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!

Just wondering who is planning on purchasing Snowy on launch weekend?  For the 29 dollar price point, I’m not sure that I’ll pass it up this weekend.

My favorite band by far has to be Three Days Grace. I connect with their music in so many ways and just love the sound. The previous album, One-X, was a pretty nice success compared to the ones before it and I have been eagerly awaiting another album since 2005.

September 22 is the date to remember for the new album titled “Life Starts Now”. I’m hoping it turns out to be as amazing as I hope. Let me know if you’re a 3DG fan as well!

http://www.threedaysgrace.com/

Check them out here.

Read More.

Found via | Wired.com

The closing comes as a way to save Adobe money in the global recession. Adobe also announced it would lay off roughly 600 workers in December.

I’m a little shaken as it’s the first real news I’ve heard of software engineers being hit by the poor economy.

Features include:

• New rendering engine for faster page loads
• New Javascript rendering engine – for blazing fast Javascript performance.
• HTML 5 support
• Geo-awareness
• Improved Search
• Improved Privacy Controls
• Several other features

Just to hit on a few of these, the new rendering engines will bring much faster page loads and apps that use a lot of javascript, like MobileMe, Google Docs or GMail, will see huge performance increases. HTML 5 support will bring native offline data storage, similar to GoogleGears, allowing web applications to work in “offline mode”, as well as native support for video and audio so websites can embed video/audio files and they will play without a plugin. Geo-awareness means websites can ask the browser for your location and get an accurate reading, which will actually be a HUGE deal. And of course everyone loves new search features and privacy controls.

Just launch Firefox to get the update, or head to getfirefox.com for a disk image when it’s released in a few hours.

Found via | WebMonkey

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared Tuesday to be “National Sovereignty Day,” complete with a military parade to display to Iraqis — and a still stubborn insurgency — its ability to maintain order in a nation ravaged by six years of war.

I hope that the Iraqi people and government are able to show the world and the insurgence that they mean business, bringing peace to their country. Sovereignty is such a beautiful thing and I’m sure they will cherish it.

Found via | FoxNews

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.

1. Open iCal
2. In the Calendar list, under Subscriptions, Control-click (or right-click) the calendar you want to copy to your iPhone or iPod touch
3. In the menu that appears, select “Copy URL to Clipboard”
4. Compose an email message to yourself (to an email address you are checking on your iPhone/iPod touch), and paste the URL into the body of the message
5. Send the email
6. On your iPhone or iPod touch, open the email and tap on the URL
7. Tap “subscribe” in the dialog that is triggered by the link

For more information, visit the knowledge base article from Apple.

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

As always, make sure to make a backup of everything first just in case your upgrade doesn’t go as smooth.

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.

The good news is I’ll be graduating with a Bachelors in Computer Science on Friday May 8th from the University of Tennessee.  I’m wrapping up things with final exams this week, but can’t wait to actually walk across the stage soon.  And unlike some of my graduating friends, I’m lucky enough to be offered a permanent position with my current employer since October 2008, Digital Media Graphix.  I’ll be coming on full time as the second software engineer on May 10th and I’m excited to have more time at work to tackle some really fun projects we have lined up.

I’ll also be starting a freelance project in a couple weeks, writing a custom content management system (CMS) for a HIV prevention and AIDS awareness site.  More details on that once I get into it and have something to show off.

And for the last bit of news, I’m also in talks to begin writing a Cocoa app that I will hopefully have out later this year.  Once I get some more planning done and get some of the details hammered out, I’ll have more information regarding that as well.  I’m still trying to decide if I’d like to do it all myself, or create an open source project to get some more help.  I think I have something that a lot of Mac users want and there currently isn’t anything providing a comprehensive solution.

And for those out there who would like more frequent updates, I encourage you to follow me on Twitter (macfanatic).  I’m much more adept at posting 140 character updates throughout the day compared to writing a full blog post.

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.

I’ve discussed why I absolutely love Cappuccino for web development.  It’s a modern, full featured language and API that makes writing interactive and complex web applications much simpler.  Up until this point, writing the UI for a Cappuccino application has entailed a lot of “stupid” code for layouts and positioning of controls.  This is acceptable for people coming from Windows programming, Linux, and even Java for the most part.  You have to write a good chunk of code for even the most basic button to be on the window.

Atlas changes that.

For developers familiar with Apple’s own Developer Tools, Atlas is Xcode and Interface Builder combined into a web application, itself built upon Cappuccino.  You edit your CIB file, which contains your menu bar, windows, models, views and controllers.  It acts very similar to Interface Builder, in that you can simply drag from a button to a controller to set an action, or drag from a model to a view to set an outlet.  The Inspector even has most of the normal Cocoa conveniences.

Atlas is not yet available, but has been demoed in Miami.  You can head on over to the Atlas website, from the 280 North team ( who brought us 280 Slides and Cappuccino) to register on the mailing list.

From the doubleTwist website:

We started doubleTwist because we were disappointed by the quality of software applications offered by the major device manufacturers. We wanted to build a universal media application that helps people quickly and easily play all their stuff, on all their devices and share their experiences with all their friends.
Our vision is to provide for media what the browser achieved for the web: a single, streamlined interface that connects to any device, media source or network.

The application most notably allows you to sync content with other devices besides an iPhone or iPod with the elegance of a Mac.  I haven’t played around with it enough to get a good feel, but looks extremely well put together so far.

Desktoptopia takes a slightly more refined approach: a small Menu Bar application that lets you quickly go to the previous or next background, see the title of the current background, and assign a rating. You can change the time interval at which the backgrounds swap out, and pause if you find one you really like.

What makes Desktoptopia pleasant is you “subscribe” to categories, so you can just uncheck something if it’s not in your fancy. I’m surprised at the high quality and uniqueness of the images and have been enjoying it for a few weeks now.

Desktoptopia is free for Mac with a beta for PC.

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

There seems to be a flood of GTD (getting things done) applications available for the Mac lately.  There is OmniFocus from the OmniGroup, which doesn’t seem to fit my needs at all.  A little too professional and over the top.  I need something very flexible and that will get me up and running quickly.  Then there is a new application about to debut from The Potion Factory, entitled The Hit List.  The Hit List takes another unique approach to task management, and I’m sure that I’ll be taking a look at it more closely in the future.  

Ease of Use

I think that one area Things excels in is ease of use.  You can customize the system-wide shortcut to create a new task, no matter what application you’re currently using.  Just hit that keyboard shortcut and a small window pops up, letting me give it a title, pressing a couple keys to tag, drag an email, website, contact or file into the notes area, set a due date if I wish and I’m done and back to working on what I was doing.

Organizing your tasks couldn’t be simpler.  There are a few focus areas: “Today”, “Next”, “Someday”, “Scheduled” and “Projects”.  Today obviously contains what you’ve deemed you should focus on today.  If you set dates on your tasks, they default to automatically showing up in Today on the day they are due.  You can make a task show up several days ahead, if that’s what you wish.  ”Next” just represents what you’re not working on today, but is upcoming in a few days or weeks.  A nice overview of what you’ll be tackling soon.  ”Scheduled” lets you create repeating tasks at your leisure, great for finances, or create a task that you’re just not ready to start on.  Just create that task in scheduled and it’ll show up when you can actually get started on it.  

Projects lets you organize your tasks according to what you’re working on.  Your tasks show up here (and in Today, just separated off by the project).  Just another way to separate your tasks.  Areas follow the same principle, allowing you to group similar tasks according to maybe work, school, or a hobby.

There’s support for People, allowing you to add teammates and keep up with what they’re working on.  If you have Leopard, Things can place your tasks as To-Do items in iCal, which can be handy.  There’s great support for dropping just about anything you can find in the Notes section of a task: drop a webpage to view later, a file that you need, a contact from address book, or an email to view.  Nice way to get everything you need grouped together so when you’re ready to tackle the task, everything is there in one place.

Tasks don’t just die when you’re done, they go to the logbook.  A simple way to look up information about past projects, who completed what, what that website was, etc.

Tagging

What allows Things to offer such great flexibility is its great support for tagging.  I can create a task, and assign it to as many tags as I want.  Then, the smart filter bar at the top lets me quickly see all tasks sharing whatever tags I want.  I can assign a group to a set of tags, so those tasks always show up there, easily manage tags and the hierarchy (for instance, have my classes under “School” and my work projects under “Work”).  

Open up the tag manager to see what shortcuts have been assigned to each tag.  In my case, I can quickly select a group of tasks and press “w” to assign them the “Work” tag.  I have a few of these memorized and it makes creating new tasks much quicker, even though Things already has great auto-complete support built in for your tags. 

Things for iPhone

I think we are starting to see a trend in Mac software: applications that want to take advantage of the Mac and provide a full set of features will undoubtedly provide an iPhone companion.  In this case, the iPhone version of Things is just as full featured as the Mac version, letting you very easily view your tasks for today, upcoming, or someday.  You can quickly enter a new task, great support for quickly tagging, set a due date, etc.  And when your Mac and iPhone are on the same wireless network, Things will automatically sync the two devices.  Overall a great iPhone application that makes using Things just that much more useful for me.  Things for iPhone will set you back $9.99 USD.

Conclusion

Things for Mac and iPhone work wonderfully together.  They provide you with a seamless way to stay on top of everything you need to be tackling in your busy life.  At $60 USD for both apps, it’s a little pricy for some.  But compared to similar offerings already available, the level of fit and finish, and the enthusiasm of the development team, I’m sure there will be plenty of new features and more exciting things to come, making Things the #1 task management and organization application for the Mac.

Links

Things from Cultured Code

Interview with Things Developer

OmniFocus from OmniGroup

The Hit List from Potion Factory

TV Shows in one of those Mac applications that I use all the time, and make my life so much simpler, yet I forget I’m even using it because it works so well. That’s the definition of good software in my opinion.

TV Shows allows you to subscribe to different, well, TV shows, and it downloads the torrent files to your computer, automatically opening your torrent client if needed. You can select whether you want HD content, if available, and so much more. The application lets me keep up to date with about 6 shows that just download automatically, usually within an hour of being on TV. Combine that with this great AppleScript for adding AVI files to iTunes (and as a TV Show with show info, no less) and I have a great workflow.

I’m not sure what version 1.0 will bring, but I’ve been using version 0.3.4 for a year and a half now, so whatever features come in version 1.0, they will be welcomed. Slated for February 2009.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/inauguration_obama_text

Jobs wrote an email to the team at Apple, and since then has been published in the PR section. It reads:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

I’m personally glad that the man is taking time to better himself. I love Apple. That has only happened since Jobs has returned, so I naturally connect the two as inseparable and codependent. But I’m with the other pundits in the blogsphere in that Apple can, and will, survive without Jobs. Maybe he knows this and that is the real reason he is taking a leave of absence. I tend to think that if he wasn’t sure things would continue, he would probably stay until his death, or the Board of Directors got up the courage to make him stay home.

Will Steve actually return this summer, to wow us with some new gadgetry at WWDC 2009? Who knows. I sincerely hope that all is well and even if he decides not to return, he can at least enjoy time with his family. The man has brought so much to Apple, the computing industry, and my life, that he deserves a break if he wants one.

Here’s to Jobs’ return. But if not, to a long and happy life doing whatever the hell he pleases. And if that’s selling some new product, I might just buy it.

Any feedback would be great!

Espresso brings a lot of flexibility to the table, and the developers are working hard at getting this core functionality working in the now open beta. One fan has already taken the initiative to launch a site to share the plugins (Sugars) and themes that are currently available for the application. Still in beta, yet people are churning these out!

My personal favorite so far is the Cappuccino theme. I just noticed that there currently isn’t support for PHP, so I’m thinking of taking that under my wing and writing a plugin. We’ll see if that comes to fruition…

Check out Coffee House here.

Espresso from MacRabbit

Faces

iPhoto has been given facial recognition as a feature called “Faces”. iPhoto automatically recognizes people in your photos and gives you the chance to give the person a name. Then, iPhoto will suggest photos that the person appears in. As you continue to use iPhoto, essentially tagging all the people that appear, iPhoto just gets smarter and can even more accurately recognize faces. To make this feature useful, you can now view your photos by Faces, in addition to Events, to view all photos that a particular person appears in.

And here is the coolest part yet: Facebook integration with Faces. You can quickly and easily publish and album to Facebook, with the album appearing in the iPhoto source list. And the photos are automatically tagged for you. And, if someone tags himself in the photo, iPhoto is aware of it and will notify you, so you can add that information to your iPhoto library. Now that is integration and makes this Facebook photo junkie happy!

Geo tagging support is built in on several levels, easily using the information from your GPS enabled camera, such as the iPhone, to place your photos by locations. Don’t have a GPS camera? You can easily add the location to your photos within iPhoto, so you won’t be left out. Great for viewing all the photos taken in Paris, for example. Or how about when creating a physical photo book and having a map in there, complete with arrows for the trip you took. Very polished indeed.

Slideshows

The slideshows feature has been greatly improved, with support for some pretty cool themes and finally the ability to quickly share with iTunes to take on your iPod or iPhone and share with your friends. And slideshows even use face detection to make sure that it doesn’t crop people out when displaying the pictures. Now that’s impressive. Another nice step forward.

I have to say that I’ll be ordering my copy of iLife 09 simply for iPhoto. The face detection and Facebook integration is well worth the 80 bucks as far as I’m concerned. A truly great release!

I’m talking about a new addition to the language being created by Apple which adds anonymous functions to the language.

The uses and implications of this weren’t immediately apparent to me, but my interest was piqued as I continued reading the article.  Mike is quick to point out that anonymous functions would allow developers to innovate and essentially add features to the language.  Fast iteration was added to ObjC 2.0 in Leopard, allowing us to avoid NSEnumerator and go straight to a for( .. in .. ) statement. 

