Archive for the 'Development' Category

Lets face it — TextEdit is underpowered. It is the only text editor Apple gives us, and it’s just that; a text editor. You can go in certain directions and get a CSS editor, or an HTML editor, but what about an Everything editor? That is where TextMate comes in. Just as it is dubbed, it is the missing editor for OS X.

Early last year, we compared several well-known Mac FTP clients. Though we established that Transmit was King, CyberDuck always stood out as a cheap, no-frills version.

However, that was version 2. With Leopard now well into it’s third iteration (10.5.2), CyberDuck has also been flapping it’s wings once again, but does it fly? Let’s take a look.

I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren’t interested in (or don’t know about) the “lower levels” of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words “Welcome to Darwin”? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we’re going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin.

A little over a year ago, a new FTP application called Flow began to surface around the web. This application, developed by Brian Amerige, has been in beta and under NDA since then. On March 30th, people who were a part of the beta testing team were sent an email announcing that Flow version 1.0 would be released this Friday, April 4th.

Tuesdays are nearly always the Apple day of the week. It’s Apple’s release date of choice, and rightly so; it allows stock to be in stores, and hence people’s hands, by the weekend.

But 2008 has been an interesting year, and it all started with a comment at a small event, known as MacWorld from a Mr Steven P. Jobs (ever heard of him, I certainly haven’t):

Recently Iconfactory, along with Artis software, updated their screen measuring tool xScope to version 2.0. xScope is a simple application that can measure anything on your screen and it includes 7 distinct tools. If you are someone who pushes pixels all day, I think xScope might just be something you cannot afford not to take a look at.

So let’s get started.

First is the Crosshair. The crosshair simply tells you what x and y coordinates your mouse pointer is currently at. This includes horizontal and vertical guides and a small bubble displaying the x and y coordinates.

Image maps. We have all seen them dotted around the net. If you are a Facebook user you will be more than familiar with “tagging” people in photos. That is a particularly clever form of image mapping.

Essentially image mapping is adding different links to different parts of an image that you select, which link to something relevant. For example, if there is a particular building in an image you could make it so when someone clicks it, it takes the user to the building’s website.

Without using Parallels, Crossover or Bootcamp, or even having a Windows Partition! Today we’ll be using Wine to emulate Windows and run all version of Internet Exlorer, which will make for a much lighter overall system footprint. It will also integrate perfectly into OS X.

I get asked this one a lot by web developers so I thought I would throw this up here for posterity. Not everyone wants to taint their Mac by running full blown Windows on it (am I right?), but if you’re a web developer it’s pretty critical that you build pages that render properly in Internet Explorer. If you have done this type of work on *nix you might remember using a great tool named ies4linux. Well you guessed it, ies4osx was recently ported to the Mac by Mike Kronenberg.

Today marks the 1-month anniversary of when Leopard was released to the masses. Now I haven’t seen any statistics yet, but based off what I have seen, I am going to say that Leopard was a smash success.

In this last month, Apple has pushed out one update of Leopard, and developers all across the globe have pushed out updates of their own. As of now, all of the major applications I use have been updated to play nice with Leopard. Of course, there are a few applications that will have their update be Leopard-only, and those are the applications that I would like to take a look at in this post.

Version 1.7 of Yummy FTP, which is - obviously - an FTP client, has just been released by Yummy Software. This application is well-known for its file uploading speed compared to other existing applications.

This new version brings to the application Leopard support and built-in Quick Look functionality, among other enhancements.

Yummy FTP claims to be the fastest FTP client for Mac on the market. In fact, the developer indicates that Yummy FTP is not only faster than other FTP applications like Fetch, Transmit or Interarchy, but it also uses far less CPU cycles. Indeed, they’re 4 times faster than Fetch for transferring 385 files, because it uses only 10% of the CPU, whereas Fetch uses 60% and Transmit clocks in at 100%.

A few weeks ago I gave the guys at MacApper a preview copy of my new software BitClamp. The response was pretty positive in that quick preview and I did my best to answer reader’s questions. Today Bitclamp is unveiled for all to use. What follows is developer’s preview of BitClamp so be warned this is not an unbiased review (as I’m the developer).

The all-new big cat is in the wild, but it has a rarer Big-Brother that hasn’t received so much publicity. This is the new Leopard Server.

So what’s new? Well, quite a lot really. There are some special features; however, they are installed alongside some tools to make it an extremely easy server to setup.

Apple is calling it ‘The World’s Easiest Server‘ and claiming that no IT department is required. This could be a huge selling point, as most day to day tasks can be done from within one window: Server Preferences. Just like System Preferences in Desktop OS X, you can change users, setup and configure services available on the network, as well as see different information about what the server is doing.

Adobe is one of the most important third-party software developers that Apple has. Building software that caters to the Pro market, they represent an essential piece of the pie.

The software company has outlined its plan for Leopard compatibility, and I must say it’s looking good because they’re “proud to support this impressive new operating system”.

First of all, if you’re using one or some combination of the following products:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Adobe Flash CS3 Professional and Flash Player 9
• Adobe Contribute CS3
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• Adobe Fireworks CS3
• Adobe GoLive 9

Two days ago, we reviewed TaskPaper, a simple GTD app. Being one of the most innovative GTD apps out there, we simply had to have a talk with the developer. So we tracked Jesse Grosjean down to his home in Bangor, Maine, and had a little chat with him.

He talks about OS X development and how he started Hog Bay Software. Jesse also shares his thoughts on the iPhone SDK. Plus, if you stick around, you’ll also find out about the two copies of TaskPaper we have to give away.

*Editor: This article was written right before Unity3D released a 2.0 version (watch for this review soon).

OTEE’s Unity3D promises to be what the Mac needs and many of us have wanted for years, a program that is to 3D what Macromedia Director was to 2D. It’s close enough that it will take your breath away, but it falls short of its promise in ways that may frustrate many potential users.

A Little History