I have received comments on both of my recent software reviews about the responsiveness and friendliness of the two developers involved. One was writing that their manner was just adding to an already wonderful app, and the other was improving on a program that was less than perfect, taking suggestions for fixes and features. And this got me to thinking. When I have loved a product, whether it was a game or a utility, what was it that really drew me into paying money, into supporting the app? And, in most cases, it was my communication with the writer of the program.

There have been many times when I’ve had questions about a program before buying it. And in most of these cases, I’ve emailed the company asking those questions. This of course only works with smaller companies, but in a way that makes it better. I felt so honored when I emailed Delicious Monster, the makers of Delicious Library, and got an answer back not only promptly but also from the Major-domo of the program himself. The personal connection just made me want to buy the program even more. On another occasion I had an issue with a certain backup tool. I emailed the developer, and got a quick, correct response telling me what I should do to resolve the problem. While it was written in a manner that my father describes as “friendly but with an edge of ‘you should know this already,’” it answered my question and made me more dedicated to use the tool—over and instead of the built-in Time Machine.

An argument can be raised, of course, that if an app is truly perfect, a user wouldn’t need to talk to the developer. No problems would ever arise, and so no communication or troubleshooting would ever be necessary. But there are two counter arguments to this. First, a program could hardly ever be this perfect. Second, one might want to contact the developers simply to thank them on delivering such a wonderful product, and encourage them to keep on going. I have done this myself many times. In my opinion, there is never a reason not to contact a developer, and in return, rarely a reason for them not to contact you. Being a friendly person, and even just a person and not a faceless company, is a wonderful way to promote an app, get people’s interest, and keep them coming back.

The fine folks over at TouchArcade were recently tipped off to the existence of a YouTube video claiming that a very dedicated coder has found a way to get World of Warcraft running on the iPhone.  It may sound like an elaborate hoax (and for all we know, it is) but does that mean it’s impossible?

If you check out the video you’ll see that they’re actually booting the game from Vollee.  VolleeX is an engine designed to allow PC games to be streamed to the iPhone, not unlike how certain PlayStation 3 games can be streamed to a PlayStation Portable.  So it’s entirely feasible that the game could be booted with the aid of the Vollee client.  But even if it was as simple as that, the video shows a layout for World of Warcraft that is uniquely adapted for the iPhone.  That would mean that someone would have had to invest the time and money into getting everything just right.  What kind of hacker would have the resources to tackle that?

Vollee would.

As it turns out Vollee has a partnership with Activision-Blizzard, World of Warcraft’s parent company.  It’s entirely feasible that this could just be an early teaser that’s surfacing in the form of a “leak” from the developer.  Fake leaks are a big part of viral marketing.   They’re a great way to get people talking.  Clearly, it’s working — the Vollee website has been knocked offline (one would assume due to traffic) all afternoon.

And Vollee has never said they weren’t working on a mobile version of World of Warcraft, either.  In an interview with PocketGamer.co.uk back in May 2008, they were asked flat out if they might be able to bring World of Warcraft to the iPhone.  Here’s what they had to say;

We can bring all MMOs and virtual worlds to mobile. We’ve been approaching the major developers and publishers with the idea of enabling all of them to benefit from VolleeX… The possibilities are limitless.

That’s not to say that Vollee is necessarily responsible for the footage online, or to even say that this isn’t just an elaborate hoax.  But when you weigh all the facts, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to find out this was just an early look at what might one day become the official iPhone app for streaming World of Warcraft.  For all we know, they’re just testing the water.

Seeing WoW on the iPhone may seem like a crazy concept at first, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense.  It’s the most popular game on the planet right now.  People have no mobile way to access their characters(save for a wireless laptop).  Vollee is working on technology to do things just like this.  And most of all, rumors of the Premium Games Store haven’t gone away.  If Apple is looking for the perfect app to launch a store with games at a $19.99 price point, i couldn’t think of a better way to guarantee that success than with Warcraft.

To start off this series, I’ve decided to talk about some of the many popular tools web developers use every day to create their own websites.  This post is divided into two parts because there are two kinds of web development apps out there: W.Y.S.I.W.Y.Gs and Text Based apps.

W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G Apps

In case you’re puzzled on what that means, here’s an explanation.  WYSIWYG is an abbreviation for “what you see is what you get”.  It basically means that whatever you see on the screen, is what your web page will look like when you publish it.

Let’s take a look at some of today’s popular WYSIWYG apps for designing websites.

RapidWeaver

Created by Realmac Software, RapidWeaver is one of the most popular 3rd party apps designed to create beautiful webpages with just a couple clicks.  With 40 themes included, all you have to do is enter in your content whether it’s text, images or both, and RapidWeaver will format it so that it fits with your selected theme.  To find out more, check out our review here at MacApper.

iWeb

iWeb is Apple’s take on a WYSIWYG web app.  Literally, what you see on the screen is what you’re going to see when you hit the big “Publish” button.  Insert and drag around text boxes and images to make your web page exactly the way you want it without having to type a single line of code.  iWeb is part of Apple’s iLife Suite of sofware apps including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand.  You can find out more via iWeb’s product page.

All of the apps have a price tag but also have a demo in which you can download and see which one you like best.  If you’re looking for a little more control over the design and content of your web page, try the other type of web development app:  Text Based apps.

Text Based Apps

These apps are exactly what the title suggests – Text based meaning that in order to achieve your goal of the perfect web page, you’re going to have to stretch your fingers.  The plus side is that with these apps, every element of your page is customizable making the result exactly like the image in your head.

Here’s a small list of popular text based apps out of the countless selections available today.

Coda

From Panic inc. comes a one-windowed web development app designed to have all the tools you need at your fingertips.  Coda takes a bunch of separate apps and incorporates them and their features into one nicely designed package.  Top feautres include a text editor with auto-complete for most of the many popular coding languages, a built in FTP engine which is used to transfer your files onto your web server making your page accessible to the world wide web, and a CSS editor.  If you don’t understand a bunch of these terms, stay tuned.  Everything will be explained in time.

Dashcode

Some of you might have not expected to see this app in the list.  Dashcode is Apple’s way of making the development process of creating “widgets” a lot easier.  But did you ever think of Dashcode’s code editing features?  Auto-complete, text coloring, and what’s more?  It’s Free!

Textmate

This one’s a biggie.  This text editing giant is from a company known as MacroMates.  You name it, Textmate’s got it.  Besides the standard ability of editing and creating files for the web, Textmate’s expandability in terms of plugins makes it truly a universal text editor for the Mac.  To find out more, check out their site or look at our review here at MacApper.

These are just some of the many amazing Text Based web developing apps available.  Be sure to check out Apple.com’s downloads page for a larger list.

There you have it!  If you have any more quetions about the apps, feel free to look them up and find a review here at MacApper.  Stay tuned for our next installment which will talk about using Dashcode to start developing your first webpage.

The first thing you will notice about BBEdit is how many menubar items it has. For basic text editing and programming, you probably won’t even use half of these. So, BBEdit can be used in extremely advanced ways, and basic ways. However, if you are just using it for basic tasks, it can be very daunting.

When creating a document there is one main thing that you will need to worry about–the type of document. There are about 30 choices, including Objective-C, HTML, CSS and TeX. Choosing the right type will help BBEdit get the code-sense right. You can also set it to automatic, and it will choose one for you based on the content of the document. When you open a file that has not been created with it, this is what it does. Automatic is a very helpful choice.

The main window in BBEdit is actually very simple. The toolbar has normal items like an inspector, a button to show the file in the Finder, locking and unlocking and a few view options. Then, under the toolbar, you have a few popups. The arrows allow you to go through all the files opened in the current window. The next one displays the currently opened file. If you click on it, you can choose from all files in the current window. The next one allows you to go to specific ’symbols.’ A symbol can be a method or a declaration. They are very useful for long documents. The next button allows you to add, find and delete markers. Markers are basically bookmarks for your files. The next button opens the file’s counterpart. This is really only used in Objective-C and other C languages–You have a header and a main file. So, if you have the header file open, it will open the main file, and vice versa. The last button has a list of included files (for the current document). If you click on one, it will try to find it, and then open it in the Finder. BBEdit provides a lot of usability just in the main interface–And that is only about 2% of the whole application.

The next most useful feature in BBEdit is its search. My favorite part is that it does multi-file search. This means that you can replace a word with another in many files at once. This feature is found in Search>Multi-File Search… You can also do a regular search, and a quick search from the same menubar item. BBEdit also has a file comparer. This means you can feed it two files, and it will show you what’s different. You just go to Search>Find Differences… Then, select the newer version of the file, and the old version. BBEdit will then show you both documents at once, and the differences below. You can also compare two opened documents by going to Search>Compare Two Front Documents. Other standalone difference comparing applications show you a bit more info like visually what’s changed. BBEdit just tells you. BBEdit also includes a few other search features for advanced users.