Blocks wouldn’t exactly have the same syntax, but you could easily implement this in your own code to get the feature.  There are several other examples, some notes that Blocks have access to local variables, and then the following point which is amazing:

Another place where blocks will make things much nicer is when dealing with callbacks. If you’ve ever written much Cocoa code you’ve probably had to write a sheet callback, and it’s a pain in the ass. If you need to pass variables through to the other side then it gets really frustrating with code like this:

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 - (void)method {
        int foo;
        NSString *bar;
 
       /* do some work with those variables */
        NSDictionary *ctx = [[NSDictionary alloc] 
            initWithObjectsAndKeys:
                [NSNumber numberWithInt:foo], @"foo"!REG3XP0!>,
                bar, @"bar"!REG3XP0!>,
                nil];
        [NSApp beginSheet:sheet
            modalForWindow:window
            modalDelegate:self
            didEndSelector:@selector(methodSheetDidEnd:
             returnCode:contextInfo:)
            contextInfo:ctx];
    }
 
    - (void)methodSheetDidEnd:(NSWindow *)sheet 
            returnCode:(int)code 
            contextInfo:(void *)ctx {
        NSDictionary *ctxDict = ctx;
        [ctxDict autorelease];
 
        int foo = [[ctxDict objectforKey:@"foo"] intValue];
        NSString *bar = [ctxDict objectForKey:@"bar"];
        /* do some more stuff with those variables
    }

Wow! What a pain that is. Since I removed all the stuff that does work, nearly everything that remains is just boilerplate. Horrible boilerplate whose only purpose is to tell the sheet who to call, and to pack up local information in a way that the sheet can give it back to you later on. Now let’s imagine we were redoing this API using blocks and see how it would look:

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- (void)method {
        int foo;
        NSString *bar;
        /* do some work with those variables */
        [sheet beginSheetModalForWindow:window 
            didEndBlock:^(int code){
            /* do stuff with foo */
            /* do stuff with bar */
            /* do stuff with code, or sheet, or window, etc */
        }];
    }

There are several other examples on the page and I think Cocoa developers will be very excited to see this addition to the language, presumably with Snow Leopard in 2009.

Read the article here.

I thank everyone who’s supported this blog over the years. May we enjoy several more!

Ecto 3 Features

Download Ecto 3 Now

Theory

From Wikipedia:

A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search technique used in computing to find exact or approximate solutions to optimization and search problems. Genetic algorithms are categorized as global search heuristics. Genetic algorithms are a particular class of evolutionary algorithms (also known as evolutionary computation) that use techniques inspired by evolutionary biology such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover (also called recombination).

I even took the liberty of including my paper on my findings with this project, just because there are so many parameters to test and creating the graphs can be rather time consuming. So take a look at the paper if you would like to read up on the relationships between the number of chromosomes and the average fitness of the population at any given generation, for example.

More uses of NSOperation and NSOperationQueue for multithreading in this project.

Download

Xcode Project (3.1 or later) | Leopard Only

Genetic Algorithm | Leopard Only

Biologically Inspired Computation Series

Theory

Essentially, we are running a network that we can train to recognize data, or solve a problem. We do this by giving the network sample data, and for each set of sample data, running the network through one time. We calculate the error of this run, adjust the weight of the connections between all the neurons in the entire network, and repeat. After running through all the sample data we have adjusted the weights to ‘recognize’ the data. Then, given another set of data, the network is trained to perform the same operation, such as classification (maybe determining forged vs authentic bank notes) or just solving a mathematical equation, such as we do in this particular example.

Code

This simulator is written in Cocoa, requires Xcode 3.1 or later, and is Leopard only. Subclasses NSOperation for multithreading, and have two subclassed NSViews for a ‘Safari Downloads’ style window, just showing the progress of each running experiment, with a cancel button beside it.

Download

Xcode Project (3.1 or later) | Leopard Only

Neural Net | Leopard Only

Biologically Inspired Computation Series

Back Propagation on Wikipedia

Activation/Inhibition Cellular Automaton

This is a simulator written in Cocoa for running a series of experiments and creating Excel files with the results.  Activation/Inhibition CAs are similar to how a cell on a zebra determines if it should be white or black.  There is no overall governing authority, yet patterns arise naturally.  Intermediate example of using Cocoa classes such as open/save panels, notifications and the file manager.  Excellent for examining how to code complex mathematical formulas and summations in C code.

Hopfield Network

This is a simulator written in Cocoa to test the relationship between the number of stored patterns in a Hopfield Network and the accuracy with which they are remembered.  A very interesting exercise making use of NSOperation and NSOperationQueue for simple multithreading and general Cocoa design patterns such as using a delegate.

Back Propagation Neural Network

Another Cocoa simulator written to investigate the relationship between parameters for a network.  Given a set of data, can train the network to recognize that data.  Then from there, the network can ’solve’ a problem.  In this simulation, there are two mathematical equations that are solved with this network.  Illustrates custom views, multithreading, and more.

Genetic Algorithms

The last Cocoa simulator in the series, written to investigate the relationship between input parameters for a given population of organisms over several generations.  Parameters include the probability of mutation in the offspring’s chromosomes, number of chromosomes per individual, how much sharing of chromosomes occurs when two individuals mate, and creating your own fitness function to quantify the ‘best fit’ individual based upon the DNA.  Multithreading and general Cocoa design patterns.

Going Further

I find this general area of computer science very interesting and would love to spend time researching and learning more about neural networks and genetic algorithms.  If you have any suggestions or comments about the code or projects in general, I’d love to hear from you, so drop me an email.

Theory

From Wikipedia:

  A Hopfield net is a form of recurrent artificial neural network invented by John Hopfield. Hopfield nets serve as content-addressable memory systems with binary threshold units. They are guaranteed to converge to a local minimum, but convergence to one of the stored patterns is not guaranteed.

Basically, you can fine tune the weights (connections between neurons) in the network so as to ’store’ data in the network. Imagine a square area, not necessarily flat, with a few deep potholes in it. Now, we start the network anywhere on this grid, and as the network progresses, it moves towards the nearest pothole. At the bottom of this pothole is a stored pattern, which is ‘remembered’ by the network. So given a corrupt image, the network can ‘remember’ the real image as it works its way to the sinkhole.

This simulation investigates how many patterns a network can hold versus the accuracy with which the network can recall. For example, a network with only 5 neurons simply cannot accurately recall many patterns, and this simulator allows you to investigate this relationship.

There are two PDFs included with the Xcode project, a theoretical overview and a detailed implementation guide. The simulator produces comma separated value (CSV) files, which can be opened in Numbers or Excel for graphing.

Get Started Now

Of interest to Cocoa programmers, this project makes use of NSOperation and NSOperation queue for quick and efficient multithreading.

Xcode Project (3.1 or later) | Leopard Only

Hopfield Network | Leopard Only

Hopfield Network on Wikipedia

Biologically Inspired Computation Series

Digital Media Graphix

First and foremost, I’ve been hired doing software development with a design firm here in town, called Digital Media Graphix. It has been fairly exciting so far and I’m looking forward to projects that are about to pushed onto my plate here in the next week. So far I dived head first into writing native installers for Windows and Mac, and that was actually a good bit of fun. I’ve done some troubleshooting with Ajax and PHP bugs and meddled with helping the other designers in house organize a project so it will be easier to code and maintain. 

Overall, it seems like a great fit for my personality, as the staff is relaxed and talented. There is one full time programmer specializing in Flash, AIR, Javascript, etc and I’m the apprentice, bringing useful C, C++, and Cocoa skills to the table. It’s a great first time job and I’m loving the experience and the challenge.

MacBook

I sold my trusty first generation black MacBook to a friend after the launch of the newest aluminum ones in mid October and haven’t looked back.  I absolutely love this computer and it is more than I’ve ever expected from a Mac.  The solid and sexy all aluminum enclosure, beautiful and bright glass covered display, and the sexy backlit keyboard all remind me why I love using Macs.  I highly recommend this for anyone debating whether to get a previous generation MacBook for a discounted price.  The newer versions are so much better and worth the extra 300USD.

Podcasting

It hit me today that it has been 14 months since I last produced a podcast episode. I never acknowledged the fact that I was finished with podcasting and I wanted to take the quick moment here to thank everyone who made the podcast such a success. I truly enjoyed working on it and all the listeners are what helped propel this site into the position it is in today.

If you truly miss it that much, get in contact with me. I’m looking at ways of reviving the podcast, and would love to have suggestions, or better yet, a helping hand in the project.

Facade

I’m impatiently awaiting the debut of a new theming application for Leopard, called Facade.  It looks very promising, integrating full theme management and application, along with an innovative “Theme Store” for content delivery (still have some free themes).  Definitely worth taking a look at.

Cappuccino

I can’t stress enough how amazing this framework is.  Seriously, I put my full weight behind Cappuccino and I’m working hard on a few demo applications and tutorials to hopefully publish before New Years.  I think SproutCore is certainly a viable competitor and love the competition between the two.  However, Cappuccino has changed how I approach large web development projects.

Certainly take a look at my introductory article on Cappuccino here (June 2008).

Obama

I’m both relieved and disappointed that the presidential elections are over.  I rather enjoyed the useless news coverage, and later in the campaign, the wonderfully amusing Palin.  However, I hope the American people can unite behind Obama and ultimately bring change.  Rather cliche´, but I’m okay with it.

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

Speechless.

Found via | One Digital Life

Vote NO on 8!

For all those waiting for updated MacBooks, we finally have an official date. Apple sent out media invites this morning for 10am PST on Tuesday October 14th. “The Spotlight turns to notebooks”.

I have several friends waiting since school began this semester, to make the switch to Mac and I’ve convinced them to hold off. Plus, there is a good possibility I’ll be purchasing a one myself. Hopefully we won’t be disappointed!

JSCocoa bridges Cocoa to JavascriptCore (WebKit’s JS engine). It allows you to call C code, ObjC code, use C structs, and build Javascript classes inheriting from ObjC classes.

Basically, JSCocoa allows you to use Cocoa classes and the runtime, only using Javascript. An important note for those following this blog closely, JSCocoa does not perform the same mission or tasks as the two other popular “javascript frameworks” aiming to bring Cocoa to the web today, Cappuccino and SproutCore. JSCocoa would allow a developer to write a full Cocoa application only using Javascript. I’m not really sure why anyone would do this, but it’s nice to have the capability.

JSCocoa Homepage

Version 0.5.5 includes over 60 fixes, and several key new features, including: New build tools, including:

• press
• Key-Value-Observing
• CPSplitView
• CPWebView
• CPDate
• Additional Editor Support
• Major performance gains

Full list of resolved bugs since 0.5.1.

Download the update directly: Starter, Tools.

If you’re not familiar with Cappuccino, I have an introductory article to look over.

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!

Theory

Imagine a single skin cell on a zebra. How does the cell know whether it should be white or black? Simply puts, the cell takes into account the value of the surrounding cells. If it’s surrounded by several black cells, then more than likely it should be black, right? Over time the cell keep looking at the cells around it, and the system changes. Eventually, the system will reach a pattern where it doesn’t change anymore. When this happens, the system has converged. Overall this is the basic theory behind pattern formation, on which the Activation/Inhibition Cellular Automaton is based.

This project is designed to investigate how varying parameters in the mathematical equation affects the pattern formation. For example, there is a parameter that influences how many cells away actually influence the current cell’s decision to be white or black. A larger number means that cells farther away are considered, while a smaller number means the converse. By varying a total of six parameters in the experiment, one can see the effect that these parameters have on the system.

Purpose

The Xcode project, aica, is written to perform a few different tasks. First off, you can quickly run a set of sample experiments that will produce some interesting converged systems. By interesting, I mean that the images representing the patterns are visually intriguing, as well as mathematically. AICA also allows a user to quickly run one experiment with a set of parameters, or run a larger set of experiments with different parameters from file.

In designing this application for my Biologically Inspired Computation course, I needed quantitative measurements describing what is happening in the system. These measurements are calculated once the system has converged and are not very pretty equations, involving lots of summations, logarithms and probability. I’m not going to delve into the mechanics and descriptions of these calculations, even though that was part of my report.

Design

I needed this to perform the basic tasks outlined above. In addition, I also wanted to have better statistics, so for each set of parameters ran (an experiment), I might want to run this several times and take the average of the calculated values describing the system. I classified each of these as a “trial”. So, the application structure is beginning to look something like this:

• Controller code for interacting with the interface and managing the experiments to be ran
• An experiment, which will run several trials and average the results, creating an Excel file with data
• A trial, which runs until convergence, writing image files for each step in the simulation

Feel free to look through project. There are two PDF files accompanying, containing the original project description and theory behind the simulation as well as a more technical document providing hints for writing the summations and mathematical equations as C code. This also contains some specific Cocoa programming techniques of interest to newbies, including using a NSProgressIndicator, Objective-C properties, NSNotifications, sheet programming, using NSSavePanel and NSOpenPanel, as well as creating directories and files using NSFileManager.

Get Started Now

Overall, if you have any comments or questions about the project, I’d love to hear from you. Even if you aren’t specifically interested, you should download the Application itself and give it a quick test run. Universal build, Leopard only. I also included some more sample files for systematically varying the parameters as I used in my project and used to draw conclusions about the behavior.

AICA Simulator (Leopard Only)

Source Code and Project Files

Biologically Inspired Computation Series

Cappuccino is a new web development platform that implements Cocoa for the web. The language, Objective-J is super similar to Objective-C and the Cocoa classes in AppKit and Foundation can be found in Cappuccino. For my first article on Cappuccino, read here.

Download now!

