Blog
April 25th, 2006
There's not many truly revolutionary desktop writing applications - but the real-time, collaborative, editor SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys is definitely near the top of the list. It has certainly influenced a number of web application developers, as sort of a 'gold standard' for what online collaboration could be like.
For a long time Subethaedit was a shareware program - but they recently switched to a pay-only structure (which made me sad inside). However, have no fear! If you're not familiar with BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com, it's this opportunity where an app developer 'donates' a number of copies of their application in return for page rank a link back to their site. If enough people actually add the links back, then MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software to all those who participated. Regardless, I think this is a great opportunity to get a free serial key for Subethaedit, if nothing else. So, check it out and if you have a blog, send a little link love - if anyone deserves it, it's the developers of Subethaedit.
Tags: subethaedit, osx, applications, programming
79 Comments on 'Subethaedit'
July 12th, 2005
- In the new release of Google Earth, there's an exciting feature that lets you dynamically load geographical data in from other sources. They even have an markup language for it called KML. People have already started putting Flickr photos ontop of the maps.
- On a similar note, if you have a Geotagged RSS feed that you want to put onto a Google Map, you should consider giving this utility a try.
- The newer versions of Microsoft Word save their documents in an XML format. So it was only a matter of time before someone wrong an XSL template to generate these documents.
- Do you have a lot of text that you want converted into speech? You should check out the say command on OS X.
- Google now has built in currency conversion. I've been waiting for this for a long time, considering that you've been able to convert units of measurement and weight for the longest time, this step only seemed logical.
- Interested to see how the moods of large-scale communites fluctuate over time? The Livejournal Mood Browser does just that, with informative graphs too!
- What's better then a free textbook on Graph Theory? Not much!
Tags: graph, rss, osx, data, geo, theory, free, livejournal, xml, xslt, geotag, google, earth, kml
Comment on 'Data Grab Bag'
July 8th, 2005
Included in the new release of Apple OS X, Tiger, is a simple command-line application that can be used to convert one document format, to another. Think of it as Image Magick, only for text documents. This is an amazingly useful feature. You can convert to/from any number of these format: txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, wordml, or webarchive. Consider this: You have a text document, borrowed from the repository at Project Gutenberg, but you're friends refuse to read anything that isn't a Word doc - and you don't own Word. No problem, just run your text file through this program and you should have your desired result. Now, couple this with a quick install of Ghostscript and you'll be able to generate Postscript files (and, subsequently, PDF files and Images - which brings you full circle back to Image Magick) all from the command-line!
Tags: data, convert, text, documents, tiger, osx, apple
2 Comments on 'Batch Document Conversion with OSX'
June 17th, 2005
One thing that I've been looking to do, lately, is to create a Screencast (much like the ones presented by Jon Udell). I went through all the dirty work, trying to find a way to do it that was completely free - no strings attached. The result is usable (albeit, without audio or a mouse cursor) - and certainly a good start. I hope some more (free) screencasting packages get released in the near future.
Software to Install:
- OS X Developer Tools - This package (which is distributed on the OS X install CD) installs all sorts of development goodies that are going to be needed for the next couple appliations. (Unless you already installed it, then just skip this step) If you no longer have your install CD, join the Developer Connection web site, and there should be a version available there for download.
- X11 The next step is to install X11 - again, this comes on the installation CD. It use to be available on the Apple web site, but seems to be MIA since Tiger was released.
- osxvnc This is a handy, free, application which gets you a super-simple VNC server up-and-running in no time.
- Fink Fink is a repository of common, open source, pieces of software. You may also want Fink Commander, which is a nice GUI frontend for Fink (it may come bundled with Fink by default, check first).
- ming - Open up Fink Commander and search for the 'ming' package (version 0.2a - not 0.3!) and install it.
- vnc2swf vnc2swf takes a VNC image stream and converts it into a Flash movie - making it viewable by most of the Web-browsing public. I like to download this package and extract it to my /Applications folder. Once you have it downloaded, open a new Command Line Terminal and type the following commands: 'cd /Applications/vnc2swf' (or wherever you extracted your vnc2swf package), './configure --with-ming=/sw', 'make', 'make install'. You should then have a vnc2swf binary sitting in that directory, ready to play with.
How To Capture A Screencast:
- Start osxvnc. Simply pick the default options and click 'Start Server'.
- Start X11.
- In the X11 command window that comes up, type 'cd /Applications/vnc2swf' (or wherever you extracted your vnc2swf package).
- To start recording, type the following: './vnc2swf -nowindow out.swf :0'. Press 'F9' to begin recording and 'F8' to stop.
- Now type 'open out.swf' on the command line to see your finished result! You will want to look over the vnc2swf documentation to see which options will suit your presentation best.
Happy Screencasting!
Tags: screencast, free, screencasts, osx, software, open_source
47 Comments on 'Making Free Screencasts on OS X'
June 14th, 2005
I just finished up a mini-tour of the new web application that I'm working on: ideaShrub. The tour comes in the form of a mini-screencast for everyone to watch. This is my first attempt at making a screencast and I think it went fairly well (save for the lack of voice over and mouse cursor, but I'm working on fixing that for future 'casts).
In this tour I cover a couple different aspects of the new site:
- A user's main profile page
- A user's shrub list (and the Create A Set and Create A Shrub widgets)
- A user's contacts list
- All communities
- All people
- All shrubs
- Options, straight to Profile Editing
- A user's main profile page (again)
- Shrub Editing (I saved the best for last!)
This portion includes moving leaves, creating leaves, editing leaves, navigation, changing text attributes (bold, underline, strikethrough), indenting, undenting)
As a note, the application itself is still a long ways off from being complete - I expect to be making a lot of progress within the next couple weeks and possibly launching at the beginning of July.
So, without further ado:
NOTE: Best if watched at 800x600, it gets kind of 'warped' otherwise.
Tags: mindmap, brainstorming, ideas, firefox, osx, screencast, ideashrub
7 Comments on 'ideaShrub Screencast'
May 3rd, 2005
A good new feature in Safari 2.0 is the RSS reader, which I'm sure everyone has heard about by now. However, Apple feels compelled to change all feed URLs from their original http: to a new feed:, making it annoying to use that address elsewhere. The one area that is particularly frustrating is trying to subscribe to a web site using a bookmarklet (such as one provided by most of the major news aggregator services). So, in a nutshell, here are a bunch of modified bookmarklets that will work in Safari, handling the wonky feed URLs easily.
Drag the following link(s) your bookmark bar:
Note: The above links will still work in Firefox, IE, Opera, et. al.
Tags: apple, osx, safari, rss, feed, blogs, bookmarklet
1 Comment on 'Feed Links in Safari'
