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Reflection.app: AirPlay Mirroring to your Mac
I’m not sure I need it,but it feels pretty damn cool nonetheless. I currently use a product called AirServer to send AirPlay audio and video to my Mac, but this actually mirrors the entire display of your iOS device onto your Mac.
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Reflection.app: AirPlay Mirroring to your Mac
I’m not sure I need it,but it feels pretty damn cool nonetheless. I currently use a product called AirServer to send AirPlay audio and video to my Mac, but this actually mirrors the entire display of your iOS device onto your Mac.
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Web Dev App Reviews from the Pros – Part 1, Mac
Fuel Your Apps asked me, and several other web pros including Dan Rubin and Tim Van Damme, what apps we code in on OS X.
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mxcl’s homebrew
Interesting-looking alternative to MacPorts and Fink.
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understudy
An in-progress plugin for Front Row that adds Hulu and Netflix streaming support. I’ve recently moved to a tiny studio condo with no TV and no cable, so I’m in the process of trying to set up a good iMac-based TV solution. Once I get it all figured out, it’ll probably be worth a blog post about my experiences.
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Espresso: Upcoming text editor for Mac
I’m skeptical of the idea that any app will really be able to compete with TextMate, but this does look quite sexy. I’ll be watching.
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Tools We Use: Textmate
Kenny has a nice post over the Blue Flavor blog detailing a bunch of reasons why TextMate rocks our socks off. I sort of hate to admit it as someone who identifies as a designer moreso than a coder, but TextMate is probably the single most-used and most important piece of software on my Mac. I use it for everything.
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Cornerstone: GUI SVN Client
Another Mac SVN client. This one, at a glance, looks more interesting than Versions, to me.
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Preview of Versions SVN Client
I had been excitedly awaiting Versions for a long time, until I gave up and declared it vaporware. Now, it looks like it may be for real. This preview is very enticing. Want.
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Django Admin Omnigraffle Stencil
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful.
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Cabel Sasser: Coda Confidential
I’ve had this one in my “to watch later” pile for several weeks, and I finally got around to it last night. Cabel’s one of the more entertaining speakers I’ve ever head the pleasure of seeing in person, and this talk about the development of Coda certainly lives up to that. He’s insightful, funny, and interesting. Check it out. In my opinion, Panic is still synonymous with great Mac software — even as I was never the target market for Coda and Expan drive has largely made Transmit unnecessary for me.
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Daring Fireball: ExpanDrive
As much trouble as I’ve had with sshfs being slow as balls, I think I’m going to splure for this $29 app, which Gruber gives a glorius review.
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Silverback: Guerrilla usability testing from Clearleft
Silverback, from our friends at Clearleft, is a really nice new Mac app for usability testing that makes uses of Macs’ built in iSight, the Apple Remote, and more. It’s a simple app, but it’s extremely well-designed (as you’d expect from Clearleft!), and appears to do what it does very elegantly. If you do usability testing with live subjects, you really should check it out. Also noteworthy to an animals lover like me: Clearleft is donating 10% of the profits to saving the gorillas. Awesome.
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Noodlesoft: Hazel
Hazel is a neat-looking little Mac app that let you do e-mail rule-like filtering on your filesystem. Sounds cool.
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Anxiety: lightweight to-do management for Mac
I’ve only played with it for about 60 seconds, but this little app looks great, so far. Simple, fast, and uses the built in Leopard system-wide To-Do service. Love it, so far. Thanks be to Gruber.
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Leopard Stacks “overlays”
This is a freaking great idea. Sadly, it’s a pain in the ass to implement, so I won’t bother. But this is exactly the sort of thing Apple should have built-into Stacks to make them better. I love the concept of Stacks, but the implementation is definitely lacking. I’m sure it’ll get better over the next few releases of OS X — just like everything else has.
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Spotlight Strikes Back: In Leopard, It Works Great
Matt Nuberg on what makes Leopard’s Spotlight so great. I agree with every word: Spotlight in Leopard is freakin’ badass. Love it.