Check out this article from the Cappuccino blog for more information

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others. However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released. Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

The NDA is gone. Finally books can be published and developers can share code. Whether this will ultimately hurt things is just a wait and see.

From Apple Developer Connection

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.

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  <canvas id="example"></canvas>
  <script type="text/javascript">
     var g = new Bluff.Line('example', 400);
     g.theme_37signals();
     g.title = 'My Graph';
     g.data('Apples', [1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3]);
     g.data('Oranges', [4, 8, 7, 9, 8, 9]);
     g.data('Watermelon', [2, 3, 1, 5, 6, 8]);
     g.data('Peaches', [9, 9, 10, 8, 7, 9]);
     g.labels = {0: '2003', 2: '2004', 4: '2005'};
     g.draw();
   </script>

Download Bluff Library

The reasoning behind these denials is seemingly more frequently described as duplicating functionality. However, as Macworld points out, Apple seems to have no problem admitting applications that do duplicate most functionality, or even admitting applications by the same name.

… Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. …

As Dan from Macworld points out, Apple owns the App Store and has the right to admit or deny admittance to anyone. However, it would be wise to apply those rules equally and so far it seems safe to say that Apple is not doing so. Let’s hope this changes, or I sincerely believe that the iPhone platform will suffer greatly as developers lose confidence in building great applications for a device that they might never be able to sell it to.

Read complete article on MailWranger denial from Macworld

Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster fame wrote up a lengthy proposal of ways to fix the App Store and the approval process. Mostly Wil discusses the fact that Apple is having to come up with ad-hoc solutions on the fly and needs to set down and fix the real problems (such as allowing a user to buy a 1000 dollar app without a confirmation click) before resorting to censorship. Overall, a very interesting read.

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.

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for ( int i = 0, NSPoint p = [self updatingCell]; i < maxIterations && p.x > 0; i++, p = [self updatingCell] ) {
// Do something interesting with this NSPoint
}

I’ve used the above approach several times, letting me compact code when in loops. However, the next trick presented by Parmanoir, developer of CocoaNav, is one I never thought of and the article gives a wonderful explanation of the comma operator in C and family.

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// Log and return
if (error) return NSLog(@"MyFunction failed with error: %@", error), NO;

OtherInbox is currently in a private beta. You can signup here. The first 25 registering from this blog can get started right away. Thanks for reading Macfanatic and enjoy the invitations!

Download Now for Leopard Only

Web version for Firefox and Safari

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.

The previous design, 3rd generation, were quite ugly I think.  Just the design as well as the colors.  However, the updated Nano is simply stunning in color and shape.  The updated software, including Cover Flow, is quite impressive as well.  I can’t wait to play with one of these in person.

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

If you’re looking for help with a Cocoa, iPhone, or web project, or have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.  I have a few ideas myself and have one in development, but I’m still up for more to take on.  Look forward to hearing from everyone!

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!

Still in beta, v1.5 introduces several new features including:

• Support for .pkg files
• Support for receiving demographic information from users
• Can update bundles, not restricted to just .app applications
• Minimum system version checking for users
• Garbage Collection
• Better version comparison algorithm
• DSA instead of less secure MD5
• Won’t update if app is running from a disk image

Andy has also taken the time to dramatically simplify the Sparkle site itself, and move the project over to Launchpad for easier development. Be sure to check out this new version to incorporate into your apps to gain the new features.

Sparkle Page

Sparkle on LaunchPad

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

For all the Knoxvillians out there, Pride is returning to East Tennessee this week. There are events each evening this week, leading up to the day long celebration of the LGBT community on Saturday, June 21st, from 3-10 in Market Square. And of course, there will be an after party at Rainbow West.

I will most likely be attending the Thursday night event, which is Sundown in the City. If you’re gay and are going to be there, wear red and show support!

Also, I hope to meet some fellow bloggers from the area at the Saturday event in Market Square. The Lambda Student Union from the University of Tennessee will be there with a table, providing information to allies and meeting people in the community. Look for our table and come up and say hi.

Knoxville Pride 2008

Lambda Student Union

There was buzz during WWDC ‘08 about Safari 4’s 1.61x Javascript performance improvement over Safari 3.1. Even more, it is 4.34x as fast compared to Safari 3.0. That’s very impressive improvements, placing Safari and WebKit out ahead of even the latest version of Firefox, version 3, released just today. Well, if you would like that performance boost today while running Javascript intensive sites, then download the latest nightly build from the WebKit site and have fun!

WebKit Open-Source Project

The community has been hard at work and before now the most notable project being developed was by the Shiira web browser team, called BlkAppKit.

Tim Davis from Binary Method has been hard at work creating an awesome framework of HUD controls. Unlike the few other kits already out there, BGHUD AppKit does not use images to create the controls. None at all. These controls are beautiful and ready for Resolution Independence. Also worth noting is the shear number of controls already available, the speed with which the developer is creating new ones and the community that is using it, including RealMac Software, developers of RapidWeaver.

Another unique feature to the BGHUD AppKit is theming. Tim has taken an interesting approach to theming the controls to better match your application, if you need something different than the default HUD style. Place your controls on the windows and set the custom class, as you would with any other custom control in Interface Builder. Building and Running the application at this time will show no difference. However, if you initiate an object controller, of either “BGThemeManager” or “BGGradientTheme” and connect the outlet of every control to this object, your controls are now updated. Using the “BGGradientTheme” gives you the default appearance, while using the theme manager lets you customize the controls.

This seems a little tedious upfront, especially if you want to just use the default appearance. However, if you needed to change the overall appearance of your application, instead of subclassing all of these controls, you can simply subclass and use the update theme manager. Therefore, it does pay off in that respect.

My personal recommendation: If I don’t set the outlet on my control to a theme manager, then use the default HUD behavior. That way I don’t even have to worry with it. But, the work put into this framework is phenomenal and it seems that Tim isn’t sleeping until he implements every last single available control perfectly. If you need HUD controls in your project, I strongly believe this is the best framework available. The work is beautiful, it’s under heavy and active development, the developer is responsive to requests, it’s easily theme-able, and all the controls are already Resolution Independent.

Update: Tim has already read the post and really liked my recommendation for simplifying the ThemeManager behavior. Even better, he’s already implemented the change into the framework, so checking out subsequent version from SVN are now more friendly. Check out his blog for more details and to get your copy.

BGHUD AppKit Home

Shiira BlkAppKit

RealMac Software

My previous post on HUD controls in Leopard

For one, the SproutCore website is now back online after being Dugg a couple days ago. And not only that, there is a very good introduction to models, records (including saving and retrieving) and a brief introduction to the local database, called the Store. If you’re interested in developing more full-featured, Desktop like apps for the web, you need to check out the SproutCore framework.

Models Tutorial

SproutCore Site

My Introduction to SproutCore

Objective-J, Cappuccino, and 280Slides.com

My Introduction to Objective-J and Cappuccino

Buy the EP on iTunes

Throughout the development of Mac OS X, Apple has reexamined the old ways of doing things in UNIX and proposed new architectures. One example is launchd, the process that manages the launching, termination, and supervision of other processes in the system. It replaces a variety of existing process managers including init, rc, inetd, xinetd, atd, crond and watchdogd. Few UNIX vendors would bother to engineer an entirely new way to do things, and if undertaken in the FOSS world, such an innovation would rarely be adopted by enough of the Linux community to ever matter.

and

Rather than expecting each developer to become an expert in the black art of multithreading, Apple has built sophisticated process management into the kernel where it belongs and added language conventions that enable mere mortals to take advantage of a wide variety of different hardware that users might have at their disposal.

Grand Central Dispatch manages processes in a manner analogous to modern networking. Old telephone equipment used to use circuit switching to transmit information over networks; a dedicated circuit path is easy to set up but it is also expensive and potentially fragile. Modern networking uses packet switching, which breaks up data, phone conversations, or video streams into packets and routes each of them independently in a far more efficient way that is also resilient to network outages. Packets get routed around the problems.

For those without a technical background, Grand Central is going to be big. The ‘black art of multithreading’ is not being said lightly. By adding elegant support in Mac OS itself, Apple is enabling developers to take advantage of multicore Macs with greater ease than ever before. The performance improvement in most applications, and indeed in OS X itself, will be available and noticeable immediately. However, just imagine the payoff we’ll see as Intel continues to deliver chips with more and more cores.

Roughly Drafted Magazine

Snow Leopard Teaser

SproutCore adds a MVC (model-view-controller) structure to Javascript. Of course, Cocoa devs will be happy to find the same features noted in Cappuccino, such as undo/redo, bindings, document management, client-side storage with HTML5, and more.

Roughly Drafted Magazine has a very interesting article detailing the implications from this powerful framework. The important ideas to take away from this article lie along the lines that this framework is basically Cocoa for web apps. Apple has already been using SproutCore for over a year in the .Mac Web Gallery, and now has fully deployed SproutCore in the rebranded and revamped .Mac service, MobileMe, in addition to hiring the developer of SproutCore himself. Putting all this effort into the framework and testing it by developing interactive and very Mac-like web applications gives the user the idea that web applications don’t have to suck. So, a new market is emerging.

This is an amazing article with lots of grounded arguments for Apple’s moves, and the industry’s attitude in general. While you’re checking out Roughly Drafted Magazine, be sure to read other articles which are just as amazing!

Roughly Drafted Magazine

SpoutCore Javascript Framework

280Slides Online Presentation Software

Signup for a free profile today. And while you’re there, be sure to check out my profile as well!

Elian Gonzalez joins Cuba’s youth Communists [From Elian Gonzalez joins Cuba's youth Communists - CNN.com]

This is one of those moments that truly put my age back into perception. I’m only 21, but Elian Gonzalez brings up memories from my youth. And now the 14yr old is a member of the Cuban Communists. Not that I don’t condone that, but just interesting that he can still make news like this 8 years after the famous custody battle.

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

HyperSpaces boasts such features as named spaces, desktop labels, different desktop pictures and desktop tinting. It makes heavy use of Leopards Core Animation and Core Image to beautifully let you organize your work. Currently in a private beta, check out the HyperSpaces website to register for a notification when HyperSpaces comes out in public beta shortly.

Related Links:

CocoaBots Software

Tony Arnold | Lead HyperSpaces Developer

Cocoia Blog | Creating the HyperSpace Icon

[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

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/snowleopard/

Twing.com today announced the debut of its new online community and forum search engine, www.Twing.com. Created to be the Internet’s best resource for helping users search and discover opinions, information and conversations that match their interests, Twing.com includes its own blogs and forums to provide updated community information and an ongoing conversation with visitors and forum owners.

“Online forums are an established medium people have been using to communicate since the early days of the internet, even predating the web. The number of users of these forums has been consistently growing year over year, and recent estimates of U.S. users alone exceeds 50 million,” said Kevin Shea, General Manager for Twing.com. “As more users become active, more forums have been created and this trend is continuing. Our goal is to help these internet users to participate in discussions, ask questions, get answers and offer advice by providing a resource that organizes this category of online content and uncovers the discussions that interest them. We expect Twing.com to be an invaluable resource for forum users and owners.”

Twing.com’s use of proprietary software and algorithms enables users to search into forum content well beyond the limitations of traditional search engines. With Twing.com, Internet users can search the rich user-generated content found in online communities and forums, and access these discussions through highly relevant, easy-to-read search results.

Twing.com also caters to forum owners by enabling them to submit their sites to the Twing Forum Directory, a resource designed to generate traffic and enhance the quality of discussion taking place on forums.

“Just about any interest area has a forum, and sometimes hundreds of them,” added Scott Germaise, Twing’s Director of Product Management. “Forums are a great source of information, especially if you’re looking for advice or help from real people facing the same issues. The advantage Twing.com offers is its clarity of focus on forum content, which is the essence of online community. By offering multiple search options plus advanced filtering and sorting tools, people can effectively search forums in ways not available until Twing.com. We believe people will not only benefit from using Twing.com, but will also become more aware of and contribute to the ongoing growth and value of forum communities all over the Internet.”

Twing.com is easily used by entering search terms to quickly locate specific discussions and/or topics. Visitors can register – for free – to become a Twing.com member and participate in Twing.com’s forums and take advantage of current and upcoming personalization options.

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.

From the Versions website:

Whether you’re a designer, developer, editor or project manager, chances are you already have plenty on your mind. Versions saves you the hassle and makes working with Subversion easy for your entire team. Thanks to Versions’ clear-cut approach to Subversion, novices and power users alike will enjoy using it. And if you haven’t moved to Subversion yet, now is the time.

Spaces was one of the new features in Leopard I was most excited about, but I found the actual implementation unusable. [Henry Story wrote a fine description][d] of the problems with Spaces in 10.5.0. When I linked to his critique, [I wrote]:

I’ve tried to love Spaces but can’t, because I want to divide spaces into tasks, and some apps, like my web browser, need to have windows in every space. If I’m in, say, space 3 and Command-Tab to Safari, I want Safari to activate in my current space, not jump me to whichever space contains the frontmost Safari window. In short, Spaces seems designed for app partitioning, not task partitioning.

Take, for example, the task of writing this article. What I want to be able to do with Spaces is dedicate one space solely to the task. I want Safari windows pertaining to any web pages related to the article, and MarsEdit and BBEdit windows for the article itself. But I don’t want all open Safari, MarsEdit, and BBEdit windows in this space — I only want those pertaining to the article. There was simply no way to make this work in 10.5.0 through 10.5.2; you could get the windows grouped this way, but you’d keep getting switched to another space when what you wanted to do was switch to another app within the current space. Spaces really only seemed suited to putting all of any given app’s windows in a particular space (or making all an app’s windows visible in all spaces). This isn’t to say Spaces wasn’t usable, only that it wasn’t usable for grouping a few windows from different apps together in one Space.

