My theory; Shaun has a twin and we’ve been fooled for years.

“Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub.”

Boom.

You see, with one application GitHub has just expanded its potential customer base many times larger than it already is. GitHub isn’t just for command line elitists anymore. Now just about anyone that can use a Mac application, and understand what it is to commit a new version of their work here and there, can use Git and GitHub to help control their source.

Before today GitHub’s potential customer base, or target-market if you will, has been those that fully grok Git, the command line, and source control. Or, people willing to put in the work to go through the tutorials to become one of these people. Their website was simply icing on the cake for people already using that workflow. In fact, their service was so compelling that many have switched from other source control platforms to Git just to take advantage of GitHub. However, now for all of the designers, copywriters, hobbyists and even solo development shoppes that didn’t seen the need to learn and fully understand source control – Git just got easy and GitHub made it happen. And that is many, many, many people.

Some, including myself, would argue that this could breed a bunch of people that understand GitHub for Mac more than they understand Git. And I think it is fairly obvious that understanding Git, for any professional, is more valuable than understanding GitHub for Mac. However, now that I’ve thought it over for these last few hours I’m beginning to see this application as an extension of GitHub’s many other offerings to make Git easier. You see, GitHub has always provided documentation, events, online training and tools to try to make Git easier for everyone. If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub. GitHub for Mac is simply an extension of these educational efforts that GitHub has always offered since the beginning. It is yet another lily pad for people to jump on as they cross from shore to shore. Brilliant.

GitHub for Mac isn’t the first application to give Git a UI on the Macintosh but it is the first that came from the guys behind GitHub and that alone will be enough to make many people make the jump. It also helps that the application is very good. If they work as feverishly to keep GitHub for Mac up-to-date as they do all of their other services I think everyone will look back at this app’s launch as a major point in the company’s already incredible story.

I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

So it turns out my fears have been abated. The Mac App Store is great. Simply run Software Update on any Macintosh running Snow Leopard.

Erica Sudan has made a nice little utility called AirPlayer (look for the download link in the list at the bottom of the page) that makes it dead simple to use your Mac as an AirPlay destination device. Sort of like turning your Mac into a TV with an AppleTV attached.

I just used the YouTube application on my iPad and played the video back on my Mac using this utility and it works just fine. Simple too.

/via Lifehacker.

The new Reeder for Mac beta is out and it is wonderful. It ties together Reeder for iPhone and Reeder for iPad (both of which I’ve bought and paid for). I’m 100% sure that I will be purchasing Reeder for Mac too – when its fully baked.

My fears are being squelched. Sort of.

Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.

The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.

Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.

So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.

So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.

This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.

It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.

I think it is great. Flash has certainly been a tool to help us get to where we are today and no one could argue with its ubiquity. It is a tool that was good enough to get the job done and pretty much everyone had it.

But tools have cost and some are more expensive than others. Flash has proved to be a bit too expensive on the Mac for some people. At the cost of performance and battery life – some would rather do without that particular tool and go with another one. One that costs less, seemingly has the same quality but maybe less features. HTML5 video playback, on most up-to-date Macs, outperforms Flash video playback in nearly every way except features. But, arguably, most every day uses for video do not need many features.

So why do I think it is great that so many are uninstalling Flash? Because there hasn’t been enough pressure on Adobe over the years to improve Flash’s performance on the Mac. Adobe has been updating Flash for years but (and this point is probably arguable) they’ve been worried less about performance on the Mac then they’ve been worried perhaps about features. They’ve spent more time making Flash do more instead of simply doing it better.

Apple started putting pressure on Adobe by releasing the iPhone without Flash. Apple never said Flash didn’t do anything useful – they simply pointed out what needed to be improved in Flash for it to run on the iPhone. Performance and stability were the two biggest complaints from Apple. The two things Adobe seemingly hadn’t been focused on. And Apple also thought Flash didn’t have very good interactions with a touch-based interface. Something Adobe could probably address rather easily.