One great thing in BBEdit is its autocompletion. It will try to figure out what you want to type based on the contents of the file you’re in. If you’re coding in Objective-C, and you created a method, but you only remember the beginning, this can help you. Just type in the first few letters, and BBEdit will give you a list of possibilities. However, this feature is also in a free app like Xcode. But, Xcode is built for programming with Cocoa, and BBEdit is built for…well…anything.

There are also a few notable features that I will not go into detail with. BBEdit now has MobileMe syncing. This means that your preferences and Application Support will be synced to all of your computers running BBEdit. Another is To Do tracking. With this, you can actually put To Do’s and Fixes to make in your files so you remember what you’re supposed to do. The final is the scratchpad. This gives you a window where you can put things for remembering or edit text to get it the way you want it before you actually put it in your code.

Overall, BBEdit is a very full-featured app. There are many more things that what I talked about in this review. But, my main issue is its interface. It looks fairly outdated–It doesn’t look like a Leopard. They are on version 9, so it has been out for a while, so it’s not like they created an app specifically for Leopard without a Leopard interface. But, it could use a revamp. My other gripe with it is text coloring. You can change the color of different things (like in Xcode and TextMate). But, there are no color packs! No one can share their awesome color combinations with others. Even Xcode has this feature.

Bare Bones Software, called BBEdit retails for $125 and you can download a free trial from their site. That is a very high price, so, in my opinion, BBEdit should only be used by advanced users. Because the others can just use Xcode or TextMate. But, for the advanced users it is…well…very advanced. It gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of features–It doesn’t suck.

One of the greatest blessings that Apple has given us developers is documentation. And not just documentation, but in-depth, clear, and understandable documentation. There are also lots of sample codes and coding guides. And when you install the SDK you automatically get all of this free of charge. You can even access it all right from Xcode; just go to Help>Documentation. You will then be presented with the documentation window. Based on whether or not you have the iPhone SDK installed, you will see Mac OS X and iPhone sections. You can search through certain sets (like OS X 10.5, or iPhone 2.2) or search them all. If you have the iPhone SDK installed, though, you will want to search by sets so you don’t accidentally try to put Cocoa Touch in Cocoa. If you click on a set in the sidebar, you can view its main page, which can help you find what you need if you don’t know what its called. The documentation is going to be your best friend as a Cocoa developer. You are never expected to remember those long delegate methods like tableView:targetIndexPathForMoveFromRowAtIndexPath:toProposedIndexPath: or even short methods like initWithCoder:.

Another great tool that can be used for remembering methods or blocks of code is Code Collector Pro (which we have previously reviewed). Code Collector Pro allows you to create code snippets and then sort them by tags, description, language, etc. It is very useful if there are large chunks of code that you use very often. You could use something like TextExpander, but Code Collector Pro is built for coders. It even has syntax highlighting.

One of my personal favorite tools is Class-Dump. Class-Dump allows you to feed it a binary file, and it will give you all the header files associated with that binary. This is great for finding private header files in things like UIKit, or if you just want to see the header files of your favorite application. The basic syntax for it is class-dump -H /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes. Before you run it you may want to call mkdir ~/Dekstop/headers and then cd ~/Dekstop/headers. This is just to make sure you don’t end up with 100+ header files in your home folder.

The final tool (or tools) I will leave you with are websites. These are my favorite websites for finding tutorials and answers to my questions:

• CocoaDev
• iPhone Dev SDK
• Cocoa Dev Central
• Cocoabuilder
• Cocoa-Dev lists

Apple provides a completely free package of Applications that can be used to develop in Cocoa and other languages, such as Java. To download this package, you will want to register for a free account from ADC (Apple Developer Connection). This will allow you to download the latest SDK (package of tools), and provide you with lots of sample code and guides. You can also purchase paid memberships, which include things such as hardware discounts and pre-releases of OS X builds. But if you are just beginning Cocoa development, I suggest you just register for a free account.

Once you have downloaded and installed the SDK, you can just begin programming. But if you have never programmed in any type of C before, you will most definitely need some help. This being the first part of a Cocoa series, I will not be giving sample code or instructions for how to do things, but I will point you to a few great books. The first one is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass. This is usually known as the must-have book for any Cocoa developer. It is an especially great source for those starting out. It guides you through how to do many things in Cocoa, starting with the basics, and ending with topics like Core Data and Core Animation.

Another great book that’s not so much about Cocoa as it is about Xcode is Xcode 3 Unleashed, by Fritz Anderson. This book focuses on the Xcode programming environment, and teaches you how to use Xcode to its fullest. But if you are more concerned with learning Cocoa than learning Xcode, then you may want to hold off on getting this book until you understand Cocoa a little better.

Although people have differing opinions on whether this book should be read by beginners, I will still recommend it. It is The C Programming Language, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (sometimes known as K&R). Although, as seen in the title, this is not about Cocoa or Objective-C, this can give you an understanding of C. Although knowing C is not necessary for programming in Cocoa, it is very helpful. Objective-C is pretty vast, but there are some things that you may have to do in C, so it can be very helpful too. It is really up to you whether you would like to read this book.

The last book I will recommend is Stephen G. Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C 2.0. Objective-C 2.0 is very new, and some other books may have not been updated yet to cover it. It is great for beginners; it really teaches you how to program (as suggested in the title). It is much along the lines of Hillegass’ book, even though it is not usually seen as a must-have. I highly recommend this for you beginners.

I hope this has given you the tools you need to begin learning Cocoa. You should expect many more of these articles which will cover more advanced topics in Cocoa, Xcode, and anything related to Cocoa development. Happy programming!

There are several different ways to design a website or a software application. Some people like to start with Photoshop or Illustrator and create the complete design. Others like to start with code, and build up the look at the same time they are creating functionality. Another technique is wireframing, where you mockup just enough of a page or screen’s layout to understand the functionality, then turn it over to a designer to create a finished look.

For a couple of weeks, I’d been using OmniGraffle to do just that. Then I had a chance to try Balsamiq Mockups. If OmniGraffle is a complete painter’s workshop, then Balsamiq Mockups would be a box of 64 crayons. And that’s a good thing.

The UI is very simple. You have your workbook area, where you create mockups, and your available elements at the top. Drag or double-click one to add it to your mockup. There’s also a UI library search at the top, so if the element you want isn’t visible, you can quickly find it. All the elements have a hand-drawn look, which gives the whole process a feeling of sketching out an idea. Balsamiq Mockups is very easy to use, but it is not an OS X native app (it’s built on Adobe Air, so it runs on all platforms) so it lacks the standard Mac look. It also lacks some standard functionality, like hiding the window.

Any element that has text can be double-clicked to change the text. For an element with multiple items, like a list, you can type in a comma-separated string to generate as many items as you want. There’s also a tool window that pops up when you select an element that gives you context-sensitive tools for editing the element.

I particularly liked the full-screen view, which displays your mockup with a big blue arrow you control with the mouse. It’s great for presentations and pointing out specific elements.

Balsamiq Mockups can print your creation, save it as a PNG, save it to the native Mockups format, or export it as an XML file. Having an export option is nice, but since the output will only work with Balsamiq Mockups, it’s not particularly useful.

Professionals that do wireframing all day, every day, will probably be better served by OmniGraffle, with all its tools and options. For developers that just want to get their ideas down with minimum fuss, Balsamiq Mockups is a great tool. At $79 it’s a little pricey, but it is cheaper — and easier to use — than a lot of the alternatives.

From what we can see from the public beta so far, Espresso can easily be divided into 3 sections: Editor, Project Organizer, and Publisher. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Editor

Espresso shares CSSEdit’s tabbed editor window. Making a tab is as easy as going to File > New Tab or Command + T. Once created, users can re-arrange them or drag them out of the tab bar to make them separate windows.

When typing in code, Espresso automatically changes the style of the text to better understand and differentiate your code. Colors can be customized by making themes located in Espresso’s preferences. Users can create themes and share them online with other developers. Espresso also allows you to visually navigate through your code via the “navigator” tool located on the right-hand side of the editor window. This tricked out list view shows all of your tags and elements much like the way CSSEdit does.

Espresso is able to recognize your code with something called “Sugars“. Sugars are pre-packaged files that contain all of the information needed for Espresso to work with your code. All one must do is simply double click one to install it. What’s more is that developers can create their own Sugars making Espresso’s editor extremely versatile.

Project Organizer

Espresso organizes all of your files in groups called projects. To create a project, go to File > New Project… or press Shift + Command + N. Espresso manifests your projects in folders located wherever you save them. Each project folder contains all of your files along with Espresso’s project file recognizable by it’s “.esproj” extension.