This week’s release of 10.5.3 brought good news: Apple has addressed this problem with a few seemingly minor changes to Spaces. Apple’s release notes for 10.5.3 hint at the changes, but don’t explain them in any detail:

Spaces

• Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.

• Resolves an issue in which activating an application from the Dock switches to a different space, even if there is a window for that application in the current space.

• Fixes an issue in which Command-Tab may incorrectly switch to a new space.

• Addresses reliability issues with Spaces when syncing preferences over .Mac.

Some of these are simply bug fixes. Clearly, for example, switching between spaces shouldn’t have changed the window ordering within a space. But some of these describe new behavior which only kicks in if you turn off a new-to-10.5.3 checkbox in the Spaces panel in System Preferences: “When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application”.

By default, it’s checked, which means app switching under Spaces remains much the same as it was on 10.5.0–10.5.2. For example, let’s say you have two spaces, with one or more Safari windows in space 1, and no Safari windows in space 2. If you’re in space 2 and activate Safari — whether by clicking the Dock icon, Command-Tabbing, or by opening a link in some other app’s window in space 2, then Spaces will jump you to space 1, where there are already open Safari windows.

If you turn this new checkbox off, however, activating an app, even one that has no windows in the current space, will not jump you to another space. Once you’re in a space, you stay there until you explicitly switch spaces, not just switch apps. This makes all the difference in the world for the way I, and others, want to use Spaces.

This is a major change to the way Spaces works, but the checkbox label doesn’t exactly make it clear. (I don’t have a better label to suggest; it’s a tough feature to describe in the length of a checkbox label.) Sadly, the help content for Spaces does not seem to have been updated to even mention this checkbox, let alone describe what it does.

One non-obvious detail is that you can switch to another space by clicking an app’s Dock icon multiple times. If you click a running app’s Dock icon once, that app will activate in the current space. If it doesn’t have any open windows in the current space, it will activate without creating a new untitled window. But if you click that same app’s Dock icon again, you’ll jump to the next space in which that app does have an open window. If the app has open windows spread across multiple spaces, subsequent clicks on its Dock icon will cycle through those spaces. So if you have four total spaces, with Safari windows in spaces 1 and 3, you can repeatedly click Safari’s icon in the Dock to cycle between spaces 1 and 3. If you’re starting in space 2 or 4, clicking Safari’s Dock icon once will activate Safari in that space but without a window.

Using Command-Tab to switch between apps, you will never automatically switch to another space when this new “switching” checkbox is turned off. (It’d be nice if the Command-Tab window provided some sort of indication for which apps have open windows in the current space.)

I also ran into an issue specific to web browsers. In the General tab of Safari’s preferences window, you can specify whether links from other applications open in a new Safari window or in a new tab in the frontmost existing Safari window. I had been using the “in a new tab” option. However, with this new Spaces feature, opening a link from another app in a space that has no Safari windows will jump you to the next space that does have one. Ideally, I’d like to see Safari create a new window in the current space in this situation, but as it stands, changing Safari’s preference to open links in a new window is good enough. (This same thing applies to other tabbed web browsers, such as Firefox and Camino.)

In short, if you were happy with the way Spaces worked through 10.5.2, you shouldn’t notice any changes, because the default behavior remains the same in 10.5.3. But if, like me, Spaces drove you nuts by switching between spaces when you only wanted to switch between apps within the current space, give it another shot after turning this new checkbox off. Kudos to the Spaces team.

---

Lastly, I should mention that I had problems getting this new feature to work at all. After upgrading to 10.5.3 and seeing the Spaces-related changes in the release notes, I tried it out. Toggling the new checkbox made no difference for me, however — I got the same old “jump to another space when switching apps” behavior either way. I solved the problem by trashing my com.apple.dock.plist preferences file (which, since Spaces is controlled by the Dock, is where most Spaces-related prefs seem to be stored). After logging out and logging back in, the new checkbox worked perfectly.

[From ★ Spaces in 10.5.3]

If you find any bugs throughout the site, which will most likely happen, please send me a quick email so I can get it sorted out. Thanks!

Read Article.

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.

My friends and I came up with a new game this past summer and this semester I’ve created a 2-player online version. It’s a ton of fun and I would appreciate any feedback you have. I do have a few more ideas in the works, as well as expanded documentation, but all in good time. I plan to officially release it into the wild this July.

Quick overview of the game:

• You’re dealt 9 cards, 3 of which you don’t see
• Then you pick 3 cards to save for the end of the game
• You can only play cards of equal or greater value each turn
• 2’s, 8’s, and Joker’s are wild
• Aces are high
• First player to completely go out of cards wins.

Start playing now!

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Someone is referred to the site because of a Google search every couple minutes. I spend time looking at the stats to see what you are searching for and where you end up once you are on the site. All important information.

Any thoughts?

Flow is exciting for a few reasons. First, it’s Leopard only. This means that the interface is super slick (lickable as the developer describes it). Views are animated and everything is simply gorgeous and simple to use. Leopard technologies such as Quicklook are also employed in the app. Quicklook files from your servers!

The first thing you’ll notice when launching Flow, is that it just feels right. It’s super responsive and fits in perfectly with the Leopard UI. Complete with tabs and a simplistic and intuitive interface, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Flow provides a built-in editor as well, which is fairly decent. The bottom pane of the window provides you with a live preview of your changes, and the editor actually supports syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, XML and CSS. However, it seems that Javascript highlighting isn’t available at this time, but hopefully will be in a future release. Note: the image below is while using Quicklook in Flow, not from my Mac.

Bonjour is also available, right in the sidebar. Because I have “Remote Login” (ssh) enabled on my Macbook, my computer showed up under the SFTP folder here. Just double-clicking on my computer and entering my password instantly logged me in and brought up my home folder. If there were more computers on my network, this could be very useful indeed.

Droplets are very useful as well. Simply create a droplet from the “Bookmarks” menu and an icon appears on your Desktop (which you can move then anywhere on your Mac). Then, just drop a file or folder on the droplet, and whether Flow is running or not, the stuff is uploaded to your server.

A few things I’ve noticed. First, If you have a tab open and double-click on a bookmark to log you in, the tab will be used for that bookmark. This is the same behavior that is in Safari. However, I would rather stay logged in to both and have the bookmark be opened in a new tab. If that annoys you, there is an easy set in Preferences to enable. Just a heads up. Second, Bonjour connections seem to be just a bit buggy still. It took me a couple clicks to get the right information to show up in the login pane when clicking on my computer, and once connected, the name of the tab wasn’t updated to the new connection. However, bugs have been filed

This is definitely an exciting new app and is very refreshing as the previous leader in the FTP space, Transmit, was getting long in the tooth. Congrats to Brian from Extended Mac on his first release!

You can download a free 15 day trial from Extended Mac Software here. Flow is 29 USD for all 1.x upgrades.

The Lambda Student Union of the University of Tennessee is holding an event in Market Square, on Sunday April 6th, from 1-10pm. Women bands will perform all afternoon and evening, benefiting local charities and organizations. The event is free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

For a small fee, there is an extensive video series available detailing icon design.

Icon Resource.net

Take a look here.

If you want to execute a process in the background in the shell, just append an ampersand to the end of the command. Most of the time this isn’t that useful, but the special appeal is when launch X apps from the shell. If you don’t append the &, the shell waits for the X app to terminate before returning a prompt, so the window is useless.

I spend quite a lot of time in Unix and just now found this tip out, as I’m writing my own simple shell for one of my classes. Cool tip indeed.

Yes, you could use Cmd-t or use the menu item, but sometimes I’m just right there with the mouse and that’s the quickest way. With the ability to rearrange and drag-n-drop tabs that Safari 3 added, I’m very pleased with tab support now.

This passage from a reader email pretty much nails it:

Yes, it would make a difference if the checkbox for Safari were unchecked by default. Also, the “new installs” should be visually separated from the “updates to programs you’ve already installed”, and clearly marked as such. I’m all in favor of programs updating themselves — especially potentially network-exploitable apps like iTunes or QuickTime — but companies shouldn’t abuse that to push entirely unrelated software on end users.

The reason reactions to this controversy have been so polarized is that we’ve been mostly arguing about the wrong thing: how or whether Apple should offer new applications to Windows users via the current Software Update app. The problem is with the design of the Software Update app itself.

The reader is right: updates to currently-installed software are an entirely different thing than offers to install new software. Different things should look different; the current design of Software Update doesn’t allow for such a visual differentiation.

For updates to installed software, the simple plain list Software Update currently displays is perfect. New software — like, in this case, Safari — should be displayed separately and more prominently. A big app icon alongside a brief description, perhaps — something that, visually, is instantly recognizable as something different from the regular updates. It should be clear that what’s being offered is both new and optional. The default should be not to install — or, perhaps, the user could be required to explicitly click either “Install” or “Don’t Install”, with neither option selected by default. If the user chooses “Don’t Install”, Software Update should then offer the user the option to never again be prompted about this particular application. (You can do this now, using the “Ignore Update” command in the Update menu, but this feature should not be hidden in a menu.)

Maybe Apple realizes this, but they figured it wasn’t worth the effort to add an entirely new presentation mode to the Software Update app, because they don’t have any other new Windows apps on the horizon. I.e., that, given their current plans, it wouldn’t be a new “ask the user if they want this brand new app installed” feature, but rather, for all intents and purposes, really just an “ask the user if they want Safari” feature.

But laziness is no excuse. This entire controversy, minuscule though it may be, could — and should — have been avoided if Apple had followed the design principle of making things that are different look different.

[From ★ Update - Daring Fireball]

I think DF summed the whole “controversy” up with this post. Very well put.

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.

Now in the sidebar, are three more boxes with interesting data. First, there is a “What’s Hot” box that shows 5 posts, with the date of the last comment. Hopefully this will help everyone see where people are discussing posts on the site.

There is a box below that which shows the Top 10 Pages. This simply pulls data from my Mint installation and shows the 10 pages (right now also including the homepage and the blog itself). Once again, this is meant as a way to for everyone to see where most people are going on the site.

Finally, there is a box below that which shows the top 5 commented posts of all time.

If you have any other suggestions for the site, I’d love to hear them. Also, if you are interested in implementing something similar on your site, post a comment and we’ll follow up with that!

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.

Simply put, using the Spotlight-like search on the site always worked, whether you were on the main page or viewing a post. But clicking the “View More Results…” link to get more than 6 results as well as excerpts, post timestamps, and the number of comments….well, that only worked if you were on the main page. That has now been fixed, so search away!

In a post from Knoxify, a site dedicated to building a community and “better everyone’s life” in Knoxville, Mac Fanatic was listed as one of seven blogs chosen for being “rich in content and color”.

I’m honored to be listed on that list!

However, the time came to renew and I figured that if nothing else, I at least wanted my own place to develop and test apps on the web, so here we are. Not exactly the brightest outlook for the site, and one that I don’t like when reviewing just how much time and effort I, and others, have put into this project.

You can easily create a UITextField to handle text input. The interesting part comes into play because there is a keyboard associated with the UITextField, obviously for providing input. That keyboard can be specified what action to do when the return button is pressed, giving a way to process the text. The cool part is, it’s extremely easy for developers to use the many different types of keyboards present on the iPhone. For example, there is a numeric keyboard, the default keyboard, one for entering URLs, one for entering email addresses, and so on. Below is a quick code block, adapted from the “Hello World” example.

aTextField.borderStyle = UITextFieldBorderStyleRounded;
aTextField.contentVerticalAlignment = UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentCenter;
aTextField.placeholder = @”Your name”;
aTextField.keyboardType = UIKeyboardTypeEmailAddress;

Some other examples of keyboard types:

• UIKeyboardTypeDefault
• UIKeyboardTypeNamePhonePad
• UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad
• UIKeyboardTypeNumbersAndPunctuation
• UIKeyboardTypePhonePad
• UIKeyboardTypeURL

At this moment, the page isn’t up, but I would imagine it would be available shortly.

You can download a quick Automator Application that will copy the two files and place them on your Desktop, or use the steps below.

or, in the Finder, go to:

/System/Library/CoreServices/

One of the many items in that folder is the “Setup Assistant” application. Ctrl-click on that and choose “Show Package Contents”.

Now find:Contents/Resources/TransistionSection.bundle and ctrl-click on the bundle, choosing “Show Package Contents”.

“Contents/Resources/intro-sound.mp3″ is the music that goes along with “Contents/Resources/intro.mov”

You can copy those files to your Desktop and run them through some software (iMovie or Quicktime Pro) and get them in one file, and you have a finished result!

This has been verified to work with Snow Leopard, Mac OS 10.6 (modified on Aug 31, 2009)

AOL has done an about-face regarding third-party access to the company’s AIM chat network. AOL’s recently launched OpenAIM 2.0 provides open, uninhibited access to services like Meebo, or all-in-one IM clients like Pidgin, allowing them to freely and easily use the AIM instant messaging network. That’s quite a change from AOL’s previous stance toward such competitors, which seemed to be somewhere between sticking its head in the sand and unleashing a pack of angry lawyers. At the moment, multi-platform IM desktop clients like Pidgin or Adium (the popular Mac client) generally rely on hacking and reverse engineering access to chat networks run by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Not only is that bad for developers since it means more work, it also means th [From AOL Opens Up the AIM Instant Messaging Network | Compiler from Wired.com]

Found via | Wired Blog Network

Cocoa is My Girlfriend

Feb 19, 12:34 PM EST Toshiba Quits HD DVD Business By YURI KAGEYAMA AP Business Writer AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi Watch Related Video Toshiba Quits HD DVD Business Buy AP Photo Reprints Your Questions Answered Ask AP: Political Ads, E-Mail’s Hyphen TOKYO (AP) — Toshiba’s decision to no longer develop, make or market high-definition HD DVD players and recorders will mean consumers can start feeling more confident about buying the victorious rival technology – a Blu-ray disc player. Analysts say competition is expected to heat up among the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and recorders, which include Japanese makers Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Sharp Corp. as well as Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea. In making the announcement, Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida said he wanted to avoid confusion among consumers. The decision was relatively quick, coming just several years after the competing technologies arrived. In the last video format [From Wired News - AP News]

I’m pretty excited that there has finally been a decision in the format war. Not that I’m in the market for a high definition entertainment system anytime soon, but I would expect Apple to finally introduce Macs with Blu-Ray drives here shortly and stuff can really get exciting.

