also remember that IB Palettes don’t work with IB 3, you will need to find (or create) IB Plugins.

Core Animation

Recall that the -orderIn and -orderOut options in IB are for adding and removing subviews to the selected view in IB (-setWantsLayer:YES). So NSTabView will not magically transition views in and out unless you are programatically creating new tabs and such.

That was just a quick list of the headache I endured over the last few weeks adjusting to Leopard and mainly spending lots of time with trees in Cocoa.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about ObjC 2.0 additions, whether it’s garbage collection or something more minute!

• Official iPhone SDK
• iPhone Software v1.1.3
  • Text Messaging Improvements
    • Support for MMS (Multimedia – Pics and Vids)
    • Support for multiple text message recipients
    • Preference to keep text message recipient list ordered by date or sorted manually
    • Support for text input in landscape mode anywhere, not just in Safari (Would be awesome for texting)
  • Mail Improvements
    • Easier multiple message deletion in Mail
    • Let me set a background on the phone on the home screen, not just black
    • Support for flagging of mail messages via IMAP
    • Syncing of Notes with Leopard Mail
  • Phone Improvements
    • Preference to always show the favorites when I tap on the Phone App, instead of last used (Recents, etc)
    • Ability to clear just my missed calls in the Recents list, instead of clearing all Recent calls
    • Ability to edit contact info from Favorites in Phone.app, instead of having to find the contact under Contacts and edit it there
  • General Additions and Features
    • Ability to save images from Safari in a special album on the phone
    • If current hardware supports it, let me take videos with my iPhone
    • AIM, Yahoo, and MSN chat support
    • More games for iPhone that are not web based
• iTunes Movie Rentals
  • Hopefully this will be affordable
  • Would be amazing if there was a “Rent-to-Own” option, pay 3.99 for a rental and then apply that credit towards purchase of the movie
• Update to Leopard Mail letting me have more Dock icon badges telling me unread RSS items
• New PC-Mac commercial, because they are so fun
• Amazing stats on iPhone, iPod, and Mac sales during the holiday season
• Addition of Leopard Docks to the Mac OS X Downloads page (just like Apple added Widgets)
• Macbook Pro updates – serious redesign as it retains the PowerBook G4 form factor
• New Cinema Displays
• Seriously updated Mac Mini

So, that’s an extensive list of what I’d really like to see happen at MacWorld here in a few weeks. Of course, I’m well aware that some or most of these won’t come true. I’m actually fairly surprised that so much of the things I wanted to see at MacWorld were related to the iPhone. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
Overall I think MacWorld will be fairly exciting. We definitely won’t be seeing updates to iLife or iWork and it took forever for that to materialize last year and it’s just not time for an update. I’m not really sure what the “One More Thing…” could be either, but that’s half the fun!

And finally, I’m also very interested to see if there will be demos of the first wave of Leopard-only applications at MacWorld. Delicious Library and TextMate are two that come to my mind that would be the most exciting to demo (and I believe I read that Wil Shipley will indeed be giving a demo).

Did I leave anything out that you just know will be at MacWorld in January? Leave a comment on this post!

HUD (Heads Up Display) are those gorgeous black windows that have started popping up all over Mac applications. Especially in iPhoto and Aperture, as well as Pages and more, these beautiful windows serve a specific purpose. Apple went so far as to finally include a HUD window in Interface Builder, so that developers don’t have to use a hacked together version (Interface Designers like uniformity, so it is better when everyone is using the same thing vs 15 different versions of the same window, which is the case now). So, I naturally assumed that Apple also provided HUD versions of buttons, lists, and more, to match this window.

I was wrong.

I can create this nice window with no effort now, but as soon as I place something on it, it looks stupid. The simple screenshots above illustrates the effect. (Also notice the differences in the window itself. See how big of a difference there is just on the lines at the bottom right of the window where you resize? Now imagine that every time I had to write an application, I had to make this from scratch. With all the Mac developers out there, you can imagine that there are lots of variations). I sure hope that Apple fixes this soon and doesn’t wait until 10.6 and a new window style to add this for developers.

# Spring-Loaded Dock
Items in the Dock are spring-loaded. Just drag a file, hover over any application in the Dock, and press the Space bar — the application opens instantly. For example, to add a picture to your iPhoto library, just drag the image file and hover over the iPhoto icon in the Dock. Press the Space bar, and once iPhoto opens, you can drag the image into your iPhoto library. If you drag a file and hover over a stack, pressing the Space bar opens a Finder window showing the contents of the stack.

# Workflow Variables in Automator
Automate more productively by creating workflows that can store and retrieve data during execution. Workflow Variables let you use the same information at different steps of the workflow, giving you added functionality and flexibility.

# Scratched Disc Recovery – DVD Player
Smoothly play back even DVDs that may be damaged. New technology in Leopard can locate and avoid scratched areas of the disc.

# Instant Screen Sharing from the Finder
Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes.

# Hide Local Video – iChat
Remove the picture-in-picture view from your iChat video conference if you prefer not seeing yourself in the chat. Just select Hide Local Video from the Video menu.

# iChat Hot Key
Bring your iChat window to the front anytime with a dedicated keyboard shortcut.

# PDF Manipulation in Preview
Re-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.

# Printer Drivers via Software Update
Make sure you always have the latest printer drivers. Download directly to your system using the familiar capabilities of Software Update.

# Dictionary Definitions in Spotlight
Quickly find the definition of any word by entering it in the Spotlight search field.

# Calculations in Spotlight
Find answers fast. Just activate Spotlight and type in a simple or sophisticated equation, and Spotlight will instantly show you the result. Enjoy support for over 40 functions ranging from simple math to logarithms to trigonometry.

# Scroll Non-Active Windows – System
Scroll any open window, even if it’s not active. Simply position your mouse over the target window and scroll.

3rd Party Applications

I didn’t pay much attention to the iPhone ‘hacking’ arena before my purchase because I didn’t really see anything interesting there. I didn’t have the phone, so I didn’t realize what was lacking. Now that I have one, it’s painfully obvious what is great about the phone, and what is missing.

All other Smart Phones allow users to install applications. It’s even a major feature, the ability to extend the phone’s use as people develop applications for it. In fact, that is what made the personal computer what it is today. Adaptability. The simple fact that I can buy a computer and with software, allow it to accomplish several tasks. With the introduction of the personal computer, consumers didn’t have to buy hardware to perform a single task. It revolutionized the industry.

The iPhone is revolutionary.

So why does Apple block consumers from installing applications? Apple encourages, thrives, off of the growing and supportive Mac OS X developer community. For the iPhone, Apple is actively blocking these enthusiastic and creative individuals to bring innovative possibilities to the platform. I don’t understand the rationale at all. There are applications for GPS, themes, games, and a Terminal. These only add to the value of the device. Why? Because I can now perform more than one task with my iPhone.

War

The iPhone community is at war with Apple. You read it. War. With the release of the v1.1.1 firmware, Apple has made it blatantly clear that it will not allow the iPhone to be modified in any way. This is different from the previous position on the matter, which was simply a lack of support.

Apple’s current position on the unlocking of phones seems reasonable to me. Apple has a contract with AT&T. I have a contract with AT&T. We all need to honor our contracts. I have no problems with Apple working fervently to prevent unlocking of the phone. I don’t think the severity of the punishment fits the crime at the present time however. Just because the phone was unlocked, doesn’t mean that it should be bricked and unusable, even as an iPod.

The harsh attack on the 3rd party development community is a step in the wrong direction. Apple is risking, and indeed is, alienating its customers (read:1 million+ iPhones) just so we don’t play Yahtzee or have an application to help us split a check up at dinner.

Is the Mac a great computer without the 3rd party applications? No.

Is the iPhone great without 3rd party applications? I rest my case.

Ringtones

To add insult to injury, this super modern cell phone is handicapped when it comes to ringtones. To add a ringtone to your iPhone, the current model is:

• Search for intended ringtone on iTunes Store
• Make sure before mentioned song is ordained by Jesus to be a ringtone
• Purchase the song
• Use awesome iTunes ringtone making feature to create ringtone
• Purchase the same 30 seconds of the same song you just bought, except now it’s a ringtone

This bothers me. I almost wouldn’t mind paying to make ringtones from songs in my library. Maybe not 0.99, but I would pay. Just to use the awesome ringtone maker in iTunes. However, I would want to make ringtones from lots of music that I have from CDs. Or that was free. Or I even downloaded from the iTunes Store, but is not an “approved” ringtone.

Where I Stand

Here is a short clip found from iPhoneAlley which really nails the issue.

I love my iPhone. But when I say love, I mean I love it with v1.0.2 of the firware, so I can have a few games and have a background on the phone. And with v7.4.1 of iTunes, so I can add ringtones, even of legally purchased songs, imagine that.

Until Apple realizes that locking out developers is holding the phone back, the road will continue to be bumpy. I’m stuck with the expensive phone now, so I hope to see a treaty between the development community and Apple soon, for everyone’s sake.

Go forth and let others know of this. Knowledge is power.

I have an American Express card and have racked up some points over the last few months and thought I might actually redeem them on something in the near future. Since I purchased my iPhone, I have wanted some music videos that are in better quality and might also buy some ringtones if Apple keeps locking out custom ringtones with every iTunes update (separate rant altogether). So, I decided to redeem 5,500 points for a $50 iTunes Card and just entered the code into iTunes to redeem it.

I’m mad.

The first item I knew I wanted was a music video by Rihanna. After clicking the “Buy Video” button, this message appeared.

So, iTunes will only let me purchase songs and iTunes Plus songs. I have $50 of credit in the store, but I can’t apply that to music videos, movies, tv shows, ringtones, or anything else. What good is $50 of songs? It expires in about 11 months, so I might have possibly used 1/2 of it by then….but what the hell Apple? Or is this some kind of weird conspiracy that I should complain to American Express about?

First, the ‘new’ iMac is new.  Sort of.  Yes, it has a redesigned keyboard and is now in a very professional, metal casing.  And the new iMac has a glossy screen, just like the Macbooks.  And it’s smaller.  But all in all, this is not the machine I was hoping for.  Performance-wise, the iMac is just as blazingly fast as ever and is a real competitor to other products out there.  However, the form factor hasn’t really changed in several years and I was hoping for, and indeed expecting, something radically new that would push the bounds of computing today as we know it.  I guess we got that with the iPhone and Apple’s designers need a rest for now.

Apple finally released some important software about eight months later than expected, iWork ’08 and iLife ’08.  We were led to believe that both of these products were pushed back because the software was heavily tied to new features and technologies only available in Leopard.  With this wee’s release, we now know that this isn’t the case and that leaves me a bit disappointed.  Let me elaborate.

First, iWork is a mixture of feelings.  Numbers finally made it’s debut, and a rather strong one at that.  I have used the software for about 30 minutes and it seems to be a robust and very elegant spreadsheet application.  Way better than Excel has ever hoped to be.  But Pages gained only marginal features (read: changes tracking) and poor Keynote just gained some new transitions and templates.  That’s not really a new release at all folks, who are we kidding?  UPDATE: Somehow I missed the ‘instant-alpha’ feature, to instantly erase backgrounds from images.  I haven’t tried this feature out yet.

When reading over the presentation notes, I was initially excited about one announcement in particular.  iMovie.  Not because I use iMovie that often, au contraire.  I was excited because I saw the phrase ‘video library’.  Jobs was on stage telling viewers that iMovie wasn’t really iMovie anymore, that it had been rewritten from the ground-up based on a new workflow and had gained a horrid icon.  But I was excited.  iTunes just isn’t designed to manage my video library.  And I thought that Apple had finally decided to fill this need with a new iMovie.  After reading more about the software, I realized that this wasn’t the case at all.  However, the software does seem promising and takes a new approach to film-editing.

For the other iLife applications, I can’t think of anything to say.  iTunes saw no update, apparently iTunes is no longer part of iLife in any shape or form.  iPhoto saw significant updates, using the term ‘event’ quite a lot, but I’m not interested in this update either.  Garageband gained 24-bit audio support and a live band feature, but nothing as groundbreaking as the previous release with iLife ’06.  Oh, and iDVD received new themes.

It was exciting initially for Apple to release so many Mac products and let us know that the iPhone and the iPod are important, but not the only thing Apple does.  However, I feel like a lot was left out of this release at the same time and that projects were stalled and then hurried out the door to make a deadline, with a lot of features left out just to make some marketing buzz.

I’m just a little disappointed, but I’ll let you know more when my copy of iLife ’08 arrives.

What I’m trying to accomplish is a row of tabs, but the current selected one being a different color. There are all kinds of ways to accomplish this, but here is one developer’s beautiful solution for static pages. Just wrap each page in a different div. Example being, homepage has <div id=”home”>, the Help page has <div id=”help”> and so forth. On the links that make up the navigation, assign each link a class, such as “navigation-link”. Then in the stylesheet, just add something such as

#home .navigation-link, #help .navigation-link { //stuff to make it stand out }

That works wonders. However, in my case, I’m trying to accomplish the same thing on dynamic pages, created through a WordPress theme. I have a dirty solution written in Javascript, but I’m going to work on writing it in PHP if at all possible so that it doesn’t have that momentary lag that the page has right now. You can preview the work at http://www.macfanatic.net/testing/

Javascript Code for changing the class of a link to reflect it’s currently selected:

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<script type="text/javascript" src="mootools.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('domready', function() {
	var a_list = $$('#nav li a');    // Array of nav link elements
	var i = 0;
	while ( i &lt; a_list.length ) {
		if ( (window.location.pathname).search(a_list[i].getProperty('href')) != -1 ){
			//alert("Match found at location " + i +" with name " + a_list[i]);
			a_list[i].addClass('current');
		}
		i++;
	}
});
</script>

Also note that this uses the MooTools library, which you can download here.

In the July edition of macCompanion, I wrote a simply marvelous article for anyone who has ever wondered what went into creating a basic widget for Dashboard in Tiger. I give a step-by-step guide, from downloading a free copy of Dashcode for Tiger, customizing the widget interface, and writing the Javascript to perform computations and read/write widget preferences.

If I’m further inspired or receive interest, I’ll continue work on the sample project provided. It is now one of my commonly used widgets (hence the reason I originally created it) and I’d like to share with everyone. Now that I have your interest, check the article out below.

Creating a Dashboard Widget: July Edition of macCompanion Magazine

Multicore Support

This is a major improvement for all Intel Mac users. Even first generation Macbook users and all the early Intel adopters should see performance gains in Leopard. Tiger was designed to run on one-core processors, which was fine at the time. However, all Intel Macs have at least 2 cores, with the high-end Mac Pro having 8 all together. Can you see the reasoning here? With Leopard optimized to make the best use of all those cores, and new ways for developers to further improve their programs (read more about NSOperation and NSOperationQueue ), Leopard should see a significant performance improvement.

Safari 3 for Windows

I’m not sure if Safari 3 for Windows is a secret feature of Leopard or not. I’m actually using the beta on Windows right now to write this article and so far it has behaved itself rather nicely. The attention to detail in making Safari for Windows just like Safari on Mac is incredible. Even the contextual menu (right-click) gives you the same options, such as "Save Image to Desktop". I mean, that’s just crazy.

Boot Camp

Most were hoping for Jobs to announce some amazing virtualization technology built right in to Leopard. I’m rather glad that this approach wasn’t taken for a few reasons. First, there are already two options on the market today: Parallels and VMWare. Parallels has proven they are dedicated to providing new features and constantly improving the software. I love Apple, but if they incorporated virtualization into Leopard, the updates would be few and far between when compared to Parallels. Just check out Parallels new 3.0 release to get what I mean.

What Jobs did tell us is that Boot Camp will allow you to switch between Windows and Leopard faster. Quick example: If you’re in Leopard and need to switch to Windows, be sure to use the Restart in Windows option from the Apple Menu. This will place Leopard into a hibernating state and, if you’ve previously used Windows, should start Windows from where you left off. This will make the process much more relatable to Suspending a virtual machine in Parallels.

New Desktop

The redesigned Desktop is touted as the number one feature for Leopard. However, I don’t see anything revolutionary or amazing about it.

• The Menu Bar has a new look. It’s very comparable to the trashy-translucent taskbar in Vista. I’m not excited, but I’ll put my concerns aside until I see it in person.
• The Dock has seen a facelift. Your icons now sit on a silver background that reflects any window behind it, making it look 3D. Might look cool, but is that really a feature?
• No blue background. I’m very sad. For me, the Mac experience has always included a new, cool Aqua background with every major release. Jobs explicitly stated that no one ever uses these and it’s a waste of time. I like them Steve!
• Anyone else notice that the hard drive icon wasn’t on the Desktop. Very minimalist look.
• Stacks. I’m actually fairly excited about this new feature. Basically, it’s a way to organize your files and preview the contents in a cool new way, without opening a Finder window. This was originally rumored to be included in Panther, then in Tiger, and now in Leopard. Nice to see it finally made it in. All the demos show the stacks being used in the Dock. I wonder if we’ll be able to use them other places. I love the concept, but won’t use it that much if I have to use them only in the Dock.

