Tuesday, February 27, 2007

 

How to make Mac icons

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I love trying out new desktop icons from sites like the Iconfactory. In fact, my copy of Pixadex is bursting with nearly 3,000 icons. I guess it was inevitable that I'd eventually want to try to make my own.

Luckily, Macinstruct has posted a great tutorial on making icons for the Mac. It's fully illustrated and provides easy to follow, step-by-step instructions. Now I know what I'll be trying this weekend.

[Via Macsimum News]
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

Monday, February 26, 2007

 

Spanning Sync 1.0b15 - Sync Your iCal & Google Calendars


Spanning Sync provides a two-way sync between iCal and your Google Calendars. Spanning Sync is currently in a free beta period, so if you decide to give it a try, back up your calendars before using the application.


What’s New/Fixed In v1.0b15




Download The Latest Beta Of Spanning Sync Here



(Via Cool OSX Apps.)

 

Gear Media Tech podcast from the Pixel Corps

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Leo and his growing band of merry podcasters can *not* stop generating media, and one of their latest efforts just might give the rest of us a smoother ride while hopping on the bandwagon. Gear Media Tech (iTS podcast link) is a new podcast headlined by Leo Laporte, Scott Bourne and Alex Lindsay (whom you may also know from such stellar podcasts as This Week in Media and MacBreak Weekly), delving into the tools, tips and techniques of producing media for the web.

I haven't gotten around to listening to an episode yet; I just stumbled across this and subscribed to download their first two episodes (it's brand-spanking new). Judging from the quality of the other TWiT empire shows, however, I'm sure this one will be a valuable resource to any aspiring pod and vidcasters, yours truly included.
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

Monday, February 19, 2007

 

Learn Cocoa, Part II

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When we posted about Part I of Scott Stevenson's Learn Cocoa tutorial, some people complained that there wasn't actually any coding involved. Well Part II at least introduces what Scott calls "Thinking in Code" and begins to dig a little deeper into what is required to actually use Xcode to write a Cocoa application. Obviously, Scott is moving very slowly, as yet again he requires no previous experience, but his lavishly illustrated guide is a pleasure to behold. He holds out the promise of more such guides in the future, provided some donations are forthcoming. Given how well he's done so far, I hope that comes to pass. Check it out at Cocoa Dev Central.
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

 

FFOSS (Freeware/Free & Open Source Software) Friday


Here’s my weekly summary of Freeware, Open Source, and free web services mentioned in my personal blog last week.


Gawker: Create Mac OS X Time Lapsed Video with a Web Cam

Here’s an Open Source app for Mac OS X that will probably redirect all productive time to making amusing time-lapsed videos.


Gawker


If you feel like taking on Wallace and Gromit (or Gumby for the older crowd), you should take a look at some of the same videos on the Gawker site for inspiration.


Fugu: Mac OS X SCP Client

Fugu 1.2.0 was released on May 2, 2005 and hasn’t been updated since (though there is a roadmap through version 1.5). However, it is still a useful utility if you transfer files using SCP/SFTP instead of FTP.


Although you can open up a Mac OS X terminal window and use the scp command from the command line, it is often nice to have a GUI interface for the task. Fugu uses what Windows users often refer to as the Norton Commander interface (a reference to an old DOS application). It provides two vertical panes. The one on the left is your local Mac.


FlightGear Flight Simulator

Here’s a very nice looking (based on the screenshots) Open Source multiplatform flight simulator app…


FlightGear Flight Simulator


Here’s a link to the Free Software Magazine’s review of it.


Yahoo! Pipes



Yahoo! Pipes launched yesterday (Feb. 8). It caused such a rush that the service went offline for a few hours and is still a bit flaky even a day later. Pipes lets you consume feed data from any site and then use simple logic or combinations of feeds to product a custom result. The programming is created using an easy to use drag and drop graphical interface. The example shown here is my first attempt. It takes the feed from O’Reilly’s Inside Port 25 site where Matt Asay and I write blogs related to Microsoft and the Open Source world. It then checks through the feed and pulls out just the blog items I wrote. A simple change could reverse it by just grabbing Matt’s blog items.




(Via Mac DevCenter.)

 

Yahoo Pipes


If you haven’t gone over to play with the new Yahoo!Pipes yet, you just might want to give it a try. It’s kind of like a Quartz Composer/Tinker Toy-inspired layout system for information and it’s tons of fun. Pipes allow you to collect and filter information to create custom information feeds.