Also to note, Barack has several other ways to connect with voters, including facebook and being a digg user. And of course, Hillary is on facebook as well!

Barack on Twitter

Barack on Facebook

Hillary on Facebook

iPhone Facebook Ad

Just judging from the website, this will be an awesome release. The website itself is simply stunning, all the graphics are top notch, and there are nice blog updates detailing the progress of the application including screenshots.

I’m not sure what Headline will promise in features that you can’t get in any other current application, but it promises to have a beautiful interface!

More Information | Doseido Blog

Found via | AppleInsider

Please educate yourself on the candidates and vote!

On the Big Nerd Ranch website, the release is marked simply as “Spring 2008″. However, the publishing date on Amazon is marked as June 2, 2008. Pre-ordering through Amazon will guarantee you receive your copy as soon as it’s available.

Found via | Ranchero.com

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!

The keyboard now utilizes the screen’s multitouch functionality enabling two-finger typing. That means you can hold shift + a key and it will type in caps, just like a real keyboard.

A nice addition indeed.

First, the game is slated to finally be released sometime this year. And on top of that, EA has promised it will be released for Mac and PC at the same time. Now, after WWDC 07 last summer, this was the arrangement. However, that hasn’t been the case yet as far as I know, so hopefully they will play their cards right and make right by this mammoth release.

Anyone have thoughts on this game? I’m not usually a gamer by any means, but the general idea of this and the fact it’s backed by the guy who created my two favorite games….well, it gets me excited.

Found via | TUAW

Thankfully the guys at iPhone Alley wrote up this article with a hands on experience. Turns out it really is as simple as it sounds. There are two discs in the DVD case now, a regular one, and then one with bonus content. Popping the second one into your computer brings up iTunes with a page from the Disc. You enter a serial code found inside the case, and the copy begins.

This is pretty cool because the studios have started to realize that yes, we would like a physical copy of our favorite movies, but would also like to have a digital copy to watch on our iPods and such as well. For those who currently rip a DVD and then encode it, taking several hours, this will be a pleasant change.

I’ve been keeping tabs on the release candidates, but I actually missed the 3.0 release amid the holiday season. v3 was released on December 18, 2007 and is available for download. The changelog is so immense that I can’t even begin to digest the details, but a lot of the gripes I had with the 2.x releases are completely gone and the system is a lot more maintainable and usable for the average administrator.

You can be sure that the moment I have some time, I’ll be upgrading Mac Fanatic’s message boards to the new release. Ability to easily upload files and so much more is very exciting. I’m super excited about better user management and spam control.

Give phpbb a try here.

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?

First off, I was searching for about the cheapest thing with four wheels, while still being stylish and fun to drive. In my quest for my first new car, I seriously looked at the Toyota Yaris and the Honda Fit as about the only other affordable options. The Mazda 3 Hatchback as well as the VW Rabbit are two beautiful pieces of machinery, but were out of my price range.

The 1.8L engine coupled with the 6 speed manual transmission makes the Versa a much more thrilling car than either the Yaris or the Fit. Quick acceleration makes for fun city driving or agility to pass, and 6th gear allows for easy and quiet interstate driving. Gas mileage is rated slightly lower (about 31MPG) than the competitors, but performance and fun was more important in this little car compared to a few extra miles per gallon.

Overall, the Versa has a nice feature set. With a base price around 12,500, features such as air conditioning and a CD player are included. There are of course several options available, but I only opted for the Power package, which included some random items as well as power locks/windows and cruise. The sound system is astounding as far as I’m concerned. The cabin is filled with sound and retains quality even with lots of bass.

I’m not a fan of the sedan version, but I love the hatchback I bought. It’s a thrill to drive and has all the features I wanted in my first car, minus one. I would have liked to have an audio input jack in the car, but that was only available with the SE model.

Nissan Versa Website

Thanks to all of you who have continued your support of the site, I truly appreciate it.

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!

Version 3 is a major update still in the beta stage, but you can download a free copy of the beta version here. A revised interface, filtering, improved performance, tagging, plugin support and more are just some of the features that I’ve noticed.

You can listen to my podcast reviewing Ecto 2 and other blogging software solutions here.

I think it’s a pretty cool accomplishment and something that I’m proud of. For someone who doesn’t have that much time to pour into this project anymore and started this as an experiment and a hobby anyway, I’m happy.

My question to everyone is, do you still find the site useful and in what direction would you like the site to take?

For more information, visit the World AIDS Day Campaign website.

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.

Greensboro, NC – November 27, 2007 – From the start, you could tell they were meant to be together. Pixadex, our intuitive and familiar icon organizer, and CandyBar, our safe and cheerful icon customization utility, always worked hand-in-hand to transform your desktop into a place you could call home.

Now, thanks to the power of modern computerized technology, unthinkable magic has happened: these two apps have been joined into one!

Introducing CandyBar 3, only for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Brought to you by Panic and the Iconfactory, CandyBar 3 brings the best of CandyBar 2 and Pixadex 2 together into one powerful, new application. CandyBar, as always, lets you easily and safely customize your Leopard system icons like the trash can, volumes, and even the infamous Leopard default folders, so your desktop will be uniquely yours. And now, with Pixadex’s feature set built right into CandyBar, users can import, organize and search huge numbers of icons quickly and easily, making it super simple to find just the right icon.

But wait, there’s more! CandyBar 3 goes even further, now allowing users to even customize the look of the Leopard dock, just by simply dragging and dropping new images from the Finder. Better still, specially marked iContainers – neatly packaged sets of icons, available now at The Iconfactory – even contain built-in replacement Docks, usable with a single click.

With a brand new interface, 512 x 512 icon support, Quick Look integration in the Finder, super fast icon loading and browsing, improved smart collections, and much more, this is truly an upgrade to be reckoned with.

CandyBar 3 is available today from Panic for the low price of $29. Discount upgrade pricing is available for registered users of both CandyBar 2 and Pixadex 2. Additionally, users who purchased CandyBar 2 or Pixadex 2 on or after October 1st, 2007 qualify for a free, instant upgrade to CandyBar 3

As an extra bonus, CandyBar 3 also includes a built-in brand new icon set, Float, from The Iconfactory. Automatically installed on first launch, and with a a clean, simple style, Float makes your system feel lighter than air.

Visit Panic.com for full details and to download your free trial version today!

You can check out my review of Billings here.

Huge discounts are in place and the kickoff for the event is Nov 27. Be sure to check it out for great deals on Mac software, up to 70% off!

Give Good Food to Your Mac

The authoring of software doesn’t mean others can’t evolve it or include it in their OS. Thanks to Microsoft now those features that appear on both OS will be more stable and neetly polished rather than performing a rush job typical of Apple. Wintel PC are cutting edge, Apple lovers it’s time to switch to a reliable and stable Wintel PC

Yep, Mac users, it’s time to switch to a reliable and stable Wintel PC.

The Knoxville News Sentinel states:

Passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act came despite protests from some gay rights supporters that the bill does not protect transgender workers. That term covers transsexuals, cross-dressers and others whose outward appearance does not match their gender at birth. The measure would make it illegal for employers to make decisions about hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee based on sexual orientation. It would exempt churches and the military.

I’m personally excited to see this bill make it this far. However, it still has to pass the Senate as well as President Bush, so I’m not expecting it to make it into law until the new Congress convenes with elections next fall. One important point here is the fact that gender has been ignored in this version of the bill. While it would make me very happy to have sexual orientation added to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, it will still ignore those in the LGBT community which feel confined by traditional gender roles.

I’m interested to hear other people’s opinions on the exclusion of gender identity in the ENDA bill. In the student organization I’m involved with in on campus, we are struggling amongst ourselves for our group policy on the matter and how to pursue it in the University. Anyone with past experience, etc, it would be great to hear what you have to say.

Joy of Tech

More details here.

GimmeSomeTune is highly customizable. Nearly every aspect of it can be changed and adjusted to the user’s personal needs. It is Freeware, but donations are greatly appreciated and used for further development of the application. GimmeSomeTune requires Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, an older version for Mac OS X 10.3.9 is still available on the website.

Website
Product URL
Direct Download Link
Direct Download Link for OS X 10.3.9
Screenshots of GimmeSomeTune
Logos of Eternal Storms Software

BusySync is a Mac OS X System Preference Pane that runs in the background and adds calendar sharing capabilities to iCal. Leveraging Apple Sync Services and Bonjour, calendar events created by one user are instantly published and synchronized with other iCal users on the network. Users can share and edit calendars, make changes on each others calendars, and everything is automatically synchronized between each user, on each Mac.

Feature Highlights in Version 1.0:

Bonjour Networking: Calendars are automatically published on a local area network without the need for a dedicated server.

Multi-User Editing: BusySync allows multiple users to share and edit calendars. Changes made by one user are instantly synchronized with all others on the network.

Security: Calendars can be password protected to provide different groups of users with different access privileges, including read/write, read-only, or no access.

Offline Access: Changes made to a shared calendar while disconnected from a home or office network are automatically synchronized when connected.

Supported Languages:
* English, French, German, Japanese

System Requirements:
* Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
* Universal Binary: Works great on both Intel and PowerPC

Pricing and Availability:
BusySync 1.0 is available directly from BusyMac.com. Pricing for new customers starts at $19.95 USD per user, with multi-unit discounts available.

How does BusySync differ from the group scheduling features in Leopard iCal?
BusySync is targeted at families and small workgroups that wish to share calendars without the need for a dedicated server. Leopard iCal supports CalDAV, a client/server scheduling specification targeted at large workgroups. It requires a dedicated server and software included in Mac OS X Server. If you don’t have a dedicated server running Mac OS X Server, the new group scheduling features in Leopard iCal are not available to you.

Website
Product URL
Direct Download Link
Purchase Link
Screenshot
Video Tutorial

This new version adds a redesigned timeline, now using in/out/playhead model and can create MPEG-4 file with chapter markers, to be enjoyed on your iPod or iPhone.

Powerful editing operations like splitting a movie into clips, a Batch Converter, an Audio Waveform tool to make sharp audio editing and synchronization, are among most appreciated features of version 3. SimpleMovieX also provides a search pane to quickly find a sequence and an adaptable timeline for accurate playhead positioning even in large duration movies. Huge files beyond 4GB, for example 6 hours of TV recording, can be edited without truncating.

SimpleMovieX is a tool for a wide public: Discriminating TV viewers that clean their recordings of commercials, Users of a digital camera, mobile phone or camcorder that need to edit, compile, convert and share their personal footage, Video collectors compiling music concerts or Google Video shorts, …

For occasional users, an unlimited demo version of SimpleMovieX is available for free download.

SimpleMovieX requires Mac OS X v10.3 or higher. QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component is required to take advantage of MPEG-2 capabilities. QuickTime Pro is not required.

Website
Product URL
Direct Download Link

Built from the ground up to resemble the media browser found in several Apple applications, the Karelia iMedia Browser is a stand-alone utility that can be used to quickly access a user’s library of photos, sounds, movies, or bookmarks.

“We initially built an iMedia Browser into Sandvox, our website-creation tool, because we wanted Sandvox users to be able to access their media as easily as they could from Apple’s own programs,” said Dan Wood of Karelia Software. “Since it’s a general need, we decided to release it as a utility that can be used in conjunction with just about any other application as well.”

The Karelia iMedia Browser allows users to browse their libraries of photos (iPhoto, Aperture, and Pictures folders); music (iTunes library, GarageBand songs, and Music folders); movies (from iTunes, iPhoto, and Movies folders), and bookmarks (from several leading web browsers). It can be activated either from the dock or from a small icon in the menu bar.

Karelia Software also announced the immediate public availability of the source code for the underlying media browser framework, written by developers at Karelia and other companies. In addition to being used in Sandvox, the iMedia framework is currently used by developers around the world in a number of third-party applications, including Skitch, MemoryMiner, Ubercaster, iStar Composer, Norkross Movie, and Posterino. The iMedia framework is extensible, allowing developers to add new media types or sources of media.

“For more than a year, the Karelia iMedia Browser framework has provided the critically important media browsing functionality in MemoryMiner,” said John C. Fox, MemoryMiner’s creator. Integration of the iMedia Framework was unbelievably easy. I’m personally grateful to the folks at Karelia for having made this engineering work freely available to the Mac developer community.”

The Karelia iMedia Browser is available for downloading from Karelia’s website. It is a Universal Binary for PowerPC and Intel architectures, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” or 10.5 “Leopard.” The download contains nine languages: English, French, Italian, Danish, German, Swedish, Japanese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Additional URLs:
Google Code page for iMedia: http://code.google.com/p/imedia/
iStar Composer: http://www.scriptsoftware.com/composer/
Ubercaster: http://www.ubercaster.com/
Norcross Movie: http://www.norrkross.com/software/movie/
Skitch: http://plasq.com/skitch
MemoryMiner: http://www.memoryminer.com/
Posterino: http://zykloid.com/posterino

iMedia

Jumsoft tried to keep the application simple for users who do not have the time to learn about accounting. The developers of Money 2.4 believe that people are capable of managing their own finances. Money 2.4 helps its users with elegance and ease-of-use. Even more important the application’s full compatibility is with virtually all of the standards and concepts of accounting.