Espresso’s project interface is made up of one window divided into two parts: the sidebar and the editor. The editor is the same editor we talked about earlier with the exception of the sidebar being attached to its left. The sidebar is where you access all of your files and servers. The first part of the sidebar is entitled “Workspace”. Simply put, the workspace is where Espresso puts all of your currently open files. Think of them as tabs, only this time they’re located in the sidebar as list items. You can still reorder them and drag them out of the window to make separate individual windows, however Espresso puts them there by default to keep things together.

Publisher

You’ve created your files, organized them into a project, and now you’re ready to get them online. Luckily for you there is nothing to worry about because Espresso has a built in FTP client that supports FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 services. Espresso handles uploading files a little differently from the average FTP client. Yes, you could simply drag your files in and out of the window, or you could use the Update, Merge, and Mirror features. Clicking these toolbar items when your server is selected does exactly what they say they do. Clicking “Update” checks the files on your computer to see if any of them have been changed. Espresso then shows you which files need to be uploaded and replaced. All you then need to do is hit “Publish”. Clicking “Merge” syncs the files on your computer and the files on the server so that both have the most recent information. Clicking “Mirror” checks your files and deletes any information on the server that isn’t in your local project.

Finishing Thoughts

Espresso is very much still in BETA form. MacRabbit is right when saying that Espresso is buggy and is by no means perfect. I myself have discovered a problem of Espresso not recognizing my files as updated when it checks through to see what files need to be updated, however this convenience is not needed. I can simply drag the files onto the right place and manually transfer it like a normal FTP client. All of the previewed content above is based off of Espresso version 1.0b1. Espresso’s preo-rder price is 59.95€ ($84 USD) and is available now for download at Espresso’s Product Page.

Versions makes SVN easy. All you have to do to setup a Repository (where the files are stored) Bookmark is select the [+] button and click Add Repository Bookmark… You will then be prompted for a name, URL, and username and password. Most open-source SVN Repositories don’t require a password, but for a personal repository, you will probably want one. Once you have entered all the relevant information, just click the Create button. The Repository will then show up in the Bookmarks sidebar. When you click on one of these bookmarks, the Repository will be loaded.

The main panel of Versions has 3 tabs: Timeline, Browse, and Transcript. The Timeline tab shows you the most recent revisions. For each revision it tells you the user who made the change, the revision number, the files that were changed, and a description of the change. The browse tab gives you a look at the files in the Repository. It shows the files exactly like in list mode in the Finder. Double-clicking on a file will allow you to edit it and clicking the Quick Look toolbar item will allow you to view it in Quick Look. If you click the Compare Diff toolbar icon, you can compare the most recent version of the file with a previous revision. Once you choose the previous revision, it will open the files in the file-comparison app that you choose in Versions’ preferences (I suggest using Changes). The transcript tab just shows you what Versions has been doing (e.g. opening a file from a Repository, etc.).

Versions not only makes it easy to view Repositories, but it also makes it easy to upload to them. To create a Checkout Version (a local copy) of a Repository, just select a bookmark, go to the Browse tab, and select what part of the project you want, and then click the Checkout toolbar item. Versions will prompt you with a dialogue of where to save it to, and then it will save it. It would be nice if you could just select a bookmark and click Checkout, and it would download the entire thing. When you want to upload changes from your working copy, all you have to do is select your working copy, select the files you want to commit, and click the Commit toolbar item. If you added new files from the last time you uploaded, you will need to mark them as needing to be uploaded. You can do this by selecting the file and clicking the Add toolbar item. If there is a file listed that you do not want to upload, just click the Delete toolbar item. It can be a bit tedious to have to select to add all your new files, but it’s worth it.

If you are a real SVN lover and power-user, you will really like the information shown about files when the Inspector toolbar icon is clicked. I will not even try to explain all the features here, for I do not know them all, but they are useful to some.

Versions has just come out of Beta and now retails for about $48.57 (€39). It is the prettiest, most intuitive, and easiest to use SVN client available for the Mac. It is even a partner of Beanstalk, the best source of private Repositories. If you do any shared work, namely code, I suggest that you download the free trial of Versions and see how it compares to what you have used in the past; I think you will be surprised at how helpful it is.

Rulers’ main feature is just putting rulers on your screen. It adds a horizontal ruler to the top of your screen, and a vertical ruler to the left side of your screen. Wherever your mouse is, there will be a red marker on each ruler to show the relative position of your mouse to the rulers (which is not the actual start of your screen). If you don’t want to see the rulers because you are using some of Rulers’ other tools, just go to the point where the two rulers meet and click on the [-]. Whenever you want them back, you just click on the [+] in that same corner. If you want the rulers to be on different sides of the screen, just go to Rulers>Preferences… and change the corner in which the rulers meet. You can change opacity and colors, too.

The only window you will see in Rulers is the inspector. This is where you can see where your mouse is (zoomed in, of course), the mouse’s coordinates, and the color of the pixel your mouse is over. There are two coordinates that it gives for your mouse: relative and absolute. Relative is the position from the rulers, and absolute is the position from the upper-left-hand corner of your screen. The color field shows you the color of the pixel that your mouse is currently over in Hex and RGB codes. The first time you open Rulers, this window will show all three of these fields. If you click the spiral in the upper-right-hand corner of the window, you can toggle between full, only image, and only coordinates and color.

Of course, Rulers doesn’t just show you an inspector and rulers, it has many nice tools too. One of these is lines. Lines are like reference points; you can put them on your screen to always know where x pixels from the left of the screen is. There are a few ways to add these. You can click on the ruler parallel to the line you want to add, and then just drag until it is where you want it. You may be thinking that the whole ruler will drag, but it doesn’t, only a line gets dragged. You can also go to Tools>Add horizontal line and Add vertical line. And finally, you can create an intersection. Just position your mouse where you want the lines to intersect (yes, this will create two lines), and hit Command-I. I am not sure why they let you select the intersection tool from the Tools menu, because it will just create the intersection over the menu item.

There is one other great use for lines — screenshots. If you use Apple’s built-in screenshot commands, you can select only a certain region to grab, but you have no way to take time, and get the position exactly right. Well, with Rulers, you just create a couple lines, and hit Command-3 or Command-4. Command-4 lets you select a region, and then it snaps a picture of only that region to your desktop. Command-3, on the other hand, lets you select a region, and then it copies the picture to your clipboard. These features are great for selecting the exact region that you need for a screenshot.

The last feature I will tell you about is Auto Measuring. With this, you can put your mouse anywhere on your screen, and Rulers will tell you the amount of space between two elements. If you want to know the width of the sidebar of a Website, just put your mouse somewhere on that sidebar (where there is no text), and it will tell you. It gives you the distances across and up-and-down between things. As said above, text usually gets in the way of these measurements, so make sure there is text around when you do it.

omnidea’s Rulers retails for about $16, and you can pick up a trial from their site. It is almost essential to design and some programming work, so if you fit one of those descriptions, I highly suggest that you give it a try.

MacPilot has a pretty basic interface. Separate categories are in the top tool bar while the main portion of the window displays the main information. MacPilot has many different categories, like general apps, network settings, tools, and much more. Under General you can change many system and application settings. Just find the application in the list on the left and browse the different hidden features. Under the Disk and Network categories you can find many options and lots of information about your connected disks and networks. MacPilot also has many helpful tools. It even includes a large list of key combos, useful when you forget some.

MacPilot is an easy-to-use application, but sometimes it can just get confusing. But don’t worry! On the bottom of most windows you can find a help guide. Hover your mouse over an item and it explains what it does. This helps you find what you want and avoid doing something wrong. Everything is pretty well organized and easy to find, although a search feature would be nice.

MacPilot is available for $19.95 and has a 15 day free trial. If you don’t want to buy MacPilot you can always try the free Secrets, which has many similar features. These are both great applications for changing some of those hidden settings in Mac OS X.

Code Collector Pro is basically a place to put long snippets of code that you don’t want to have to remember. I have found that it is best to put anything and everything that you could possible need, because you never know when you will need it.

If you like everything to be organized then Code Collector Pro has a great feature for you: smart groups (and regular ones too). With its smart groups, you can organize snippets by name, tags, description, language, license, and source. So, you can make one folder for Objective-C, one for HTML, etc. This feature would be even better, though, if you could have groups within groups.

As I mentioned above, you can give snippets tags. These are not only useful when sorting, but also when searching. Everything that is associated with a snippet (e.g., name, description, tags) can be searched for. So, if you have a huge library of thousands of snippets, searching will sometimes be the easiest way to find things. However, if you search in a group (or smart group), it will search throughout the whole library, and not just the group, even though the group is still highlighted in the sidebar.

My favorite feature (by far) is the ability to just drag a snippet into any Cocoa application, and it will put the code from that snippet where you dragged it! Although it may seem like a useless feature, because you can just copy and paste, it saves you lots of time, and is just simpler. When you need to use hundreds of snippets, you will see how much time you save.