EA Games

Not really a feature of Leopard itself, but an important announcement for the Mac anyway. Traditionally, game titles were released for console and PC and then ported over to Mac several months later, if at all. EA announced during the keynote that they are committed to delivering new titles to the Mac alongside the console and PC releases. As time progresses, the Mac should shun its reputation as the “non-gaming” platform.

Core Animation

Remember when I said we would are going to see some awesome applications that are built as Leopard-only? The main reason for that is this technology right here. Core Animation let’s developers create very fluid, interactive, and attractive interfaces with ease. There were several demos of the technology at WWDC last year and I’m sure it’s a main focus this year as well. A quick example was given in Monday’s keynote. If you’ve ever seen the AppleTV intro movie, you’re on the right track. Very cool applications will follow.

Improved Developer Tools

The mac is only as strong as its developers and Apple realizes this. So with Leopard, developers get a XCode 3, sporting tons of new features including refactoring (even in nib files) and function collapsing, XRay for seeing exactly what your app is doing at any time, DTrace, Dashcode for creating widgets, and Interface Builder 3. All of those mentioned are huge updates and improvements, and XRay and Dashcode are new applications all together. XRay will make performance tuning your applications so much easier. I love you Apple!

Back to my Mac

Dot Mac didn’t see any other improvements besides this one feature as far as I can tell. Basically, you enable a setting on all your Macs and those computers talk with the dot Mac service. Then, if you’re on the road with your laptop and realize that you need something off any of your other computers, you fire up the Finder and they appear in the sidebar for you. Works just like you’re on your home network. Details haven’t been released about the service working with firewalls or routers. I’d imagine an Airport Base Station update might introduce this functionality at a later time.

New Finder

I think everyone was hoping for a new Finder. I personally feel disappointed however. The Finder does have a new interface, but then again, it’s not new. It’s just iTunes for your files. Coverflow in the Finder looks remotely useful, but I’m not sure just how much I’ll use it. The overall appearance seems a little drab, especially if you’re already not a fan of the iTunes 7 look. That look will be everywhere in Leopard. No hiding. It will find you. Also of note is a report that the new Finder is the first one to be scrapped and written in Cocoa. And because of the multitude of updates to Cocoa, including multicore and 64-bit support, performance is drastically improved. At least that part is welcome.

Spaces

Spaces is just Apple’s incarnation of a virtual desktop manager. Granted it’s a very nice one, but still nothing that wasn’t available before Leopard (see Virtue). Spaces will allow you to group application windows in “spaces” so you can better organize screen clutter. It’s a natural extension to Expose and should be very useful.

Quick Look

This new technology is everywhere in Leopard. If you are in the new Finder and want to quickly preview a Word, Excel, PDF, or some other common file, just tap the spacebar and a black translucent window pops up letting you scroll through the document with ease. It will even let you preview pictures and movies in full screen mode. Which raises the question: Will full-screen mode be enabled without Quicktime Pro in Leopard?

Quick Look is a plug-in architecture so developers can easily add support for their applications, just like Spotlight plugins were everywhere after Tiger’s release. This will also allow these documents to work with the Finder’s Cover Flow view. Therefore if OminGroup releases a Quick Look plugin for OmniOutliner, you will be able to quickly preview the file without opening OmniOutlier from right within the Finder and also be able to scroll through the document in Cover Flow view. Pretty cool stuff.

Time Machine

If you haven’t heard of Time Machine by now, you’ve lived in a hole my friend. Basically, this is Apple’s very pretty way of dealing with backup software. You attach an external disc, Leopard asks if you want to enable Time Machine, and from there you’re all set. If you’re ever missing a file, start Time Machine and you get this spacial 3D view of your files and once you locate the old file, you just “recover” it to the present. Very easy representation and should be accessible to more users as well.

Front Row and DVD Player

These weren’t talked about in the keynote, but are mentioned on the Apple website. Front Row is now like the AppleTV interface. I’m not quite as excited because I find the current Front Row interface to be superior to the one in the AppleTV, but that’s the update. DVD player also sports more HUD style windows and several new features for bookmarking playback and more.

Parental Controls

Parental controls have been beefed up in Leopard as well. Now Leopard can filter out websites based on content and parents can set time limits on the computer. The time limits can be based on usage, say a one hour limit, and also for times the child can use the computer. Useful for setting bedtimes and such. I’m not sure if Vista has anything like this or not.

Photo Booth

If you read the fine print, Photo Booth has seen some updates as well. There are more effects to use on your pictures, backdrops, “burst” pictures, and Photo Booth now does video too. The “burst” pictures are a quick series of 4 pictures in succession which can be made into an animation. And the fact that Photo Booth does video is just cool. Applying all those effects to your video in a snap will be even more fun at parties!

iChat

iChat has seen some major updates, many of those mentioned above in Photo Booth. Backdrops, like sitting in front of a green-screen, are a touted feature. Photo Booth effects are now supported in iChat as well as tabbed chats to clean up window clutter. iChat Theater is a new technology that lets you share photos, presentations and more in a video chat, just like if you were giving a Keynote presentation in person. Also of note is the following text from the Apple website: “Chat works with AIM, the largest instant messaging community in the U.S. You and your buddies can be either AIM or .Mac users. Text, audio, and video chat whether your buddies use a Mac or PC. Sign in with your AIM account and all your buddies appear in your iChat buddy list”. Does the Tiger version of iChat support video and audio chats with PC users? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t and this is a very welcome feature!

Conclusion

There are several other features that I didn’t discuss, such as the new Mail and iCal. You can read more on all the features in Leopard here. The Apple website has finally seen a facelift and looks fairly impressive, so check that out as well. If you’re interested, the WWDC keynote is available online and there are several videos and images showing the new applications and features available in Leopard.

Let me know your impressions about Leopard. With only a few months until the release, we are in the final stretch.

Read more about Joost and how to get an invite here.

View some screenshots here.

Be sure to participate in the discussion in the Message Boards as well.

Safari is pretty standard stuff. The only thing I’d like to add is that you should certainly check out the plugins available at Pimp My Safari. I also recommend Inquisitor. Inquisitor is what makes Safari so cool right now!

Now, the feature that I have to share about Shiira: View Source. For all the web developers out there, this should amaze you. We are used to the same take on this feature. It’s something cross-platform and built-in to every browser. Some show an unformatted, non-syntax colored (IE!!) view, while others try and clean it up a good bit and do a decent job. Shiira is 10 years ahead of all that.

When you use View Source in Shiira, this is what you’re presented with. Please view the full versions. It’s worth it.

I hope those are enticing. I mean, that is awesome. You can view all the Javascript and CSS files easily from right within this view. View all the images, look at link attributes, view the DOM structure. This is just freaking amazing. Now if you could just easily save a javascript file for later viewing.

Download Shiira here.

He recommends using an Automator action to set the comments field of some songs to something useful. In this example, we’ll use “Mac Fanatic”. Now you create a smart playlist using “Comment contains Mac Fanatic” and “Rating is greater than 3″ just to weed out the bad songs and save that as “Mac Fanatic Source” for our example. That is the base of all our songs. However, the reader suggested creating one more smart playlist so that we don’t hear the same songs repeatedly. If we create a new smart playlist using “Playlist is Mac Fanatic Source” and check the box that says “Limit to 25 items” and choose the “Least recently played” option from the pop-up menu.

Now when you sync your iPod, the playlist will update with your iTunes and it will be just like a party shuffle. You could opt out of using comments as the criteria for the source playlist if you wished to have it more general, or just take everything from one genre that is least played, that sort of thing. Leave some comments if you need more info or run into problems!

Boot Camp is Apple’s own implementation allowing you to either use your computer as a Mac, or turn it off and restart and use it as a Windows PC. Disadvantages include security threats as well as lack of ease of use. Advantage would be playing games at full speed on Windows.

Parallels is a Mac application that allows you to run Windows and any Windows applications on your Mac. It is feature rich including drag-n-drop from Windows and Mac apps, full mouse and keyboard support, iSight support, and the super cool cohernce mode. You can even configure Parallels so that the Windows applications show up in your dock and in Spotlight results. Makes it super easy for me to launch Internet Explorer!

CrossOver is from CodeWeavers and is the smaller utiltiy out of the bunch. While the previous two require a full version of Windows, CrossOver fakes Windows applications into believing that they are running on Windows. Because of this approach, some applications have limited functionaly or refuse to work at all. An example would be Internet Explorer. I was asked which approach would be better for web development. Parallels is best in my opinion because IE6 and IE7 both work, can be just a window, and you can continue to work on the website on your Mac. Boot Camp would require you to restart to preview your work and CrossOver has a few minor issues with IE6 and doesn’t support IE7 at all.

Be sure to check out the discussion about this episode in the Mac Fanatic Message Boards here.

I also mentioned a previous post about using DVD Shrink on a Mac, using CrossOver. You can read there here.

Read more about Boot Camp here.

Read more about Parallels here.

Read more about CrossOver here.

Download CSSEdit 2.5 here.

I talked about TVShows within the last week or so. Very cool app that lets you subscribe to your favorite TV show and it will launch your bit-torrent client and start the download for you. Turns out Xtorrent already does it for you. Basically, you find yourself an RSS feed for your favorite TV show and add that in Xtorrent. It will download them for you and add to iTunes. Cool stuff.

The only thing I’d like to add is that this approach requires the user to go out and locate the RSS feed to use in Xtorrent as with TVShows the list is populated in the app itself. You just do a quick filter for “Bones” and you get the full season. I would think that Dave would eventually work this into his app, but who knows. Since Xtorrent is built around ease-of-use (see: bundling several free features into one application), I would hope this RSS feature would evolve to include just selecting the feed from within. Who knows.

Read original post here.

See about Xtorrent here.

Listen to Mac Fanatic review of Xtorrent here.

Read my thoughts on TVShows here.

This Friday, we’ll see the 1.0 release of Cha-Ching. As if that’s not exciting enough, every day this week the Midnight Apps website will be updated with a new and awesome feature that will debut in the 1.0 release. Today’s feature is Spotlight integration. Quicken doesn’t even come close anymore guys.

Be sure to head over to the website using the links below and read more up on it. Also of note is that every day the price goes up by 5 bucks until reaching the final sales price this Friday. It’s one of those deals where if you buy it early before the release, something first met with great success from Disco, you get it cheaper. Starts out at 20 bucks today, ending at 40 on Friday. So if you want this app, and I’m pretty sure you will after you use it, download soon.

You can see details and download Cha-Ching here.

You can read a very short overview of Cha-Ching here.

If you find yourself irresistibly drawn to this app, you might want to enter to win one of three copies here on the website. Contest entries start April 23 and run till June 1. Check here for more details.

Along comes TVShows. This app is in the very early stages of development (0.2 release). However, it’s open source, which is to be applauded, and does something very unique. Instead of spending your time searching for the right torrent for the latest TV show of your choice, TVShows lets you subscribe to any show you want.

Basically, you launch the application, search for a TV Show of your choice and click the “Subscribe” button beside that. From there, you can choose to start downloading all episodes from a previous date (like 2 episodes past) or just click the “Next Aired Show” and when the next show is available, it downloads that one and subsequent ones.

TVShows Interface

TVShows is not a bit-torrent client. It only listens for new episodes and then launches your default bit-torrent client for you. I recommend either Transmission or Tomato Torrent, both of which are free.

Download TVShows.

Download Transmission.

Download Tomato Torrent.

Found via Torrent Freak

Frenzic Screenshot



Little Shop of Treasures Screenshot

Sometimes we just need a way to get on with our day after a long morning of monotonous work. These two games will help get your brain back into working order in no time! Listen to this episode to hear a bit about gameplay and then be sure to download the trial versions or purchase them from the links below!

Download Frenzic

Download Little Shop of Treasures

Previous Quinn Podcast

I first talked about Schoolhouse in a review on December 17, 2006. Even then, the app was a great way to organize class assignments, projects, calculate grades and general good organization and time management that I so desperately need for my classes. After using the app this semester, I’m pretty much hooked.

To my utter delight, the developer released his 2.0 version in the last few days, adding numerous features and polishes. It is certainly worth checking out the new version, even if you didn’t like the original. And remember, this awesome software is still free! With optional donations, of course.

See my Schoolhouse 1.0 Review

Visit the Schoolhouse website to download and read more

Understand that I have used Windows ME, 2000, and XP and continue to still do so and provide support for those systems at work. I have also played around with several Linux flavors including Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo, and my personal favorite for ease of use, Mandrake, or Mandriva as it is now called I believe. I haven’t touched a Linux system, other than Debian running XFCE for my computer science labs, since my move to Mac. If you have used this amazing Ubuntu, please let me know why you like it! Any pertinent articles or personal experiences would be great. I’m always open to new ideas and the community at large seems to be pretty excited about this distro, so I’d like to know what they got right.

A description as taken from MacRumors:

Did you know that if you’ve purchased one or more songs from an eligible album, you may now be able to buy the rest of the album at a reduced price? You have up to six months after first downloading a song from an eligible album to purchase the remainder of the album.

To expound upon, this is really cool. I fall into this category all too often. I buy the latest and hottest singles as soon as they’re on iTunes after hearing them on the radio. Then a few months later, I sometimes find myself purchasing the album. That isn’t my general case, I’ve only purchased around 6 albums or so from iTunes. But still, it counts. I wish I had know about this earlier in the week because I had purchased 4 songs from Three Days Grace’s first album a few months back. This week I decided to buy the rest of the songs. It was basically the same price to just buy the whole album, and I figured I was supporting my band, so I did that anyway. So I really paid 1.99 for 4 of those songs. And I’ve done that before.

The service works really well actually. Once in the iTunes Store, click the “Complete My Album” link. From there you are shown all the albums you have purchased at least one song from. I have 108 albums listed, shockingly enough. Now I know where my money goes! Of those albums, however, the pricing is listed beside that. Most albums I just bought one song from, and the pricing is 9.00 (9.99 for album – .99 one song). Others I purchased more from and the pricing is lower, like 6.00. I’m not sure if age plays a part in the pricing right now or not either.

Hurry if you believe you’ll want to do this, as right now this offer applies to all the songs you’ve every purchased (some were like 2 years ago or more for me). This lasts until late June, when after that, the offer only applies to songs you’ve purchased in the last 6 months.

Tubular is an application geared to allow you to easily browse, search, and convert videos from YouTube. Very nice piece of software still under development, but worth looking at now. Music this week is Facedown by The Jumpsuit Apparatus.

(Application Main Window)

Tubular Site

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.

I’ve had plenty of experience with Tablet PCs from Gateway while working on campus for tech support. We have setup and delivered several of these units to faculty members over the last year. What I would define a tablet device as is simply the device’s ability to receive input other than traditional ways, such as keyboard, mouse, or speech (even though most of us don’t use this anyway). The Gateway Tablet PCs that I’ve used suck. They are huge, heavy, have an obnoxiously large and deformed battery, the latches on the lid are horrible and it runs Windows. I think that about sums it up.

What are the aspects that I liked about the Tablets I’ve played on? Hand-written input is very appealing for certain tasks and can just plain be fun at times. I’m not sure that I would take notes like that in a class, because I can usually type faster than I write and what I’ve typed is far more legible, editable, and readable at the end. However, Tablets are pretty cool because you can use a pen to provide text-based input and do a few mouse-like actions.

Multi-Touch

The iPhone is beautiful. But before I got lost in the sheer beauty of the device, I was amazed, in love, drooling, almost panting because of the multi-touch display. I’m extremely interested in human-computer interaction ( Computer Scientist in training here ) and this is a wonderful step forward in the evolution between man and machine. The interaction looks so natural, so beautiful. The computer understands basic human actions that make sense at a very low level of our mind. Simply amazing. The double-finger pinch to zoom in and out…..Yeah, I want an iPhone just to do that. But just think what that technology would allow.

ModBook

At Macworld this week, the first Mac based Tablet solution was released, with availability promised in April and base model pricing starting at 2,279. This unit is basically what the name implies, a modded Macbook. This company has removed the screen and inserted a stylus driven screen in it’s place, complete with iSight reinstalled. I’m not sure if the screen swivels to reveal a keyboard, as the pictures online don’t show, but I would surely think so. However, I’m not 100% sure either.

So is this Modbook exciting? If I had seen this before the iPhone, I would have said yes. Inkwell, built into Mac OS X from at least Panther onward, is wonderful hand writing recognition software. I would have said the Modbook was a cool piece of hardware. After iPhone? I have to say I’m not interested in paying for a modded Macbook. I want the entire interface to be alive and waiting for me to just touch it with simple gestures to indicate actions. I want to have iPhoto or Aperture open and to reach out and pinch, flick, drag and tap to do all of my editing. It would be something just like out of a science fiction movie, or a TV show that depicts extremely advanced technology only available to the government.

Where to next?

We have a tablet Mac, although not directly from Apple. We have multi-touch, which will be used in the iPhone and most probably new iPods here shortly. That only leaves actual laptop-like devices to receive this new technology. Am I excited? You bet I am. I would buy something like I described above in a heartbeat. Of course, I would want Leopard installed as well….

What do you think? Do you believe that Apple will roll out new iPhone like iPods in the next few months with possibly a new smaller form-factor multi-touch device to follow? Or do you think that this is all a phase and we will out grow it? Some people are really against tablet-like devices, so your thoughts would be great.