Major Features in Money 2.4:
Money 2.4 features new and simplified user interface, smart accounts, powerful reports, bill management, budget management, the ability to transfer transactions from one account to another, improved accounts management, banking management, payee management, improved categories management, OFX file format support, improved QIF support, and support for multiple currencies.

New features: Portfolio and Investment Accounts.
* QIF and OFX imports have been improved.
* Added Transaction Security to Smart Account’s criteria.
* Fixed bug with transfer between accounts with different currencies.
* Other small bug fixes.

System Requirements:
Money 2.4 requires Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.3 or later. Money 2.4 is Universal Binary, so it will run on any Intel or PPC Mac.

A single license of Money 2.4 is $39. Pre-registered Money users can upgrade to Money 2.4 for $10.

Jumsoft
Money 2.4
Getting Money 2.4

As an early product tester put it: “Leap gives me the feeling of having control over the chaos that inevitably creeps into the home folder over the years, despite all efforts. And its incredible what stuff you can find that you didn’t even know exists”

As Mac users for over 20 years, the two principals of Ironic Software have always been disappointed at the performance of the Finder. Leap is their response to the feeling that one gets while looking for files – even files that are in a known location – in Apple’s Finder.

Ted Leckie, user interface guru at Ironic puts it like this:
“Locating a file that you know the exact location of can involve many clicks as a folder hierarchy is descended. Make a wrong turn – and you are out of luck. Leap solves that problem by getting rid of the hierarchy, while allowing you to find what you are looking for in just a click or two”.

Leap’s main other author is Tom Andersen, who has worked with Ted since they first developed Starry Night, an Apple design award winning astronomy program. Tom has designed the engine of Leap to be able to deal with the untold thousands of files that sit on a modern computer today.

Tom had this to add:
“There are other search tools and Finder replacements out there, but they tend to fall into two categories, they are either like the Finder with more buttons, or they are text based search tools like Google Desktop. The problem with Google Desktop is that you search for items by entering text, when many of the documents on a typical computer are best remembered by what they look like. Leap allows you to look for documents visually, with text, by file size – however you remember it”.

The program features an iTunes like interface, making it easy to use, so that users can be doing useful things within a few seconds. It also has a great levels of customization available, so that users can set up Leap to reflect the files they care about and the workflow that they perform daily. It supports drag and drop, saving searches, and more. One big feature that it brings is the ability to ’see’ many of your files as they actually look, instead of an icon. This is a feature also of Apple’s upcoming Leopard release, but Leap users can get that today in OS X 10.4 Tiger.

What about Leopard?
With Apple’s Leopard due out soon, a trip to Apple’s web site shows some of the features of the new OS X 10.5 Finder. As Ted points out: “The Leopard Finder is one of the big reasons we developed Leap – we are disappointed with the lack of any real new direction the Finder is taking.”

Leap requires a Mac running OS X 10.4.8 or later. It is available for $34 USD from Ironic’s website.

Ironic Software was founded in 2006 to develop Mac only software. The company is located in Meaford and Toronto, Ontario Canada. The company has developed two software products. Yep – the best PDF manager for the Mac, and Leap – the Finder how it was meant to be.

Review copies of Leap are of course available to members of the Press.

Ironic Software Website
Leap URL
Download trial version
Purchase
Leap Screenshot
Icon

I hope that the platform remains open enough that developers are squashed out of the model and that there will still be free applications available. I’m all for keeping my iPhone stable though. Certainly a day to mark on the calendars!

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

# 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.

Preorder today with free delivery on Oct 26th!

codepoetry has announced the release of Notae 2.2. Notae 2.2 brings significant improvements over the previous version of the popular advanced notebook software by including such features as template notes (notes you can insert into other notes), partial matching for tag searches, optional automatic saving of documents when they are closed, adding or removing tags via contextual menus as well as many smaller usability enhancements.

Notae is a powerful solution to the problem of keeping track of notes and information that a user collects while working with the computer. By incorporating the full power of Mac OS X’s text system, Notae presents an easy and capable workspace for writing short notes or long essays, all with easy access to Mac OS X’s powerful typography tools. While other tools merely include the standard Apple Text menu, Notae has assigned traditional keyboard shortcuts to kerning, leading, and other text commands so that you never have to leave the keyboard to get the look you want or navigate through your notes.

In addition to creating text notes, Notae allows users to keep PDF notes or even download web pages as Web Notes for future reference. Every note type can be tagged and organized, enabling the user to easily locate the note in the future via the innovative Tag Browser feature.

Notae 2.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. After the 14-day demonstration period, the program can be registered for $29 USD.

Website
Product URL
Direct Download Link

Colorado Springs, Colorado – October 15, 2007 – Atomic Bird, LLC today celebrates five years as an independent Macintosh software developer. The occasion will be marked by a five day promotion during which every fifth order will be free.

Atomic Bird made its public debut on October 15, 2002. Since then it has been making software that integrates with Mac OS X to make it just that much nicer to use, however you use it.

From Monday October 15 through Friday October 19, one out of every five software orders placed through the Atomic Bird web store will be free.

Atomic Bird’s flagship product is Macaroni, a system utility which automates the Mac OS X system maintenance process, freeing users from routine maintenance tasks. Other products include the innovative MondoMouse window management tool and Chimey, a clock-chime utility for Mac OS X.

Website
Purchase Link
Developer Blog
Macaroni
MondoMouse
Chimey

The site started as a personal blog that slowly evolved into what it is today. That process has taken lots of my time and I just don’t have the time needed to keep the site moving forward at the current pace. Therefore, I’d love to have some help. If you know of anyone that would like to help in providing content for Mac Fanatic, send me an email.

Help can come in a variety of forms. I’m interested in Mac application reviews for web publication, Mac news to be posted on the blog, general help in site moderation, and of course, content for podcasts.
There are a lot of options here, so if you think you have something to offer the site, please let me know. I’d obviously prefer someone who has a bit of experience, but I’m completely open to a new blogger or writer. Everyone has to start out somewhere and it’d be awesome to have more talent on board.

Hope to hear from some people soon. By all means, share this post with others.

BackJack Continuum(TM):

Cost effective, offsite backup to enhance Leopard’s Time Machine(R)

Apple’s Mac OSX Leopard with Time Machine(R) is coming soon, promising the ability to perform simple, onsite backups to local hard drives. “Mac users have been begging for a deep-rooted, simple to use, local backup solution for some time”, states President Chris Brown, “And, while Time Machine(R) is looking like it will finally solve this problem in a way that only Apple can do it, our forward-looking clients have asked for a way to solve the remaining problem of also getting their files offsite. Our response is Continuum.”

BackJack Continuum(TM) eliminates the need to physically rotate hard drives to an offsite location by providing a fully automated and secure solution that transfers files to our data centers on a nightly basis. Continuum achieves this core business function in an extremely economical fashion, thereby allowing clients to stay focused on their core competencies.

The importance of offsite file protection remains paramount to protect against catastrophes such as fire, theft and natural disasters. As such, Synectics is complementing Apple’s Time Machine(R) with their new, cost-effective Continuum(TM) solution that will provide Mac users with the offsite protection necessary to complete their business backup strategy.

BackJack New Version 5:

Same great service at significantly lower rates

In today’s modern business world, it has become increasingly more difficult to ensure solutions are in place that guarantee routine, convenient and effective backup. For those whose use of the Mac generates income, or supports key business or educational activities, BackJack is a viable solution for the protection of your files.

BackJack is most commonly used as a standalone solution for those not doing local backups; for example, mobile laptop users or, in Mac environments where local backups are not practical. An upcoming new version of the software tightly coupled with a new, modern data center makes BackJack even more appealing and cost-effective.

BackJack
BackJack Continuum
BackJack Version 5

Following from this was a guide to enable the installation of Mail, Google Maps and other applications from the iPhone on the iPod Touch. And even more exciting was the announcement that previously bricked 1.1.1 phones could now be updated with the SIM unlocking (iPhone SIM Free) software and will once again work. That alone should make very many users happy.

Apple debuted the WebApps directory for iPhone and iPod Touch on the Apple website, showcasing iPhone adapted websites, or “webapps”, allowing users to browse the site and find an application to fill their need. I find it incredibly strange that the Apple WebApp directory doesn’t have a iPhone version of the site, to easily flick through categories and browse the applications and a quick link to bookmark it. A little disappointing, but there are a lot of applications already listed in the directory, so this will be refreshing to users who were not aware of these websites in the past.

To have your webapp showcased on the Apple directory, you just submit it for approval. I would have liked to have seen the addition of adding these webapps to the springboard and more, but that might possibly come with a future update to the firmware around Leopard’s launch according to other rumors.

Mainz, Germany – October 5, 2007 – After to incredibly positive feedback at the Paris Apple Expo, Synium Software GmbH is delighted to announce the prerelease of their popular genealogy application, MacFamilyTree 5, for a worldwide Public Beta test.

Rewritten from the ground up using XCode and Cocoa, MacFamilyTree 5 sports a much faster database engine, and a completely redesigned user interface, marking Version 5.0 as the most significant update in the application’s history. Version 5 is fully Leopard-compatible, Apple’s upcoming operating system for the Mac: Mac OS X 10.5.

* Completely configurable user interface:
- Windows and Panes for data entry manipulation can be fitted according to personal taste.

* Family Assistant:
- Dynamically and graphically guides users through the process of creating and maintaining family trees.

* CoreData Database Technology:
- MacFamilyTree can easily handle multiple thousands of individuals and families.

* Visualize Through Virtual Globe:
- Interactively visualize a family tree through time and space.

* Integrated Web-Hosting Service:
- All registered customers may upload their family trees as HTML to the Internet, free of charge.

* Made for Printed Output, Presentations or Screen:
- Views can be edited just like a DTP program and easily printed, prepared for online presentations or on the screen.

* User-Selectable Themes:
- New and improved HTML export now includes user-selectable themes.

* .Mac Integration:
- Facilitate sharing of family trees via Apple’s own dedicated web-hosting service.

* GEDCOM Compatible:
- Fully compatible with GEDCOM for sharing genealogy data.

Supported Languages:
* US English, French, Italian and German

System Requirements:
MacFamilyTree 5 requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher, a PPC Macintosh with 512 MByte RAM (1024 recommended), ATI Radeon 7500 or NVidia GeForce 4 MX graphics chipset or better and a minimum of 16 MByte video memory. All Macintosh computers with Intel processors and Intel’s GMA 950 graphics chipset or better are supported. MacFamilyTree 5 is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Pricing and Availability:
MacFamilyTree 5 can be purchased for $49.00 USD. $25 USD upgrade. Demo is also available for download. Update from all previous versions of MacFamilyTree requires valid registration key from previous versions. For customers who purchased MacFamilyTree 4 on, or after August 14th, 2007 the upgrade to MacFamilyTree 5 is free. Registration codes will automatically work with MacFamilyTree 5.

Although MacFamilyTree 5 has already been submitted to heavy internal and public beta testing, crashes and even the loss of data cannot be completely ruled out. Version 5 should not be used in a live, or production environment, and users are advised to test at their own risk.

Synium Software GmbH
MacFamilyTree 5
MacFamilyTree 5 Download
New Graphical User Interface
Illustrated Preview of MacFamilyTree 5

I tried several other Mac news readers including the highly praised NetNewsWire, and even tried a relatively new app called NewsLife. However, in the end, all I ended up with was a list of features that I want from each application, and not having an application that even comes close.

Vienna is open-source, which leads to a faster development cycle than most other news readers on the market today. Vienna just saw a 2.1 release that is stable and has a UI lift. Overall, it’s nice news reader that has the basics down firmly. Vienna is missing lots of cool features from Newfire, NewsLife, and NetNewsWire. However, so far this is the only one that I’ve been able to comfortably live with on a day to day basis. So, Vienna is my news reader of choice right now.

Have any thoughts on news readers for Mac? Or any websites that make a good job of it? I’m still interested in a web-based approach here because I’m on my iPhone often and would like to easily be able to catch up my feeds there.

* Alerts regarding security risks that affect Macs
* General articles on Macintosh security
* Information about Apple security updates, for Mac OS X and other Apple products
* Information about security updates for other popular Macintosh software
* Articles about general Internet security
* Questions from readers, and answers from Intego’s security experts and support team
* Interviews with Macintosh security experts
* Announcements of new Intego products, and tips and tricks for getting the most out of Intego software

The Mac Security Blog will be updated regularly, and information about new Macintosh security threats or security updates will be added as soon as possible. In addition to presenting articles about best practices for Mac security, The Mac Security Blog will also feature articles about general Internet security for Mac users. Written for novices and experts alike, The Mac Security Blog will be the place to go for up-to-the-minute Mac security news and information.

“We want to help Mac users, in every way possible, keep their Macs secure,” said Laurent Marteau, CEO of Intego. “With the many security threats facing Internet users, The Mac Security Blog is the ideal platform for Mac users who want to make sure they are protected from the dangers of the Internet.”

The Mac Security Blog can be read at http://blog.intego.com, and an RSS feed is available for readers who want to know about the latest articles as soon as possible.

Intego
The Mac Security Blog

The readers of MacGeneration have elected nine products, with results and all photos related to the event online.

* iPod Touch as the “best Apple product”.

* La Cie FireWire Speakers as the “best hardware”.

* Adobe Creative Suite 3 as the “best professional creative software”.

* FileMaker Pro 9 as the “best productivity software”.

* OpenOffice.org as the “best open source software”.

* Boinx FotoMagico as the “best creative software”.

