tingilinde

iphone games

I haven't really fallen for anything yet - here is a resource if you are looking for announcements and more information than appears in the apps store.

aquaforest is cute - I wouldn't pay for it, but still cute

getting out from under acrobat

30 alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

a bad unix script

this is terribly funny

obscure word processors

Scrivener came up in a conversation today...

Two friends who write for a living swear by it. If you need a regular WP, this isn't it, but folks who put together shards of stuff to get a final structure may want to take a look -- it has some real fans.

Not a tool for technical writers, but others may want to check it out. Check out the video

seasonal screen savers

Skyrocket is a nice fireworks "screen saver" for OS X

hopefully you won't shoot your eye out.

my silly iphone prediction

Hey, why not...

My guess is that something is going to be done with .mac for the iPhone. A way to encourage Mac and iPhone use. (of course .mac needs to be brought out of the stone age; -- one feature - synchronization - works very well, but many other features have a poor price/performance ratio).

So I'm guessing iChat (perhaps with audio) will appear in .mac for the device. One can think of a few other services to bundle, and historically Apple has shown a fondness for annuities.

non-firefox, non-safari browser for os x

Some OS X users, particularly switchers, find themselves using Firefox. I'm more on the WebKit branch of OS X browsers (Omniweb and Safari), but when I want/need to use something Gecko-ish, I'm repulsed by the user experience of Firefox. Camino is much cleaner and, for me, works better.

Camino has recently seen a major revision change .... 1.5 here.

Of course browser choices are quite personal... if you are into Firefox plug-ins, stick with Firefox.

omnifocus

The folks at Omnigroup are working on a new task management application - Omnifocus - check out the movie if you use or lust after task management apps.

Something like this would be neat on the iPhone...

hierarchical edge bundling

A neat paper (pdf) by Danny Holten and mentioned in the often interesting information aesthetics blog

Abstract:

A compound graph is a frequently encountered type of data set. Relations are given between items, and a hierarchy is defined on the items as well. We present a new method for visualizing such compound graphs. Our approach is based on visually bundling the adjacency edges, i.e., non-hierarchical edges, together. We realize this as follows. We assume that the hierarchy is shown via a standard tree visualization method. Next, we bend each adjacency edge, modeled as a B-spline curve, toward the polyline defined by the path via the inclusion edges from one node to another. This hierarchical bundling reduces visual clutter and also visualizes implicit adjacency edges between parent nodes that are the result of explicit adjacency edges between their respective child nodes. Furthermore, hierarchical edge bundling is a generic method which can be used in conjunction with existing tree visualization techniques. We illustrate our technique by providing example visualizations and discuss the results based on an informal evaluation provided by potential users of such visualizations.

You need a variety of tools to visualize relationships - this looks promising (there are times when I could have used something like this)

a word processor for writers...

... or at least some of them. I suspect writers are all over the place in tool requirements, but three writer types have mentioned Scrivener (OS X only) in the past few months. One of these guys - a serious and very successful novelist - pointed to the Scrivener review on 43 Folders.

Not for everyone (I use a very simple text editor for 90%+ of what I do and LaTeX for the technical stuff ... it supports MultiMarkDown, so perhaps I should give it a try), but if you are sorting out the next Harry Potter, perhaps it is worth the trial period.

It is good to see tools that differ seriously from the Word metaphor ... they may not work for you, but they may be just the ticket for the author of a book you'll read.

iterm

A simple tabbed terminal for OS X ... some of you may find it useful./

vienna rss reader

Vienna is a fairly new and uncluttered rss newsreader ... it isn't as fast as NetNewsWire, but I like its layout and simplicity... the price is right too.

cheap(er) apps

A friend who happens to be a single person software development house asked that I plug the macsanta coupon.

About 100 mostly small OS X software companies offer 20% off through the end of 12/25.

I have only used a few of the offerings, but highly recommend Audio Hijack Pro and Fission from Rogue Amobea, OmniGraffle and OmniWeb from OmniGroup, Notebook from Circus Ponies and Seasonality from Gaucho.