Another thing that Code Collector Pro has that you will not find in something like TextExpander is bundles. If you are familiar to TextMate, then you will know what these are. Bundles are used by Code Collector Pro to highlight code based on the type of object something is. Like in Objective-C, variables will be highlighted in different colors than id’s. You can even use bundles made for TextMate! And if you don’t use TextMate, Code Collector Pro has built in bundles for common languages. It would be nice if they updated their Objective-C bundle to support the new Objective-C 2.0, though.

The last feature I will tell you about is Code Collector.net. Code Collector.net is a way to share snippets with people anywhere. To turn on syncing with Code Collector.net, just go to Preferences->Sharing and click Get an Account. Once you have your account, just put your information into the fields and your off!. The only problems you will find are, when browsing Code Collector.net, there are a lot of the exact same snippets because some people never delete the example ones.

Code Collector Pro, by M Cubed Software, retails for about $29, and you can pick up a free trial as well. I would say that Code Collector Pro is for moderate to advanced programmers, but some beginners may find it helpful, too. It has saved me a lot of time, and I hope that it will do the same for you.

There are 6 apps that are a part of the AppStoreGems site right now, from 5 developers. The apps are as follows:

1. Sketches
2. Where To?
3. Groceries
4. FileMagnet
5. Kineo
6. Pennies

Each developer is donating their revenue to a different charity, from the following list:

• Prevent Cancer Foundation
• UNICEF
• Oxfam International
• Teach for America
• American Humane

John Casasanta posted a blog post to the taptaptap website detailing this event, and the AppStoreGems website. Personally, I think it is great when developers get together and hold an event like this. The developers get exposure for their application, and charities benefit in the process.

Included with the Apple Developer Tools is a file comparison app called FileMerge. It works, but it looks and feels outdated. Before I found Changes, I used that. Since using Changes, I have never looked back though. Changes is the first app to bring a nice interface to a file comparison app (for Mac). But, its not just a pretty interface, it performs amazingly and carries many nice features too.

The first and most important way that it differs from an app like FileMerge is its built in SFTP support. This means you can see changes between files on and off your hard drive. All you have to do is click Connect, set up your SFTP, and you’re off! This is extremely helpful because usually when you’re doing a collaborative project, the main file will be on a server. However, all Changes is really doing is mounting the server in the Finder. Because it is just mounting in Finder, it would be nice if it supported a few more types of servers.

To compare two files, you can do one of two things. You can drag each file onto the Original and Modified boxes. Or you can click on either the Original or Modified button, and choose your files. Then you just hit Compare, and you’re off!

The comparing interface of Changes is extremely easy to use. You can choose to see only the differences or everything from the toolbar. You can also go from difference to difference by clicking Next and Pervious Diff. When you want to commit a change from one side, you just hit the Merge toolbar item that corresponds with what you want to do. You can even refresh the files (in case you edited one of the files while this window was open), by hitting Refresh.

The last two features I would like to tell you about are the TextMate, BBEdit, TextWrangler, and Terminal support. All of these let you compare files from within the application. Instead of having to open Changes, you can do it from right inside the app! To use any of these, you have to have the Terminal Support installed too.

As you may have been able to tell, Changes is very simple to use, but yet, it is not feature deprived. It has everything you would expect from a file comparison app, and then some! It even works with subversion! It’s price point is its only minor problem. It costs $39.95, so some of you may be turned off by that. With the price aside, Changes is a great app, and even with the price, you may find it very useful.

iTweak, formerly “iWeb Expander”, allows the end user to make some very handy additions to make his or her site that much more professional and full-featured. When you open iTweak for the first time, you’re greeted by a fairly lengthy Welcome screen that advises you to take advantage of the tutorials available on Guimkie’s site. They offer detailed tutorials for almost every feature of the program, and it makes it that much easier to learn how to make all of the changes you want.

After you get to the main screen, you can start to dig right in and make any of the changes you want. After you use the iWeb option to “Publish to a Folder…”, you can start to work with iTweak. You choose the folder of the site by clicking on the “Choose Published Site” button, and then proceed to tweak whatever you want. The app makes it super easy to add a favicon (the small icon present in your address bar before the ‘http’), integrate Google search, or even install a hit counter. Additionally, when you’re publishing to a non-.mac/MobileMe server that supports PHP, you can add in a Contact form, something that I know I personally miss from using RapidWeaver. Adding the ability for comments, and even adding site-wide security, is only a click away. Finally, you can search and replace any code globally in the entire site, so making changes to small things is really made simple and straightforward as well.

After you’re done making all of your changes, you simply click on the “Process Site” button and can then upload it to your FTP server and allow it for all people to see. After asking a friend to test it with .mac, he reported that it certainly worked as advertised, but that the PHP functions do not work since .mac doesn’t support PHP in iWeb sites. However, for those people who are using iWeb to quickly whip up sites for other locations, the functionality added by iTweak is certainly a welcomed addition.

iTweak is a free application from Guimkie software, but donations are accepted.

Lingon is a graphical user interface for interacting with your launchd config files in Leopard. You can use Lingon to run both scripts and applications at certain intervals, when a file is modified, or when items are placed into a folder. You can also use Lingon to edit current config files in both Basic and Expert Modes. This video shows you how I use Lingon to keep things organized on my MacBook Pro.

Lingon is freeware provided by Peter Borg, the creator of Smultron and Hallon, and is available here.

DMG Architect is like Interface Builder for your disk images, helping you make a great design for them. Whenever you open it, the theme viewer will open. This is where you will choose the basic background image for your DMG. You can choose one of the included ones, choose an image from your disk or get the background from a disk image that you have on your computer. I think that the included themes are great; I have never found myself in need of any others. If you need the disk image window to be big, though, you may have problems with their themes, because for the most part the images are pretty small.

Once you have chosen a theme, you are almost done! First, you probably want to drop the files that you need onto DMG Architect’s window. Then you will want to open the Inspector. This is where you will customize almost every aspect of your DMG. First there is Position & Size. This is where you can choose the size of the window for your DMG and where it is located on the user’s screen. In the next tab (Icon Properties) you can actually choose an icon to use for the DMG and/or the file. This is another easy way to give a great impression to users. Now, in the DMG Background Background tab, you can choose a background to use from your disk. There is also a toolbar item in DMG Architect labeled “Template” which will just bring up the theme viewer.

In the next tab, License, you can add license agreements to your DMG. These are those pesky popups you get when you open disk images. I have to be honest, these can turn me away from an app, but if you need a user to agree to something, you will need one of these. The DMG Properties is where you specify the properties for your final DMG. These are basically the options you get in Disk Utility for creating a new disk image. And the final tab, DMG Info, is just the place to specify names for the Volume and file and the save location.

As you might be able to see, DMG Architect, by Sourcebits, is a very simple app. It makes things that usually take 30 minutes or more in the Finder, take under 5 minutes instead. If you’re a developer, you know that time is money, and this app definitely values that. Although the price tag, $29.99, may seem a little pricey, it is an invaluable little tool, and will end up being worth it. Like I said above, because time is money, this app will end up saving you money, so in the end, it will pay for itself.

Since v3.6 (the last version, reviewed by myself on MacApper), RapidWeaver has undergone a major Leopard overhaul (as a free upgrade) to improve on everything from interface to publishing.

The first major upgrade to RapidWeaver was it’s interface. As I said in the introduction, it has been completely overhauled, and re-thoughtout. You will now find a toolbar at the top of the RapidWeaver window with access to all of the most-used actions. This includes things like adding a page, publishing, and page info/setup. The Edit window also has a format bar at the bottom with quick access to things like bolding text, aligning, adding lists, and links.

The next section of RapidWeaver that got an overhaul was the option panes. The Site Setup floating pane was dropped in favor of a drop down pane, and also now includes a spot for you to add a Google Analytics tracking code. The Page Inspector has been cleaned up, and the buttons have now been super-sized for easy navigation. For each page there are 4 panes that always stay the same (General, Sidebar, Header and Styles), and the last button is where you can change options specific to each page’s type.

The Media Inspector now has it’s own button in the toolbar. The Media Inspector lets you do basic image edits like adding a border, rotating, cropping, filename, dimensions and adding an alt tag. The Snippets window now has a button in the toolbar and now sports a look similar to the To-Do list application Anxiety.

In terms of publishing RapidWeaver has went through some big changes. When you click the “Publish” button, you can choose to publish via FTP or .Mac, and also more advanced options like SFTP. When you have filled out your information, clicking publish will have your files scroll past the screen in a coverflow-esque view as they are uploaded. When the upload is finished, RapidWeaver plays the same chime iTunes does when it is finished burning a disc, and if you have Growl installed, you will receive a notification. The next time you make changes, you just have to click the Publish button and your changes will be published. You no longer have to go through the publishing setup window again to publish changes.

RapidWeaver save files can now be quick-looked in the Finder, so you can see a full preview of your site without having to open RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver also has a full manual, so learning to use all of RapidWeaver’s features is now no longer a guessing game.