More Pictures and details from Apple Insider about ModBook

First, I have played around with the new interface in Office 12 Beta, for PC. I was unsure up until MacWorld as to the direction the Mac BU at Microsoft would take as far as to interface design and a feature set for the next version, beyond the fact that it should finally be a Universal application. MacWorld cleared a lot of stuff up this week as there are now screenshots available of the Mac Office 2008. Looks like the Mac BU has borrowed heavily from the Office 12 “Ribbon” interface design, and I’m not sure that I like it just yet.

When using Office 12 Beta for PC, the interface still needed a lot of refinement and more consideration. It does present a large learning curve for most users and required a lot of my attention to get tasks accomplished, because of the revamped interface. That is not the way software should be. Just because the interface changes from something familiar, it should only change to get better and more intuitive, not to cause more confusion.

The Mac version, from what I can tell from the few screenshots posted online, seems to be decently implemented from the PC version, but I don’t believe there is anything to make me switch back to Office anytime soon.

So, do you think that the new “Ribbon” interface will revolutionize Office for millions of users, or will create lots of headaches and is a bad move? Leave your thoughts below, I’m interested to see other people’s opinions on this.

Office 2008 Screenshots

Read on to see some snippets of code with an explanation and download a sample project.

In this first bit, we are filtering out only keys pressed that are part of the numeric keypad.
Arrow keys fall into this category. The string is a string of keys pressed.

Now we have a char that represents the key pressed, an arrow key still

The above deals with the user hitting the up arrow key and the below deals with user hitting the down arrow key

Essentially, I set a NSTextField’s custom class to my StepperTextField. Then I set the outlet from the text field to a NSStepper I already have configured in the interface, correct with maxValue and minValue set for the NSStepper in IB. Of note, I use the keyUp: method because the keyDown: method is being captured by the field editor inside the NSTextField, so I never catch those events. This seemed like the simplest approach to me. Now when the user hits a down arrow, the number will decrement by one. An up arrow increments it by one. If the value will be over the maxValue, it gets set to 1. If it will be less than 1, it gets set to the maxValue.

Download a sample project with plenty of comments here.

The feature that has been in the news the most in the last few days is the addition of ZFS support in Leopard. For those that really don’t care about filesystems (me included for the most part), should you be excited? My short answer: no. To the end user, some stuff will certainly change for the better, but it won’t be like you’ll install Leopard by formatting your Mac with ZFS and all of your worries will disappear. The addition of ZFS might enable some really cool features to be added to applications and the OS itself later (sorta like Time Machine), but for Leoarpd’s initial release, I really don’t see it being anything that exciting.

A few other notes about this latest release include update builds of Quicktime sporting the HUD-style Inspector windows (see my previous post my thoughts on this matter), updated screen saver options, more parental control options and updates to the Quick Look feature in the Finder, where you can preview files in a cute little window instead of having to open up an application to do this.

Overall, I haven’t had the change to play with any version of Leopard since I received my WWDC copy without updates, so I’m not really sure how the progress is going. Of note in the article, the author doesn’t feel like Apple will be able to deliver a production release of Leopard at MacWorld in January. This is a little disappointing, but at the same time I’d rather Apple spend the little extra time needed to deliver a stable and well-rounded product than try and rush something out the door to compete with a buggy initial release of Vista.

Found via | AppleInsider

Great. So you hate reading about Apple stories, yet you take the time to leave comments on one. Makes complete sense in a way, but aren’t you complaining to the wrong group of people at that point?

There were other comments in between these two, but basically it’s a back and forth anti-Microsoft, anti-Apple related stuff. I mean, I dislike using a PC, but I don’t go around using foul language and talking bad about their products. I’m intelligent enough to have an informed conversation with someone over the pros/cons of both platforms and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether MSFTdaBomb38 thinks that Apple products are horrible or not.

Bottom line? Just how childish is this? If the hardcore Windows users are so fed up with the amount of Apple-related content that is on digg (and there is enough to keep me reading, otherwise I would move on) why don’t they create their own Windows-centric kinda place and be happy there together? Just my thoughts…

You can read the comments and digg the article I’m referring to here.

Schoolhouse

Schoolhouse is a very nice way to keep up with all of your coursework, simply put. Features include GPA and Final grade calculators, graphing of grades, prioritizing, Classcasting to share your assignments with classmates, sending assignments to iCal and iPod, and much more. The interface is very clean and well laid out. Overall it seems to be a very stable application that the developer has created to deal with his schoolwork himself. Also of note is that a new version, 2.0, is supposedly in the works with an expected release date over this holiday season break, as the developer is away from school and hopes to get it out with the extra time.

Be sure to listen to this episode to get more details!

Download the latest version of Schoolhouse here

Please note that this review was for a 1.x version of Schoolhouse. As of late March 2007, version 2.1 was released. This newer version is leaps and bounds ahead of the one talked about in this review, so please consider trying out the latest version for yourself. Expect an new episode reviewing this software in the near future.

Conceptually, the user will enter a search string in the search box, something like “Jo”. Now, you will need to find every object in your table that has “jo” in it. You get to choose the amount of control, as a programmer, you put into this. If you want to be very kind, you can add a drop-down menu that the user clicks to search for “Jo” just in the name field, for example. However, I feel that most people are comfortable enough with just filtering (ie, not full-scale searching), we will simply search every item in our object to find matches. Still with me?

For example (‘Por Exemplo’ comes to mind..) :

Imagine we are creating an address book-like app (hint-hint) and each person in our address book has four pieces of data each. Each person has a name, a screen name, an url, and an image associated with them. We certainly can’t filter the images, but we would like to search through the names, screen names, and urls. So, let’s figure out what we’re going to do.

First, you’re going to setup your interface in IB. I’m not going to take the time to go through all of this, but you drop a NSSearchField onto your window and hook up the bindings with the “predicate” option farther down the Inspector window. I have an array controller of “Person” objects, so I want to set my bindings as “PeopleController” as my source (same as the data source for my tableview), filterPredicate, and the model key as “personName” (the string that holds the name in a Person object, doesn’t really matter, but you must fill in a valid KVC value here).

I have also subclassed out the standard NSArrayController to provide filtering support. I connect my “search” IBAction to my NSSearchField, to actually implement the searching. I also like the instant filtering style, so I select the “Sends Search String Immediately” attribute in IB for my NSSearchField.

That ties up the interface stuff, now we need to actually figure out how we are going so sort. The concept behind this is we go through every object in the original array (that supplies the table) and see if it matches our search criteria. If it does match, we’ll throw it into a new array. When we’ve searched everything, we’ll return this array to the table so it can display it as the search results. When the user is done searching, we release that array and return the table back to the original array that holds all of our data. Let’s start searching!

Code for the filtering Array Controller

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- (void)search:(id)sender {
	[self setSearchString:[sender stringValue]];
	[self rearrangeObjects];
}
 
- (NSArray *)arrangeObjects:(NSArray *)objects {
 
	if ( searchString == nil || [searchString isEqualToString:@""] ) {
		newObject = nil;
		return [super arrangeObjects:objects];
	}
 
	/*
		Create array of objects that match search string.
		Also add any newly-created object unconditionally:
		(a) You’ll get an error if a newly-added object isn’t added to arrangedObjects.
		(b) The user will see newly-added objects even if they don’t match the search term.
	*/
 
	NSMutableArray* matchedObjects = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity:[objects count]];
 
	// case-insensitive search
	NSString *lowerSearch = [searchString lowercaseString];
 
	NSEnumerator *oEnum = [objects objectEnumerator];
	id item;
 
	while (item = [oEnum nextObject]) {
 
		// if the item has just been created, add it unconditionally
		if (item == newObject) {
			[matchedObjects addObject:item];
			newObject = nil;
		} else {
 
			NSString *lowerName = [[item valueForKeyPath:@"personName"] lowercaseString];
			NSString *lowerScreenName = [[item valueForKeyPath:@"personScreenName"] lowercaseString];
			NSString *lowerUrl = [[item valueForKeyPath:@"personUrl"] lowercaseString];
 
			if ( lowerName != NULL && [lowerName rangeOfString:lowerSearch].location != NSNotFound) {
				[matchedObjects addObject:item];
			} else if ( lowerScreenName != NULL && [lowerScreenName rangeOfString:lowerSearch].location != NSNotFound ) {
				[matchedObjects addObject:item];
			} else if ( lowerUrl != NULL && [lowerUrl rangeOfString:lowerSearch].location != NSNotFound ) {
				[matchedObjects addObject:item];
			}
		}
	}
	return [super arrangeObjects:matchedObjects];
}

The code above goes through each object in the array and pulls out a string for the name, url, and screen name. It compares the entered search string to each of those strings, and if it matches, adds it to the array we return that has the matchedObjects. Of note here is that we check for a NULL string from the object because if we don’t, the object will show up in the results even though it shouldn’t.

I think that was enough of an intro to searching. Let me know if you would like to hear more about implementing the ‘Recent Search Items’ list, or searching by category. Comments are welcome. If you’re interested in a working XCode project with the code, let me know and I might throw one together and post it online.

UPDATE: I didn’t originally provide enough information about this controller, so here are a few links and documentation. Apple has documentation on this subject with almost the identical sample code that is published by mmalc below. You can read the documentation here.

Download mmalc’s source (pretty much what is in the documenation) here.  This is a sample project, so it’s nice to look at as well.  Of note, if you want the iTunes, Spotlight-like behavior of instant results (a true “filtering” action, vs searching), go into Interface Builder, select the NSSearchField and for it’s attributes, check the box with “Sends search string immediately”.  A nice example. Check out his website with lots of other good bindings related examples is here.

So, I’ve tried every browser known to man for Mac. What I’ve come to discover is I generally like the Webkit renderer more than the gecko-based Firefox derivatives. Webkit has always produced cleaner, crisper pages with less CSS issues (probably a result of my poor styling and coding) than Firefox could ever do. I’ve been using Camino for several months now and enjoy the browser greatly, even though it is gecko powered. For those that don’t know, Camino is a Mac built version of Firefox. It uses the same renderer for the pages, but the interface and much of the code is all built on a Mac in XCode, in turn meaning that Camino automatically uses several nice Cocoa features, like spell-checking, dictionary, and tons more, seamlessly integrating with your other Mac applications. Firefox doesn’t do that.

Firefox 3 is scheduled to be released in May 2007 and the first alpha builds are already out. There are some nice features in the works, but the single biggest one is the addition of a graphics library and more Mac native features. Until Firefox 3, Firefox had been using the old QuickDraw framework on the Mac. Of importance is that this was pre-OS X software and is officially deprecated in Leopard. So, with Firefox 3, an open-source framework called Cairo will be used for the Windows and Linux builds, while the Mac builds will have access to the Core Image based Quartz, the same library that Webkit uses for its graphics rendering. Basically, stuff will look like it should under Firefox 3, for the first time. In fact, with the help of the new graphics library, Firefox 3 finally passes the Acid 2 Test. The Acid 2 Test is a test developed by the W3C to test if a browser can handle web standards. Currently the only two that I know of that don’t pass this test are Firefox and IE.

So, I downloaded Firefox 3 Nightly and played with it for a bit. The rendering is much better. It handles fonts much, much better than before, producing the crisp, clear text that I so love with Webkit based browsers. It also handles SVG graphics much better as well as finally tackling some nasty, long-standing CSS bugs.

Overall, Firefox 3 will be a nice release and I’m excited because Camino should benefit from the new rendering updates as well.

Found via | Ars Technica
Download Nightly Build Here
Grab Your Copy of the Mac’s Best Browser, Camino, Here

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<?php if ( !is_page() ) : ?>
	<span class="date"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></span> &bull; <span class="postmetadata">Tags: <?php the_category(', ') ?>
<?php endif; ?><?php edit_post_link('Edit','<strong>|</strong> ',"); ?></span>
 
<div id="entry">
 
	<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry;'); ?>
 
	<!– Checks to see if this is a post page. If it is, then we don't want to display the comments link. If not, we want to display it (main page basically) –>
	<?php if (!is_single() && !is_page()) : ?>
		<p><div id = “main-comments">There are <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?> for 'lt;?php the_title(); ?>'</div></p>
	<?php endif; ?>
 
</div>

The problem I was trying to fix was simple. When you are on the main page of the site with all the posts, you want to be able to see the area under the post that displays information like “There are (some #) comments for (post name)”. You don’t need to see that when you are on the actual post’s page to read the full post and look at comments. You also don’t need to see a date and tag info for pages in WordPress, such as the new About and Downloads pages. Just of note, I have left Rapidweaver for this site. It’s on a sad note since Rapidweaver is what spawned this site almost a year ago this week. It’s been a great year and I’ll more about that later, but I’m no longer using Rapidweaver on the site.

To put it simply, the issue I was having was with the PHP if() statement, by trying to have the HTML code on the page only if it met that condition. The solution my my problem came with the realization of a colon operator in PHP that allowed me to write the above code. Just out there for anyone else that might be having issues as well.

I’m sure there are some seasoned Cocoa programmers out there wondering about my confusion over this class, but it was kinda scary. I’m very comfortable writing plain C and feel very powerful because I know what is going on and if I get a little stumped, I can always hack something homemade together. That’s not really the way it is a lot of times with Cocoa, there is so much already available you don’t have to hack it together and it would be better if you didn’t. So back to NSNumbers.

Just to get your brains working this morning, here was a preview if() statement I had in my code, just checking to see if the number that the user entered in an NSTextField was of appropriate range.

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if ( [startingValue intValue] >= 300 || startingValueInt <= 0) {
	// Do something
}

This doesn’t seem too bad at all to me. I need the value to be between 1 and 300. However, I decided to get a bit more specific with my code and created an NSArray of NSNumbers holding the upper limits to check against in each specific case. This was used to add that in the Category object itself and then you come up with the following if statement, if you will:

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// This was just a very lengthy way of using NSNumbers to make sure that the entered value was in proper range
if ( [[NSNumber numberWithInt:startingValueInt] compare: [[categories objectAtIndex: [CategoriesController selectionIndex]] categoryMaxValue]] == NSOrderedDescending || startingValueInt <= 0) {
	// Do something
}

Now granted, you could still use a regular “>=” operator here by calling the “- intValue” method on the NSNumbers I’m using. However, I thought that I would go all out and even use an NSComparisonResult as well. Just goes to show you that you can look smart and your code do nothing at all. Another snippet of code is below for those that wondered about getting all of my NSNumbers into my Category array.

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// Setup another array with just the ranges for each category — This is the max array, all mins are zero
// Note that I have setup similar arrays holding the names and urls that I’m sticking into each Category ‘c’
 
NSArray* maxes = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:[NSNumber numberWithInt:445], [NSNumber numberWithInt: 265],
	[NSNumber numberWithInt:221], [NSNumber numberWithInt:106], [NSNumber numberWithInt:69],
	[NSNumber numberWithInt:21], [NSNumber numberWithInt:229], [NSNumber numberWithInt:69],
	[NSNumber numberWithInt:322], [NSNumber numberWithInt:266], [NSNumber numberWithInt:138],
	[NSNumber numberWithInt:320], [NSNumber numberWithInt:107], [NSNumber numberWithInt:99],
	[NSNumber numberWithInt:313], nil];
 
// Now need to create the categories, using each piece to make one, and insert it into the categories array
for (NSInteger i = 0; i < [names count]; i++) {
	c = [Category new];
	[c setCategoryUrl: [urls objectAtIndex:i]];
	[c setCategoryName:[names objectAtIndex:i]];
	[c setCategoryMaxValue:[maxes objectAtIndex:i]];
	[categories insertObject: c atIndex: i];
}

More Reading | Cocoa Dev Central

Let me say that again. Wow. This is a breakthrough for Parallels. The software has been great before, letting you run Windows or Linux in a window. Versions after the initial release added some nice features such as better mouse, networking, and USB support. However, all of that is just a memory with the new beta.

Some of the super exciting features for this beta include:
– New look and feel
– A centralized VM Machines Catalogue
– Resizable Main window letting you resize it like any other Mac app, including a live updating screen resolution
– Drag and Drop between Windows and Mac apps
– Read/Write BootCamp partition
– Boot from the BootCamp partition
– Parallels Transporter lets you migrate a Windows PC or more to a VM for Parallels to use
– Coherency. Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS.
– Improved graphic performance. Up to 50% on different applications.
– Connect/disconnect USB devices schema improved. No more “wait 5-10 seconds” message on USB device connecting to Parallels Desktop for Mac.
– Improved networking
– Use Mac key commands in Windows apps ( like Cmd-A for select all)
– Cool visual effects
– Improved Shared folders

This is shaping up to be a huge release and best of all it will be a FREE update to those who have already purchased.

I also wanted to mention that this is an incredibly faster release. Booting my XP VM took less than 10 seconds!
Another cool feature is that you get a preview of you VM in the Dock, just like a mini-QT video. Very cool!

Watch a short clip of the new Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta 3036 here.

You can download the beta here.
Mirror here.

