Rant: Hey Apple, where is my iPod Touch?
It seems like the last 12 months have involved a lot of waiting for technology. I waited almost all night with hundreds of others in -20°C winter cold for a Nintendo Wii. Loads of us (well not me actually) waited in long lines to get an iPhone [Ed: I did! 4 hours!]. Every time I’ve failed to pre-order some cool gadget, I’ve ended up waiting and regretting it. So when the long rumored iPhone-without-the-phone iPod touch was announced, I jumped on the bandwagon and ordered one from store.apple.com straightaway.
Tutorial: Quartz Composer Part 2 – How to Make a Quartz Composer Screen Saver
Our last tutorial’s picture viewer, while pretty cool, wasn’t useful for too much more than just viewing images within Quartz Composer. This time, we’ll take your great QC skills and use them to break our creations free from Quartz Composer and into the rest of the Mac OS X environment.
In our last Quartz Composer tutorial, a tour through exciting QC concepts such as displaying images, layers, mouse input and using the Math Patch, we learned how to create a reactive and visually appealing composition in just minutes. This time we’ll make a great MacApper RSS screensaver while we discuss concepts such as making a really cool visual particle generator, controlling your Composition’s attributes from the screen saver preference panel and using macros from other Quartz Compositions.
Typeset: See Your Fonts, Make Them Shine
Typeset is a brave little application that takes on a particularly interesting challenge. That challenge is being a partner/replacement for Apple’s Font Book. It has often been said, that as a indie developer, it’s dangerous to make software that might be stepped on.
Sure, you might be able to compete with other indie software companies, but when it’s the mighty Apple that we’re talking about, boy will it be rough (see Cabel’s experience). Yet competing on Apple’s turf is exactly what Typeset has done, and I think they’ve done a good job of it.
Buy a Mac, Get an iPod
There’s no doubt, Apple loves us students! That’s why Apple offers great deals to individuals enrolled in post-secondary education. These deals include giving students a very generous discounts off of an annual desktop and/or laptop purchase and discounted Apple Developer Connection memberships.
Needless to say, this comes as a very welcome perk for those of us spending all of our money buying texts and all our time studying them. While Apple’s student discounts are offered year-round, we are currently in the season of an even more exciting and limited time discount being offered to University, College and other post-secondary students: Buy a Mac, get a free iPod Nano.
Review: LaCie 320GB USB Hard Drive
With the release of Leopard this fall, and the exciting prospect of keeping all of their data safe with Time Machine, it’s likely millions of Mac users are going to descend on local hardware dealers to snatch up external hard drives.
It’s also likely that hard drive manufacturers will, foreseeing this trend, do what it takes to get you and I to purchase their drives and make the most money off it. It’s now more important than ever to be smart and informed when making your hard drive purchase. To that end, I hope you’ll let me share my experience using the LaCie 320GB USB 2.0 hard drive.
Tutorial: Make Quicksilver your Dictionary
I won’t belabor (you can use this tip to find out what ‘belabor’ means) you with more Quicksilver fanboyism… We already know how awesome it is. What I will do though, is share with you a little tip that I’ve found really helpful when reading, writing and blogging. I know there are many great ways to look-up a word in the dictionary on the fly in Mac OS X, but unfortunately my favorite method–selecting text and then pressing Command-Control-D–only lets me view one definition at a time. Take a peek at this very simple look-up technique and I think you’ll be pleased to find there is a simple way to use Quicksilver to get definitions and look at multiple words at once.
Tutorial: Make a Quartz Composition Part I
Quartz Composer, like Cover Flow, is one of those cool little gems of independent Mac software that Apple has acquired. Even though they weren’t created within Cupertino, these apps have changed the way we use and even think of Mac OS X.
Even with the most basic level of knowledge, you can use Quartz Composer to create “Compositions” that take advantage of fairly powerful technologies like OpenGL, Quartz and Core Image to create beautiful transitions, filters and screen savers. The creative possibilities are truly vast with Quartz Composer as your canvas. In this first of a two part series I’d like to walk you through a interesting tutorial to help you discover Quartz Composer and perhaps inspire your imagination to create cool compositions on your own.
New From Insanely Great Tees: iShirt
Our good friends at Insanely Great Tees, the cool T-Shirt company that created the original “I’m a Mac” and “Steve Jobs For President” T-Shirts, have released a great new T-shirt design this week.
The new addition to the Insanely Great Tees line, aptly titled “iShirt” features a pixel art iPod that calls back to the good old days of 256-shade grayscale and the user interface of the original iPod. The new iShirt design is available for US$17 + Shipping and, as always, is printed on super high-quality American Apparel cotton.
Tutorial: How to Make a Flickr Uploader: Part II
This article is part of a 2 part series – check out my initial post on building a Flickr uploader.
Traditional “Contextual Menu Style” Image Uploader
My method of choice requires slightly more effort each time I upload, but provides much more freedom in naming, tagging and describing my individual photos. Rather than uploading a pre-designated folder’s contents in every run of the plug-in, it will only upload that image (or those images) that are selected in Finder. In other words this plug-in will act a bit more like the contextual menu actions you may have used before – like the “Create Archive of… ” and “Toast It” contextual menu commands.
Tutorial: How To Make a Flickr Uploader: Part I
This post is part of a 2 part series.
There are so many great applications for uploading you photos to Flickr, the social photo sharing site. You could use ConnectedFlow’s FlickrExport series, but is there a way to do it without installing extra apps?
In this tutorial I’d like to show you a very easy way to upload images from the Finder with a little help from Automator. Making a simple Automator Workflow Plug-in for the Finder to move your images to Flickr is an excellent and unobtrusive method I’d like to walk you through.