Nisus Writer Express is a special case. In the pre-OS X days, Nisus Writer was one of the best word processors on any platform - highly scriptable and well reasoned. Nisus Writer Express is the OS X version, but falls short of the original's flexibility. It is, however, a fine choice for non-technical papers. It can read and write to rtf or MS Word format, but lacks the collaborative features of Word. I find myself staying away from Word where possible and using simple word processors like NWE or Pages for 95% of my documents and LaTeX for anything that requires real typesetting. The net result is I'm much less frustrated than I was when I only used Word

cute weather app

Seasonality is a cute weather data display application. The information is available elsewhere, but this is ad-free with better performance than the weather webpages. $25, but you can try it for a month...

oh..

The Macsanta page has a code worth 20% off on OS X software from the smaller developers. A few come highly recommended (Rogue Amobea, Circus Ponies, TheCodingMonkeys, and OmniGroup all make software I absolutely need).

holiday recreation

It looks like I won't be getting around to recreational reading over the holiday.

Photoshop user from the dawn of time (before it was Photoshop or from Adobe:-)

____

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals has a few video previews of PS CS3 online. PS is sufficiently complex that it makes sense to join this organization for a year or two just for the instructional tools they provide. If you are really serious about PS, consider it part of the price.

bjarne in technology review

A nice interview with Bjarne in Technology Review

recommended

soundbooth

When people learn that I have a bit of audio experience questions about audio editors start flowing.

Five years ago the answer was easy - SoundEdit 16 - a simple application that barely required a manual and just worked. The application faded and times have changed.

There is lots of good stuff on the high end - eg $300 and up with real learning curves. At the low end are a handful of applications that may or may not be sufficient for simple home recording, tape/lp digitization and podcasting ...

Now Adobe has Soundbooth in beta. Early indications are that this is very much like SoundEdit 16. If your system is supported, this may be the right tool for most people.

freemind

opensource mindmap

some people love Mindmap, others don't ... I'm in the later group, but if you need it. this seems to work.

cider, not wine

A push for moving games to OS X.

Doing it in the developer's shop probably results in something more robust than the more generic Wine approach, but time will tell... I worry when someone describes the amount of work in such small numbers though,..

supported wine for os x to be uncorked

Wine is a program which allows you to operate DOS and Windows executables on Linux and Unix operating systems. It isn't an emulator, but rather demands x86 hardware and implements Windows API calls using equivalents in Unix or Linux (usually X11).

About 50 Windows programs have been seriously tested (basically the Office suite and, oddly enough, some programs that run on OS X and Windows, but not Linux - Quicktime is the most popular), but many others work.

It turns out CodeWeavers offers a commercial version and, in the near future, will offer one for OS X.

Lots of people will find this very useful - lets say you only have a few Windows programs to run, but generally stick with OS X. Rather than a separate Windows box, dual boot Intel Mac (bootcamp) or Parallels, you can just run the program - no need to buy or run Windows.

Very desirable if it works.

what if omnigroup made planning software?

hmmmmm

I haven't tried it (but am downloading the trial now). My experience with Omnigroup is they write outstanding software. I'm betting this isn't the sort of stuff to plan something like building the next Boeing jet with, but there may be niches where it does very well.

os x open source software

A nice summary of open source software available on OS X...

There is quite a bit out there and some of it is very good.

skype video for os x

I actually use video conferencing in our little business. Usually this is with OS X users who are using iChat AV, but there have been times when I've wanted to connect to Windows users on Skype.

I haven't tried it, but several of you have an interest, so here is the link..

_______
later ... I have tried it. Don't go there yet. It isn't ready for prime time.

delicious library sale

Delicious Library is a nifty little home library cataloging tool - particularly useful if you loan your stuff to others. Lots of desirable features... if you are into cataloging your stuff. I'm afraid I'm not (I did use the beta way back when and was impressed).

If you have a need, they currently have a gambler's sale (the price goes down for awhile to some magical unannounced point where the sale goes away)... the current price is $25, which is probably a good deal.

cheap office compatibility for os x

Use authentic MS Office 2004 - there is currently a $50 rebate putting the Amazon price for the student/teacher edition (have a student in the house?) at $78.92 with free shipping.

cool little app

Trans Lucy (sigh) lets you watch a movie in a translucent pane above what you are working on ... what is extra sweet is that you can click through the movie window to interact with the apps below directly.