Found via | Michael Verdi Blog

Now, for some reason I always find myself suckered into reading these articles when they appear on digg. The top 10 Mac shareware apps, 10 Mac apps you don’t know about, etc. Usually the same stuff over and over again. This was a nice approach and kinda reflected some of the things that I mentioned that I would like to see appear in Leopard.

#1 – Windowshade
I’m a bit of a disadvantage for this article simply because I never used a Mac steadily before Tiger. I used 7.5 for awhile on an old Performa, but that was just for kicks. So, I know what Windowshade is, but never really saw the point of it. I think Expose does a pretty good job of what I like to do now and I’m super excited about multiple desktops in Leopard, so I think that I will be very happy and won’t need this feature at all.

#2 – Improved Trash
I can easily agree with this feature, although I wouldn’t have placed this as high on the list. It would be nice to be able to have a “Restore All Items” or just a “Restore Item” button like you have in XP and Classic. The size of the trash would be nice as well.

#3 – Map any F-key to an Application
This is certainly a niche request, I can’t see myself ever needing this. This is back from the days when every keyboard had buttons for email, browser, music, etc. I always found that very annoying. The first emachines tower that I had easily had 20 buttons along a separate row for various tasks, even one for eBay. I mean, let’s get real here.

#4 – Ejecting One Partition of a Disk
I had always thought I was crazy for wanting this feature, or that I was doing something wrong to not get it working. My external USB hard drive has two partitions on it and while most of the time if you are going to eject the disk you are going to unplug it, I always wondered why ejecting one partition ejects the whole disk. Fundamentally that’s not what I’m doing, I’m just ejecting one. Oh well. Would be nice to have a preference or be able to option-cmd-E or something to get a bit more control over it.

#5 – Internet Helper Preferences
The argument here is that all of your internet related preferences should be in System Preferences instead of in various applications, like Mail and Safari (which contains preferences for your RSS reader as well…go figure). At WWDC 2006 this summer, this came up as a very heated discussion in the Aqua feedback forum. The guy leading the discussion stated that the starting purpose was to make it more intuitive for the user to find the preferences and to just be able to set it in the application they are using. So if you switch to Camino for the best browsing experience in the world (and you should!), then you just set your default browser there. However, not all developers implement these preferences in the same way, if at all, and it’s just confusing, which is the valid argument here. We discussed this in the forum and I believe Apple heard our complaints pretty well. The guy at least said he would put it higher on the list of stuff to look at.

#6 – Tabbed Folders
Yeah, we don’t need this. We don’t need another launcher, there is enough going on with the Dock without this.

#7 – Appearance Themes
I have mixed feelings about this one. Coming from Linux and Windows, I got very used to being able to customize my desktop however I wanted. This isn’t as easy in Windows, but is very easy to do with Gnome and KDE on Linux (as well as the other 10,000 DEs out there). While I sometimes feel like I would like a tad more variety from Aqua, I’m generally very happy. If you could easily bundle all of your preferences, such as your sounds, Desktop, screensaver, selection color, etc into a “theme”, that would be kinda cool. But certainly not a huge selling point.

#8 – Print Finder Window
Really, did people use this? I won’t even bother with this one, I think I won’t lose sleep over it.

#9 – Put URL of downloaded files in Get Info’s Comments Field
This would be nice actually. I like the fact that you can see where you downloaded a file from in the Get Info panel already, but having it user editable, or at least where you could easily launch a browser from it, would be nice.

#10 – Flashing Menubar to Display Alerts when Muted
Sounds like something else that would annoy me. The damn Dock icons already bounce enough, I don’t need the screen flashing at me to let me know Software Update is done.

That’s just my thoughts on this article. Read it in more detail and leave your own thoughts below.

The actual site itself is down from the traffic, but you can catch the mirror below.

Read the interview here.

“UMG refused to license its music to the Zune unless it could receive a percentage of each device sold, in addition to standard music licensing fees for downloads and subscriptions.”

That right there has some issues because evidently the music groups are getting even greedier than before. Are they going to start boycotting their customers? Let’s not sell music because we don’t get enough money from it….

Then the punch line, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it,” UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. “So it’s time to get paid for it.”

This just infuriates me and makes me wonder who in the world put this guy in charge of a company. I’m not a business owner, but I’m pretty sure that you aren’t supposed to nationally upset your current customers, let alone any potential ones. I admit to having music that I haven’t purchased in my library. However, that is a very small percentage. I wasn’t in the whole Napter/mp3 thing way back, I just bought the CDs that I liked and ripped them on my computer. Then iTunes came around and for the ease/quality/price, I was hooked. Heck, I even PAY to get most of my TV shows from the iTunes Store. Don’t even get me started on the amount of money I’ve spent on Law and Order: SVU, Bones, or various other music singles and albums. Evidently I’m a thief because I own an iPod however.

I don’t want to make anyone else angry, but I could justify this a bit if we were talking strictly about Windows using iPod owners. To generalize, Windows users aren’t as excited about their computer and don’t have as much offense about downloading anything, ie, pirating software. However, I don’t know of any Mac users that pirate software. The software on the Mac is great and I, for one, am more than happy to pay the shareware developers when they have done a good job.

All in point though, it is just horribly business practice to publicly come out and say that your past buyers are theives. I’m not going to boycott the label simply because I don’t wanna make the effort. I’ll continue to make my purchases from the iTunes Store. However, I sure as hell won’t be buying any CDs ever again and if I do happen to notice that UMG is the group behind that hot single I want, well, I might just take them up it and become a statistic of theirs.

Found via digg | Read Article

I ask that you please not laugh. However, I think the colors turned out nicely and it’s actually kinda pretty. What you would use if for is beyond me, but this is my own work and I’m proud of it!

Some of the basic features include wonderful code complete and suggestion, a gorgeous interface that lets you get anything done in one or two clicks, a visual styles editor that makes your life extremely easy and the most significant feature has to be the live preview window. With this you can open up any URL or file and override the stylesheet in use with the one that you are editing, for real-time previewing. From there you have innovative features like the Milestone manager that let you keep track of your progress and easily revert to a previous state and an easy validation window for keeping your code clean. A great app that you can download here and try out for yourself.

The Basic Code-Visual View

Milestones Manager Window

Live Preview Window

It was just a weeks ago that I had set down with my private beta copy of Disco, the new disc authoring app that has taken the Mac community by storm. Overall the application is very nice and seems to earn its keep. All of the bugs aren’t worked out of it just yet because it is still beta, but it’s a nice piece of software that clearly shows just how much work went into the project and will surely be one of those apps that Mac users keep around in their Applications folder. You can listen to my initial impression of Disco here.

What better way to learn more about Disco then talk to one of the guys from the Disco team, Austin Sarner!

Me: How long have you been using a Mac?

Austin: I’ve actually only been using Macs for about 5 years now.

Me: What was your first Mac?

Austin: A Titanium iBook, 1 Ghz.

Me: What is your current hardware setup?

Austin: MacBook Pro with a 23″ Cinema display

Me: What kind of educational experience have you had?

Austin: I have just finished up high school and I’m looking into going back to school down the road. Not sure what I’ll major in, but definitely something non-computer related.

Me: How long have you been developing on the Mac?

Austin: I’ve been developing since a few months after I got my first Mac, starting with AppleScript, then RealBasic, and now Cocoa.

Me: Do you have any other software that I’ve missed and should know about?

I’ve worked on a handful of other shareware and freeware apps in the past, most of which aren’t worth mentioning. AppZapper is my other significant project alongside Disco.

Me: What are you most excited about in terms of developer technologies to debut in Leopard?

Austin: Without breaking our WWDC NDA, I can safely say that Leopard so far appears to be a very developer centric release. There are plenty of new technologies that will allow us to take advantage of some pretty advanced UI functionality with little effort.

Me: Who is on your team and what is everyone’s main focus?

Austin: Our team is made up of Jasper Hauser, Brian Ball, and I. Brian handles the crazy marketing promotions, Jasper designs the pretty graphics, and I code it up. Together, Jasper and I design the workflow and interaction and also handle the blog.

Me: Who came up with the original idea for the app?

Austin: I originally had the idea to make a simple disc copying app. We started with that and things just kind of evolved.

Me: How long has the project been underway?

Austin: We’ve been working on Disco since late June.

Me: What features are you hoping to put tin the final 1.0 release that we haven’t seen in the beta so far?

Austin: For the most part, the beta is feature complete.

Me: What are your future plans for Disco?

Austin: We have quite a few cool features in the works. Things like Discography and Spandex push the boundaries of what you would associate with a burning app.

Overall, Disco is not a direct Toast competitor. We’re out to make a real disc burning app for real people and appeal to the actual user in every way possible.

Well, there you have it. Seems like Austin and Jasper make an amazing team and I’m excited to see what else they come up with not only with Disco, but for the Mac community in the coming years.

If you are interested in grabbing your own free trial copy of the Disco beta, you can check out the Disco website here for more info with introductory pricing starting at just 14.95 USD.
Also of note is the newly launched website created by theMacNurse called Mac App A Day which promises to have copies of some of Austin Sarner’s apps as part of their giveaway, so be on the lookout for those and more awesome Mac shareware applications for free on that website starting December 1.

Download your free 21 day demo of PathFinder 4 here.

I run across a lot of applications every day when I’m on the net. I check out all the latest postings on Version Tracker and keep my eye out for new software on Digg as well as some other blogs that I subscribe too. And the last place that I find software is MacZot. This application is one that I purchased as a bundle awhile back, a member of five apps that I got for something outrageous, like 5 dollars. I was a little disappointed when I read what was in the bundle because I hadn’t heard of any of them before and I wasn’t sure what the apps were capable of. Now I’m sharing KIT with you today as another application that you should seriously check into, especially if you want to get even more organized with your Mac.

Features

KIT has a bit role to fill: making your life more organized and productive. That’s a rather large project objective if you ask me. However, KIT goes a good ways to fulfilling that promise right from the start, you just have to let the application help you. KIT is based on a model similar to what all of us are familiar with in iTunes and iPhoto. KIT is based on a library model where you can easily import files of several different types, and then organize, tag, label, shuffle, search and just in general find what you need when you need it.

Upon first glance I wasn’t sure what role this application was supposed to fill since I use Spotlight for almost everything already. I use it as an application launcher and to find 99% of the files that I ever need. My Desktop is clear and I like to keep my dock as clutter free as possible as well. That just leaves me and Spotlight, a god-send in Tiger as far as I’m concerned. Therefore KIT has to do something more than just find your files easily.

After you import files into KIT, you can tag them for better and more efficient searching later. There is a sidebar that lets you easily add comments, just like Spotlight comments, so that when you search it will be easier to find it. You can create and delete categories, and assign colors to those categories so that it’s easier to identify what category a file is in at one glance, similar to what you can do in Mail.app with rules and highlighting (I use that feature a lot). From the sidebar you can quickly assign a category to a file, helping you out later down the road as we’ll see.

Since you can assign so much metadata to your files you’ve imported, cool features like Smart Groups, once again like we’ve seen in Tiger and iTunes, lets you aggregate your files from categories, comments, filenames, names, and much more. Very powerful stuff. There are also static groups that you just drag and drop files into.

Besides just being able to find your files easily, you can preview them right within the application, like a split view that we have in Mail.app This means your text files, movies, audio files, images, PDFs, and a really cool feature with webpages makes it easy for you to see what the file is without having to open up an external application. The Web Archive feature is really cool because it captures the page for you and renders it when you preview it. You can view the page offline and keep it for as long as you need it. You can also refresh and update the page later and there is an easy Action button so that you can open the page in an external browser or copy the address to your system clipboard.

All of this said, I’m sure that I’ve just scratched the surface of this application. Feel free to download a trial copy (regular price $25) and let me know if you find a use for it that I’ve missed. The app has a nice interface and is a cinch to use, so go give it a try today.

Music this week is “I Devise My Own Demise” by Papa Roach. Click on the album art in the site sidebar to go to music store.

Download your free trial copy of KIT here

I found this application on the net a few days ago and after using it for the last little bit, I have to share since I whole-heartedly think that we have an application that is going to take the Mac financial community by storm.

Cha-Ching takes a completely different approach to money management: it makes it fun. Yep, managing your finances can be fun. I bet you never even thought that before, have you? I’ve been a Quicken user since it came packaged with my Mac over a year ago. I used it because it had the basic features that I needed, but I never enjoyed the experience. It felt too fragmented, like something was missing and the interface was horrendous, possibly left over from the Carbon days, I’m not sure….the design was just out dated and bad.

Cha-Ching just saw it’s 0.2 release today and the three man development team is headed up by Juan Alvarez, the cool guy that developed the application I talked about awhile that makes using RSS technology a breeze and fun, Cast Life. You can read more about that awesome application here.

What sets this app apart from the likes of Quicken is it’s unique feature set and the interface (you knew that was coming, I’m obsessed with the application’s looks…if it works, but it’s not stunning, it’s not on my list of “awesome” apps). The interface is playful with plenty of custom effects that I’m sure took Juan quite a bit of time to get working just right. The design guy on board did a wonderful job with the graphics and the team’s hard work shows off. Features like smart-drawers for easy organization of transactions, iSight integration so you can easily add photos for your transactions and plenty of other nifty features make the app fun to use and make you productive too.

Cha Ching isn’t a Quicken killer just yet. Juan says he is working on adding more features like accounts and more, but at the moment the application isn’t quite ready to just take over all of your finances. It works great for seeing who owes you money and what you’ve spent, but it’s not a replace-all app just yet. Stay tuned, I’m sure that will all change shortly.

Below is a quick screenshot of the app in action from the Cha-Ching website. Watch out in the next couple weeks as Juan and I plan to have a talk on a podcast episode about his plans for the application and more.

Cha-Ching website

I just wanted to give everyone the heads up that the October issue of the online macCompanion magazine is out. Looks like it has some pretty good articles in it this month, be sure to head on over and check it out.

Read this month’s issue of macCompanion.

The one that I came up with that I really like is the nasty buttons that are in Mail.app. I absolutely despise them with a passion and found a little app that replaces them for you with the ones from the Panther version of Mail. So, not nasty button things and nice icons in their place. A nice update if you ask me. So, be sure to download it if you’d like to regain your nice buttons back in Mail (Tiger version).

Download Mail Stamps 2.0 here.

This is a new application that is what using bittorrent technology should be like. Built-in searching and easy downloading of files makes the whole process seamless with great sense of elegance and style. Currently a free beta available for download, will be shareware once it’s finished. Music this week is “Hate Me” by Blue October.

Download the subtler replacement for iTunes 7 here.

Grab the Xtorrent beta here. 

Read article from AppleInsider here.

Codeweavers CrossOver for Mac is still a beta release. However, it seems to be a solid beta release and with the promise of new features to be added and more applications to be officially supported by the time we see a final release, this product looks like it will shape up to be a serious contender in the growing Windows virtualization sector of the Mac software community.

Essentially, you can get most of the same basic functionality of this product for free from an open-source project called Darwine, which is a port from the Linux project WINE for Mac OS X. I have tried using Darwine before, including using this same application, but I wasn’t sucsessful in getting it working. So, my experience with CrossOver for Mac was much better, but the open-source alternative (on which CrossOver is based) is available if you’re a tinkerer.

CrossOver and Darwine are described as a Windows API compatibility layer on top of the host OS. What makes this solution different from a complete virtualization solution like Parallels Desktop is that instead of having to run a full OS, like Windows XP, with all it’s services and processes, you are just going to be running the application. CrossOver will fool the application, in our case DVD Shrink, to believe that it is running on a Windows 2000 installation, and with a very few small exceptions, it runs withtout a glitch right beside all of our other Mac OS X applications. That being said, this is the holy grail in some respects, but the worst thing to happen for Mac developers in others (think “Let’s just write Windows software, they can always just run that on a Mac with CrossOver….”).

CrossOver for Mac

So let’s get started using DVD Shrink for Windows on our Mac! Of importance in this tutorial is the fact that you don’t have to have an Intel Mac to get this working as far as I can tell, although I haven’t tested it on a PPC one yet. (I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking here.  Yes, WINE ran just fine on Linux, but it was Linux x86, not Linux for PPC.  Therefore, CrossOver is for Intel Macs only, although I can’t find that on their website easily.  First, you’re going to need to download and copy the CrossOver application to your Applications folder (or where you keep your apps). Download CrossOver Beta 1 here. Now, fire up CrossOver for the first time. You’re going to get a box begging for financing everytime you launch the app, register if you wish to support the effort and get in on lower intro pricing (like what Parallels did). If not, just click “Continue”.

Now we need to install a piece of software. We’re going to be working with a program for Windows called DVD Shrink. This piece of software lets you take a DVD that is larger than the standard 4.7GB and shrink it to fit on that size disc, allowing you to make a backup copy of a commercial DVD. (NOTE: I do not condone or suggest that you use this tuturial as a way to break the law. Only copy or backup DVDs that you own and don’t distribute those). You can download DVD Shrink 3.2 here.

Once you have downloaded DVD Shrink, you need to unzip the zip archive. You will now see a program labeled “dvdshrink32setup.exe” on your Desktop with an icon with some gears and the CrossOver logo. If you double-click this, it should launch CrossOver, even if the program isn’t currently running. However, I recommend (just because I haven’t tested installing something that way) to go through the “Install Software” feature inside of CrossOver. Use the “Configure > Install Software” feature to bring up a window like the one below. The list of supported software isn’t very long (there is an online list as well that you can talk with other people about your experiences with a certain piece of software), so we’re going to use the “Install Unsupported Software” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the window.

