Author Archive

Posted on October 12, 2008 - by brian hamm

Updates coming

I apologize for not publishing any new (primary) posts here lately. I spent a great deal of time and energy the last few weeks looking for a place to live, packing, moving, unpacking and settling in.

I have several new posts/drafts that I’m working and will begin publishing this week. And, of course, the right column - ‘Freshly Picked’ - is updated daily, regardless of what’s going on in the primary (left) column. Thanks for visiting!

Posted on September 18, 2008 - by brian hamm

Twitter Site Updated

You may be stumbled onto the Twitter site tonight and thought to yourself, “hrm.. something feels different”. And you’d be right.

The guys at Twitter are starting to roll out a series of updates. According to Twitter, this round is purely cosmetic.. and will support some future (not so trivial) updates.

I like the new look. The ‘home’ page and site designer are definite improvements over the previous versions. Doesn’t look like they’ve spent any effort updating the ‘followers’ and ‘following’ tabs this around.

A good step in the right direction, though..

Posted on September 18, 2008 - by brian hamm

Follow Me

Normally, individuals will follow Mac companies/sites on Twitter to help stay updated on Mac software and related news.

As it turns out, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is now following me.. as of 5 minutes ago. Interesting. Of course, they’re following 2500 other Twitter accounts as well, so.. ;)

Still.. thanks for the add guys!

Posted on September 15, 2008 - by brian hamm

Air Sharing - File Sharing For Your iPhone

If you have an iPhone (or iPod Touch) with 2.0 firmware, and wish you could use some of your iPhone’s free space to store a few documents.. consider your wish granted. Air Sharing, from Avatron Software, is an application you install on your iPhone (or Touch) and turns it into a WebDAV server. If you don’t know what that means, I’ll give it to you in english. Your iPhone is now a wireless flash drive :)

From your Mac, PC or Linux box, you connect to your iPhone the same way you connect to a file server. For Mac users, this is the Finder’s ‘Connect to Server’ under the Go menu. Enter your iPhone’s IP or Bonjour (network friendly) name and your iPhone will appear in the Finder’s sidebar, along with any other devices on your local net. The rest works just like you’d expect.. drag, drop, rename, open documents right on your phone.

Air Sharing supports documents from iWork, Microsoft Office, PDF, RTF, Plain text, Source code, Movies, Audio and Images. See the Avatron site for exactly which fomats are supported. An integrated help file will walk you through how to set up your Mac or PC to work with Air Sharing, and will explain all of the options.

Avatron is offering this fantastic utility for free until September 19, after which time it will cost you $6.99. You can get Air Sharing at the iTunes App Store.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by brian hamm

Adium 1.3 & Facebook disconnect issue

Ok, so you’ve been running the new Adium 1.3 and have added your Facebook account. You’ll find that this works great.. a much better experience than chatting from the Facebook website. You’ll ALSO find if you have Adium connected and try to use the Facebook website, you’ll be logged out almost immediately.

The only solution for the moment is to (from Adium) click the ‘Status’ menu and select ‘Offline’ for your Facebook account when you want to use the Facebook website. Of course, the opposite is true as well..

There’s a discussion starting up at Cocoa Forge if you’re interested.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by brian hamm

New iPods, iTunes 8

Moments ago, at Apple’s ‘Let’s Rock’ event, Steve Jobs lifted the curtain on iTunes 8 and some snazzy new iPods, just in time for the upcoming holiday season.

The nano is ‘tall’ again, but it’s curved.. even on the top. It now sports an accelerometer (more on that in a sec). VERY colorful. New headphones include a micro controller to skip tracks and a microphone for voice recording. Prices are lower.. with more storage. 8GB model is $149, and a new 16GB comes in at $199

The accelerometer works like it does on the iPhone and takes advantage of the nano’s new (old?) dimensions. Turn the nano on its side and you see the familiar cover flow interface to browse music. This is also how you watch video. And here’s a nifty trick.. want to shuffle your music/playlist? Just shake the nano to ‘mix it up’. Love that.

Taking aim at Sony’s PSP?

Next up.. iPod Touch. The new design is curved like that of the iPhone 3G and has a stainless back (ooh, shiny!). Integrated volume controls. It’s thinner than the iPhone. ‘Genius’ playist creation (more about this later). They also focused a lot on mobile gaming during the event.. looks like they’re going after Sony’s PSP. Models are 8GB, 16GB and 32GB.. $229, $299 and $399 respectively.

The iPod Classic remained untouched for this event. You may wonder why they still have a Classic. One word.. (hard disk) storage. You’re not going to find a solid state iPod with 80GB or 160GB. When companies are producing solid state memory at those capacities (and competitively priced), i think you may see the ‘Classic’ go by the wayside.