I don't think I would use it enough to buy it, but it is cool.

gliffy

Several people have been telling me how cool Gliffy is ... another "web 2.0" application - this one is a diagram editor.

It works fairly well, but is clearly under development. It might be OK for limited use, but I'll stick with the much slicker (and more expensive:-) OmniGraffle.

memorable meetings

About five years ago a colleague brought a two megapixel camera to work to document meetings and thinking sessions by capturing whiteboards. He (hi Norm!) is an excellent notetaker, but it is astounding how much more you remember with a few visuals spread about in the notes. An added bonus is you can take photos of everyone in the meeting for additional recall.

highly recommended if your workplace allows cameras - you can do this with a cameraphone, but 2 megapixels is about the bottom limit for a nice image. Remember to turn off the flash.

It is very easy to touch up the images in Photoshop (play with the histogram and/or contrast curves), but Save My Whiteboard is a little application that works well.

(a tip of the hat to Nancy for reminding me)

good enough software

There are times when "good enough" is best.

I tend to get frustrated with overly featured software. It is often expensive, the features I need are hard to find, and the interface is often byzantine (to accommodate all of those "features").

Some people claim that OS X tends to attract developers who create small well-honed programs that focus on a fairly narrow task. There is also quite a bit of bloatware, but there are more than a few programs that are real gems.

A friend has been trying to find a simple MacDraw-like program for Windows without luck. He notes many public domain programs that don't offer exactly what he wants and large difficult to use programs that offer too much. A month ago I looked at what was available on the OS X side and found three candidates that seem to do exactly what he wants. Linda has just found another - WouldjaDraw.

macdraw-like program

Someone asked about the lack of simple MacDraw-ish vector based drawing programs. Illustrator is somewhat difficult to master, expensive, and overkill for many purposes.

A good candidate is Inform. Inexpensive as these things go ($79) and available in trial form.

john gruber on apple's move

I've been thinking about Apple's dual boot announcement - the basic worry, of course, is the reaction of third party developers. Of course, if it makes OS X more popular (people who want to use OS X, but have or think they have to run a Windows program or two), life gets better for OS X developers.

Clearly I don't know enough to sort this out and John Gruber takes a stab at it, so I will defer to him.

I did notice the nice "X" that appears in the logo (as he points out) when I first saw the logo. Apple sweats some of the subtle marketing points.

google @last

strange ... Google has acquired @Last Software - the makers of SketchUp (a piece of software I want, but can't justify)

camino 1.0

Camino 1.0 was released for OS X last week.

There are several good OS X browsers. Caminio is a branch of Mozilla is much more Macish than Firefox (I greatly prefer it to Firefox).

inspiration for the make crowd

possible inspiration for Make-like projects from the Craft Technology Group at the University of Colorado

and if you are looking for real inspiration, try The Cabaret Mechancial Theater

rss readers for os x

A short review of OS X rss readers appears in Ars Technia.

NetNewWire rules - one of the OS X apps I can't imagine being without.

full webpage capture

There are times when you want to capture a full page that extends past your window boundaries.

Paparazzi has a few rough areas, but basically works (OS X).

artrage for os x

OS X users - particularly those with Wacom tablets - will want to try ArtRage. (2 MB dmg file)

A very simple sketching interface that reminds me of Alias SketchBook (a neat tool that I can't afford)

stuff you really need

Brent Simons NetNewsWire 2.0 has been out for about a week.

The best rss aggregator I've seen on any platform.

You need it.

(MarsEdit is also nice and Nancy will correct me if I don't mention the deeply fine Huevos)

semi-useful tiger dictionary tip

Some of you have probably discovered this, but Apple's documentation leaves much to be desired so I note it here...

Hovering over a word in some applications (Safari, Mail, Pages) and pressing clover, control, D will bring up a dictionary. Moving the mouse to a different word will caused the dictionary to switch words on the fly.

tiger notes

I've been playing around with OS X Tiger for a few hours. A few comments.

• Don't expect any performance from your system until the hard drive(s) have been indexed by Spotlight. This took about 2 hours on my iBook and 10 hours on my bursting-at-the-seams PowerMac G5.