With the success of both the iPhone and iPad obviously the guys at Adobe should have been striving pretty hard to make Flash run much better on these mobile devices. Obviously they haven’t done that or been able to accomplish that because – well, Flash still isn’t on the iPhone.

Then Apple decided that the new Macbook Air performs much better without Flash being installed and so they’ve left it out of this model by default. Something they learned from not having Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The new Macbook Air can boast a considerably longer battery life and better CPU performance simply because it does not have Flash installed.

Sure, many new Macbook Air owners will still install Flash the moment their browser tells them they don’t have it – but I’d bet they are selling boat loads of these Airs so there are still going to be a lot of people without Flash running around the Web.

This recent fad of Flash being uninstalled en masse by the Mac tech crowd, the Fireballers if I may, is simply the next squeeze on Adobe. Yet another reason for Adobe to step up and alleviate the reasons people are uninstalling Flash.

Put simply, if Flash didn’t cause our Macs to melt and our batteries to die this conversation wouldn’t be happening. The iPhone would have shipped with Flash, the iPad too, and we’d all be happy to have Flash installed on our Macs. But the truth is Flash really sucks on the Mac. And as a Macintosh user and someone who works for a company with a very big Flash product – I’m hoping that Adobe is being squeezed hard enough now to make something finally happen. To finally make Flash better on the Mac.

Acorn, my photo editor and general image-manipulation application of choice for the Mac, has been updated and now includes a Tilt-Shift filter.

Above is an image I took with my first-generation iPhone in July 2007 in Philadelphia while attending BlogPhiladelphia. Acorn’s Tilt-Shift filter made an old photo interesting again.

Well done Gus.

I think I can spot a winner too, honestly.

Take the Mac for example. When I switched I told everyone I knew that they should switch to the Mac. Most people gave excuses (some good, most not) about why they “couldn’t switch” or “it wouldn’t work for them”. Now nearly everyone that I suggested the Mac to has at least one in their home as well as an iPhone and I wouldn’t doubt an iPad is next. Oh, and they’re all on Twitter too.

To them I say – I told you so.

Side note: OneWay is open source so there’s that.

/via TJ Luoma on TUAW.

“I sometimes sit and wonder what sort of applications could have been made for the Macintosh if, say, Apple had opened up an App Store that supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Would the river of money have been split into three smaller tributaries? Would people flock to the Mac the same way they have iPhone and now iPad? Arguably the main reasons people buy iPhones and iPads is the ease of finding/installing software and content. Imagine if things were that easy on the Mac. And imagine if developers were excited to build applications for the Mac again!”

Well, I needn’t wonder anymore. In answer to an email asking about a Mac App Store Steve Jobs has replied “Nope”.

I know developers wouldn’t want the closed nature of the current App Store in any type of Mac App Store but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be in favor of a Mac App Store to help promote/sell their applications.

Oh well, software on the Mac will have to find another way to survive.

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

iPhone was, as Scott Forstall recently put it, a gold rush for developers. Simple, relatively inexpensive applications for iPhone that hit the top paid, popular or featured lists on the App Store have made some serious dough for their developers. This caused a lot of developers to focus on iPhone either exclusively or in addition to their offerings for either the Mac or PC. They’ve spent a considerable amount of time focused on iPhone app development.

iPad is creating a similar environment. iPhone applications are being ported over to iPad and new applications are being developed and released as quickly as possible – and exclusively for iPad. A lot of time and effort is going into building these applications and I’m sure it will mean a lot of money in the pockets of developers.

You can’t blame the developers for going where the money is but I fear for the future of Mac software and I’m even beginning to fear for iPhone’s. I fear that one day all of the great work, the great applications, the incredible design will have migrated exclusively to iPad. That may not happen for some time and people are still making some serious money on making both Mac and iPhone applications – but the tide is definitely on its way out to the iPad sea.

I sometimes sit and wonder what sort of applications could have been made for the Macintosh if, say, Apple had opened up an App Store that supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Would the river of money have been split into three smaller tributaries? Would people flock to the Mac the same way they have iPhone and now iPad? Arguably the main reasons people buy iPhones and iPads is the ease of finding/installing software and content. Imagine if things were that easy on the Mac. And imagine if developers were excited to build applications for the Mac again!