Real Genius.

iTunes got a full point update to v.8 and features a new browsing mode (grid). Cover flow is still there, but grid is better for viewing a whole lot of content at once. The new ‘Genius’ feature is essentially the evolution of smart playlists. It does what services like Pandora and Last.fm have been working on for a while now. Genius analyzes your music and finds/suggests similar songs from your library, or from the iTunes Store. You need to upload information about your library to the iTunes Store to participate. This is all opt-in and anonymous, of course.

Also new to the iTunes Store, HD television shows.. not just movies. TV shows in HD are $2.99, $1.99 for standard def (as before). iTunes 8 is free and available today.. check software update or try downloading directly from Apple’s site.

Posted on August 30, 2008 - by brian hamm

BBEdit Reaches Version 9

Bare Bones Edit, affectionately known as BBEdit, has now arrived at version 9. The release notes are pretty long, as you might expect for a full point release. More about key features in a minute..

BBEdit has long been one of those products that make it a joy to build sites on a Mac. While I consider myself a fan, competing applications like Panic Software’s CODA have been quickly closing in on BBEdit, even exceeding it in areas like auto-completion, overall interface and price ($79 vs. $129). That said, Bare Bones Software has an extensive history and huge installed base.. a base who has practically grown up with the product. This full point update will go a long way toward keeping them happy.

Notable improvements:

• Improved multi-file grouping into ‘Projects’
• Better auto-completion and syntax coloring, to speed development
• You can now work with/edit the search results without opening up another window
• Application preferences and ‘Application Support’ folder can be synced over .Mac/MobileMe
• New Scratchpad allowing quick edits and batch copy/paste prior to inserting code into your document
• Improved autosave (every minute)
• VM Ware ‘Fusion’ users can now preview pages in Windows versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE

Upgrading to BBEdit 9 from any prior commercial version is $30. If you bought BBEdit after Jan 1, 2008 your upgrade looks like it will be free.

Posted on August 27, 2008 - by brian hamm

Things & Things Touch

Cultured Code, who is already off to a great start with their GTD desktop application Things, has released their highly anticipated iPhone version.

You can use either of these apps on their own, but if you have a Mac and an iPhone, your life is about to get a lot simpler.. or at least more organized.

In either Things app, you can add individual tasks, combine those into multi-step projects, tag items with keywords and set due dates. Tasks uncompleted by their due date are automatically rolled into your ‘today’ list, so they don’t simply get lost. There’s also a hot-key preference, so you can quickly call up the ‘new task’ window from anywhere on your Mac and commit something to your to-do list.

The interface (for for both apps) is minimal, but quick and efficient and helps you get information in/out with a minimum of fuss. And with the latest update, this all now syncs via wi-fi (no ‘push’ though.. yet).

Posted on August 27, 2008 - by brian hamm

Panic releases CODA 1.5

How many of you out there use Panic’s Transmit as your FTP application on the Mac? Lots of you, probably. Most folks who need an FTP program are uploading HTML pages and/or PHP scripts to web servers. If that sounds like you.. then you likely have need for a powerful text editor to create those files. I bet you’ve been using something like Dreamweaver or perhaps BBEdit.. arguably two of the best damn editors in existence. Fair enough.

For some though, Dreamweaver is just too deep of an application (not to mention expensive). BBEdit users may swear by their editor of choice, but wouldn’t it be nice to have features like split pane live previews, excellent code completion, code folding, and a built-in FTP app on par with Transmit? I’ll answer that for you.. yes, it would. :) You can thank your friends at Panic Software - the same folks who make Transmit - because they have a product called CODA, and it’s what I always wanted BBEdit to.. be.

CODA has a super text editor, file transfer (Transmit is built in), svn support, css editing (raw or GUI), terminal support and integrated HTML, CSS and Javascript references.. all for well under $100. Check it out.

Posted on August 26, 2008 - by brian hamm

Adium 1.3 adds support for Facebook chat

If you use Apple’s iChat, but have friends on other services like Yahoo, MSN or GoogleTalk (among others), you should take a look at Adium. It’s free, and supports pretty much every messaging platform on the planet. And, starting this week, you can add yet another.. Adium now supports Facebook, as part of its recent v1.3 update.

Users of the ‘new’ Facebook lately have likely seen the new status bar located at the bottom of the page. It show friend updates and other notifications, as well as allowing chat between users in a pop-up window. It works, but it also keeps you isolated (by design?) from your other messaging services, where you’re likely to have a lengthy history and buddy list. If you’d rather keep all of your buddies in one place, Adium is the answer.

The beloved Mac-only messaging application has a lively developer community as well, where fans create and alter themes both for buddy lists and messaging windows. With various colors, alignments and transparency options, you can easily find a theme that will blend in with your existing desktop and other apps.

Adium requires Mac OS X 10.4.. get the v1.3 update here