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Apple to release iPhone/iPod touch SDK in February
With an official SDK in place, mark my words: Mac OS X mobile (or whatever you want to call it) is about to become the most significant platform in a long, long time.
Here’s hoping it’s pretty “open” to lots of developers.
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iPhone Popup Growl Style by Wilson Miner
Wilson has created a sweet little iPhone-esque Growl notification style. I love it! First one I’ve ever seen that convinced me to switch away from the Music Video style.
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Apple: iPhone apps to go unchallenged
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of ipod marketing, has publicly stated that Apple is taking a neutral position on the subject of native third-party iPhone apps: Apple won’t support them at all, but it also won’t attempt to deter their development via legal means or via software updates that would break them.
This is terrific news. Apple took this stance with the Apple TV, and it worked wonderfully for them. This is what I needed to hear from Apple in order for me to consider installing third party apps on my iPhone. Now, all I need is a real killer app that gives me a reason to invest the time — I haven’t seen it, thus far.
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Phill Ryu: Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. Or Aqua.
Phill discusses the (apparent) new direction for the visual design of OS X in Leopard — an outer space theme. Personally, I like the futuristic look in general, but I’m a bit dismayed by the outer space photography as backgrounds in time machine and on the desktop. It’s just too over-the-top for my tastes.
Then again, I usually roll with a solid color for my desktop background. So I guess I’m dull.
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Font rendering philosophies of Windows and Mac OS X
“…Windows looks sharper at the expense of not actually being a very accurate representation of the text. The Mac with it’s design/DTP background is a much more accurate representation and scales more naturally than Windows which consequently jumps around a lot vertically.”
The piece includes a great example of just how true this is. It also includes this great quotes:
Visit“The issue is reminiscent of the ‘I hate black bars on wide-screen films’ brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display.”
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iPhone Central: The iPhone Hacking Kit, step by step
If you’ve got the balls for it, this looks like the most complete iPhone hacking guide around.
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Django, running on an iPhone
Jacob Kaplan-Moss installed Django (and Python, obviously) on his iPhone. Then, he used Django’s database introspection tool to build Django models for the iPhone’s built-in call database. Then, he used DJango’s built-in admin tool to view/edit said call database. Then, he took a screenshot of it.
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Vista puts Mac OS X font rendering to shame
George Ou puts an image of Vista’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing next to Mac OS X’s non-sub-pixel anti-aliasing and declares Vista the winner. No shit, Sherlock. How about a level playing field?
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EA officially backs off of Mac releases
It’s one thing to not release your games for Mac. It’s another thing entirely to stand on stage with Steve Jobs Himself™ and promise you’re going to release your games for Mac, and then not do it. How lame.
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Blue Flavor: New Features and a New Leaflet!
Garrett outlines what’s new in the latest release of Leaflets. Some nice additions, here. If you’re an iPhone user, check it out!
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Subtraction: Unsung Software
Khoi’s post about has favorite Mac software you’ve never heard of has generated a ton of comments with other suggestions. Can’t wait to go through this list!
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Inman: Hacking the iPhone on an Intel Mac
Shaun gives the best instructions I’ve seen yet on how to do all sort of nifty hackery on your iPhone. And I say “your iPhone,” because I wouldn’t dare try it on mine.
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Things: A forthcoming Mac GTD app
Assuming this sees the light of day and is as good as it appears from a single screenshot, it may well give OmniFocus a run for its money. Looking forward to giving it a try, anyway.
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Leaflets Blog: Mobile User Experience
Keith Robinson writes about why we made the decisions we did, how it fits (or doesn’t) into the “one web” strategy, and why we built Leaflets with web standards — even though some of those standards are only surrently supported by one browser.
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The strange case of ‘Made for iPhone’ websites
Although I understand the reasoning here (“the iPhone can view full web sites, why make simplified ones for it”?), I can’t help but think anyone who doesn’t appreciate something like Leaflets hasn’t actually tried to use an iPhone over EDGE for serious browsing.