Apple isn’t out of position yet to make this happen. With a single move, adding Mac software to the App Store, they could start a gold rush for Macintosh developers the way they have for iPhone and iPad developers. Unlike iPhone and iPad, though, it should be just another way to download applications – not the only way to do so. This way both developers and consumers could decide how to get applications themselves and not be forced one way or the other. I think, ultimately, developers would decide to distribute their applications through the App Store because that is how users would choose to get their applications but at least they’d have the choice. Wouldn’t that be great?

But this may never happen and that is why I fear for the future of Mac software.

Anyway, the Hud Growl Theme by the immensely talented Rogie of Komodo Media has brought me back to Growl. I’ve reinstalled it, tweaked the settings to be far less annoying and installed this theme to make my Growl experience better than ever – and valuable.

Update May 20, 2011: It turns out that Tomlinson’s website is down. So, here is a brief synopsis of what you can do to add this functionality to your Mac.

• Open Terminal
• In terminal, enter: open .profile
• Add the following lines of code
  # TextMate
  # set path and simple shell function
  export TEXTMATE_PATH=/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate
  mate () {
  $TEXTMATE_PATH $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6
  }
  # svn for TextMate (default editor, end-of-line types)
  export EDITOR="$TEXTMATE_PATH -w"
  export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

  # Coda
# set path
export CODA_PATH=/Applications/Coda.app
# function roughly like 'mate .' by expanding '.' to '*.htm*'
coda () {
if [[ "." == $1 ]]
then
open -a $CODA_PATH *.htm*
else
open -a $CODA_PATH $1 $2 $3
fi
}

• Save .profile
• Quit Terminal
• Restart Terminal

There is also a slightly more robust script written for Coda by Aditya Bhargava that handles a few more tidbits and it is available on GitHub.

Taken on October 15, 2004.

Five years ago today: Well, not really. I haven’t been keeping up with my “five years ago today posts” and so this one is a bit late. Switching to the Macintosh was a fairly long process for me due to the work I was doing at the time. My having the iMac up and on my desk, as my main computer at the time, was sort of a big deal for me.

The desk I had at the time was an old library table. It wasn’t very fashionable but it was sturdy and did its job until I switched to the IKEA desk that I have now.

The Microsoft Wireless keyboard and mouse, which came with a USB dongle that I despised, wasn’t a bad setup at the time. I miss the ergonomics of the keyboard, actually. The new, slim keyboards from Apple are incredibly nice to type on but are not as nice on the wrists as that keyboard was.

You’ll notice that a really old version of TheUberGeeks.net (a site that has since gone the way of the dinosaur) is loaded on the iMac. The good old days indeed.

In late August I opened iChat, as I typically do, only to see that no one was online. Having quite a few people in my buddy list this makes for a strange occurrence. I rarely see an empty buddy list. A few hours go by and I check it again, still – no one. After a little bit of investigation I determined that my buddy list simply hadn’t loaded correctly. Since this has happened in the past I decided to go offline, quit iChat, and start over.

That didn’t help. I decided to try to View -> Show Offline Buddies. Sure enough, all of my contacts where showing up offline. I asked Eliza if she was online, and she was, so I quickly deleted her from my buddy list, added her back – and she then showed up as being online. I thought that too was odd but I was happy to get it working again. I quickly went through a handful of contacts that I normally use AIM to chat with, deleted them, and added them back in((This process isn’t too difficult since iChat stores buddy information in the Mac OS Address Book.)).

Later I signed off of iChat and went on with my day. The next time I started iChat. Same thing happened again, even with the contacts that I had added back using the delete-add-again method. Weird.

Now it was time to get out the shovel.

A Google search or three later I found other people that had experienced similar problems. Some of them solved their issue by logging in and out of AIM a few times and poof, their buddy list returned. Others used the method I described above and the changes held. Others still completely “reinstalled” iChat by removing all of their accounts, preference files, and other related files and starting from scratch. I tried all of these solutions and still no dice.