Click “Continue” in the next window. The next window is informing you that installing software that isn’t officially supported has a good chance of messing up what you already have installed and working. If you follow the suggestions, then you can create a new “bottle” which is essentially a little container where your application thinks it’s running in Windows. For this tutorial I haven’t installed anything before, so I had to create a new bottle to start with. It’s up to your discretion whether you’d want to keep using different bottles for every program or not. I’m not sure what the effects on hard drive space and the like would be.

The next window that appears lets you choose the installer that you’re going to use. This is the “dvdshrink32setup.exe” file that we unzipped on our Desktop. Choose the left option in the window and then browse to that file and click “Continue”. From there it will launch the actual DVD Shrink install program for you to install with. Use all of the default options until you are finished with the installer.

Once you have that installed, go back into CrossOver and go to your “Programs > DVD Shrink > DVD Shrink” menu to start the program that we just installed. It will launch the program and then we can get started backing up a DVD. I won’t go into much detail here because there are numerous tutorials available on the net about using DVD Shrink. Use Google and find those. I’ll mention just a few quirks with the program here because they are related to CrossOver and the Mac.

You won’t be able to access the disc itself in this program. CrossOver doesn’t let the program see the physical drive itself. This being said, you won’t be able to use the built-in burn functionality either. You’re going to need some free hard drive space to get this accomplished because we’re going to be copying the entire DVD uncompressed to you hard drive (from 4.7 up to almost 9GB in some cases), then we’re going to encode it in DVD Shrink (I’m assuming that takes up some space somewhere) and then we’re going to create another 4.7GB disc image.

To access your DVD, you’re going to need an application that will “rip” the DVD to your hard drive. There are a few solutions available for Mac, the most used being MacTheRipper. (I’m not linking to that here for copyright violation issues. However, you can find it on VersionTracker or MacUpdate). Rip your DVD to your hard drive and it will create a folder with the name of your DVD and in that it will have a “Video_TS” folder. That’s all good. (Recommend placing this on your Desktop as it will make locating it easier later).
Now, back in DVD Shrink, we need to open up the DVD we just ripped to the hard drive. Click the “Open Files” button back in DVD Shrink and we’ll have to browse for the “Video_TS” folder that we just ripped to the drive. If you placed this on your Desktop, you can use the “My Mac Desktop” folder in the file browser for easy access. If not, finding it is going to be a pain. Your hard drive shows up a few different ways in the browser (Your home folder as well as the root of the drive) and if you have stored it on an external disc, you would have to use the “/” and then “Volumes” to be able to find the name of your disc. This is very confusing for some Mac users because they have never seen folders with that name before. If you’re interested in why you are seeing that, read more up on Unix and it’s underpinnings in Mac OS X.

Now that we have sucsessfully opened our DVD, you can change a bunch of settings to tweak the compression on your extras, languages, submenus and more. You want the whole bar across the top to be green, saying that it will fit onto one disc just fine. Once that is done, we’re going to want to “Backup” our DVD. After clicking the “Backup” button, you have a couple options to save our work. You can either save it as a Disc Image which we can later simply burn to a DVD using Disk Utility, or you can save it to a folder, which will create another Video_TS folder, which you would need something like Toast, or LiquidCD (which is very nice and free, I’ll be talking about it in another episode) to be able to burn to DVD.

With whatever option you choose, you now have a working version of the disc you started out with, except that you have it on a smaller, regular DVD now. If you’re confused about how to burn a disc image using Disk Utility, you need to open Disk Utility (Applications/Utlities) and open an image from the “File” menu. Then select that image in the left-hand pane and click the “Burn” button to burn the image. You can also do this with several other applications, but this is an easy way as well.

I hope that everyone has had sucsess with DVD Shrink and can now sit back in wonder at what you’ve accomplished. Be sure to send me emails and talk to me on AIM if you have any questions about the topic and I’ll get back to you shortly. Also, if you found this article helpful, be sure to click the big “Digg This” button at the bottom of the page so that we can share this info with others.

Boot Camp

I was originally going to do an indepth review of Boot Camp here as well, but after looking around the net for awhile, I realized that there is already several hours worth of reading available for people to read. That said, I was pretty impressed with the painlessness of the whole process and I didn’t have any problems getting Windows XP SP2 installed on my Macbook. My whole obsession with this started because I was going to place and boot XP from my external USB drive, but not having time to get this accomplished right now, I settled for trying this out. If you have a need for better video and graphics support (such as games!!) than what Parallels provides, than this is a pretty cool solution. It’s also free and will be bundled in with Leopard itself when that finally launches. Key thing to remember is to just backup your data before you get started, and that you can’t use any disc except a full install, no upgrade discs.

I have an Applescript up on the Downloads page, if anyone is interested, that will automatically convert an image to a 64X64 image, assuming that you started with a square image to start with. I use this a lot for shrinking Mac icons into managable PNG images for use on the site.

For the meat of this tip however, I just discovered an easy way to convert an image’s size, with a free app that comes bundled with OS X (unfortunately not Preview). That application is the Color Sync Utility. Just use Spotlight to find that, open up your image in the app, click the button that resembles a “Zoom to Fit” button in Preview, but this is a resizer button in Color Sync Utility.

Click that button, and you can resize by percentage, width, height, etc. This is a great little workaround and gives me more flexibility than my Applescript or having to use Photoshop to accomplish the same thing. If anyone else has an easier way, I’d be glad to hear it!

So, basically I have this 200Gb external USB disk that I couldn’t use because I couldn’t format it from Disk Utility on my Macbook. Disk Utility would just hang and never get a thing accomplished. So, I found a very good tip here from the great people over at MacOSXHints and that got me started in the right direction.

The basics of this tip was that you would need a Windows machine to just write the partitions out. You didn’t need to format them with Windows, but just initiliaze the disk and then create your partitions. Wasn’t that tricky, you use the built-in disk management that is located in the “Manage” contextual menu after you right-click on “My Computer”, at least on XP. So, I got that setup with no probs.

Hooking the drive backup to my Mac is where it got tricky. Disk Utility still wouldn’t play well at all, so I went with the Terminal approach. NOTE: diskutil from the Terminal has the same probs, don’t even try it.

newfs_msdos -v FAT_VOLUME_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk3s2

The above command formatted the second partition on my external disk as FAT32 so that I could easily share some stuff between Windows, Linux, and Mac. Great. Now to getting the majority of my disk as a Journaled HFS+ volume so I wouldn’t have to worry about filenames getting corrupted and would be able to enjoy all the great stuff with the filesystem. Hard to do my friends.

In the tip, there was another command to format the first volume. I ran that and got “Initialized HFS+ volume…” Sounds promising. In the tip the author also mentioned that his system picked up the FAT32 one, but he had to manually mount the HFS+ volume. Tried that with no sucsess, got an IOKit timeout error.

From here I went back to the drawing boards. I had heard of issues with Firewire drives and Oxford chipsets. This is a USB drive, so that ruled FW out and the chipset didn’t seem to be the problem for Windows, so I ruled that one out as well. Next, I’d heard reports that booting from your installation disk might work. I tried that with my Macbook’s DVD and got the same results (with Disk Utility and diskutil from a Terminal window).

I had heard that it was possibly related to an Intel issue, so I set off with a retail copy (10.4.2) of Tiger and tried doing the same things on my brothers older eMac. No luck with that either. The last thing I had left to try was the tip I’d read somewhere that Panther was the only thing some people could use to get it working. I didn’t have a Mac with Panther on it, so I had disregarded this tip earlier in the process. However, it just hit me that I did have a Panther CD lying around and that if I booted from that I would have a Terminal and Disk Utility as well. Guess what! Using Disk Utility from the Panther CD, I was able to easily format my HFS disk and all went as you would expect. The caveat of this approach is that evidently Panther won’t format FAT32 volumes, so you would still need to format this via a Windows machine, of back in Tiger (via the Terminal, still couldn’t get it working with Disk Utility at all).

A very long process for something that should be very easy to do.  I’m filing a bug report right now to see what the deal is, but hopefully this will help get someone else off on the right foot if you are having issues as well.

First off, this is going to be a major upgrade from Tiger. There is all kinds of goodies that are under the hood that when applications start rolling out that take advantage of these technologies, end users are just going to be so much happier. Developers are pretty happy right now too.

So for the things that I can talk about, and elaborate on what you’ve heard all about so far.

Time Machine. This is a major innovation when you stop and think about it. Backing up your software and system isn’t a new idea, but the way that Apple has chosen to implement it is quite astounding and revolutionary. Basically, you can use Time Machine to back up your entire system, with some few tweaks for excluding stuff you don’t want backed up. That’s the only thing that Time Machine has in common with regular backup solutions of the past, however. Time Machine provides a really cool interface for locating files that you have deleted in the past. So, if you open a Finder window and see that you’re missing “foo.txt”, you can fire up Time Machine, you enter a cool 3D space view, and you can fly back day by day until you see your file. Then, you just hit the recover button to bring it back into the present, you exit Time Machine, and you’re all set!

Mail 3.0 brings some interesting features, especially if you spend a lot of time in the app. Mail now supports stationary, so you can easily create impressive emails and send out to friends. There is a system-wide To-Do system that both Mail and iCal tie into, allowing developers to be more creative in the future and tie into it as well. Mail is also a decent RSS reader and supports Notes as well.

iChat 4.0 packs quite a punch. This app now provides support for animated buddy icons, sports a new interface, and provides support for goodies such as Photo Booth effects and backgrounds, both video and images.

Spaces is another feature built into the OS this year that will kill yet another small developer. Applications like Virtue and Desktop Manager have been available on the Mac platform to allow users more room to work with. Expose was a step in the right direction a few years ago, but Apple has introduced a full multiple desktop manager into the OS called Spaces. You can configure this for several individual desktops and it works wonderfully. You can use Expose when you zoom out and see all of the spaces, so that you can see all the windows in each desktop and you can even drag windows from one space to another, a very, very cool feature.

There are several other new features demoed in Leopard during Steve Jobs’ Keynote address here at WWDC yesterday, so be sure to head on over to the Apple website and look at the Leopard Preview here to learn more about the technologies!

On a more personal note, this is a beta release and there are a few things that have bothered me enough that I’ll mention them here. First off, the feature that I love most about my Macbook might even be the ability to tap with both fingers and have that act as a ctrl-click. Yep, that’s not working right now. Spotlight is very, very, very fast for launching applications now, thank goodness! However, this will hurt the wonderful app Quicksilver some in the future. It’s not a replacement, but it does cover the basics.

You can download Maintenance here.

So, for those that don’t know what this site is about, I’m mainly focused on providing interesting tips and reviews for Mac users. Sometimes this varies from slightly more technical stuff (see this post) to more common things, such as an RSS Tutorial, but I like to think that I keep everyone happy by jumping around a bit in coverage. I produce the Mac Fanatic podcast which airs weekly, usually up on Sunday afternoons at the lastest. There is also a video feed that I just posted, as our video and audio episodes were in the same podcast for the last few months.

I’m a 19 year old college student working a couple of jobs and attending WWDC 2006 in less than 2 weeks! I’ll be throwing in an intro article for the macCompanion production in the August issue and will have WWDC coverage in the September issue. Check back on this website for some thoughts and experiences throughout the conference itself as well.

Let me know what you want to hear reviewed or covered! I’m only one person and while what may strike me as immensely interesting, others assure me that not everyone enjoys looking through lines of code and having a “Hey, that’s how you do that!” moment. So, welcome to the site and I hope you’ll be back. There are feeds on the left of the page so you can stay up to date, including with comments, Atom, RSS, the podcast feed, and a link to the podcast on the Music Store.

Long live the Mac!

The 2.0 Private Beta (which just so happens to be public now, go figure) is amazing. It builds upon the features of Safari and Webkit and takes them to a whole new level. I personally love the floating black-transulcent windows like we have in iPhoto 6 or Aperture. I have taken some screenshots of the build in action so you can see the beauty. Not all of the browser is localized in English yet, but it’s still fairly usable.

You can download your own copy off our servers here, or check for more frequent updates from sourceforge here.

Found via Philly Ryu

In this episode, I’m taking a look at just what makes Intel Macs different from those that have come before it. To sum it up very briefly, with an Intel Mac you have options to run Windows and other PC related OSes that you didn’t have as a feasible option before. Products such as Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp allow you to easily install and use Windows and Windows applications on your new Intel Mac.

There will be one more podcast before I’m off to WWDC in great San Francisco. Be sure to leave me comments, send emails, keep the human interaction alive!

Also mentioned in this episode was the Ten Minute Mac podcast hosted by James Matarrese. You can look at the podcast in the Music Store at this link, or view his website at this one.

I haven’t had any of my MSN friends online yet to test this out, but you can add contacts very easily. It doesn’t just automatically show up in your list or give you a way to import your contacts either. I’m assuming that your MSN friends have to be using Windows Live Messenger as well to talk to you, but I can’t confirm anything without someone online. Below are a few quick screenshots of the added functionality.

Grab the latest beta of Yahoo here.

When Adding A Contact You Have These Choices

When You Login To Messenger

This is a great, true Mac OS X application. There are amazing transitions, effects, a wonderfully laid out and well implemented interface along with great features. Sad thing is that the Tetris company just contacted the developer (only took them a few years, no doubt) saying that they were infringing on copyright laws and all that. So, while the developer figures all this stuff out, there’s not an official release available.
This program has many unique features including:

• Single Player Mode
• Dual Player Mode and Tournament Play
• Tons of features with Network Play such as Bonjour support, built in chat, score tracking for all players and a webpage listing servers available over the net.
• 10 Levels to choose from, fully customizable keyboard settings, and it’s freeware!

Main Window

Bonjour Networking

Network Chatting

All in all, this is a wonderful application and a good implementation on the original game, so be sure to head over to the developer’s site here.

Technorati Tags: Quinn, Review

Read more and download the new version here.

Technorati Tags: Rapidweaver

(Click Image above to go to download page)

I wanted everyone to know that a new version of Yahoo Messenger for Mac has finally been released. This is a major deal for a few reasons. First off, Yahoo is about the easiest way for Mac users to be able to use a webcam with PC users. iChat does support webcams wonderfully, but you can’t use it with AIM or any other messenger, so it’s only good for use with other Mac users. Also, this version introduces support for Windows Live messaging, so that you can now talk to your MSN contacts through Yahoo messenger. I haven’t got a change to set this up yet, or even see how for that matter, but you can supposedly do this. I’ll get back with more info once I figure that out.
The interface has underwent some much needed changes. The current stable version (2.5.3) was released into the wild back in 2003, if I’ve got my years correct. Therefore, the interface is brought up to snuff, there are awesome Growl like notifications, new icons and support for the latest iSight cams in the Macbooks, even letting you take snapshots just like if you’re in Photo Booth and use that directly as your display image in the messenger itself.

This version also adds a “Current Playing iTunes Track” as a status option, features an almost iChat like chat window with large prominent photos displayed on the sides and chat bubbles containing the messages, full Address Book integration so that you can add a contact from a Contact Card already in your Address Book and tons of other cool features. I’ve included some basic screenshots to get everyone started.

Initial Signon Window

Address Book Integration

Current iTunes Track

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger versions.

Setting Display Image

Choosing a Display Image

Technorati Tags: Review, Yahoo Messenger

• Improved Spotlight
• Revised Handling of Applications
• Integrated iCal, Address Book, and Mail
• Front Row on Steroids
• Better built in RSS Support
• More Eye Candy
• Better Dashboard Implementation
• To Quit or Not To Quit?
• iTunes: for Movies
• Death of Plastic

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, RSS

First, object oriented programming is the ‘bomb’, for lack of better words. This just makes sense. While I learned a lot about working through problems and all that while learning C, an OOP just makes so much more sense.

Second, Cocoa is heaven. This is the way programming should be. There are probably thousands of well documented and easily searchable classes, objects, methods, etc, all at your fingertips. It’s extremely easy to add functionality to an application because it’s so well documented and right there for you.

Third, there was no third. I love XCode, I love my Mac, I love OOP. Cocoa is the best. Nothing more to say.

Implementing RSS using Rapidweaver

I imagine that the majority of the listeners of this are going to be Rapidweaver users, since I get a lot of feedback asking for stuff dealing with Rapidweaver. So, I’ll spend most of my time focusing on this. Rapidweaver only has one type of page that supports RSS, that being the “Blog” page. You use this type of page for creating blog entries, as well as if you were going to produce and distribute a podcast.
First add a blog style page. Then click on the “Setup” button and view the “RSS Feed” options to get your feed setup for use.

In Rapidweaver 3.5, you can add text in the “Summary” field. Adding text here lets you summarize what is displayed when people view your feed. They would only see this text and then your readers would have to view the full article to get the text in the “Main Entry” area.

Once you click on the “Setup…” button, you get the following window where you can customize your RSS feed even more. Most of the fields are self explanatory and I briefly talked about them in the podcast as well.