To get started, visit Yahoo Pipes via Firefox. (Pipes works a lot better with Firefox than Safari.) Click “create a new pipe” and log into your Yahoo account.


More after the jump…


You’ll see a list of modules on the left, chunked into categories like Sources (items from the web), User inputs (exactly what it sounds like), Operators (programmatic elements), URL (an element that builds URLs), String (concatenation) and Date. To create a pipe, you drag modules into the main layout window and connect them together.


For example, this pipe prompts the user for a Zip code and then searches for Pizza within a five-mile radius.


PizzaExample.jpg


This pipe searches the Mac blog and TUAW for my posts.


FeedsExample2.jpg


You can also make the pipes do a “content analysis” on an RSS feed and replace the results with Flickr images that match the content of that feed, or you can keep an eye on current prices for particular eBay items, and so forth. To get inspired, pop over to Yahoo’s list of the most frequently run pipes. All published pipe layouts are public. If you see something you like, you can grab it and adapt it for your own use.


There are docs here, but they’re pretty sparse and not especially helpful.




(Via Mac DevCenter.)

Sunday, February 18, 2007

 

NetNewsWire 3.0 developer version released to the public





Nnw3.0D46Screenshot NetNewsWire is the one of the feed readers of choice for us MacUser bloggers, so it's always nice to see an update to this fantastic program. The latest version is the 3.0d46 developer release. This first public release of the pre-beta version of NetNewsWire 3.0 is still very unstable and incomplete. But, it does offer some very attractive new features. These include Spotlight indexing of news items, feed "thumbnails," tab previews (like in OmniWeb), full Growl support, and a new combined view. I briefly tried out the new version, and it looks very cool, but is still nowhere near ready for me to depend upon for day-to-day use. With that said, try out NetNewsWire 3.0 if you dare, but just make sure to back up first.


[via Infinite Loop]




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Primary category: Software : Updates



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(Via MacUser.)

Sunday, February 11, 2007

 

Apple wants you to watch the new Get a Mac ad. Cancel or allow?

Vista SecurityI'm not sure I want to talk about this, but, well I feel that I owe it to you. Last night, for the first time, I used Vista. I know, I know—I'm not proud of it. Believe me. I was just helping move my friend's data from her old computer to her brand new laptop, which just happened to be loaded with Vista. I didn't mean for it to go this way.
Anyway, this morning, I woke up to find that Apple had released a new ad, this time dealing with Vista's security. And for the first time, I really, genuinely laughed my ass off at a Get a Mac ad. Because it was spot on.
You see, every time you try to do anything that could remotely be construed as a security risk, Vista asks you if you're sure. It's just one of many features that has made me dub Vista the "Operating System Most Likely to Make You Want to End Your Pathetic Existence."
The thing that just confounds me, as I noted to my friend after growling in frustration at dismissing the confirmation dialog box for the umpteenth time, was that it doesn't ask you for any sort of security verification. If you want to do something in OS X that requires administrator approval, you have to enter your password (even if you're logged in as administrator). Whereas in Vista, it just asks you if you're sure; if you are, you click "Continue." That's it. Look MS, security that gets in the way of what you want to do is almost worse than no security at all. Because if you make it too obtrusive, people are just going to turn it off.
My biggest disappointment was that after spending ten minutes trying to figure out how to get Flip 3D, the Exposé knockoff, to work, I discovered that it wouldn't because it was Vista Home Basic. You know what, Microsoft? Bite me. I was willing to give you a shot, but you blew it. Also, everything in your operation pulses, glows, or flashes. Please hire at least one person who knows something about design. Cheers.


(Via MacUser.)

Friday, February 09, 2007

 

New Get a Mac ad: Security


I am not one of those Mac people who immediately hates anything from Microsoft, in fact I actually think Vista is a pretty good OS (I've been using it for awhile now on my MacBook Pro). That being said, the latest Get A Mac ad from Apple is right on the money. It is called 'Security' and it features the familiar PC and Mac, but this time the PC has a security guard. The security guard gives the PC a chance to 'cancel or allow' pretty much everything, much like Vista's User Account Control which can be pretty darned annoying.

It is nice to see Apple aggressively taking on Vista, but I would still rather see these commercials highlight features of OS X rather than simply mock Vista (though that has its charms as well).

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

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