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and so I thought there would be a good chance that the upgrade to a new version of iChat would hopefully help my situation. So I deleted everything related to iChat, upgraded to Snow Leopard, and hoped for the best. Again, it didn’t work.

So, I’m down to the point now where I believe that my account at AOL is somehow messed up. I am not sure where to go from here besides trying to contact someone on the AIM team. If you are on the AIM team, and you’re reading this, you can contact me and let me know how to fix this – and I will be grateful.

After climbing a tree at Lehigh University in an attempt to capture a cicada I ended up finding several skins left on a tree at about eye level. Go figure. There is tons of information on Cicadas on Wikipedia. Worth perusing.

Inspired by Chris Masto’s Workspace shot on Flickr – here is my way-too-messy desk. Made with Pano for iPhone.

Thanks to Apple for providing a solution in relatively short order.

Setting up the new 15-inch Macbook Pro. The Migration Assistant is absolutely incredible.

Update: After just the first charge the black Macbook is getting about 3 hours of battery life. Splendid.

Mike Rundle, whom I had the extreme pleasure of working with at 9rules, is – and I have absolutely no reservations about saying this out loud – one of the very best designers I will ever work with. He also doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with regards to programming. And he’s done just that with Beak – his foray into developing software for the Macintosh (which is, I think, exactly what he should be doing).

Beak is a simple, yet relatively full-featured Twitter application for the Macintosh that has Mike’s visual tastes dripping all over it. The icons in the application, as an example, could be picked out as Mike’s work from a hundred yards.

One of the differentiators that Beak has going for it, over any of the other Twitter applications I’ve used for the Mac, is the “Stats” tab. Mike chose to use the URL shortener Idek.net, which has a nice, clean, simple API, that allows him to show the number of click thrus on a URL that you’ve shortened from within Beak itself. I think this is both genius and handy. While Tweetie supports all of the URL shortening services I could ever want (and photo posting services too), it doesn’t support showing the statistics of those clicks nor does it even connect me to my account on said URL shorteners (neither does Beak, but at least I can easily check the stats tab).

There are several other nits that Mike has, no doubt pain stakingly [sic], poured over, refined, and included in the first version of this application. Profile pop-up boxes, in-line replies and retweets, and support for multiple accounts all seem like things that someone who was taking the easy way would have left out.

This is still “beta” software people. But I’m very much looking forward to what Mike ends up with before hitting 1.0 and even more looking forward to seeing what he does for his next trick in the world of Mac applications.

Reading his review, albeit late and after an update has already been released for it, has inspired me to dive into the application a little more fully. I’ve found even more than I thought was there before. Tweetie is a fantastic Twitter application for the Mac.

Tweetie for Mac, which I’ve been using all morning, allows for multiple accounts, posting from the browser, auto URL shortening, and much more. Although it feels like 1.0 it is certainly a well polished 1.0. Looking forward to watching this application mature.

I’m spoiled by a rich-editor in WordPress, that saves drafts automatically and even has multiple revisions, and so I’m sticking with WordPress for now. But if I was going to use an application to write with – it’d be MarsEdit.

Oh, and the latest version supports Tumblr now. Which is excellent.

Caius, of Random Genius, recently published some of these hidden preferences including:

• A way to restore the old tab bar.
• Turning off the auto-complete search bar.
• Removing Coverflow.
• …and much more.

I am not sure why you’d want to change some of these preferences (as I feel they are some of the best features of the new version of Safari), but they are there, you can if you want, and Caius shows you how.

Source: Safari 4 Hidden Preferences.

Date taken: February 17, 2004 | On a Mac.

Five years ago today: I had a video chat with Chris Clark while he was still in Perth, Australia. Now he’s somewhere in Canada or the US-west coast I think. I believe Chris was my first (!) video chat on a Macintosh but I could be mistaken.

Where ever you are right now Chris – g’day!