Now that you have all of that setup, you just need to publish and view your site in a browser and there will be a little blue icon with RSS in it or the orange feed icon if you’re using something besides Safari. Congratulations, that wasn’t hard, was it?

Implementing RSS using iWeb

iWeb is actually a lot easier to get up and running with RSS. You have to have either a “Blog” or “Podcast” style page, and there are options for both of them under the “RSS” tab in the Inspector window. It’s already enabled for you, all you have to do is to add entries to your blog and you’re all set!

All you have to do is add entries. To do that just make sure that you’re viewing the “Entries” part of your blog page.





The “Blog” part of the Inspector gives you options for your blog page while the “Podcast” part gives you more control over your podcast, while using iWeb.

Anyone should be able to get all this setup pretty easy if they wanted to. The key thing is to figure out if you really need RSS for your site. If you’re going to podcast, then it’s a must. If you add a lot of stuff to your site, or blog, then it’s a must. If you just have a website that you change once a month, you probably don’t need the trouble of setting this up.

Read more about Rapidweaver, the awesome website creation and management application from RealMac Software here.

Read about Apple’s own iWeb here.

Read about Newsfire, the killer RSS aggregator for Mac OS X here.

Technorati Tags: Rapidweaver, iWeb, RSS

As a preface, I have had 4 months of immersion in C. We’re talking reading the textbook as leisure reading kinda thing. A real page turner. I’ve had my “Programming in Objective-C” book by Kochran for about the past year, but couldn’t get very far into it because I had no programming experience at all, and I don’t care what the author says, you need some to keep up with the stuff in the book.

With my free time I’ve caught up my reading on Cocoa. Cocoa is object oriented where C is procedural, so there were some fundamental design changes that I had to get my head around, but in general, objects rock! I’ve worked out a half dozen normal starter programs involving manipulating fractions, but I wanted to really learn something new and work with a GUI.

In this tutorial, you are talked through the steps of creating a currency converter application. This is pretty easy to follow and understand and I highly recommend it if you’re just wanting to learn what programming is like. It will give you a deeper appreciation for the applications you use everyday, and if you’re a developer, will give you a profound appreciation for Cocoa.

I added some stuff to this project not found in the tutorial.

• NSNumberFormatter (Formatting the numbers in the text field to show up like dollars and cents)
• Adding Help Documentation to your application
• Adding “Scrolling Credits” to show more info in the “About MyApplication” area
• Quitting when last window closed (aka new app style, like iPhoto, Photo Booth, etc)
• Launching a URL (If you click “Help” and then “Visit Developer’s Website” it launches the site)

You can download a disk image that has the compiled program (Universal) and the source project for you. Grab that here or off the downloads page.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Cocoa, XCode

First off, if you wish you can open up the XCode project and just play around in there to see what is happening. The tutorial does a good job explaining a lot of stuff, so I’m not going to repeat that here.

Adding a URL Object to launch a website
If you want to add this functionality to your application, you can get it very easily actually. While you’re in Interface Builder, click on the “NSObject” in the “Classes” area of the window and create a new object. Name it whatever you want, but we’re calling it “URLController”. Create the files for that object, add a target/action called “goToUrl” and then initiate that object. Now select what interface element you want to use this controller (the “Visit Developer’s Site” in this case) and ctrl-click and drag from that object to the controller we just created. Connect the element to the “goToUrl” target/action we created. Save your .nib file.

Back in XCode, your ‘URLController.h’ file should look like this:

@interface URLController : NSObject
{
}

//This is the action called by the “Visit Developer’s Website” in the “Help” Menu
- (IBAction)goToURL:(id)sender;

@end

Now that you’ve done that, you need to add the code to actually launch the site. We do this by calling a method ‘openUrl’ of NSWorkspace which takes a “NSURL” as an argument. You can simply assign your URL to the NSURL and then you’re all set. The following tidbit of code will launch the site, place it in your ‘URLController.m’

- (IBAction)goToURL:(id)sender
{

//Every app has access to a “NSWorkspace”. We call the method “openURL” which takes an NSURL as an
//argument to open up our webpage.

[[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/"]];

}

Now that you’ve got that setup, save, build and run your app. You should have that working right. If you don’t, don’t go on until you have that up and running. As always, email me with questions!

Adding Help to your Application
This is actually quite simple, especially if you have some HTML and CSS behind you already. You’re just going to create some HTML files and have them all working in a directory called ‘YourAppName Help’. (The Help Viewer window is around 500px wide, for your info). Once you have that all up and running, just drag that folder into your XCode project, choosing the options to copy the stuff into your project as well as the bottom option of recursively add the folders. Now you need to add a little bit of stuff to your ‘info.plist’ that you edited earlier in the tutorial. Add the following lines to your file, replacing ‘Currency Converter’ with your app name.

<key>CFBundleHelpBookFolder</key>
<string>Currency Converter Help</string>
<key>CFBundleHelpBookName</key>
<string>Currency Converter Help</string>

Formatting your NSTextFields
This is actually a very broad topic that I can’t even possibly get into today, but a very basic explanation follows. If you’ve ever used C, then you’re familiar with all of the ways you can ‘format’ messages to the shell, via spaces, etc. There is a lot to be said for ‘%.3f’. So, how do you get that same functionality with a GUI in Cocoa? Just drag and drop of course!

You just need to fire up Interface Builder and drag the little field with some numbers on it ONTO the NSTextField that you already have in your app. This will add a ‘Formatting’ item if you view the Inspector window, and here you can change the actual formatting options.

Scrolling Credits
Now that you have that setup, you just need to add your scrolling credits and we’re almost done. Create a ‘credits.rtf’ in your project (or create it with your text editor of choice and add it to your project, doesn’t matter). Whatever this file says will show up in the “About MyApp” menu item.

Quitting after last window closed
Finally, since this little application only has one window and no way to open a new one, we’ll just go ahead and let it quit the program once the window is closed. To do this we just need to add a simple method to one of our controllers and add that in Interface Builder.

- (BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSApplication *)theApplication
{
return YES;
}

Adding the above code to the ‘URLController.m’ file lets us close the app when the last window is closed. We need to fire up Interface Builder and select the “delegate” option first off to make our ‘File’s Owner’ connect to the ‘URLController’ so that it will use the code we just put in the ‘URLController’

After you build and run this last time, everything should work. Help for your app, credits, ways to launch a URL as well as quitting after closing the last window. Pat yourself on the back, you just did what it took me a full 8 hours to research and implement

So, my good friend in his wise wisdom of the net found this page where someone owns up to the work. This guy is an amazing artist and sculptor and the creator of the Genpets. Read up on it for more interesting info.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

This version brings support for the developer’s own implementation of Intel Macs CPU temp, so it doesn’t require that you download, configure, and launch the SpeedIt kernel extension anymore. The application itself will do all of this for you. It can also show you the different temperatures per core of your Core Duo, so that is a very cool feature also.

Visit the developer’s website here.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macbook

This beats anything that I have ever seen in my entire life. I thought that people were responsible with messing with DNA and that the government had some kind of restriction on it. This proves that whole theory wrong.

A friend pointed out this website where the company is getting ready to launch a full lineup of 7 bioengineered “buddies” for kids to have as a pet. You can pick their color that corresponds with it’s personality, as well as a few other features. The poor things are actually ALIVE in a package. Yep, alive, on a shelf in a retail store. They are “hibernating”, bound to the package, strapped in with a feeding tube, a heart monitor and a “freshness strip” just so you don’t buy one that has been on the shelf for too long.

This is wrong on several levels. I find it deeply disturbing that parents would even think about buying one of these creatures and give it to a child just because it is “low maintenance” and would save some time. Oh, and it won’t shed on the couch because it’s hairless. If I saw one of these things in real life I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t get sick or scream.

These might be engineered pets, but they are still living, breathing animals (according to the site). Please help raise awareness of this issue is all I ask. And if they actually make it to market, I’d like to see the videos on YouTube and pictures of the things, in “flesh” of course.

(*Genpet™ life may vary depending on temperature and Genpet ™ freshness)

Technorati Tags: GenPets

The kernel extension lets other programs, such as CoreDuoTemp or the iStat Nano Widget, see just how hot your Intel Mac is running. Without this little piece of software, there isn’t any software currently available that can give you this information.

Grab it from our Downloads page.

Changelog v1.2
Updated speedit extension v.50 – Caution: This update seems to have problems on my system, don’t recommend the update as of yet.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macbook, SpeedIt

Testers have also disclosed that Apple has implemented fixes into the release for saving Adobe and Quark documents to AFP mounted volumes, syncing files and other data to .Mac, and using iChat to create chat rooms over the AIM protocol.

AppleInsider | Mac OS X 10.4.7 to deliver audio fixes, more

Technorati Tags: Apple, iChat

So, as I was trying to create a graphic for the post about my switch back to Apple Mail, I thought that I would try my hand at creating a simple little arrow in my graphic. I just fired up Keynote, created a blank slide, added an arrow from the shapes menu and voila! Turns out if you just select the little arrow that you just made and copy it, then you can paste it directly into Photoshop as a vector graphic, being able to rotate it around and everything.

Moral of the story: Don’t underestimate the hidden power of iWork apps and use them in your day to day life!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Keynote

I love the awesome screen on my new Macbook. The quality and lighting is stunning, absolutely wonderful. Far surpasses even the nice 20.1″ widescreen LCD I bought a month or more back. I have quickly fallen for the widescreen format. DVDs look great. Garageband is made for widescreen, as well as several other iLife 06 and iWork 06 apps.

So, what better way to enjoy all this screen space than to add another view to Mail? With this plugin, Mail turns into an almost Entourage style view (setup of panes) with your mailboxes and folders on the left, your list of messages in the middle and message previews in the far right. I personally like this view as I can see more of my message at a glance, but it does need a widescreen monitor for it to truly shine.

Note: When you install this little application, it changes your layout in Mail. To revert, you need to uninstall the bundle itself. The developer has listed a preference pane that would allow you to change this a little easier as a feature on a wishlist, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. Therefore, if you feel queasy about installing this, I would stay back. It shouldn’t mess your Mail up, but if you plan on switching back and forth (between widescreen and normal view) quite often, then this isn’t a solution for you.

You can view the developer’s site here.

You can download the plugin from the developer here or from our downloads page.

Technorati Tags: Apple

Tip being that if you have external displays hooked up and you take a screenshot (Cmd-Shift-3 by default) you actually get two images placed on your desktop, one for each display. I thought this was really cool. I don’t know why I was not expecting to get an image for my external display, but it was a nice surprise to just get two images and…it just work.

They are “Gargle” boxers. They resemble a Google search page with twists on common buttons and links. For a geek like me, this is just too much. Below are a few pictures for your amusement.

I saw the iTunes Essentials collection for Gay Pride Month and decided to read more up on the matter. It’s sort of embarrassing to not even know what it’s all about when I try to consider myself a well rounded person and I’d like to consider myself an activist for gay rights.

So, it turns out that June is gay pride month. You can read a complete history of events and the movement itself from Wikipeida here. Be proud of whatever you are.

After getting my account setup, I first have to say that the web design is extremely incredible. I was just awed at the use of colors, rounded edges, gradients…it was just so beautifully crafted, you could tell that people put so much time into this, and to then think that it’s free. I’m contemplating upgrading just to give them some money for such a superb product.

So, the uses of this are pretty limitless in some respects. I have been using the Macfanatic.net server as a way to share files with friends for awhile now, just uploading stuff and then they download it. However, most of my friends aren’t technical enough to use an FTP client to upload stuff back to the server, so that we could share. I wouldn’t want to have to setup more FTP user accounts either.

Box.net is a great way to share stuff then. You can have public files and folders, or make some of them strictly private. With that thought, you can simply share all kinds of stuff easily between users. Another use that is pretty cool and is almost strictly reserved to .Mac users is iCal Publishing.

I’ve never used .Mac and don’t plan on it, even though I get in moods every now and then where I want to buy a subscription and play around with the features. Being able to easily share your iCal calendars is a major plus. Basically, you need to head on over to www.box.net and setup a free account, keeping in mind that if you want to share stuff with people, they’ll need to login and they will require your email (username) and password. Choose something unimportant.

Once you have the account setup, you simply select the calendar you want to share in iCal, select “Publish” and enter the server address of “https://www.box.net/dav” with your username and password. You might have to try using just “http”, but play around with it until you find a way that works. You can read a better set of instructions from the site I found over here.

I like the fact that the man feels passionate enough about something to leave the company that he cofounded. I have mixed feelings for the tech industry though. I’m a very strong Apple supporter. However, I feel slightly nostalgic that some of the big men that have essentially created the industry as I know, are starting to leave. With Bill Gates on the way out, there are just a handful left in the business. Just makes you think just how much longer Jobs will be with us. I have only been a devout Apple fan since the return of Jobs, so I can’t imagine and Apple without him. Just food for thought.

Read article from AppleInsider.

Since then, I’ve used this application mainly as a toy when I’ve been bored and wanted a playful and cool interface (remember, I’m all about the interface..) However, a new version has just been released and I downloaded that to see what has changed.

I must say, a lot has changed! The toolbar has seen some minor changes, the blogging part of the program has been overhauled and then there is a new feature called “News”. To start out with, I really enjoy the “News” feature. It’s basically a web interface to several RSS feeds grouped in categories, but it is done EXTREMELY well (forgive my shouting). I can’t stress just how amazingly well implemented this is and is causing Safari to look slightly outdated at the moment.

The blog has sadly been moved out of a tab and into it’s own window. I don’t like the floating window because I’m in love with tabs. I want to blog in a tab. I would also like to see a feature to blog a specific page. If I’m viewing a page, if I hit “Blog” I’d like to have that text and link to it placed in a new post. That’s the whole reason you would blog from a browser, right?

Flickr, Delicious support….there is a lot of features packed into this. While it might be Mozilla code at heart, the Flock team has put a lot of effort into making this a distincitve browsing expereince.

Visit the Flock Page.

Blogged with Flock

However, if you’re not sure just what solution is right for you, then you might want to read this article.  It explains the differences between just dual booting and running a virtual machine like Parallels.

My recommendation on that matter?  If you’re going to want to game, then using Boot Camp might be for you.  I can’t comment much more on that besides the fact that I’m not sure about driver availability for some things.  I know that Boot Camp provides many of the drivers, but stuff like your built-in iSight isn’t going to work.

If you decided that Parallels is easier, then go for it.  There is currently a free trial for you to get your feet wet.  It generally takes up less hard drive space and makes switching between Windows and Mac applications a breeze.  You will need a lot of Ram with this solution though.

Basically, just try it out and see what is best for you.  I would try Parallels first as it is easiest to remove from your system and will do less damage to your Mac if you mess something up.

Blogged with Flock

Scary as it sounds, there are reports that liquid cooled PowerMac G5s are starting to leak. And to beat it all, it leaks green goo!

Seriously, I’d check yours out if you have one and possibly be purchasing some AppleCare…

Found this from One Digital Life

Blogged with Flock

I would have really liked to share the “Doncha Wish” skit, but it’s not going to work. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

So, I grab the applications image (like if you’re changing it’s icon) and save it as a file. But this is 128×128, and a little big for most web uses. For the longest time the only way I knew of shrinking the image down to use it on the site was to use Photoshop, which is overkill.

However, I ran across a nice tip from MacOSXHints.com the other day and love it. I modified it just a tad for use with the site, but that’s it. Works wonderfully. You can see the code if you “Read More…”

There’s also a download for it on the Downloads page. You just drag an image onto the icon and it creates a copy that is resized to 64×64 on your desktop. Very nice, huh?

–Found this from MacOSXHints.com
–Modified slightly to make a 64×64 image for uses on Mac Fanatic.net site

– save in Script Editor as Application
– drag files to its icon in Finder

on open some_items

repeat with this_item in some_items

try

rescale_and_save(this_item)

end try

end repeat

end open

to rescale_and_save(this_item)

tell application “Image Events”

launch
set the target_width to 64
– open the image file
set this_image to open this_item

set typ to this_image‘s file type

copy dimensions of this_image to {current_width, current_height}
if current_width is greater than current_height then

scale this_image to size target_width

else

– figure out new height
– y2 = (y1 * x2) / x1
set the new_height to (current_height * target_width) / current_width
scale this_image to size new_height

end if

tell application “Finder” to set new_item to ¬

(container of this_item as string) & “scaled.” & (name of this_item)

save this_image in new_item as typ

end tell

end rescale_and_save

If you haven’t heard, Mircosoft is working on releasing a new version of Windows called Windows Vista. It will come out one of these years and it has some hefty expectations of the computer. So, look for the below logo to make sure that it will run Vista when it does finally come out.

This disturbed me for awhile and after reading through the RW forums just the other day, someone proposed a solution that worked.

All you do is copy over the “functions.js” file from a functioning theme (I used Magnesium) and overwrite the one that is in your theme already. I highly recommend making a backup of your current functions.js in case something turns up later and you need to revert. However, for the moment it seems to have fixed my problem and I have some photos up online again.