• Check out some of the QT videos Apple has made available. This version may set a record for sparse paper manuals. I don't understand why Apple doesn't make their online Tiger seminar widely available. It would make a great infomercial.

• A major flaw - the Spotlight interface does not allow nested boolean searches. The innards do. Apple needs to supply this functionality.

• The mail application struck me as ugly. The icons are just wrong. Changing the interface to "text only" makes a dramatic improvement

• Early benchmarks are positive.

• The Apple implementation of H.264 is outstanding.

My overall impression is very positive so far...

more on nikon and who controls your photos

I preface this by noting that I am not currently in the market for a digital SLR. I also note that I am heavily invested in the Nikon 35mm "system" with over $4,000 in lenses.

Last week we noted that Nikon was encrypting white balance information (and possibly more) in their RAW data files. This created quite an uproar which forced Nikon to make another statement.

Unfortuantely the statement (google and find it on the web - they sent me a printed version) suggests that Nikon will continue to encrypt but will allow certain third parties (the implication was who Nikon chooses) the magic stuff that gives them access to the data.

I note that RAW is now one format, but many. Camera manufacturers are creating new variations and abandoning old ones today. So what happens when you need to get to your RAW file 22 years down the road - a file that was taken with a 25 year old camera from a company that went out of business 19 years ago.

As an exercise try to open a Word 1 file. How about the last will and testiiment that was written with BeagleWorks or Electric Pencil? How about the source that you wrote to 9 track tape in the 70s? This might be your stuff, but changing formats make it difficult to impossible to recover. The addition of encryption of part of all of the file only makes it worse.

Nikon's letter suggested Nikon Capture was wonderful software and I should be pleased to use it. Er ... I have and it sucks - I want to open my RAW files in Photoshop and I'm sure others want GIMP and other tools.

My take is that my photos are my copyrighted creations (ok - my CC creations) rather than Nikon's.

Recent tests of new prosumer and advanced consumer SLRs suggest there is little difference between Canon and Nikon offerings. I would claim this isn't true - there is a huge difference if you worry about manipulating and archiving your files. The Canon is far superior to the Nikon by this measure.

Hopefully Nikon will feel the pressure and relent. Otherwise I'll have to sell my lenses and move to Canon (or someone else) when I move to digital SLRs...

cocoa covered r

A cocoa flavored version of R for OS X users who remember S.

The price is certainly right.

on unix geeks moving to os x

Nancy has made the move.

Nancy not only has incredible style and taste points, but has been one with the command line for years and years. Unix and Linux users should take note. Her recommendations are well worth the read.

speaking of bloated

Steve Gillmor (not Dan) has posted some comments and speculation on what is going on at Microsoft's Windows division these days.

I can't really comment other than noting that we are talking real complexity here ... not only the software, but the organizational complexity at Microsoft.

___

One of my co-workers has been visiting largish companies recently. He notes that people always comment on his PowerBook ... generally people have a hard time believing a company allows something other than Windows. These are people who are forced to reason with their systems on a regular basis with the systems often besting them. They are locked into Windows by legacy apps. One wonders if the legacy monopoly is forever. History suggests otherwise.

not word

I'm no great fan of Microsoft Word. It is clumsy, bloated and ugly. Unfortunately most of the business contacts I exchange documents with are in a Microsoft world.

I have just started using the 30 day trial of Nisus Writer Express 2.0. Nisus had a killer word processor back during the Mac OS 8 days. They came out with a truncated version for OS X, but it was lame - Word was a much better bet.

Version 2 is out and, based on the Okito Composer interface, it makes interfaces like Word's feel like - well - like Microsoft interfaces. It finally adds some features making it useful. It isn't LaTeX, it isn't Word, but it appears to be very useful. Folks who like Word's versioning and auto line numbering probably won't like NWE2, but many writers never use those features.

I'll post a more detailed review in a few weeks. My recommendation is that all OS X users download the trial and see if it works for you.

tofu for reading long text

Every now and again I struggle with some long text from Project Gutenberg, long web pages and a few other places. I find it somewhat easier to read through a multicolumn format and recommend tofu as a simple/free tool for reformatting text without going into an editor. Depending on your reading style this may or may not be useful.