This script, by Martin Bergek, seems to be the simplest way I’ve found to install Git from source on the Macintosh.

Source: Install git on Mac OS X 10.5.
Via: Mike Stickel on Ma.gnolia.

I’m all for independent developers charging for their applications. In fact, I don’t mind really good indy devs to charge a premium for their product if they’re going to do their best to support their customers and build a great product.

I do mind when applications that cost money, which include a trial, do not really offer much of a trial at all.

Acquisition 2, a P2P and BitTorrent application, is probably the worst possible example of how I think developers should try to get people to purchase their applications. As irony would have it, Acquisition is an application most-often-used to steal applications, music, videos, etc. but that is besides the point.

While most application trials last for 30-days, Acquisition’s lasts for 1 hour. In fact, it doesn’t even last that long. The trial version of the application severely limits the use of the application in several ways. The unregistered version of Acquisition states that “search results [are] ignored randomly”. So you can never really tell how good Acquisition is at finding what it is you’re trying to download. After an hour Acquisition throttles the bandwidth that it uses for downloads. In my experience this limit is set to just under 10Kbps. Acquisition also shows you an “nag screen” ((A screen that asks you to purchase the application.)) that you can not hide even if you hide the application itself. It is a floating “window” that will not go away so long as you have the application open. These are thing things I found in my usage before turning the application off and uninstalling it.

Some trial.

While Eliza was painting our living room we had to unplug our Tivo so I needed to find the latest episode of Heroes. BitTorrent, my usual method for downloading TV Shows when things like this happen, wasn’t working for reasons I’ve yet to figure out. So, I thought I’d give Acquisition a trial.

To be clear; Acquisition is a very well designed application. Dave Wantanabe is a very good developer and has a few successful projects under his belt. I just think the unregistered version of this application is a bit too annoying for my tastes. It isn’t a question of quality, it is a question of methodology.

I am not sure what the solution to this problem actually is. My best guess would be to offer a real trial of the software, without any limitations whatsoever, for at least a few days. Then show the nag screen. Then, maybe, limit the software’s ability to download things quickly.  Having it not find the files you’re looking for makes the application seem crippled, not limited.

Versions has now come out of beta though and is considered stable enough for sale. Version 1.0 is ~$49 USD.

Source: Versions.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been using this solution for some time now – in fact, many of the Viddler team members have. It strikes an excellent balance between simplicity, ease of use, and efficiency to help us get our work done.

Source: Friday Favorite: Coda + Versions + Beanstalk.

The most notable take-away from this first weekend of my using third-party applications on my iPhone is how very different the applications I’ve downloaded from the store feel from the applications I’ve been using for over a year.  It is something I didn’t think about as I was anticipating the release of this update.  Nearly all of the iPhone applications that are currently available are, in my opinion, beta-level 1.0 applications.  Add to it that they’ve not been built by Apple, and we’re talking about a lot of poorly designed applications.

This isn’t to say that the applications that were release on day-one aren’t valuable, good applications to have, worth the money they’re asking for, or even that they’re bad applications in any sense.  It is just that they don’t feel nearly as refined as the applications that Apple has released themselves.

Some of the most glaring examples of this are Facebook’s application, Connected Flow’s Exposure, and the Mobile AIM (this is an iTunes link) client by AOL.

First, Facebook’s iPhone application, while built natively for the iPhone – is not nearly as refined or aesthetically pleasing as their Web application for the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great application, and I think it works well.  But at the moment I prefer their Web app.

Exposure.

Second, Connected Flow’s Exposure application, the one I linked to the other day, is a pretty good way to browse through Flickr.  If I had to guess at the UI of this application prior to launch I would have been dead wrong.  The application feels very much like the Contact app on the iPhone.  Click a menu item, slide to the right, see that information, then slide back.  But, clicking on the photo and clicking on the arrow give you two different information panes.  One is the photo, full-screen, another is the photo’s metadata (ie. number of views, comments, tags, etc.).  I think all of this information should be on the same panel, inline, and the ability to leave a comment on a photo should not be 3 or 4 clicks into the application.  I think this application should look like the iPhone’s built-in photo browser, with added metadata on touch.  But it isn’t.  It went a completely different direction than I would have assumed. It isn’t all bad, Exposure is free!