To edit a theme like this, the easiest way is to just open up Rapidweaver and show the Theme Drawer. Ctrl-Click on the theme and use the “Show Contents” option. In the Finder window that pops up, just copy the “functions.js”. Repeat for the theme you’re wanting to fix, except you’ll paste instead of copying for the last step. Preview your page in your ‘new’ theme and you should see the fruits of your labor!

I talked about several WordPress plugins in this episode. You can find links to all those I mentioned at the post below:

http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/2006/06/07/wordpress-plugins/

I talked about Canvas in this episode (the editor for WordPress themes). View that at the below address.

http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/preview

Grab the AppleScripts for editing all kinds of stuff for iTunes at:

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/

Finally, the biggest topic that I covered and need to link to is for Mint. You can grab Mint at: http://www.haveamint.com

You can grab all kinds of Peppers (plugins for Mint) at the below address:

http://massiveblue.net/pepperminttea/

Sorry about all the links in this episode, but be sure to get out there and explore!

Music this week is “Searchlights” by Falling Up.

The Description field is something that I thought was restricted to Podcasts. However, as I was looking through my library a little more, I realized that any videos I’d downloaded from the iTMS already. So, I searched around on the net for a few minutes and ran across a site that has tons of AppleScripts for tinkering with iTunes.

I downloaded a script called “Enter Description Text” that lets you select a track in iTunes, and then just type in (or paste). It adds it to the right field and all is well. It doesn’t work exactly as I thought it would however. If you have downloaded content from the iTMS or have a podcast, you will notice that there is that little grey “i” that lets you read more about the description. That little icon isn’t present when you use this method. So, while your text will be in that field alright, you really can’t read it all if you have a lot because you would have to stretch the field out extremely wide, reading it in one line.

Visit Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes here.

I played around on the website some last night and ran across a few more cool things. Best of all, they’re free!

First off, there is a simple page that lets you generate useless business titles. Stuff like “Intra Departmental Associate” wouldn’t be hard to come across. I find this immensly amusing because all the titles sound important, yet don’t mean a thing. You can view that page here

The other really cool thing is that you can download some icons for your Mac. It’s a small little set of them. You can grab them from our downloads page

My favorite icon is the stapler.

If you want to use an external monitor with your MacBook in “clamshell” mode (but with the screen open), but don’t have the peripherals, here’s what to do:

However, with the MacBook’s screen off, there is no distraction. In fact, you can partially close the MacBook, keeping enough room for your hands to access the keyboard and trackpad, so you would have even less distraction. Another benefit is not having to worry about the MacBook overheating with it completely shut (clamshell mode), but on. With it open (either fully or partially), I’m sure it helps to vent heat away from the MacBook.

I think this is a nice feature to comment on for anyone who is getting a new Intel Mac laptop.

Read the original post here

Hard drive size.

There are more options, including getting a drive up to 120Gb with the new Macbooks. I opted for the stock 80Gb with my black one because I didn’t wanna wait for a custom built one and I figured that since I didn’t run out of room with 80Gb on my iBook G4, that I’d be all set. Major mistake.

There is so much more to do with an Intel Mac that you need the extra space. If you fall into the Parallels Workstation category, you’ll most likely have a couple virtual machines. We’re talking around 5gigs per one no most cases and that is just basic stuff in the OS, not storing any files, etc.

If you opt for Bootcamp, that’s 10Gb gone from the start. No getting it back.

With all the horsepower at your fingertips (I also highly recommend maxing out a 2Gb of ram, the perfomance is amazing and you’ll love the 2Gb if you want to run Parallels and still use your Mac like you’ve become accustomed to) you are more likely to do stuff that you wouldn’t have done with a PPC Mac.

Some examples of that are go crazy with video. Having a built-in iSight and all this power enables me to play around with iMovie a lot more than I ever thought I would in the past. Result? I now have around 20Gb of video footage, and that’s growing fast.

More power means more fun with Garageband. Simple as that. This holds true for several other apps as well.

Bottom line here? Take the time and think about how you’re going to use your new computer. If you even have a small thought that you might like to use Parallels or try out Bootcamp, then I strongly recommend going with at least the 80Gb, if not something higher. I only wish now that I’d chosen the 120Gb. My only hope is that upgrading the HDD seems to be fairly simple now. Now just to get up the money and do it.

I was working on a computer earlier this afternoon and just happened to notice this box sitting on the user’s desk. Being the inquisitive person that I am (while waiting for WIndows to reboot on a lovely PII tower) I investigated.

What I found caught my attention and made me laugh out loud. And the more I thought about it, I thought “Why not?!” It was a box that had pictures of Lego like figures on it. The whole idea behind the scheme is that you buy these little boxed sets (for 12.95, I already checked) and in the box you get a cubicle, computer, phone, chair, the person, and some other stuff to make their cubicle as home-like as possible.

So, as the advertising on the box suggests, “You can make their lives a living hell, be their best pal, or just let them get along”. I found the whole thing immensely hilarious and I’m seriously thinking about buying up a few of these as some gifts for older friends who are in the dreaded “corporate world” already.

You can view the site to learn more information and make a purchase here.

Get your copy here

You can subscribe to the feed at the below address or just use the handy little purple feed icon in the sidebar to the left.

http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/comments/rss/

In connection with the previous post dealing with the hard drive motion sensor, this little application lets you “slap” your mac so that you can switch between virtual desktops. I’m not sure if I like this, but you can try it out for yourself.

Download the slap-happy desktop manager here.

Someone had posted a comment earlier about two applications making use of the Motion Sensor built-in to most new Mac laptops and I happened to run across those today. Here is a video showing the one that lets you swing your laptop around while it makes lightsaber noises. Totally useless, but funny.

Download Macsaber here.

All the songs were fine, except for one that was horribly encoded with tons of skips. It was a bad experience. What made it all worse was the hassle of trying to find out how to contact Apple about the issue. It took me awhile, but you can use the link below to submit a form with the track if you have had any similar issues with a song from the iTMS.

The band mentioned above, that has an incredible sound, is “Falling Up”. Rest assured that you will hear some of their songs in future podcasts.

Submit a complaint to iTMS Staff here.

I reindexed several different ways, restarted, etc. The solution to my problem ended up being to open up Activity Monitor and search for “SystemUIServer”. If you hit “Quit Process” and the choose “Force Quit” it makes the whole right part of your Menubar reload. This fixed my problem every time.

I’m not sure why I have the problem to start with. Sometimes it’s there as soon as I restart the computer, other times it’s not. If I ever figure something out, I’ll let you know.

However, you can run into folders that the system won’t let you make aliases. After searching on the net for a bit, I found a nice little tip that lets you not only make aliases to any folder from the finder, but is also a nicer way of doing it that the “Cmd-L” mentioned above.

All you do is select the folder or item that you want to link to, and hold down the “Option-Cmd” buttons as you drag the item to a new location. It will show a little alias arrow as your drag it, and when you drop it, you have an alias where you wanted it anyway, without the “alias” stuck the end name too. Pretty useful tip, huh?

I downloaded the new version to play with last night and have got to use it for about an hour so far. Overall, it’s a nice change from the previous version.

The blog page has seen the most improvements from what I gather, including the introduction of permalinks. While I won’t be using this for any real-time production, I’ll most certainly use if for testing purposes a little later.

There are some nice new themes included with this release as well. The interface has seen a nice change and some things have been simplified. To get the full effect, head on over here and download the beta to try it out.

The battery life is on par with the previous 14″ iBook G4 I had. However, I think there is a difference when you put the computer to sleep. I don’t have hard numbers for this, but I’m 99% sure that I could leave my iBook in sleep for a few days at least, without it draining the battery. However, after about 24 hours in sleep, my Macbook will have drained a full battery and be dead.

Just a word to the wise, if you’re not going to be using your Macbook, shut it down.

PodPress – A must have plugin if you’re going to use your WordPress install for podcasting. Gives you all the options you need to make your podcast work right.

Spam Karma 2 – This is the ultimate spam killing plugin. There are tons of options so that you can fine tune just how much spam you want blocked. Has saved me a lot of time from sorting through a few hundred comments every week that were just spam.

WordPress Database Backup – This plugin is installed with WordPress by default, but you have to enable it. It gives you a nice little “Backup” option so that you can backup all your entries, etc. Also lets you backup your Spam Karma lists, very nice.

Tiger Style Administration – The default admin look for WordPress is kinda outdated. This plugin gives you a nice and clean Tiger look. Highly recommend.

Read the article I wrote concerning all the drive setup and network config stuff for WinXP and Tiger here.

The problem comes into play here though. I had enabled “Windows Sharing” on my user account in my journey to get this drive working. I was using my computer and then I started getting error messages saying “error code -10810″. Basically, after googling around for about another hour, I had so many processes running, that the system wouldn’t let me start anymore. So, after restarting several times and trying to be quick enough to open up the Activity Monitor, I found the culprit. (Also note that my Macbook was running at full steam ahead, see pic below)

Turns out I had several, and I do mean several, instances of “smbd” running. While it wasn’t using any of the processor and only 300kb of memory of each instance, it had hanged my laptop. Solution was to be quick enough to fire up System Preferences and turn of Windows Sharing. Problem fixed.

From my reading, it can be anything, not just samba. So, if you’re getting the same problem, fire up Activity Monitor (or the terminal if you’re so inclined) and see what process is there several (and we’re talking a few hundred) times. That’s your bad guy.

I do have to mention that if you have a new Macbook, you have a feature that is specific to your laptop, and one that I think most users will love at that. If you open up your Keyboard and Mouse settings in System Preferences and click on the Trackpad tab, you have an option now labeled “Tap trackpad with two fingers for secondary click”.

Enabling this little feature lets you tap on your trackpad with both fingers and get a crl-click. I love this feature!

Add right-click to XP on MacBook and MacBook Pro:
If you’ve used Bootcamp to install XP on your MacBook or MacBook Pro, you might have been frustrated by not being able to right-click. While shift + f10 will usually work, you might be looking for something more familiar. Apple Mouse Utility will let you use Control-click to right click. Simply place it in your Startup folder, and call it with /s, so that it launches silently on startup.

Also, KeyTweak will allow you to remap your Windows keyboard, useful for reassigning modifiers like Control-C to the Mac’s Command-C, etc.

Can grab the download at:

http://www.macfanatic.net/downloads/temp-loader-v10.dmg

read more | digg story

After doing research and a few hours of tinkering before I realized what I needed to do, I was able to get the kernel extension working that allowed programs like Temperature Monitor to read the CPU temperature from my new Intel Mac.

However, this was really tedious to do every time I started my computer and I’d always thought about trying to learn some simple shell scripting and AppleScript, so I dove in for the past 8 hours or so and have created my scripts, images, installers, and disk image to get everyone else with an Intel Mac up and running in no time.

You can download the Temp Monitor Loader here. Basically, the installer that I included correctly installs the SpeedIt kernel extension and places the Temperature Monitor apps along with my custom AppleScript app in a folder in your Applications folder.

If you put the AppleScript application that I created in your startup items list, then it prompts you for an admin password, loads the extension in the background, and then starts up the Lite version of Temp Monitor for you. Only have to configure the Temp apps once and you’re all set. Instructions and pictures included in the disk image, along with my AppleScript source.

This is just my way of having a good time and giving back to the community. Let me know if you run into any problems with this. I’ve tested it on a few new Macbooks and it worked just fine on all of them. It should also work fine on PPC Macs if you use the custom install option and just install the Temperature Monitor applications themselves.

EDIT: I contacted the developers of both the SpeedIt Extension and Temperature Monitor. While I’m waiting to hear back from the developer of SpeedIt Extension, the developer of the Temperature Monitor apps has clearly expressed that he doesn’t want his producted distributed/associated with this application. So, in compliance with his requests, I have modified the installer and disk image. Now the installer doesn’t distribute/install the Temp Monitor apps and the disk image has a quick link so that you can download and use them yourselves. Sorry about the confusion, but laws are laws, even though I don’t quite understand the dramatic ramifications that were supposed to come from this one.

There’s just one problem. Half the stuff doesn’t work for Intel Macs, for a few reasons. Simplest one, the good developer doesn’t have an Intel Mac to develop on. More complicated answer, it’s hard to get the stats on the Intel Macs, the platform is different and a lot of the stuff is managed by hardware, not by the Mac OS, as it has been in the past.

So, my solution? Patch together your own way, of course! I didn’t do anything revolutionary here, but it took me a few hours to come up with a working solution, so I figured I’d share.

The only thing we’re going to be working on at this point is getting yourself a temperature for your CPU. If you use any programs that are available out there today, the only thing you’re going to get is the temperature of your hard rive. That’s not very interesting, you want to know if you can boil water with your new Macbook, right?

You need to download and install something called “Speedit” by the cool guys over at InCrew software. They’ve developed a very important piece of software (a kernel extension) that allows some of these programs to tap in and see just how hot you’re CPU is running. So, the website is here. However, at the time of writing this, the site is down. So, you can download it here, from our very own server!

Now, you’ll download this lovely disk image and Safari should open it up for you. Next you need to place your “speedit.kext” someplace where you want it to stay. I recommend placing it in your “/System/Library/Extensions” folder, as that seems like a good place to put extensions, no? I’m sure they all like to be in a folder together, holding hands…all happy!

Now that you’ve copied over your extension to the right directory, it’s time to download a piece of software to use it. I highly recommend the free and useful Temperature Monitor and Temperature Monitor Lite. This handy little piece of software will let you configure your sensors (these work on PPC Macs as well, so get them!), even displaying it in your Menubar, out of the way, or having a small icon in your dock that displays the temperature.

Drag those two applications out of that disk image and throw them wherever you want. Before you can use these two great apps, we have to configure your kernel extension and get that working first. To do this, fire up the terminal. (I plan on creating an Applescript or shell script for this, but I don’t have the time to learn how to do that at the moment).

Now that you have terminal open, navigate to the folder where you placed your extension. You might use the following command if you placed it where I mentioned earlier.

Your Mac is going to ask you for your password. This is just an administrator’s password. If you’re the only person using your Mac, then just enter your password (you do have one, don’t you?!?!)

Now, you should have seen a little put of jibberish in the terminal. If all went well, it should be happy messages, don’t worry about this right now. Fire up Temperature Monitor and open the Preferences for that app. Head on over to the “Sensors” tab, click on the little expander triangle and highlight the sensor saying something about your CPU (hint: not the one labeled “SMART Disk” or the like).

Give your nice sensor a name, like a pet. Now that you have done that, click on the “Menu Bar” tab at the top. Make sure that your new sensor is listed in the window at the bottom of the screen. If it isn’t, click the plus button and add it from the choices. Remove the others if you don’t want multiple sensors showing up in your Menubar (good idea). Click the button on the middle of the screen that says “Quit application and launch lite version”.

Now, if all went well, you should have something like this in your menubar:

You can play around with the settings in the main version of the program to get more out of it, but at least now you know just how hot your Mac is running!

Last night was the season finale of Law and Order SVU and it was a wonderful epsiode. What continually draws me to this show is the way that the writers always seem to tackle the tough issues and don’t ever lead you on in your thinking. The information is presented so that you can form your own opinions about the topics as the show progresses.

This last episode was on a topic that I have never given much thought to before and as the events turned out, by the end of the show I didn’t know what I believed or how I felt anymore. When TV can make people think about tough political issues like that, then you’re accomplishing something.

So, I thought that I would see just how well we’re turning up on Google nowadays with a very simple search string “Mac Fanatic”.  For the longest time the site was buried down in the 6th and 7th page region, even though that was our domain name.  (I have read up on Google though, I learn more about search algorithms everyday).

However, searching for just “Mac Fanatic” last night got me a ranking of 7 on the page.  Quite a nice jump up from the ranks at the bottom.  If you search for far more specific stuff that I’ve written about, or had podcast episodes on, the site turns up much higher at the top, sometimes number 1 or 2 (though I don’t recall what those were).

So, I’m very proud of how the site is growing and think that I’ve found something I really enjoy doing and sharing my opinions and experiences with people.  It’s definitely a rewarding experience to get feedback and comments, it encourages me to know that there are indeed some people out there!

I glanced over an article earlier today about directing more traffic to your blog and I plan on looking that over more closely in the next few days, paying especially close attention to technorati tags.  If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I’m all ears.

999 Macbooks (120GB HDD and 2GB Ram) comes in at a whopping 2,196,801.00 dollars.  And this is even before tax.  On my 1400 dollar order today, 140 in tax was added on top of that.  Just imagine the bill if you included taxes and shipping.

So, in high spirits (and partly because this is an excellent way to procrastinate studying for an exam just hours away) I decided to compile a short list of amazing shopping cart totals.  Enjoy.

999 PowerMac Quad G5′s completely maxed out with 16GB Ram, etc along with 999 30″ Apple Displays to go with them:          18.6M  (18,604,377.00)

One maxed out Mac Mini (1.66Ghz, 2Gb Ram, 120Gb HDD) and a 23″ Apple Display comes in at 2,523.00 dollars.  I wonder if anyone has seriously considered this configuration before.

Question: Is there a limit on other types of online stores that let you go past digits in a regular Apple Store.  I was wondering if you had a business account if you might be able to place a larger order?  Although, if I placed an order for 999 computers, or even saved the cart, I’m sure I would be having a pleasant call from an Apple employee shortly.