Note that it connects with service aware apps like Omniweb and Safari...

the tiger isn't as nasty as some folks claim

A preview of OS X 10.4 was recently given at Apple's annual developer's conference. One feature - desktop widgets called Dashboard was seen as a blatant ripoff of Konfabulator.

Big companies sometimes crush small developers, but sometimes the story is a bit more involved. John Gruber has one of the saner and more informative posts on the subject.

icomic open sourced

iComic is a cute little OS X comic strip reader. There are a few warts, but it is a surprisingly good effort.

Now it has been open sourced - perhaps the rate of improvement will increase.

gimp vs photoshop

Jerry pointed me to a Slashdot discussion on GIMP vs Photoshop. Both are photo manipulation programs - Photoshop is a commercial product that has been around for 15 years and GIMP is an open source project that has been under active development since the mid 90s.

I managed to acquire serious Photoshop skills as the volunteer digital editor for a magazine startup a few years ago (I was putting in about 40 hours a week for about eighteen months in evenings and on weekends doing mostly Photoshop and a bit of Quark).

Photoshop is an amazing program that keeps growing. For the casual user it probably seems like a featuritis problem, but a serious graphics artist finds most of this very useful and will spring for each upgrade (I think the comparison is more to Mathematica than Office -- for serious users the new features in Mathematica really are useful).

Several people had been pushing me to try GIMP and I tried to spend time with it six months ago. It is probably OK for a very casual user, but its performance is poor, the interface is awful and the range and quality of the tools varies. A casual user may find it worth what he or she pays for it, but if you are using Windows or OS X I would recommend the light version of Photoshop (Photoshop Elements 2), which can be had for well under $100 and in equipment bundles.

Sadly Linux and BSD users are left out in the cold as GIMP is as good as it gets. The argument people have used is "if you don't like a piece of open source software, you can always pitch in and help" ... sure. Adobe has a development team of 50 people devoted to Photoshop who have worked for more than a decade on the program. Finding people with the talent, taste and deep appreciation of the problem for large specialized pieces of software is none trivial. GIMP has done impressive things getting as far as it has, but the effort required to make it even as usable as Photoshop Elements would be formidable.

Serious users will focus on Photoshop. It isn't cheap, but in its intended market a computer and the software is a necessary tool for getting work done. If I do $150k billable in a year (not unusual in advertising), I'm going to take advantage of a $650 program that is the only practical way for me to get there.

Don't get me wrong - I really like open source efforts. In the OS area we have seen amazing focus of talent and wonderful things have happened. The same can be said about small programs where one talented individual and grok the problem space and apply their taste and talent. Large applications have had a spottier history. A few have made real strides, but many seem to have problems getting past initial implementations. There are probably some interesting ethnographic papers lurking here.

migrating from microsoft

Josh, a friend at a medium sized company (650 employees) notes that they are planning to migrate from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and one of the open Offices. Many have talked about this and few have actually moved. Training costs are a big issue as are Microsoft's licensing scheme.

In Josh's case they may be able to make it work. About 450 of the employees just use nothing more than Word, Excel, email, a corporate web based calendar and some corporate web based databases. They did a small pilot project with a 15 person workgroup and found, with about two days of training, they could be as productive with Linux and OpenOffice.

Training is the big issue and they video taped six hours of presentations and are making DVDs so as to minimize the need for expert trainers (which they will still employ). They plan to make it clear that doing this means that employees will not have to see their healthcare benefits cut next year.

Tying saving money internally with benefits is an interesting idea. Perhaps Microsoft will have to bundle healthcare with their future offerings to fend off open source:-)

ibm g5/os x c++ and fortran compilers

The compilers Apple distributes with their OS X developer tools are not terribly optimized for the IBM G5 (970 series) processors. IBM released C++ and Fortran compilers that reportedly offer dramatic improvements.

A friend at the U of Utah Physics Dept notes performance gains across the board with some of his benchmarks running nearly fifty percent faster. He notes that IBM offers a free 60 day trial on both of the products. Education licenses are apparently highly discounted over the commercial price.

gesture recognition games

My friend Jakub was/is heavily into gesture recognition and created basic systems beginning in the mid 1980s.