Just because the iPhone has a close-to-desktop-class browser doesn’t make the experience the same as a desktop computer. Consider:
- The iPhone has a tiny screen compared to desktop computers.
- The iPhone displays about one fourth the number of pixels most desktop computers display.
- The iPhone has no Flash.
- The iPhone has no Java.
- The iPhone’s browser doesn’t support hover or mouseover effects (this one is huge!).
- The pointing device on the iPhone (your finger) is probably five times fatter than the pointing device on your desktop computer (a mouse cursor).
- You constantly have to zoom in and out while using an iPhone’s browser.
The list goes on. And these don’t even begin to address the fact that EDGE is painfully slow most of the time. The iPhone may be the best browsing experience on a phone to date (by far), but a desktop experience it is not.
My personal feeling is that no site should use user agent sniffing to prevent iPhone (or other mobile device) users from seeing the full, desktop version of a site. Although they probably exist, I don’t know of any sites that do this.
On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to provide iPhone (or other mobile device users) with an alternative version of a site that is optimized for that device.
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Fix your iPhone’s notes app: Die, Marker Felt, Die!
Jacob Kaplan-Moss: “Like everyone else, I got sick of looking at Marker Felt on my iPhone. So I did something about it.”
I’m not ballsy enough to do it on my new Jesus Phone, but if you’ve got an iPhone and gonads of steel, this one’s for you.
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Daring Fireball: Non-Top-Posting Reply Scripts for Apple Mail
If you’re one of those people (like Gruber) who hates top-posting but wants (or has) to use Apple Mail for some reason, John has written and released a couple of clever AppleScripts to invoke bottom-posting, instead.
Personally, I’ve never much minded top-posting. I usually top-post, unless I specifically want to respond point-by-point, in which case I reply inline. According to Wikipedia, people who have been online since the heyday of Usenet are supposed to be crotchety old farts who hate top-posting — but it really doesn’t bother me (and yes, I was a Usenet fiend back in the early 90s — still am, to some degree).
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How To: Use IRC On The iPhone With Colloquy
I haven’t complained much about the lack of an SDK for the iPhone, mostly because the iPhone already has 90% of the apps I’d want on it. But IRC is one of the three biggies it’s missing, for me personally (the other two are instant messaging and a good RSS reader). This is definitely a hack, but it’s a fairly elegant one and Nathan reported success with it. Worth giving a shot, if you want to IRC on the road.
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Home office
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iPhone: pottymouth friendly
I actually celebrated this quite loudly when I discovered it last night. It sure beats trying to call Mike D. a “pussy” in an SMS and having it “corrected” to “puppy” by that God-forsaken T9.
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FSF: iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them
Very convincing. I’m getting out of the iPhone line and into the GPLv3 line. Anyone know where it starts?
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iPhone Competitor Talking Points Revealed
I really do believe the the lack of IM, MMS, Song ID, and MP3s-as-ringtone will hurt the iPhone in some circles — especially the younger demographic which loves all this stuff. That is, if the consumers are smart enough to realize this stuff is missing before they plunk down their $600. Given that all of these features are pretty much a given on even the cheapest phones, it’s likely people will just assume they’re on the iPhone, as well — and be frustrated (after* their purchase.
All could possibly be added via a simple software update, but who knows whether Apple will do that or not. None of them bother me much personally, but I know a lot of people for whom the lack of these features would be a dealbreaker.
Sprint and Verizon would do well to exploit them.
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Apple: iPhone keyboard
Apple has posted a video about how the virtual keyboard in iPhone works. After reading the reviews and seeing this, I’m convinced it works very well if you simply trust it and blast away. That’s going to be hard to get used to, especially after how much I don’t trust T9. Once I do, though, it seems I’ll be able to type pretty damn fast. Check out the video — iPhone’s keyboard definitely has some smart programming behind it to help prevent and fix your mistakes.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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