Mobile AIM

Last, at least in this post, is the Mobile AIM client. This application feels like someone built it that never built for the Macintosh before – but they tried really hard and nearly pulled it off.  Some of the UIs largest faults is that there is no way to sign out from the application unless you go into your iPhone’s settings panel first, there is no way to close an IM “tab” without first clicking edit on the active IMs list and then clicking the minus button, and that Mobile AIM does not use your iPhone’s contacts.  There are many, many things wrong with this application but the fact that it works and you can be on AIM anywhere in the world makes this one a must-have-installed application.

Let me be clear, I’ve chosen these applications not because they are the worst user interfaces, but because they are among some of the better ones.  These are some of the applications that I think are going to dramatically improve over time.  I think most iPhone application UIs will improve overtime, just as some of our favorite applications on the Macintosh have.  I think more applications will be released that are better than these and as they do, everyone will benefit from the competition.

Kudos to all of the developers that locked themselves in their closets and tried their best to provide good, stable applications for the launch of the App Store.  And I’m looking forward to the future versions of your applications.

Now, if I could just find time to go through the hundreds of applications in the App Store.

Update: Somewhat unrelated, new post called How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily.  And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface.  If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.

So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete.  Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.

Solution: Use Image Capture.

My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome.  Opening iPhoto is a chore.  Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time.  So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.

1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
6. Click “Download all”.

Here are some photos of the process.

Image capture.

New folder.

Delete the photos.

Empty camera roll result.

Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while.  When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.

What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone?  This can be done but it takes some work.  After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”.  In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone ((You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes.)) select this album for syncing.  This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.

I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!

Since Apple switched to OS X, just seven years ago, they have had 5 major releases of the Operating System as well as about 5 smaller releases per major release.  That is at least 20 updates to the operating system in seven years.  How many updates have the other guys done in that amount of time?

Each major release of Leopard brought with it at least 300 new features on average.  This is where OS X 10.6, code named Snow Leopard at the moment, will be different.

Here is a quote from Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering.

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering in the statement released by Apple. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

In my honest opinion, and really I’m trying not to be biased because I like the Mac so much, Leopard was an astounding “polishing” release of OS X.  Even though Apple managed to jam in another 300 or so features into Leopard when it was release, and even though they’ve refined many of these features since it was release in 3 separate updates, I still think Leopard has a fair amount of focus on efficiency, security, and polish.  Obviously Mr. Serlet doesn’t feel the same way.

I’m really looking forward to what Snow Leopard will bring.  Macworld is reporting that one major difference is that it will support “groundbreaking amounts of RAM”.  Well, that piques my interest.  But no matter what, I think that hitting the brakes to focus on Core in software development is not only rare in this business, but very refreshing.

Source: Macworld: Apple confirms OS X Snow Leopard.

Weighing in at a 13.7mb zip file this update has been one I’ve anticipated for a very long time.  Upon launching Delicious Library 2 I was prompted to update my OS to the latest version.  I didn’t even know I wasn’t running the latest version!  I’m guessing the Delicious Monster crew had to wait until 10.5.3 was released to get this out.

I’ll write more about Delicious Library 2 later – for now, just go grab a copy.

Source: Delicious-Monster.com

Update 8:56am EST:  Turns out that Wil may have jumped the gun here.  According to Software Update, 10.5.3 hasn’t been fully baked yet, or at least it hasn’t been released yet.  It doesn’t appear on the Apple downloads site for Mac OS X updates yet either.

The latest version of the Ta-da List widget.

Keegan Jones, the developer of the widget and a heckuva photographer, was nice enough to give me a copy of the working widget shortly after I complained about it not working.  I was able to get back up and running quickly and let him know that it was working.  Customer service++.