* Titanium’s Software Onyx as the “best OS X utility”

* Kesington QuickSeek FM Transmitter as the “best iPod accessory”

A special award has been granted to Skitch by a jury composed of MacGeneration, MacBidouille, MacNews.de and MacsimumNews.

MacGeneration

Use one of the supplied templates to get started, or easily create one from scratch. Out of the box, Flux is a full featured WYSIWYG editor, offering a plethora of useful features, including full Drag and Drop, Direct Image Editing, Javascript Actions, AJAX, Embed Quicktime Movies, Flash, and other Objects, Spotlight and iPhoto support and more.

Main Features:
* Create from supplied Templates or from scratch
* Web Standards Compliant
* Full Drag and Drop Support
* WYSIWYG Editing
* Direct Image Editing with Effects
* Quicktime and Flash Support
* Integrated, Javascript Actions
* Spotlight Support
* iPhoto Support

System Requirements:
* Requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later
* Universal Binary for PowerPC & Intel
* 49 MB Hard Drive Space
* Internet connection

Pricing and Availability:
Flux 1.0.15 can now be purchased from the The Escapers web site for $49.99 USD. This is last chance to get Flux at 49.99. Once Flux is purchased, upgrades are free until version 2.0. A full featured demo is also available for download.

The Escapers
Flux
Direct Download Link

Topics covered include Mac application development, distribution and retail, marketing and go-to-market initiatives, and more. The first article in the SpinTips series, Creating a Successful Mac Product, is available immediately with subsequent series articles to be published on a monthly basis. “When it comes to successfully creating and deploying a product in the Mac industry, developers need strategic information that gives them the upper hand in the marketplace,” said Spin Studio founder and CEO, Ed Prasek. “The SpinTips series provides developers with this critical info so they can incorporate it into their creation of a strong, cohesive business path for their Mac compatible products.”

To read the first SpinTips series article, visit the Spin Studio website at www.spin-studio.com/spintips1.html

Spin Studio, LLC

Basically, a man with a case of beer strapped to the front of his riding lawnmower was “fleeing” police and wouldn’t pull over, so a policeman chased him on foot and pulled him off the mower. The man was arrested for driving under the influence.

Read entire article here.

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.

Music this week is “Better Than Me” by Hinder.

For the 8GB iPod Touch, no purchase required to enter. Simply click the link to enter. For the 16GB iPod Touch, every new Speed Download 4 license automatically gives the user 2 draw entries.

* 8GB iPod Touch (no purchase required to enter). For more information and to enter, please visit our website.

* 16GB iPod Touch (Speed Download 4* purchase required). Every Speed Download 4 license automatically gives the user 2 draw entries.

Winner will be selected by random draw the first week of Nov. 2007. Good Luck To All!

Speed Download is an easy to use, powerful and reliable download manager. It sets a higher standard for download manager innovation, and is expressly designed to be a central, unified hub for almost all downloading and file transfer activities.

Enter here.

PixelMator is the “next-generation” image manipulation application created on core Mac OS X technologies. I’m super excited to start using it and report back to everyone, but for now you can visit the developer’s website and read all about it yourself. It’s a beautiful and simple application that I’m excited to use!

PixelMator website.

HungryFlix.com is the internet’s premiere distributor of independent movies for digital devices such as the iPod, Apple TV, PSP and iPhone. The site is currently holding an Apple TV giveaway. New users can create an account online to be registered for a chance to win an Apple TV unit.

HungryFlix.com offers movie downloads from all genres. All files are DRM-free which allows users to move the content to all their digital devices.

“With HungryFlix content, you can start enjoying a great movie during your commute on the train or bus and then finish the film at home on your computer or Apple TV device,” said HungryFlix.com CEO Brian Andrews. “We feel this freedom and flexibility is a key value that we add for the current generation of movie and media fans.”

HungryFlix offers shorts, feature-length films, documentaries and how-to video clips from filmmakers across the globe. The site offers free membership for both consumers and filmmakers and a revenue sharing model for filmmakers and video producers.

“We hope to continue to help independent producers to get their great content noticed. We have great short films such as the thriller, The Prisoner, and important documentaries like America’s Chemical Angels, which highlights treating our children with behavior modification medications. These films deserve to be seen and we know there is a large audience of iPod owners out there hungry for great content.”

New users can register for an account online at http://www.hungryflix.com. Current users interested in registering for the contest can simply email their current user ID to info [at] hungryflix [dot] com. One entry per person. Contest details are available at the provided address below.

Enter here.

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?

So, I’ve looked into a few ringtone adding applications and hacks, but there is one that I really like and got working, so I’ll list the steps here. Tested with iTunes 7.4.1 on Mac.

1. Create an AAC audio file of your ringtone, using something like Garageband, QuickTime Pro, or Audicity.
2. Rename the file’s extension from .m4a to .m4r using the Get Info window on Mac
3. Import that file into iTunes. If all worked, it won’t show up in your iTunes library.
4. Go into ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Ringtones/ and you should see the file you just imported.
5. Rename the extension back to .m4a like it was before.
6. Your ringtone should show up in the RingTones tab in iTunes and will sync with your iPhone.

This method is a lot of work and most likely won’t work with the next iTunes update. So if you’re looking for something easier and don’t want to pay to create ringtones from the iTunes Store, take a look at iToner here. (Mac Only)

Tips fround from Engadget here.

Yesterday was a very surprising day in the Apple community for several reasons, not the least for the ugly new iPod Nanos. But I’m skipping ahead of myself.

First off, there were tons of new products introduced that fulfilled many of the rumors circulating the event. The biggest announcement of the day was the new iPod Touch. Basically, it’s a stripped down iPhone, but not in a bad way. The iPod Touch has the wonderful multi-touch screen that displays video and all your media beautifully and because of that is the first ‘full-screen’ iPod, even though there have been rumors about this for years now. The new iPod Touch also features Wi-Fi, letting you browse the web with Safari and download music directly from iTunes via the new iTunes Wi-Fi Store. You can grab one in any color you like, as long as it’s black and there are 8GB and 16GB versions with impressive battery life.

There were also new regular iPods released, albeit re-branded under the iPod Classic name. These new iPods feature interface enhancements, such as CoverFlow, longer battery life and a new all-metal enclosure that seems pretty sexy. The updated iPod Nano is sadly enough the “fatty” circulating the web a few weeks ago. It is smaller and slim, but because of a bigger display to allow the Nano to finally play back video, it looks really fat. The colors aren’t that attractive either, but they may appear better in person. There are also new iPod Shuffles, available in four new colors.

iPhone Update

The iPhone didn’t see a new product release, but is still causing a stir because of yesterday’s keynote. Because Apple released the iPod Touch, with it’s sleek design, built-in Wi-Fi and multi-touch display, Apple lowered the price of the iPhone by 200 USD. So instead of a 4GB version at 499 and a 8GB at 599, the iPhone comes in a 8GB version at 399. Very impressive price dive indeed, just to keep it competitive with the new iPod. However, this led to lots of very unhappy early-adopter iPhone customers and Steve Jobs released a letter to the public today on the reasons for the price cuts and offering 100 USD in Apple Store credit in compensation to the loyal Apple customers. Overall, a very nice way to deal with an angry/adoring public Steve!

On the iPhone note, if you’re thinking about buying one, now is still a good time. I just orded a 4GB version (discontinued) for 299USD. That’s a steal as I’m concerned, and brand new from the Apple Store, not refurbished or anything. So, in about 24 hours I’ll have an iPhone and I’ll be reporting back to everyone shortly.

Read Jobs’ letter to iPhone Customers

Bundled with the background, found here, it seems that Apple is moving to an outer space type design. Phill Ryu talks more about the interface changes and what that means for Aqua.

Personally, I’m excited about the innovation and clarity of the design. The user is visually shown the chronological relation of their files and it’s very intuitive to use. As far as pure beauty, I’m not sure that I’m all for it, but the concept and implementation will evolve and become more polished with future releases.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Freeridecoding announces a major update for its straightforward backup tool SmartBackup v2.1. SmartBackup is the ideal application to backup personal data to hard drives, network sharepoints, webDAV, usb sticks, iPods etc.

SmartBackup is very easy to set up. It supports the use of Spotlights “saved searches” as backup items or to define exclusion which makes creating dynamic backups very simple. SmartBackup supports sorted archiving of deleted or changed items, file exclusion, handling of multiple backup sets, one-click restore and automation using iCal, Automator or shellscripts. Be smart – backup different.

New in 2.1:
* launchable with superuser privileges
* Improved cleanup and archiving
* Improved handling of metadata
* Improved backup to network shares
* Updated interface
* German localisation
* New automator action
* Several bugfixes

System Requirements:
* Intel or PPC Mac
* MacOSX 10.3
* MacOSX 10.4 for Spotlight support
* Ready for Leopard

Languages:
* English
* German

Licenses: Single 15 Euro (appr. 21USD), Family Pack 30 Euro (appr. 42USD), Site licenses available.

Read more about SmartBackup here.

Eureka Missouri – Aug 6, 2007 – All Out Software is pleased to announce their first release of Hana 1.0, a web-browser-type application to specialize in the support of web-apps, such as webmail, calendars and organization systems. Based on the built-in WebKit, Hana is a Universal Mac OS X application designed to work with any web site that supports Apple’s internet browser, Safari (versions 1-2.x).

Hana brings order and focus to working with web-apps by stripping away all of the superfluous features of ordinary browsers, leaving the user with just the right tools to get their work done. An applications tab strip replaces the address bar and toolbar. Once a user sets up a web-app in Hana, it appears in a tab and will remain there until the user deletes or deactivates it.

What are web-apps?
A web-app is a service or web site in which a person will do something other than simply read the content. Web-apps provide a unique way for the user to communicate with others or to create, or edit content in some way. Notable uses are webmail, web calendars, photo sharing, photo editing, project management, word processing and more.

Where does one find Web-apps?
In addition to Hana’s release, All Out Software has published the Web-app Directory. This directory will be community driven and collaborative, to include user submitted web-apps that Hana supports. All Out Software will also be evaluating web-apps to add to this directory as well. The Hana Web-app Directory is available online on the Hana page at the All Out Software website.

Pricing and Availability:

Hana 1.0 can be purchased from the All Out Software web site and from within the application for US$19.91. For a limited time, Hana is available at a US$10 discount via the All Out Software website only. The full version of Hana, including a 14 day unrestricted demo-mode is available via download from the All Out Software web site.

Hana 1.0 is available for Mac OS X 10.4.4 and higher, Universal Binary, and works with Safari 1-2.x.

Read more about Hana here.

Download a copy of Hana now.

If you’ve sent me something, I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Just a quick mention of Time Machine, even though this software runs on Tiger.

Changes include:

• New logo from aspiring graphic artist, Jimmy Xander.
• Cooler ‘banner’ images that take up less space in the window
• AJAX Searching – Super cool. It’s like Spotlight, try it out now and leave some comments
• New Comment System – AJAX-goodness. Instantly preview your comment before you post, quickly reply to another comment, Gravatar support for custom avatars on comments and improved styling overall
• Other minor tweaks, security fixes, and optimizations

I’m really proud of the work I’ve done, especially the overall feel and style. The banner images turned out pretty cool and I like the intense color and sexiness. The colored ‘candy-bars’ for the search results and comments turned out better than I had hoped as well.

If you find any bugs with the new theme, a quick comment would be appreciated!

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.

To go with that, Realmac Forge has been launched, as an area to download Rapidweaver plugin SDKs, get the source for Button Builder and more.

And also of interest, is a new website being launched by RealMac Software called I Love RapidWeaver.  Right now it’s just an attractive blue page as a teaser, but could be promising.

Today I ran across this website here that offers a brush set with Rising Sun patterns.  Now I can easily create the same graphics in about 3 seconds, instead of about 8 minutes or so it was taking me.  Don’t you just love the internet?

What is interesting here is the little gem I found on the website in some sample code and open-source frameworks. The Bruji team released a framework allowing Cocoa developers to grab barcodes from an internal or external iSight or other firewire camera.

Download the source here.

Found via | Australian Mac

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.

I went to my local Apple Store and waited for a few minutes so I could get to on of the eight or ten iPhones available on display.  Just picking the phone up from the dock and sliding your finger across the screen to unlock it was a wonderful experience.  The device is superbly made, the screen is gorgeous, and all the flicking and pinching and tapping works like a charm.  I even believe that the keyboard would be easy to get used to after using it for a few more hours.  And it is the perfect video iPod with that gorgeous screen!!

The only thing I would have liked to try out (I played with everything, even the YouTube app) was making an actual call, just to hear how loud and clear the call would be.  Other than that, and the price point, I would have bought one in a second as it was perfect in all respects.

And as a delightful sidenote, the website worked perfectly on the iPhone, though it was a tad slow to load, even on the Wi-Fi at the Apple Store.  If any of you out there have iPHones and would like to share some thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Today, that has changed.

Apple previewed Leopard at WWDC 2007 and one of the technologies called QuickLook, makes heavy use of full-screen video support directly from within the Finder. After the WWDC keynote, speculation that Leopard would provide full-screen support without the need to purchase a QuickTime Pro Key arose. With QuickTime 7.2 released today for Tiger, you can finally watch all videos full-screen without the need for a Pro Key.

QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:
- Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
- Updates to the H.264 codec
- Numerous bug fixes

QuickTime 7.2 is a free update.  Check Software Update.

You should scroll up and read that again.

Burger King cannot give me a free water. So, I politely told the woman that I couldn’t afford the water, so I might as well not buy the biscuit either. And I drove off.