For the most part, this update was mostly interface updates, and implementation of some Leopard technologies. RapidWeaver makes it very easy to get a website up and running, even if you don’t even know what HTML stands for. If you have a license to RapidWeaver 3.6, this is a free upgrade for you. If you own 3.5 or earlier, this upgrade is $30. You can purchase a new license for $59 from Realmac Software’s store for a limited time, and when this offer expires, licenses will run for $79.

Initially, even the software’s author had second thoughts about creating another text editor. But he had a vision of an app that is feature-rich but stays out of your way, and the result is a sleek and powerful text editor, for a smaller price tag than its competitors. It has a great set of features specifically designed with programmers, coders, and web monkeys in mind. It does have a few things missing, which I will get into later, but first, here are some highlights of the best features.

Modes, Version Control, Templates — Oh My!
Modes provide a very handy approach to editing by allowing you to customize your document workspace based on the language you are working with. For example, you can change the edit/background/highlight colors, so that a quick glance at a document’s background will tell you that it’s a PHP document and not JSP. You can change the indent preferences. You can add or customize any symbols you want. (Don’t like using /* … */ for block comments? Change it!) Each mode comes with a set of reserved words, constants, and functions, but you can add, delete, and edit those as well.

In addition, there is support for many features that programmers will appreciate. There is built-in support for both CVS and SVN version control. You can create document templates to cut down on having to code repetitive boilerplate text in a new document. There is auto-indent, the ability to highlight the current line, and automatically match an opening brace with a closing brace. ForgEdit also offers regular expressions, which will be detailed more below.

Bookmarks
The Bookmark feature allows you to open a file or a group of files as a batch. If you have several files you need to edit as part of your workflow, they’ll be on your screen when you need them. You can bookmark one file, all open files, or all files in a window. Think of it as having a project binder with all your important files at your fingertips, accessible with one mouse-click.

Keyboard Shortcuts to Everything
Almost everything you need, from commands to navigation, already has a keyboard shortcut. But you can easily assign or change shortcuts, making it possible to do everything from the keyboard. This is great for the command-line junkies out there, as you can go from Open to Edit to Save and never leave the keyboard.

Tabbed Editing
This is a very powerful feature that allows you to have multiple files open without having a ton of individual windows cluttering up your screen. Each document opens up in its own tab, and you can change documents quickly by clicking on a tab (or assign a keyboard shortcut to switch tabs), and keep your workspace tidy.

File Drawer with FTP/SFTP support
The file drawer allows you to navigate around the folders on your hard drive. It also allows you to access files on remote servers using FTP or Secure FTP, all via the same interface, and all without leaving your main window. The top half of the drawer shows the directories on the same level as your current directory, and the bottom half shows all files in the current directory.

Find/Find in Files and Support for Regular Expressions (and a RegEx test dialog box)
Universal Find and Replace is an essential tool for programmers, and being able to search using regular expressions is indispensable. The RegEx test box is very handy for trying out a regular expression before you accidentally wipe out your file due to greedy matching.

Because the features that are included far outweigh those that are missing, I’ll put my wish-list into a single paragraph, though for some, the features that are missing may be a deal-breaker. Being able to have a split-window would be nice, so that you can have part of the code on the top half, and another part on the bottom half. In a similar vein, code-folding would allow for a more useful editing area. It would be great to have a Diff/Show Differences tool for comparing two versions of code, for those of us not using CVS or SVN. While this may be a stretch, allowing a file drawer for each tab would make navigating much easier (currently it only shows the path for the most recently-opened document). And lastly, though this may be a personal pet peeve, allow the user to choose the default side for the file drawer—I like it on the left, not the right by default.

ForgEdit is $29 from the ForgEdit website, and comes with a 30-day trial version.

This interview covers everything from getting involved in the Mac scene, to MacHeist to MDA. At the end of the interview, he also gives us a sneak peak at the interface for the iPhone app he is developing along with Sophia Teutschler of CoverSutra.

How did you get involved in the whole “Mac Scene?”

I got my first Mac back in 1990. I was a hardcore Amiga user before that and after the Amiga started to die out, I made a brief switch to the Dark Side by going with a PC for a bit. Needless to say, I totally hated it and it wasn’t long before I was able to save up for the first affordable Mac: a Macintosh Classic. It had almost no RAM, tiny hard drive, crappy monochrome screen, slow processor… but I was immediately hooked and never looked back.

Over time I got to know more and more people in the Mac community since I was developing apps and making media contacts, etc. It’s definitely an interesting scene… most Mac users are die-hards with little tolerance for mediocrity so to stand out above the crowd you really have to work hard at what you do and pay a lot of attention to aesthetics and usability.

Did you ever consider following any other avenues of work (or what else do you do besides what you do in the Mac Community)?

There’ve been times when I’ve just gotten sick of programming and I felt it was necessary to try some new things. I’ve been all over the place with things I’ve done… painting, guitar-making, and I even considered boat racing at one point. But it always comes back to programming for me, even after some long hiatuses.

Even recently, I thought I was finally done with programming but once the iPhone SDK came out, I got back into it. But I have to admit that after this last break, I was completely rusty and the learning curve was pretty steep for me this time around. I’m working on some iPhone apps with Sophia Teutschler of CoverSutra fame and she was going to be doing all the programming on them, while I did most everything else. But right before the Apple Design Awards deadline, she had a lot of CoverSutra work to do so I tried to take up the slack and did some programming for our first iPhone app. Well, to put it mildly, things didn’t go so smoothly for me with it. I’ve never been called “a shitty programmer” so many times in my life… she can be pretty harsh.

What was it like working on MacHeist? If you could go back in time, would you still accept the project?

Considering that MacHeist was my original concept to begin with, I’d have to say, yes, I definitely would “accept the project”.

MacHeist changed my life, to say the least. I’ve never been involved with a project that’s been so consuming, but I mean that in a good way. Once we get going for the season, it’s really nonstop but it gives me a rush unlike anything I’ve ever done before, work-wise. And this is for most aspects of MacHeist: mission planning, the countless all-nighters while implementing the missions, working out the bundle with devs, seeing people solve the missions (definitely the most exhilarating part of the whole thing for me), and the mad rush of the bundle sale.

What was the original inspiration for MacHeist? How did you become involved?

The original inspiration for MacHeist goes back to when I had iClip in a week-long bundle on MacZot in early 2007. Brian Ball at MacZot was trying various things during the sale to hype it up and they were mostly improvised. What he tried did increase exposure of the promotion but I had the thought that if things were planned out well ahead of time and some fun things like games and puzzles were added with free software as prizes, then things could really take of. In addition, I felt that if we could get even just a few killer apps for a bundle then it’d be a must-have.

Once I worked out some of the details in my head, I talked it over with Phill Ryu one night and I wanted to hire him to do some of the legwork for it. I got to know Phill by advertising iClip on his MacThemes site and we worked together on some past projects and promotions. And he seemed to be into this so we started to get the ball rolling. Now at this point, this was to be a MacZot event but I couldn’t come to an agreement with Brian about making this all work out between us, unfortunately.

So then Phill and I talked about doing this on our own and it just snowballed from there. I knew that I couldn’t handle all the development on my own (in the end very little actual programming on MacHeist) so he suggested bringing on Scott Meinzer to help with this. I knew Scott a bit from some of the things I worked on with Phill and I’ll just say that I wasn’t happy with this at all at the time.

But we didn’t have a lot of choice here as we didn’t know very many web programmers, especially one as good as Scott. So I reluctantly decided to give it a shot and hire him. To make a long story short, we went from me hiring Phill, then hiring Scott to having us all be approximately equal partners and it worked out for the best, I’m happy to say (although I do sleep with one eye open because I fear that Phill’s going to try to have me killed one day so he can get part of my share ).

And in the end, having Scott be a part of the team was a great thing. I got him all wrong based on my original dealings with him… I just wasn’t getting his sarcasm at the time so I was taking things too personally. Even though he can still be a bit stressy at times, I have to say that I really enjoy working with him, especially on creating the missions. When we get into the groove, it’s truly an amazing experience.

What would you say were the biggest obstacles to overcome when creating MacHeist and MacHeist II?

The biggest obstacle is definitely getting stuff done on time. I shouldn’t be “breaking down the wall” and saying this but pretty much when a mission goes live it does just as we finish implementing it (I’ve never experienced anything more chaotic than the few hours leading up to a mission going live). Sometimes we’ll even put a mission live then finish some of the final details as it’s in-progress. We have the benefit of there being a few hour delay before heisters get to the later parts of a mission so we feel like we can get away with stuff like this sometimes, but it’s pretty risky and I’m sure we’ll get bitten by it one day.

How long does it typically take to complete a mission, from planning to coding?

That’s hard to say exactly because we almost never put one together in a single stretch. The only one that I can remember that was done like that was Mission 6 to wrap-up MacHeist I because Scott and Phill seemed to go into the federal witness protection program or something and I had to get it all together mostly by myself (with design/implementation help from Ollie Wagner). That one took a few weeks to do, including a mini-heist, if I recall correctly.

