Author Archive

While I was browsing iusethis I came across this fun little game, Crittersim. A game by Clarkwood Software, Crittersim is a small simulation program of animals and species and includes a cute little icon. The graphics are very simple at the moment, though the developer just wants to get the basics down before any more UI development. It’s a fun little program to have in the background and check every now and then to see how many generations of critters there were and the current count of critters.

I was able to recently sit down with Chris Forsythe, who currently works on Adium, Growl, Perian, and Family.

Joseph: What gave you the idea for Growl?

Chris: It’s really 2 things that gave me the idea for Growl. Within the Adium project there were 2 developers. One, Jorge, wanted notifications that looked like the system bezel. The other, Adam Iser, wanted notifications that looked like Colloquy’s notifications. The problem we had with Jorge’s setup was that the system bezel is very hard to make everyone like.
For those who remember Adium from 3 years ago, there were a ton of options for just the bezel we had in Adium. There were so many that they were all in Advanced. Something had to give!

Congratulations to nan, mrkwst, and Paul, winners of last week’s giveaway of KIT! For those who didn’t win, don’t worry! There will be many more giveaways in the future. Just check back often, you never know what app we might be giving away!

KIT, which stands for Keep It Together, can be considered an updated Scrapbook. (For those that don’t remember, it was a Desk Accessory from the pre-OS X days.) It can store many kinds of snippets you want organized, such as notes, documents, images, sounds, movies, bookmarks, and archived webpages. It also makes it very easy to find what you need by using services such as Smart Groups and categories

If you’re geeky like me, then you probably browse Wikipedia for fun. I always find myself looking at one article, and just click on links to other Wikipedia pages. I just keep going deeper and deeper, until I forget what I was viewing in the first place. I always thought I was the only one that does that, until I stumbled upon Pathway.