Why does this infuriate me so much? The pure principal behind the matter is maddening. I’m a starving college student. When I do eat “out”, I have to do so cheaply. Hence the trips to Taco Bell (where you can eat for like 3 dollars) and other fast food places. I get water because it is free, and over the last couple years, I’ve taken a liking to it again. But no, Burger King won’t give me a water for free. Evidently I, and others, have been eating into their profit margins (oh, a pun) and we have to go.

So, if you’re debating going to Burger King or somewhere else, I urge you to leave Burger King behind. Unless you’re just fine with paying 18 cents plus tax for a water.

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

ThinkMac Software is excited to announce the immediate release of NewsLife 1.0. NewsLife is a super easy to use RSS news aggregator for Mac OS X.

NewsLife is a shareware product priced at €12 ($16) and is available to buy from our website. NewsLife requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and is a universal binary.

Product Overview

NewsLife’s simple interface, composed of three panes, is intuitive and easy to use. The source list lets you organise your feeds however you want. The content area presents each article to you complete with thumbnails, quick navigation links and more. The side bar contains useful features like a search field, quick view buttons, filtering controls and the news bin, which acts as a scrapbook for any articles you have dragged into it — allowing you to quickly email these items, Digg them, post them to your weblog editor or have them read aloud by your Mac.

Simplicity

ThinkMac has been developing RSS solutions for the Mac since 2002. Macworld UK awarded 4 stars to our NewsMac Pro software, and our photo gallery program, InstantGallery, earned 5 stars and a Choice award from MacFormat magazine.

Our customers have taught us that they want a program that does what it’s supposed to do, and doesn’t try and be all things to all people. Our users already have great web browsers and media players – they don’t want their RSS reader to try and usurp them. We designed NewsLife to be their companion, an application that fits into your existing Internet workflow – your “news life”.

Read More Here.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – July 9, 2007 – Appmarks.com (www.appmarks.com) is pleased to introduce AppMarks™, an easy-to-use, free Web 2.0 program that enriches the web browsing experience on the iPhone. By providing easy access to the most used web applications, the AppMarks desktop is the ideal Safari start page for iPhone users.

Just like a personalized desktop on a PC or Macintosh computer, AppMarks displays graphical “appmark” icons of your favorite web applications, widgets, and web sites. The AppMarks desktop is designed similar to iPhone’s home screen but is accessed from iPhone’s Safari web browser. Simply tap an appmark to launch a website or use the toolbar to rearrange, add, or delete appmarks.

“Tapping a graphical icon is more convenient and easier than navigating through a text list of bookmarks, which is the current model,” says Ishan Anand, co-founder of AppMarks.com. “iPhone users are comfortable using desktops on their home computers or even the iPhone home screen. AppMarks brings that familiar desktop metaphor to the iPhone’s Safari web browser.”

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.

Download AppFresh here.

Read about Pixelmator here.

I have emailed the winners using the emails they provided on the entry form. Please check that email account and reply to the email from the site by June 11th to confirm your winning status. If I don’t hear back from you by then, I’ll have to replace you with another eligible winner.

Once I have heard back from all those who won for each application, I’ll be in further contact with the developer to get your license to you. The developer will be contacting the winner(s) directly.

If you have any questions, send me an email.

Thanks again for participating!

Tune in later this month for an interview with someone from the Parallels team as we talk about the newest features and direction of Parallels on the Mac platform.

Expect an email from me by June 6 if you are a winner. Winners will also be posted on the site. Thanks to all who entered and many thanks to all developers who contributed.

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.

1 week early I gave the guy the files and the site went live. Overall it was an awesome experience. Was my first time working with a client and working under a time restraint. I was given a featureset and I had to implement all that. In the end I was able to throw in a trick or two and get it done early, all of which pleased the guy to no end.

If you’re interested in taking a look at the work, you can check the site out over here. The site is for a new podcast with multiple shows, called MacLive. There is a teaser episode right now which you can listen to from the homepage. Be sure to read up a little on each episode and browse around.

NOTE: At the time of writing this, the site owner still hasn’t edited some text on a few pages or got the online store working yet. He wanted the site as it was to at least have something up and will edit the other pages as the information comes available. Just saving myself a little embarassment there.

The 3.6 release adds features such as a much improved Flash slideshow for displaying your pictures online, support for multiple categories for a post, and more.

Oh, and the RealMac website has seen an awesome update with a completely new look. Reminds me a lot of the Delicious Library site in many ways.

Read more about RapidWeaver here.

Listen in to my review of RapidWeaver 3.5 here.

I just wanted to add that this release is not a free upgrade as the last couple releases have been. 3.6 brings several new features and weighs in at $40USD

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.

I just had to throw this out there because I find myself doing it all the time. I check my mint stats just about anytime I’m on the computer. It’s just part of my routine. Facebook, Mint, some message boards, my current debt….

When I find a site that I haven’t seen before show up in my referrers list, I check it out. I want to see who has sent me traffic! So occasionally the referring site is someone else’s mint installation. The instance that triggered this post was the good guys over at the Icon Factory for Frenzic. Looks like I had a few people leave the site and show up in their mint list and they checked the site out in return.

Just funny how everything is interconnected like that.

In case you’ve never listened in, it’s a great Mac podcast that crams several application reviews into one episode. You’ll come away with so much Mac knowledge, ready to impress your friends.

Listen in to the MacReview Cast here.

Please go forth and register on the boards. Pick out an avatar from the gallery or upload one of your own. Then start some discussions and let me know what you think about past/upcoming episodes and more. I hope this is a way for everyone to get involved in a little way and make the site more than just my ramblings and build up a community atmosophere.

Oh, and the message boards look damn good thanks to Tim Kimberl from Aqua-Soft.org.

Screenshots (Click to view full-size)

Download Coda here.

Download AppZapper here.

Download CleanApp here.

Download OnyX here.

What We Learned

In the press release today, we learned that Apple is a leader in green-friendliness, but just hasn’t been as public as its competitors about it.  Apple no longer sells CRTs, therefore eliminating most lead from its products.  LED backlighting for displays is in the works to reduce Arsenic and mainly Mercury found in LCDs today.  Apple has been shipping PVC-free packaging materials and such for the last 12 years while HP hopes to do that sometime this year.

That’s all very interesting and inspiring, but just company propaganda at the same time.  It’s nice to know that Apple takes the environment and peer pressure seriously.  Also note the promise of newer, brighter, “greener” displays in all models by 2008.

Read Press Release 

Download RapidWeaver here.

Be sure to enter to win one of three copies of RapidWeaver on the site here.

RapidWeaver 3.6 should be released early this summer. Check out the RealMac blog for updates on new features and release status.

However, if possible, something more exciting debuted today. Coda from Panic Software. I hadn’t heard anything about this application until this past weekend, but after using it for a few minutes earlier today, I think I’ll be using this app a lot more. Basically it combines everything a web developer needs into one application. Don’t get me wrong, I live and swear by CSSEdit. I code in XCode (although it sucks for web coding…keep meaning to purchase TextMate) and use CyberDuck for my FTP needs. But Coda is so much cooler. I’ll be reporting on this shortly.

Shiira 2 is a nice release as well. I have used this in the past, but the 2.0 stable release is a welcome update and I hope to go in full depth of the wonders of this magical open-source browser this summer.

Download Coda from Panic Software.

Download Shiira.

Download CSSEdit 2.5 here.

Be sure to read more about each application, listen to reviews and enter here. Consider downloading trial versions of the other applications as there is a great variety.

Digg the story here.

You can download Schoolhouse 2 here.

You can download Journler 2.5 here.

Listen to the previous review of Schoolhouse 1 here.

Listen to a previous review covering Journler here.

The contest will being on April 23 (next Monday) and last until June 1. There are a lot of software titles signed on so far and I’m very excited to offer all of this to my loyal listeners and take the time to welcome some new people as well.

If you’re interested in blogging the contest or submitting to digg or whatever way you feel to share the news with the world, go right ahead. I’ll have some nice images put up a little later in the week that everyone can use to stick on their blogs if they wish. And now for the list of software:

• Tangerine (1 copy)
• Rapidweaver (1 copy 3 copies)
• Frenzic (3 copies)
• Typinator, PopCharX, and KeyCue (1 copy each)
• Journler (1 copy)
• CSSEdit (1 copy)
• SmartBackup (1 copy)
• Cha-Ching (3 copies) 1.0 released on 4/20!
• Billings (1 copy)
• Parallels Desktop for Mac (2 copies)
• Delicious Library (1 copy)
• Disco (3 copies)
• Overflow (1 copy)

That’s a grand total of 723.23 USD of free and awesome Mac software! And there is one more surprise I’ll save for later….

Dan from Rapidweaver pledged two more copies of Rapidweaver to bring the number up to 3.  And that makes the grand total 803.13  now.

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.

SmartBackup is by far the best backup solution I’ve found for normal backups. The software is a lot like syncing your iPod. The first time you sync your backup, it will take awhile to put everything in the backup. However, subsequent backups take very little time and yet you always have your latest files. There are a lot of options to tweak for saving space and time and recovery is easy. Check out this app today!

Download SmartBackup here.

If you like this software, consider entering the Mac Fanatic Software Giveaway. Contest runs from April 23 until June 1. Read more details here.

This is a little disappointing for a few reasons. First, it shows that Apple is more dedicated to pushing the iPhone out the door than releasing software for Macs. Clearly stated as:

iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team

I understand the importance of the iPhone, but I really want Leopard. That initial point made, it’s also worth noting that while Vista debuted in January, a full 5 months before Leopard was originally going to be released, Vista now has a 9 month lead to market. Feature wise and all that, I’m not saying that Vista is in better shape. Just that as a proud Mac user, I can’t tout that Leopard is lightyears ahead of Vista and only a few weeks behind in release.

Overall, I’m sure that it will be worth the extra couple months. It seems that Apple will provide a full unveiling at WWDC this year and distribute more beta builds for testing and then release all that to production soon after. The increased time should allow for a more stable and impressive release.

Found via AppleInsider

Listen in here. 

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

Currently, the stats for the podcast come in at 49,292 for those episodes that have been downloaded by subscribers. The number is a few thousand higher at 55,681 for those that have been downloaded individually as well. So since 50,000 is a good number to celebrate, that’s what we’ll use here.

This certainly seems like a good time to give away something. So, if you have any ideas, requests, comments, now is the time to write in. I’ll leave the post open to suggestions for another week or two. Hopefully someone will write in with something good that is doable and I will be able to setup some sort of contest/giveaway again, similar to the iTunes Giveaway earlier this year. I might be able to coerce some developers into a free license, so if you have specific requests for some shareware, send them on in.

Keep the comments and emails coming!

UPDATE: I’ve heard back from Ged over at IconFactory, the great guys that gave us Frenzic. Turns out he’s excited about the giveaway too, enough to provide us with 3 full Guru copies (24.95 value each)! Many thanks to Ged from IconFactory and the rest of the team!

UPDATE 2: I’ve heard back from Andy from the Potion Factory. Turns out that the Potion Factory is willing to donate a license for Tangerine, a 24.95 value. Very awesome! The turnout of great Mac apps is very encouraging as I’ve only sent out three emails at this point.

UPDATE 3: There will be a copy of Rapidweaver available too, many thanks to Dan from RealMac Software!

UPDATE 4: I have received confirmation from the developers of CSSEdit, Typinator, PopCharX, SmartBackup, Journler, and ChaChing. If you have any special requests, please send them in soon.

Turns out, no real surprise, that the site is pretty much unusable in IE7. Yep, the latest and greatest IE and my site is broke. The text is extremely small and the javascript I have at the top of the page doesn’t work. Other than that, the site looks almost as one would expect. Except that you can’t read anything.

Looking in IE 6 is better/worse, depending how you look at it. You can at least read the text in the posts now, but the layout is extremely screwed up. JS still doesn’t work.

So, I should feel bad. I’m an aspiring developer. Granted I’m not as excited about web technologies and such, but I should strive for perfection. I wrote this theme for wordpress from the ground-up using standards, because I simply didn’t know what I was doing in CSS and such and just read the docs online. So it’s such a shame that IE can’t display all my work properly.

If this site was geared for another audience, this would certainly matter more. But, as there is only an extremely small percentage of people that use IE to view (it can be argued that the reason the percentage is so small directly relates to the fact that you can’t view the site in IE), I just don’t have the time and motivation to work out the bugs. Rant done.

• Podpress, my plugin for podcast management, is having issues. So far, the only one I see is that you can’t directly play, download, or see the download count of an individual episode on that post’s page. If you are subscribed, this doesn’t affect you.
• The links area in the sidebar isn’t working. I’m assuming that some function calls have changed since I created the theme, so I’ll have to make those changes and update the site to allow compatibility there later as well.

If you run across something other than what is mentioned here, I’d love for you to leave me a comment on this post or drop me an email at support@macfanatic.net

UPDATE: I have fixed the links/blogroll in the sidebar. Just as I figured, the function calls in 2.1 changed since I made my theme for 2.0.x series. Anyway, if anyone else is experiencing problems with their PHP functions, it’s worth checking out the WordPress Codex. There have been several template tags deprecated and added for 2.1, so it’s worth checking out. In my case, the ‘get_links()’ function was deprecated and replaced with a ‘wp_get_bookmarks()’ function. The newer function takes arguments that are much easier to read too, a very nice touch. By default, however, this new bookmark function sorts by categories and lists those names. Would be fine for an unstyled blog, but had nasty <h2> tags thrown in and more <ul> tags than I wanted.

UPDATE 2: I fixed the problem with Podpress after searching around in the WordPress Codex and the support forums for Podress for about an hour. Turns out that all that Podpress wanted, was an ‘action hook’. You can read more about those here, but I just had to add ‘<?php wp_head(); ?>’ between the <head></head> tags in my theme and I’m all set. Yay!

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