Typically, we spend several months planning and implementing everything. Throughout the year, I’ll jot down puzzle ideas as I come up with them and before MacHeist II I went away on a week long “retreat” to plan out things. Then the three of us threw ideas back and forth and came up with an overall story-line for all the missions. Scott and I would then meet-up frequently (virtually) to develop more puzzles and integrate them into the story-line. Things would change very often but at some point, we’d have a (somewhat) coherent plot, broken-up unto several missions and puzzles to fit.

Then, for each mission, we’d plan them out in fine detail so that we could pass them off to our graphics designers, Wolfgang Bartelme and Ernest Liu (we’d sometimes hijack someone else for a rush job for something we’d forgotten or needed to change last minute) and our web coder, Karl Baron. Occasionally we’d need something specialized so we’d recruit someone with the necessary skills to do those things (for example, Sophia did the Safari plug-in that let you control the maze with the Apple Remote for Mission 4 of MacHeist II). Half way through MacHeist II, we recruited IRC-goer Noël Rosenthal, who had some nifty, puzzly ideas and she helped out with various parts of Missions 3 and 4.

Overall, I’m extremely satisfied with the team we’ve assembled. We have some of the hardest working and most creative individuals in the Mac industry helping to create something that so many people in the community enjoy. It’s an extremely rewarding experience to have it all come together and hear how much people love it all.

What was your favorite mission and why?

For MacHeist I, I loved Mission 3. It was one long puzzle sequence that communicated with the heister mostly via graphics rather than words. Moreover, it included the freaky red filter iSight thingy (some people were really weirded out and paranoid from having their live image appear in their web browser, especially all tinted red and upside down) which was actually the very first puzzle I came up with for MacHeist. That whole mission had a very tight feel to it and it showed that we were finally getting the hang of things after a somewhat lackluster start.

For MacHeist II, I thought Mission 4 rocked and the heisters seemed to agree. The maze controlled by the Apple Remote really made that mission. If I recall correctly, the maze was originally Scott’s idea.

Do you ever feel like Phill (considered the face of MacHeist) is getting all the credit for MacHeist?

Totally!

But that’s partly my fault as I intentionally wanted him to be the public face originally. I’m pretty much an introvert and he was much more well known than I was leading into MacHeist I so it made sense at the time.

For MacHeist II, I tended to be a lot more in the forefront as I spent a lot of time in the forums (post count at 577 now!) and in the MacHeist IRC (some of you may be more familiar with our custom IRC client, MacHeist Chat) so I boosted my visibility quite a bit. So even though Phill got most of the credit for MacHeist I, I don’t feel that’s the case for MacHeist II and I no longer feel the deep resentment I carried around for the previous year.

What is it like working with Phill Ryu and Scott Meinzer? Any experiences you would like to share?

As for working with Phill, I once summed it up in a MacHeist forum post:

It’s no secret that Phill and I are often at odds with each other but I feel that overall, we work really well together. We’ve known each other for years and have been involved in various projects together, so even though we’re occasionally at each other’s throats (we can both be complete asses toward each other), we obviously know how to make it all work when we need to. When things aren’t clicking it can totally suck, but when it comes together and we get in the zone, it’s fantastic. And the same goes for Scott, although he and I tend to be more often on the same page with things compared with Phill. The bottom line is that we all want to do the best job we possibly can and we all have a tendency to be stubborn, so the occasional flare-up is inevitable, but we always make it work when we really need to.

Working with Scott’s usually a lot of fun. We often compliment each other creatively and he has a tendency to come up with some great puzzle concepts and story ideas for the missions. When we flesh things out it doesn’t feel like “work” at all because we’ll do a lot of brainstorming and there are always little diversions which keep things interesting. Because of working with Scotti, I now far know more than I’ve ever wanted to know about deep fryers, burn barrels, and the crown jewel of Minnesota (AKA ’sota): the walleye.

Any projects you are working on that you care to share the details of?

Yeah, but I’ll save my answer for when you ask the inevitable iPhone question… (Ok, ok, this is an email interview so I know the question’s coming since I have them all ahead of time.)

How were you involved in the conception/execution of MDA?

When Phill came up with the concept of My Dream App, he pitched it to me and I have to say that I originally wasn’t into it. I don’t watch any TV (DVDs only) and the “American Idol for Mac software” idea didn’t do much for me. But it quickly grew on me for some reason. I agreed to be a part of it so long as I didn’t have to do any programming so I took on the role of “Development Manager”.

I was involved with helping pull everything together both for the competition and for developing the apps. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so well in the long run and I quit My Dream App around September of last year (even though I’m still listed on the site) because of some personal differences Phill and I were having. I’m still really hoping that the apps get finished but I’m not sure what state things are currently in.

A little known fact is that Phill came up with the My Dream App concept after we started talking about MacHeist, not before. We felt it would’ve worked out best if we put out My Dream App first, then followed it with MacHeist. In retrospect, I’d say that it definitely was most effective doing things in this order even though I had a lot of reluctance to the ideas.

Do you have any advice for people who are just beginning to get involved in your areas of interest? i.e. Mac Developing/Web Design?

Collaborate!

I started doing Mac development on my own and while I was able to build a pretty successful business that way, it wasn’t until I started working closely with others that things really started to take off. And the overall experience got sooo much better by collaborating with other talented, motivated people.

I’m actually very surprised that so many indies in the community are pretty much solo. The saying “the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts” couldn’t be truer here and I think that if more people started working together we’d see some really great things come out of the Mac dev community. I hate to sound negative here but the scene has been pretty stagnant for too long of a time and I look forward to seeing some talented, original people get together to “rock the boat” with something really fresh and innovative.

The other advice I have is to not be afraid of doing things beyond your level of comfortability. I originally hated marketing but if I just stuck with what I was familiar with and only what I enjoyed, MacHeist simply would never have happened. Starting up an indie dev company takes countless skills and you often have to be willing to do tasks you’re just not familiar with or even have a distaste for. But when you give those things a fair chance you can gain an appreciation and sometimes even a liking for them.

With the recent announcement of the iPhone SDK, do you see yourself getting involved in developing applications for the iPhone?

When the SDK came out, I thought, “sure, why the hell not”. I toyed with the SDK a bit but was kind of empty for ideas so I felt that I was going to watch things from the sidelines this time around.

But then I came up with an idea that I felt could be done in a few days and would be pretty cool to have. I told it to Sophia and she immediately wanted to do it, so she and I partnered up for it. Well, a few days turned into several weeks as it evolved significantly and we wanted to have a killer design in it, so we hired Wolfgang to perform his pixel magic. We went through a zillion iterations for it but we’re totally happy with the end result. We can’t show the whole app because of NDA reasons with Apple but we can show a snippet of the design:

Wolfgang did such an incredible job turning our concept into reality. Doesn’t that look sweet?

And now, after my initial idea drought, Sophia and I have been coming up with cool, new things almost daily.To put it simply, I LOVE iPhone development and I’ve been very absorbed with all the apps we’re working on.

We came up with the perfect name for our iPhone app company. I wish I could tell you the URL right now but we’re in the process of buying the domain from one of those evil squatters and we’re still waiting for the transfer to finish. But keep an eye on the MacHeist forums and Sophia’s site because we’ll have info there as soon as we can make it public.

Thank you very much for joining us, John.

Thanks a bunch for having me on and for MacApper’s continued support of the things I and the people that I work with create!

Although it will be a new release, don’t expect anything revolutionary. Snow Leopard’s development team is supposedly focusing on improving speed, stability and getting rid of nasty bugs. We certainly hope it’ll fix a lot of problems the 10.5.3 Leopard update caused. With the new release, PowerPC support may finally be dropped. Snow Leopard will work only on 64-bit Intel Macs. With dropped legacy support, some blogs think that Apple is shifting its focus on the cutting-edge of computer technology. Will we see an Atom-based Apple subnotebook?

Ars Technica also said the new OS X may be shifting to a Cocoa-only wrap. Bad time for Carbon, but supposedly a good time for Objective-C developers.

When will we get a taste of Snow Leopard, you ask? Well, most sources claim there will be a developer seeding at the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference. Just don’t get too excited.

One application that is relatively new to the WYSIWYG scene is Flux, from The Escapers. This app aims to give you complete control over the look and feel of your websites, while not limiting you to only being able to adjust a few parameters of pre-installed themes.

When you first open up Flux, you can either start a new website from scratch, or from one of the included templates. If you decide to go from scratch, Flux can automatically create an index.html file, and CSS file to get you started. Once that is done, you can add additional pages/CSS files to your hearts content.