Toysight is a simple gesture recognition system that works with the iSight camera. It seems naive at first glance, but it strangely addictive.

outlining outliners

Ted Goranson continues his interesting commentary on outlining software with a third piece.

What fascinates me about Ted's series is his focus on what you might use software for rather than what it does - a very different flavor than the standard review.

keynote and xml

Keynote is Apple's OS X answer to PowerPoint.

David Miller writes about using Keynote's XML capabilities. I didn't realize you could do this...

extras for omnigraffle

OmniGraffle is what many consider to be a Visio-killer -- much more intuitive with higher quality output (of course it isn't from the onetrue software company, so Visio has nothing to worry about).

Xiu notes there are some very high quality public domain add-ons for the program.

cheap(er) office for mac os x

Let's say that you want to do something proactive about worm and virus attacks and are seriously thinking about moving to Mac OS X. The largest complaint is usually the price, but you can get a fairly good machine for less than a thousand dollars. The next issue for many people is the need for full Microsoft Office compatibility and the very high cost of Office for OS X.

Microsoft, bless them, have just rolled out a student and teacher edition that has purchasing eligibility rules similar to Office for Windows -- basically very loose. $149 and good for three machines.

There are some Office substitutes (some of them free) as well as individual word processors that may be very attractive to many Mac users but, if you really want full MS Office compatibility, this may be the best way to go.

maya personal edition

If you are motivated - really motivated Alias has announced a $20 CD containing Maya Personal Edition. There are limitations, but you can use this as the basis to master Maya (a non-trivial task) and get yourself a job as a CG animator.

Just the thing for that new dual processor G5 you have on order.

more cool software

Nisus has announced the release version of Nisus Writer for OS X.

I loved Nisus back in the OS 7 and 8 days, but the wait for an OS X version was long and I found myself using other tools.

I've been using the beta for a few months and almost exclusively for the past month. Word compatibility is good enough for most purposes and the interface is so much better than Word. The company is very responsive to suggestions and actually works on fixing bugs (Microsoft seems to feel that bugs are a marketing feature).

There are still several features under development, but the current version is very functional and this is a good time to support these guys if you like the concept. This is a refreshingly different experience than what Microsoft delivers. A friend who is a very successful novelist has been doing his work on a linux box (he developed a distaste for Microsoft when he lost his work and his backups a few years ago and had to pay to have someone retype from printouts) in OpenOffice, but is doing his current novel in Nisus on a OS X Powerbook. His comment about the current beta of NisusWriter:

It not only just works, but is feels like a fine pen on an uncluttered desk. Office and its Openoffice clone feel like the dingy holes of packrats by comparison. I know I shouldn't be using beta software for a new novel, but I'm not going back.

I wouldn't go quite that far as there is some functionality I want that isn't there at this time (although they are working on it). Even so I highly recommend it and consider it a great value at $60. Try it out with their 30 day free trial.

___

Another piece of software from the past is OmniWeb.

OmniWeb goes back to the NeXT period and is simply the most visually beautiful browser I've seen on any platform. A version was available from the early OS X beta days, but it was slow and had some rather unusual rendering characteristics.

Safari may have saved Omniweb. With Safari Apple released WebCore and Javascript Core to the public domain. OmniGroup decided to build on that foundation and has been releasing a series of betas. Unfortunately you have to be customer to use these, but these guys are worth the money. The current version (4.5 beta 3) is very nice. I'm spending about half of my time in Safari and half in OmniWeb these days.

___

Supporting small companies like Nisus and OmniGroup is not that much different from supporting the performing arts. You sometimes get a wonderful experience and it is the right thing to do.

There is an interesting life beyond sending checks to Microsoft -- at least in the OS X world. This brings up an interesting question:

Is it easier for a small company to innovate in the OS X world?

This is a sticky question that invokes several religions, but developing and marketing a product in a space where they are few (if any) competitors and customers are used to buying things online rather than in stores removes a few barriers for very small businesses. The open source community is wonderful, but making a living is not trivial.

a wiki for your desktop

VoodooPad is very cute. Imagine a personal wikiwikiweb on your desktop.

Neat stuff and worth the $10 (the trial has enough features to let you decide if you need it).