Author Archive

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Almost as if by definition, managing a spreadsheet is a dry and boring affair. So when you’ve got to work in a spreadsheet, it’s nice to do it in an environment that makes the task easy, or at least comfortable. For a very long time Microsoft’s Excel has been “the name” in spreadsheets on both the Mac and PC. To be fair, it’s not a completely undeserved honor, but Excel is still a behemoth of an application, is fairly expensive and is not a Universal Binary Application. Luckily, for those of us that need to create spreadsheets on the Mac, there are a number of great alternatives including the indie-developed Tables, by Daniel Schwill.

iSlayer has been in the business of making great looking and useful system stat monitor widgets and apps for a number of years. Their latest contribution is the donationware menu based app iStat menus. Unlike their prior system monitoring utilities which were window based Applications or Dashboard widgets, iSlayer’s iStat menus resides as a pref pane in your System Preferences and shows you your stats in the right-hand portion of the menu bar. I have used many of the prior iterations of the iStat concept, and iStat menus quickly became my favorite.

The indie software company Rhodosoft is currently looking for beta testers to use, punish and bug report their promising investment portfolio manager and financial tracker, FolioCalc. FolioCalc aims to provide a great one-stop-shop for managing your investments and helping you get rich.

Written in Cocoa with Core Data and wrapped in a pretty good looking UI, FolioCalc could be just what the doctor ordered for people wanting more convenient control over their finances. FolioCalc is loaded with useful and advanced features including the ability to track your stock portfolio in near real-time, stock-splitting support and a system that takes a lot of the work out of buying, selling and following your portfolio. FolioCalc also promises to be, from the ground up, a great way to manage any of your interest-bearing investments, not just stocks. There’s a lot to be done with FolioCalc especially if you are serious about where your money is and how it’s growing.

Gedeon Maheux, Co-Founder of the Icon Factory, has sent out a plea for your help. The Icon Factory wants to see their hit Mac puzzle game, Frenzic, be available for play on the iPhone. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably heard, Apple is not letting third party developers like the Icon Factory create Cocoa based software for the iPhone. I met Craig Hockenberry also of Icon Factory at WWDC this year and we discussed how awesome Frenzic would be on the iPhone. Think about it! It’s a viciously addictive casual puzzle game—great for killing a few minutes before class or on the bus. Frenzic’s user interface would work perfectly with the iPhone’s beautiful multi-touch screen. Finally, Frenzic has an awesome web-based leaderboard where iPhone toting folks everywhere could battle it out with each other and with Mac users for the title of best Frenzic player in the world. To me this sounds like a wicked combination… “A Match Made In Geek Heaven“.

I’ve been horribly addicted to my RSS feeds and news feeds for years. As far as RSS readers are concerned, I’ve tried a lot of them - I’ve used NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Vienna and a bunch of other obscure ones that I can’t even remember. Most recently though, I’ve been using Google Reader, a web-based service.

Google Reader is a free RSS aggregator web app that integrates with your personalized iGoogle home page, and can be accessed from essentially any computer or phone with an internet connection and a web browser. This makes it pretty handy, though it can be annoying to have to open a browser window to check your feeds - it’s an obtrusive step away from the Mac desktop-app experience.