Double clicking an HTML file will open up Flux’s main window. This window is where the bulk of your web development will take place. Double clicking on a CSS file will greet you with the alert: “CSS files are created and modified by Flux, they should not be edited externally. If you still want to open the file, press ‘Open’,” which in my eyes is a big downfall of Flux. There are some things that are easier to edit in say TextMate or CSSEdit, so it would be nice if there was a way to edit CSS files externally, and have the changes reflect in Flux. When asking the developer about this, I received this response:

Right now, you *could* edit CSS in other editors, but it’s really not something we recommend, basically because Flux supports CSS fairly well, but it does not support some of the more esoteric features, and also there is some CSS “shorthand” we don’t support yet, this means that someone could type in valid CSS which Flux might take a dislike to. Similarly, Flux supports new CSS features like@fontface rules, which other editors may not, and then they might end up messing up Flux’s valid CSS. It’s something we are thinking about and will probably try to support sometime in the future.

This might be something we see in the future of Flux’s development.

With external editing aside, lets move on to Flux’s main window. The main window of Flux is organized into three panes. Your CSS styles are in the left pane, you build the website in the middle pane, and the right pane is where you will edit your CSS styles. There is also an option to have the pane where you edit your CSS display under the styles in the left pane.

The first thing that I always do when creating a website is add the metadata. To do this in Flux, you can click on the “Page Attributes” button in the toolbar at the top of the page. You can add in your page title, keywords description and author. The other tabs are where you can add custom code/attributes, javascript files, and CSS files. make sure before you start building your website that there is a CSS file in the CSS tab. If not, drag the one you created earlier into the pane from the site manager.

To begin building a website, you have to add an element. For this review, I’ll begin by adding a div in the middle of the page, and call it “contentcontainer.” To do this, click “New Element” in the top left corner, and click “Div.” You can resize the div to whatever you please by dragging its handles. To add a CSS style to this div, right-click and select “Create style with…” or use the keyboard shortcut Control-Command-S. This will open a dialogue window that lets you name your style. Once you have created your style, you can begin to edit your div in the right-hand pane.

Selecting the div in the middle pane, or the style in the left pane, will open the CSS Editor. You can edit all things you would expect in the editor, like position, Size, Fonts, Decoration, Shadow, Padding etc., and you can add in your own attributes if you would like. Clicking a checkbox beside an attribute drops down its options. For example, if I select “Fonts” I can choose the fonts that I want displayed in that div. This makes creating the CSS for your site easy, as most of the values for that attribute are right there in the editor.

One of the really neat feature of Flux is its built-in image effects. If you add an image right into the site manager, you can apply many different image effects, from adjusting the color, to adding scrapbook tape to it (like you see in the screenshot further below). The window is a little buggy, you have to resize the window in order to see all of the options for some effects, though I have notified the developers of this problem, and hopefully it will be fixed soon. If you add an image from the site manager to your site and then add effects to it, the changes are not reflected in the Edit view, but they are in the Preview view (which I will touch on in a second). Maybe we will see this in a future update.

Flux has 3 main views. The Edit view, which we have been working in the length of this review, the Preview view which lets you preview your webpage using WebKit, and Live Preview which allows you to publish your page to a server, to preview it online. When you are ready to publish your website to the world, you can publish it by clicking “Publish” in the File menu, or upload the files in the folder Flux created in your documents folder to wherever you like.

Flux’s abilities extend far beyond what I have demonstrated here thus far. It supports adding JavaScript actions, embedding PHP, Flash, Java and even support for Ruby on Rails. I am not going to talk about all that today, but I thought I should let you know that it is all there. Flux lets you design and build websites without having to conform to a pre-designed theme, or having to code everything by hand. If you want, you can still use Flux’s built-in templates, which are very customizable.

Besides the few bugs I mentioned above, I have had quite a bit of trouble with the Undo/Redo in Flux. For example, I added an image into Flux and then deleted it. I then entered some text and deselected everything. Clicking Edit>Undo got rid of the image, but overlooked the fact that I had even just entered in some text. Just like with the other bugs, I have notified the devs of this abnormality, and it will hopefully be fixed in a future update.

Flux is $69 from The Escapers.

I have been keeping a eye open for some of these new releases the past few days, and have compiled a list of some of the applications that have been introduced, and ones that have been updated.

The first application on my list is TapeDeck. TapeDeck is an application that was released as version 1.0 on May 9th. The basic premise behind TapeDeck is being able to record audio quickly and easily. This is a Leopard-only application, that takes advantage of technologies like Core Animation, and Core Audio. Each new “tape” that you record is stored in a sliding panel, that is easy to search. When you record, the little wheels of the deck even spin, which is a nice touch. TapeDeck has been released for $25; look for a full review on MacApper soon.

The next app on my list is Bokeh. Bokeh, a joint application from Ollie Wagner and Geoff Pado, is an application that was born from Freeze Frame. It allows you to stop an application from using the processor, freeing it up for other applications to use. For example, you could freeze every other application you have open except for Final Cut Express if you were rendering a scene and wanted FCS to be able to use all of your processor. When you “Focus” on an app (freezing all other applications except for one) the screen behind the app blurs, hence the name Bokeh. A full review of Bokeh is currently in the pipes, to be consumed by you readers in the near future.

Next up we have a few application updates. Pixelmator got a big update yesterday, bringing it up to v1.2 (Draftsman). This update was free to all registered users and brought plenty of bug fixes, and some new functionality. Most notably was the introduction of rulers, a curves feature for “adjusting the entire tonal range or making precise adjustments to individual color channels in an image, and a new color balance tool essential for controlling the overall color mixture in an image for color correction work,” (Pixelmator Weblog) an enhance tool, and a polygonal lasso. The documentation of Pixelmator has also been updated, as well as a few enhanced Automator actions. You can pick up the update right from within Pixelmator, or from the Pixelmator Team’s Website.

Another application that received quite a considerable update is Picturesque, from Acqualia. I reviewed Picturesque v1.0 way back in May of 2007, and with this update, you won’t even recognize Picturesque anymore. The interface of Picturesque has been completely redone, doing away with the floating inspector window. This update in addition to a new interface, has brought a few new tools, like Perspective and Crop. A review of Picturesque has just been posted to MacApper, by our very own Joe Turner.

Now those are the only ones that I found in my travels through the internet, but I would be happy to hear some of the other ones that I may have missed.

We will find out the winners of the ADAs in a months time at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference this June.

TextMate lets you code, or just write in a large number of formats. Pretty much any format you can think of, it supports! It is made for coding, though; it doesn’t just open up any format, it really supports them. It knows the code, so it knows what color to make certain elements. Now this (at least nowadays) is in most text and code editors, but because TextMate is all-in-one, you will know when you see a certain color in any form of code that it’s a comment, a keyword, etc. This makes it truly easy to switch all of your code over into TextMate.

As I said above, TextMate color codes all of your code with certain colors for certain things, but you can also change these colors. You can do this in TextMate’s Fonts & Colors tab of the preferences. You can either choose a preset theme from the pulldown menu or add your own theme by selecting Edit Theme List and clicking the [+] button. There are about 20 built-in themes, each with a unique style, so it’s hard not to like the look of TextMate.

In the bottom of the main window of TextMate (each document) there are also some options. You can choose a text format from the popup button that says Plain Text. This is where the above feature comes in handy. It knows each language on that list, so it will highlight, color and format based on the kind of code (ie comments, keywords). I find this especially useful when compared to parts of Xcode. Xcode’s text coloring can be hard to see, but in TextMate, you can customize it so it is easier to see the coloring.

Another option in the bottom is the Actions popup. This is the popup that has the actions button (the gear). For each language, TextMate provides many actions that can be done. For example, you can make shell scripts executable, or you can simply use its math actions to add, or even send to Google Calculator. This is also where code snippets are. Under this same menu, when you select a type of code, it will give you some commonly used snippets. These can be incredibly useful for typing repetitive lines. It has a bunch of built-in snippets for each language, and you can also add them too!

One of TextMate’s best features is its terminal plugin. It can install an executable into /usr/bin that can be run from terminal. TextMate comes with many commands (for Terminal) that you can use to make programming easier. All you have to do is type “mate” into the terminal, and TextMate will appear. Of course, this is one of the simpler ones, but it still helps!

TextMate is so full of features that it would be almost impossible to list and tell about all of them. TextMate does have something that helps you learn a lot of them, though. TextMate has tips. If you go to (in the menubar) TextMate > Show Tip of the Day, it will show you today’s tip. You can also have it show you tips on startup too! I personally really like these, because I haven’t even scratched the surface of what TextMate can do.

TextMate, by MacroMates, has so many features that, even if you learn one each day, it would be hard to learn them all. It supports almost every language you can think of, and it is priced at only $62! That is less than a lot of only HTML editors, or only CSS editors! Not only does TextMate have many features, but it is also simple to use. You would think that something with so many features would be impossible to use, but it is not. It only gets complicated when you start to use the very advanced features. With all the features it carries, it is well worth the money!