This makes my GTD circle complete.  I use Ta-da List on my iPhone while I’m on the go (mostly to add things to my list so I don’t forget them) and I use the widget when I’m on my computer to check things off as I get them done.

Head on over to Ta-da List, get an account, and download Keegan’s excellent widget.  It will help you, as it has me, Get Things Done for sure.

On Friday, while I was at Viddler HQ fooling around with Rob, I noticed my friend Dan Rubin twittered the following:

“if I ditch cable, buy an AppleTV and only watch shows I’ve BT’d (I’ll pay for movie rentals), I’ll save myself over $600/year (ATV included)”

Allow me, first, to decrypt this message for you.  What Dan is saying here is that if he ditched cable television, bought an Apple TV, only watched shows that he download via BitTorrent and movie rentals through the Apple TV, he’d save $600 per year even with the price of the Apple TV taken into consideration.

The part of this post that interested me most was him saying that he’d watch shows that he downloaded via BitTorrent on his TV with the Apple TV.  So on my way home from ViddlerHQ, a one and half hour drive from the office to my doorstep, I called Dan and asked if he found an easy way to accomplish this.

From my, albeit very minimal amount of, research I’ve found that getting the Apple TV to play most codecs is no “easy” task.  Sure if you like the command line and SSHing into the Apple TV to hack the crap out of it, then it might be right up your alley, but I am always up for the quickest, simplest solution.

That is when Dan told me how he currently solves this problem; Connect 360.

I had seen Connect 360 around the Interwebs before, but I had never given it a spin.  This weekend I downloaded the trial, tried it out, and within 10 minutes of using it on my Xbox 360, I bought it.

Connect 360, in as simplest terms as possible, tricks your Xbox 360 into thinking your Macintosh is a Windows PC – and by extension shares your iTunes, iPhoto, and Video libraries to be enjoyed on your TV.  It works like a charm too.

My Connect 360 Preference pane.

This simple preference pane is where you adjust your options for Connect 360.  From then on it runs as a background process and “just works”.

If you have an Xbox 360 and, like me, have been wanting to jump onto the Apple TV in order to share music, photos, and video to your TV – consider purchasing a copy of Connect 360.  I’m really happy I did.

Thanks again Dan.

“With creative features rivaling ‘Pro’ applications, while retaining plasq’s signature ease-of-use, Comic Life Magiq is a Quantum Evolution of Comic Life.”

I’m downloading the trial right now to give it a spin.  I’m fairly confident Eliza would like to get her hands on Comic Life Magiq to create some really neat photo projects.

Video demonstration of Comic Life Magiq

Source: Comic Life Magiq.
Related:  Other posts tagged with plasq.

In Tiger, when I clicked Show All I got a really nice Spotlight-only window that I could then drill down into the results more specifically.  For example, if I was searching for photos of my friend Chris Fehnel, the window in Tiger looked like this.

Tiger’s Spotlight “show all” window.

Pretty straight forward, right?  It breaks out Documents (or in this case conversations I had with Chris in iChat), Email messages, his Address Book entry, and photos that I had tagged with his name.  Brilliant!

Tiger’s Spotlight window also allowed for some sorting options on the right “panel”.  Sorting by date, kind, location of the file, etc, – is quick, easy, and straight forward.

Now, let’s take a look at Leopard’s Spotlight window when clicking Show All for a search for “Chris Fehnel”.

Leopard’s “show all” window.

I don’t even think I have to explain how bad this is.  Imagine being new to the Mac, and seeing this window.  This is horrible, unusable, and makes me wish I could downgrade to Tiger.

If anyone has any suggestions (besides Finder replacements), I’m all ears.
 

One of the many days of working at Panera. This one Eliza, Chris, and Andrew were there.

An example view in Times.

Personally I think this view is refreshing (though it could stand to use some more padding) and I can’t wait to see how this application really works.  The only application that I can remember having a view like this was FeedDemon, but that isn’t on the Macintosh.

Source: Read RSS Newsfeeds In Style With “Times” | The Apple Blog