I’m sure there are other wild ways to dream about spending a small government’s worth of funds, let me know if you have anything else creative.

The cool tip that everyone should be amazed at is the fact that you can ctrl-click on the “Podcasts” icon in your source list in iTunes and chose the “Export Song List…” option to export your list of podcast episodes so that you can share them with your friends.  You can sorta do this with your library, but it’s not as useful.  So, export your podcast list and share with newbies to podcasting!

Check out his blog here.

He is also placed his paintings on eBay, so be sure to head over there from his blog.

A picture of the one I particularly like is below:

Law and Order SVU appears to have a stellar ending this next Tuesday evening with issues dealing with responsibility surrounding psychiatric drugs and their usage.

Will and Grace is going off the air with a two hour special this next Thursday evening.  This is a show that I love to watch, but haven’t seen a new episode in ages.  I’ll make a point to watch this one just because it has provided me with so much hope and joy over the years.

ER promises to have a decent season finale, as the medical crew is shown being under siege.  Never watch this show, but it looks like a good episode.  I believe that this one comes on Thursday evening as well.

I’m sure there are other shows that are ending (as well as That 70s Show has either had it’s ending, or will this next week) but I can’t keep up with all of them.  Let me know of something I need to watch this week!

Anyway, check out the cool site here.  Warning: Parts are in some foreign language.

His suggestion is to convert that to a mpeg movie or something of the like, but another possible solution is to use a flash player that is a program, if you didn’t want to go through the trouble of converting it.  This program also works well if you find some other comment on the web that you’d like to have access to.  For instance, I found a very useful Periodic Table that allowed you to interact and it would sum up the masses of elements and so forth.  Was very useful, but a pain to visit the site all the time (and it would be gone once my class ended).  I just downloaded the flash player and use it on my computer now, simple as that.

Grab the flash player software (not the official software, this is a Mac application) here.

Read the post on One Digital Life for more info here.

So, being the good user that I am, I decided to use this as my only way of taking notes for the class that I’m taking this summer.  So, I set down and tried to learn a little about it right before I headed off for my first class and was pleasantly surprised.  After using it for three days (counting time I’ve spent studying and outlining at home, that equals about 18 hours in this one document….) I’m very happy with this view of Word.

I exclusively use Pages for everything that I do word processing wise, but after using this view, I think I’ll be firing up Word a little more.  Basically, you have a document that has a title at the top.  The page scrolls underneath that title, so that it’s always visible.  The paper itself looks like notebook paper, and you can add and rename tabs on the right hand side, just like you would have divider tabs in a real notebook.  So, this is a nice way to organize indeed.  Add in the fact that you can record audio (haven’t tried this in class yet) right into the document on certain lines, you have highlighting and markup tools at your fingertips, and it’s easy to outline with and you’ve got a very powerful note-taking app indeed.  It’s always nice to find a new application to brag about (though I never thought MS Word would be the one).

Basically, I go to use an image, and it’s “not there” per se.  I can click on a thumbnail to bring up the image for editing, but there is just a dotted outline of a box with an exclamation mark in it.  So, I did the rebuild database, and rebuild thumbnails, and rebuild all the other stuff, but after 40 minutes (~1800 photos) I was still in the same boat as before.

So, if you have any suggestions besides just manually reimporting everything, let me know.  I checked into the iPhoto Extractor, but it doesn’t support iPhoto 6 library databases, so I can’t use that.

My problem was that I use Newsfire for all of my RSS reading and love it. It supports Spotlight just fine, but when I search, the results would show up for a few seconds under the “Documents” category, and then just disappear to somewhere where I couldn’t use the results. I was going to contact the developer about this, but then it dawned on me that it probably wasn’t specifically that guy’s fault (Newsfire is another great Mac application) but more inline with the way that Spotlight categorizes results.

So, after searching for a few minutes, I ran across BSP “Configurable Categories for Spotlight”. Sounds like it’s exactly what I wanted. So, after reading the usual “it might self-destruct” warnings from the developer, I downloaded the zip archive and ran the package. Behold, a new icon in my System Preferences called “BSP” (imagine that).

So, clicking on that gives you some interesting options. First off, if you’re really desperate to limit your returned results, you can simply remove document types that appear in categories. You can remove whole categories in the Spotlight Preferences area, but with BSP you could just remove Mail, Address Book, and all related iCal items from showing up in the appropriate list if you use Entourage for example.

So, to add my Newsfire articles (the individual RSS entries in this case) to my Spotlight search results, I first added another category because that made sense to me. You could add them where ever you wanted, but having their own category made sense to me. From there, I searched for something that would give me some Newsfire articles for that split second and when it briefly appeared I was quick enough to Apple-Enter to bring up the enclosing window. From there I used the method of holding down command “Apple” and clicking on the title part of the Finder window to see just where I was finding these little things Turns out they were stored in /Users/user_name/caches/metadata/Newsfire/

To add the articles into my newly created category using BSP, I clicked on the “Choose” button in the right-hand window and navigated and clicked on one of these newsfire articles. I just clicked “Apply Now”, watched in horror as the right side of my menubar disappeared, and then in amazement as it reappeared and I was able to search with ease with my new “Newsfire Articles” category I created.

At this point I was feeling a little creative and had already liked the Google Importer that I had installed a few days ago, so I played around with those settings for the first time. Turns out if you set the delayed time that the importer waits before it even starts searching (supposedly to help people who make a lot of typos) down, then it speeds up soooo much and makes it a wonderful experience.

I wasn’t happy with the search results showing up under “Bookmarks” even though that’s technically the file type that it is, and your Safari bookmarks would show up under this category also. I just changed the name of this category to “Google” and moved some of the categories around to my personal preference, and that is what appears in the screenshots below.

Overall, I think that an average user can do this, but it might be a little intimidating. I definitely recommend the Google Importer as a must have tool for Spotlight and think that the BSP is another feature that adds even more depth and usefulness to this key technology of Tiger.

You can check out the Google Importer site here.

You can check out the BSP site for organizing categories in Spotlight here.

Be sure to check the review out here.

So, I downloaded the Remote Desktop Client (from Microsoft) and entered all the info (after turning remote access on the computer). So, it connected just fine to the computer that was sitting next to me. Then, I connected to a friends laptop. Then I connected to the desktop and from that computer in turn connected to my friend’s laptop. Things were starting to get interesting.

So far, no one had connected to my computer. So, I tried to get that setup and working. Easy enough to flip a switch (metaphorically, I checked a box in Sharing Preferences) to get a VNC server up and running on my computer, but it took us awhile to figure out how to get a Windows computer to connect to my VNC server (even though we were using an open-source client, like RealVNC).

Just to test to make sure that everything was working, I tried to connect to myself, using Chicken of the VNC. Sure enough, it let me connect with no problems. The funny thing that happened though was a myriad of desktops, and moving the mouse created a wave effect. The most fun I’ve had at work in awhile. There are some thumbnails below, click on them to make bigger and see just how funny it looks. It reminds me of those maze and “Where’s Waldo?” pictures from my earlier years.

A great example of this is the ability to hit the backspace button and go back a page. This works just as expected when you’re in Safari or Firefox for example, but because the Finder isn’t tied into Safari like Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer are tied together, hitting the backspace key doesn’t work to go back a page when you’re just browsing your computer.

I had just given up and decided that because the applications weren’t related as closely, that the functionality just wasn’t present in the Mac OS. However, I was searching through some menus just the other day and ran across the keyboard shortcut that allows you to go back a view, essentially.

I’ve been using the “Apple-Click” the title area of the Finder to get a list of folders above that one, so that you can go up a directory. The shortcut for this is “Apple-Up-Arrow”, which makes sense enough. This isn’t the same as the back button, but as most people go down into directories as they browse, it’s very close most of the time.

If anyone knows how to enable this feature, or what I’m missing if it’s there and I just haven’t seen it, let me know and I would be very grateful. I think I need to get a Mac OS X for dummies book or something….

So, I was able to install this very easily, then all I had to do was restart my computer and plug in a monitor. Voila! After unchecking a box that said something like “Mirror Desktops” I was able to drag around my displays to get them setup the way I wanted (external on left) etc, just like it was from the factory! Best of all, I’m hooked up to a 17″ CRT right now (one I had lying around) that supports 1280X1024, so I have a very cool resolution on that monitor, while I still have my stock 1024X768 on my main iBook screen. Very, very nice!

Expose is just a tad sluggish with this setup, but it works none the less. Supposedly this script also enabled a “clamshell mode” so that you can shut your main display, wake the computer with the lid still shut, and then use the external that way. Although, it warns you several times that it won’t vent properly and may overheat, so I don’t think that I’ll be trying this feature out for long periods of time.

However, I can’t thank the person enough who submitted the link for this script, I will be playing with this for awhile now!

You can grab the AppleScript that enables this wonderful feature for iBooks and more Mac computers here.

Macrumors and Appleinsider are both reporting that displays are showing up at retail stores marked as not to open until the 9th of May, as well as manufacturing already taking place on the machines themselves. Then today, there was a “glitch” in the ipod directory of Apple’s site that had a breadcrumb showing a link to the “Macbook” without the Pro on the end of it.

Personally, I think they’ll release it when they’re ready, and that’s the way I want it to be, since I am most likely going to put my name on a waiting list as soon as it’s out. I would like the product to have some time to get the bugs out before it’s released so I don’t leave it one day to find that the power adapter burnt my laptop, that it produces a very annoying whine, or that the screen is dimmer in some areas than others…but maybe I’m just picky.

As for the features that are being touted and promised with the new Macbook, I have to say that it will be one nice machine and that it leaves me in a sticky predicament. Price-wise I’m more of an iBook user, being in college and not being able to go all out for a Powerbook/Macbook Pro. So, that’s one thing for the new Macbook. Then, I hear that it’s going to have similar features as the Pro model, such as the built-in iSight, Front Row, the remote, and PhotoBooth. That list right there is enough to make me want to run out and buy one right now. Through in a Core Duo processor, some faster RAM, maybe a larger hard drive (please!!) and the nice widescreen and I can’t wait. A very sexy magnetic latch and the MagSafe power adapter just keep making it better. Here’s the topper though: colors. I LOVED the clamshell iBooks because of their color scheme. I think Apple has kinda grown up a little bit since then, and I feel like the mature grey and white scheme needs to be on its way out the door for right now.

I think a sexy black would be a very hot seller, since that is what I want the iPod Nano so much for. I’m sure some other colors would only help, and bring life back into an essentially youth product. My problem comes in that I really like a few of the Pro features, and would love to have them in the regular line. One of them that I can’t stress enough is support for extending your desktop. It absolutely infuriates me that I can’t hook my iBook and use another monitor, instead of just mirroring. Even the cheapest Dells can do this, yet my iBook can’t!? I will refrain from harsh language. The other feature that I would really like to have brought over from the Pro line would be the feel of the machine. I just have to say that the weight (some would say this is bad, but I’m just meaning solid, well built, etc) is impressive and I like that feeling in the product.

I know that the lines have to be kept separate, so I won’t ever be completely happy. I would just like to maybe get the Pro model in colors, I’d be willing to splurge a bit for that if I could get all my features, plus a little extra power. So, as I sit at work on Tuesday glued to Apple’s site, Macrumors, Appleinsider, Macworld, etc etc just waiting for a product release or a conference, think of me.

View the researcher’s blog for more info here.

What do people want from a User Interface?

People want an intuitive way to interact with the computer, something that isn’t cumbersome and won’t require much thought. If someone can sit down and automatically start using the product, then the interface is well designed and implemented.

What advantages do you find 3D has over 2D?

3D will allow people to interact in ways that are more natural. Humans don’t live in a 2D world and making the leap to 3D will only let us interact with the machines in a more natural way letting us be more productive and spend less time thinking about the computer itself.

What disadvantages do you find with 3D environments?

With any new technology, it will be hard to accept it and will have several flaws from the start until everything is ironed out. Right now the biggest problem is hardware to effectively run the interface. A decent implementation would require much more power than most users are accustomed to today.

When using a 3D environment, do you feel it should work like the real world, or does is matter?

I think that the 3D interface should mimic some of the more basic tasks and metaphors that we associate objects with. The classic files and folders approach works well because people can easily visualize and understand what is going on. Extending that to a 3D level will require a lot of innovation, but needs to incorporate some of those basic ideas into the technology.

What interaction with an interface do you feel should remain solely 2D?

Ideally some of the most intensive tasks that are multimedia centered would flourish with the introduction of a 3D interface. Tasks like word processing and such won’t benefit from the new interface as much and would be cumbersome. As other technologies catch up, such as speech recognition, it will completely change the role of the computer.

Did the world become a more exciting place when people discovered it was a sphere opposed to flat?

Certainly so! People quickly realized there was so much more to do in the world and it was directly linked to that discovery. The introduction of a truly functioning 3D interface will open many people’s eyes and let them explore the digital media space as they never thought possible.

Why do you think 3D environments for Operating systems haven’t succeeded in the past?

The time wasn’t ready. Timing in the computer industry is almost as bad as politics sometimes. If the industry isn’t ready to adopt the new technologies, whether because of cost restraints or the lack of visionaries, it won’t happen. Making this change will require a great deal of effort and I don’t think that the right people have been able to explore this media yet.

Why, do you think, previous 3D GUI’s failed in application and OS design?

Previous 3D designs have failed because we were still looking at the design as an extension of our current method. The 3D interface will only come into it’s own when some creative person comes up with a way that makes it truly unique, not just a layer of interaction on top of old methods and metaphors of interacting with the computer.

On the topic of sound in 3D environments, what do think about blind people interacting with it?

Since the blind aren’t going to be able to interact with traditional 3D interfaces, the 3D sound might prove an area that they will flourish in. Because they’re more attuned to their hearing anyway, enabling them to use technology in a way that they truly operate everyday can’t do anything but help them.

Please feel free to leave some comments and argue with me if you have something different to say.

Catch the page with the ASCII movie here.

There is also a similar feature available if you use Flock. You can read an entry and post it directly to your blog easily. So, I’m pretty excited about all the stuff that I can do now with all the applications that are available that tie in directly with the blogging API.

I have been an iTunes user since the first version that debuted for Windows, and have been eyeing it from afar long before that. However, my brother taught me something earlier today that was truly amazing, a feature that I have been wanting forever now and was complaining about.

I have a lot of videos in my library and was complaining that if I went into full screen mode to watch them, as soon as it went to the next song, it would drop out of full screen mode and I would have to move the cursor down one to get it back again, which is a real pain.

The tip comes into play because if you select the right setting for displaying your artwork, it works! You need to have your artwork enabled, and in the little box in the bottom left hand corner there’s a small circle with an arrow in it. If you click that, the text beside it alternates from “Selected Song” to “Now Playing”. If you select the “Now Playing” option and go into full screen mode, then as the video changes, then it all works out fine and acts as you would expect it to.

Am I the only person who didn’t know this? Be sure to let me know!

However, the really interesting part comes in when you consider using remote apps that tie into the database so that you don’t have to go through the web interface to post to your blog. A fine example of this was Flock that I mention eons ago. Flock is a browser, but lets you post to your blog directly also. I’ll be looking into different applications that tie into the database here in the next few weeks. Right now I’m using a trial version of ecto. I will look at MacJournal, Journaler, and Blog Thing in the future.

Click here for pictures.

Check out some pictures here.

It turns out that EasyDMG just makes creating the compressed image easy. You just drag the files onto it and it creates an image, compresses it and everything. However, there is zero in the way of customization. That’s where DMG Packager comes in.

With this application, you just specify where you want to put the image (normally desktop is easiest), what files you want in it (including if you want a background, you just put a check in a box to make it the background image), choose and name what you want the file itself to be and where you want it, and it makes and mounts the image giving you a box telling you to make some customizations right quick, and then hit “Next”.

So, you just move the icons around (don’t worry with the image for your background, it’s going to disappear later, so move it out of the way, because if you arrange stuff around it, it will disappear and you’ll have a hole where an icon should be). You can change the size of the icons, where you want the text, etc. After you do all that, you just hit “Next” in the application, and you’re almost done.

The last step (and it took me awhile to figure this one out) is to open up Disk Utility, select the image file, go to Image > Convert and choose “Compressed”. This shrinks the image file down to something smaller than the 50MB or whatever you started out with, so there’s no free space. And it also makes it read-only.

Now, take the new file you just saved (the compressed one) and share!

If you want a more technical way of going about this, or want to understand what just exactly the application is doing, be sure to check out this resourceful link here.

However, it’s a bit scary to set this up yourself if you’ve never messed with HTML at all, or if you’re just getting started using Rapidweaver. Therefore, I was going to write my own article and post it, but as I was looking through the RW forums, I found an excellent post by TBeardmore, our Oracle, and decided that I’d just post a link to that post instead.

You can check out the tutorial here.

If you have any questions, sign up for a RW forums account and post! All the users are very quick to respond and it’s a great atmosphere. And of course, you can always shoot me an email or an instant message (via the button on the side) if you have anymore questions.

The article details how you can make the icons that appear distinctive, and therefore more useful. It also hints at how to change any application or folder icon (with a few exceptions) and I’ll be getting to that here before long.

Read the article from Macworld here.