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.

Veteran users will note that the bookmark drawer is now replaced by a panel in the main window. But it’s somewhat of a cosmetic change; the panel now includes your Bookmarks, FTP history as well as Bonjour, an Apple technology used to discover services on a local area network. Previously, your FTP history and Bonjour services were hidden in the menubar, making them hard to monitor. Surprisingly, the log drawer is still there, even though Apple’s own applications seem to be ditching drawers altogether.

Like all Leopard apps, CyberDuck now also comes with Quick Look. Select any file that you want to preview and hit the spacebar; the file is downloaded in the background and presented to you. These files are then cached, so that subsequent previews can take place instantly, without having to request the same file from it’s source again. CyberDuck 3 also adds Amazon S3 and WebDAV support; Amazon S3 is certainly more interesting because it’s not very well supported by many other clients at this stage.

CyberDuck 3 also includes a feature known as Open Web URL, which simply opens the corresponding Web URL of a selected file in your web browser. This might sound mundane at first but it can actually speed up certain workflows. On the whole, it seems like CyberDuck is playing catch-up with the other well-known FTP clients out there. But hey, it’s free and gets the job done, so there isn’t much to complain about.

CyberDuck is a simple, down-to-earth FTP manager that just gets stuff done. If you’re a no-frills person who simply wants to transfer and edit files online, this is it. If you’re looking for all the bells and whistles and a delicious-tasting user interface, keep looking (or try Transmit).

Let’s take a trip back in time…

Every Operating System has a core, called a “kernel”. Mac OS X uses a hybrid kernel – the Mach microkernel developed until about 15 years ago at Carnegie Mellon University. The Berkeley Software Distribution project, a Unix derivative from which FreeBSD and similar distributions were born, used this kernel for its BSD version of UNIX. During the development of this kernel and the growth of the BSD project, a certain Steve Jobs founded the NeXT company. Apple bought this company in 1996, effectively bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple as interim CEO (most of you probably know he left Apple in 1985). NeXtStep was a very important “step” towards Mac OS X. After a few failed attempts at using various projects, like Taligent or Copland to base their new OS project on, Apple decided to simply buy NeXT and use OpenStep, a programmer-friendly OS by NeXT, as its foundation for further development.

OpenStep used the Mach kernel. The developers at Apple then took advantage of the permissive BSD licence (which is not as aggressive towards commercial use as the GPL, for instance) to build the first Darwin with BSD code, along with other Free Software projects’ code. Thus, Darwin was born. That is why the Darwin kernel is based on both FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies.

Yes, your shiny Mac OS X and the ultra-geeky NetBSD have a lot in common. Like most UNIX systems, Darwin includes the standard set of UNIX tools, along with Apache, sendmail and similar services.

A new version of Mac OS X is prepared by putting together the different pieces of Darwin and Apple’s Quartz graphics system. Of course, the developers at Apple include their own applications and modifications, making Darwin a user-friendly environment. Your iPhone runs Darwin, too.

So now you know! You may think you don’t need this knowledge, but maybe sometime in the future you will see some potential in the UNIX base. That is why you can run X natively, for instance.

Go read the Mac Terminal Introduction by Alex and learn more!

Find out more on these sites:
gnu-darwin.org
developer.apple.com
kernel.macosforge.org

Again, “Welcome to Darwin”!

P.S. I would like to hear comments from developers. I did my homework, but if you have more information please let us know about it!

For those of you who have been a part of the beta testing team such a myself, you know that Flow has matured into quite a nice FTP client. With features such as in-application, color-coded document editing (I’m sure there is a more technical name for this feature), and a very clean and intuitive interface, I am considering switching my current FTP client (YummyFTP) for Flow. What do you think? Will Flow be enough to switch you?

Flow will be released this Friday, and be Leopard-only. Look for a full MacApper review soon.

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):

“[Big List of New Stuff]…all this in the FIRST two weeks. And we’ve got 50 more weeks to go!” At the time, it stuck in my head. Is it just a passing comment, or does he really mean Apple have 50 more products (at least!) to bring out this year? To my amazement, he seems to have meant it. Look Back. Every week, without fail, there has been some kind of Apple update:

Jan 7 – Mac Pros
Jan 15th – Macworld – Duh! – Mainly iPhone software update, as well as Movie Rentals
Jan 22nd – Pink nano
Jan 29th – MBA Ships + New UK iPhone tariffs
Feb 5th – iPod Touch + iPhone upgrades
Feb 12th – Aperture + 10.5.2
Feb 19th – Xsan + iPod Shuffle

Admittedly, some of these are minor, however I think it shows Apple’s desire to be on top of the market and to lead the way in product innovation. But could this be the year in which Apple updates every Tuesday? Is that even possible?

This Tuesday should see the release of the long awaited ‘Mobile’ OS X SDK, and then we’re into March. That’s a full 8 weeks in which Apple has pulled something out of Infinite Loop and wowed us all. And don’t forget, the MacBook Pro is overdue for an update, and in recent times the MacBook has been updated within weeks of it’s big brother, so Apple is not short of new stuff that it can bring out. Looking further into the year we have iPhone 2.0 almost confirmed, and maybe even a sneak peek at 10.6 at WWDC.

Whatever happens, this is a big year for Apple. With the growth of iPod sales slowing, Apple must explore new markets to keep investors happy and the stock price high; we’ve already seen this year what a mediocre MacWorld can do… All this leaves me wondering: what is left for 2008? Will Apple stick to the current trend of an update a week? Keep your RSS feeds burning on Tuesdays to find out!

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.

Next up, Frames. Frames are boxes, each with a different size and many options. You can make as many frames as you want and adjust their size. As you adjust the size a new bubble displays the aspect ratio of the current size. Some other options with frames is the ability to copy the frame, link frames, add a grid, or save a screenshot of what is currently inside the current frame.

Another tool is the Guide. Guides are just like the crosshairs but you can make many of them and place then wherever you want. You can view the distance between guides and move them around.

If you have ever needed to zoom into something and inspect it pixel by pixel then this next tool, the Loupe, is great for you. The Loupe shows up as one window. In the window there is an area that shows a close up view of what is under your mouse and some information about that pixel. On the side of the window it shows the pixel’s HTML, RGB, and HSB color value along with the x and y coordinates. You can also resize the Loupe tool to view a larger area.

For viewing what a certain part of a screen will look like at different resolutions or in different web browsers you can use Screens. With screens you can view how much will show up in many different web browsers along with different resolutions. This one is fairly indispensable for web developers.

The next tool is the Rulers. The ruler, of course, measures distances. The ruler can be rotated, extended, and it can display how far your mouse pointer is on it. You can also add another ruler to get a perfect straight edge.

The newest tool, and my personal favorite, is Dimensions. Dimensions is perfect for measuring areas on a website, space between windows, or about anything else. You just point the mouse somewhere, and two red lines (vertical and horizontal) stretch out until they hit a different color or area. The tool also has a shrink function, and in this mode you can drag a box around a certain element and it will shrink until it hits a color. Very handy!

Overall xScope is a great application for a graphic designer, or someone working with pixels in a professional capacity. This new update includes many features, much polish, and can be purchased for $26.95 (or upgraded from version 1.x for $10) from the Iconfactory website.

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.

However, to accomplish the effect, you need to be a bit of a wizard with HTML/Javascript. This is the problem: it is essentially a very visual task so it’s much harder to accomplish through code than say a graphical editor. RAGE MapDesign is such an editor, and it does the job beautifully. Its best feature is its simplicity; here is the main interface window and its hovering inspector:

As you can see it’s a simple toolbar based design and I can find no fault with its interface. The inspector is a great way to add links to your shapes as well as effects, although the effect choices are limited to highlight and raising a picture. There is a nice preview button that, when pressed, shows a dynamic preview of what your image map would look like in a browser, which gives you some reassurance that the end product is what you are expecting.

I have a couple of gripes with the shape editor, like how just clicking somewhere with one of the tools selected adds a tiny polygon as opposed to ignoring it until it is dragged, but this is minor. Any complaints are more than made up for by the outstanding export feature which allows you to export the map with a variety of image types and qualities as well as a choice between basic HTML or a hybrid of HTML and CSS (if you have effects on your map you need CSS).

Again, simple but functional, as well as flexible. With this you can place the map anywhere you like on your site. Overall, MapDesign is an outstandingly simple program that does one thing, and does it really well; I am struggling to fault it. If you need an image map created, or think that it would make a good addition to your site, have a look at MapDesign; you may just find you can have it done in 5 seconds flat.

MapDesign is shareware and available for $19.95 at the RAGE software website. The good news is that 5 of you lucky readers won’t have to part with your cash as RAGE has very kindly given us 5 licenses to give away.

To enter all you have to do is comment on this post with a feature that you would most like to see in RAGE MapDesign. Entries will close at 10PM EST on 5th December. Good Luck!