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Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
Chris Wilson and his team at Microsoft release a “readiness toolkit,” for IE 8, which includes (among other things), a beta of the application and a new debugging tool long the lines of Firebug. Nice.
As of today, the Web Standards movement is over. We won.
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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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Wired: Keep It Simple, Stupid
Wired’s story on 37signals is a good read — fair, balanced, and interesting. There are a few factual inaccuracies and a few odd comments (like “they would rather fail than adapt,” in the last paragraph), but overall it’s quite well-done.
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Beanstalk — Version Control with a Human Face
I love that these guys are putting a design face on top of Subversion. There’s a tendency amongst designers, it seems, to think, “version control is just for coders,” when in reality version control is something everyone ought to be using for all sorts of files. Beanstalk looks like they’re making it easy to do just that.
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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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Photoshop’s new logo.
It’s basically and aqua button with a hole in it. And a tail.
Weird.
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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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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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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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Yahoo! Finance: Blue Flavor Launches Mobile Web 2.0 Application Portal for iPhone
Our Leaflets press release has hit the wire and is making the rounds.
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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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Versions: Mac Subversion Client
Although the tools built into TextMate cover most of my needs, this appears to be a tremendously-designed and full-featured SVN client for the Mac (of course, I’m going off tiny, partial screenshots, so take it with a grain of salt). I can’t wait to try it out. Private beta coming soon.
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Daring Fireball: WWDC 2007 Keynote News
Gruber has basically the same take as me on this year’s WWDC: meh. Leopard looks neat enough and I certainly do want it, but there’s nothing I’ve seen that really feels revolutionary. Everything is just nice incremental changes. The one exception — maybe — is Time Machine, but we saw that a year ago, so it didn’t feel that exciting this time around, either.
The iPhone-doesn’t-require-an-SDK thing was pretty lame. We’ve all known that you could — and that people will — build web apps targeted at the iPhone for six months now. That’s neat, but it’d definitely not the same as writing apps for the iPhone. The lack of real third-party development on the iPhone isn’t a deal-breaker for me, but it’s certainly a bummer. And it just doesn’t make very much sense. Every other mobile phone on the market today has downloadable third-party apps. Every single one. Steve’s lines about it reducing stability or security are bullshit. It’s god dammed Mac OS X, right? If so, then it has memory protection. If allowing third-party development for the iPhone is unreliable and insecure, then so is allowing third-party development for Macs. And yet, Apple allows that.
Apple should just say what it means: It is going to ride out the iPhone as a closed platform for as long as it can. Eventually, they’ll probably let some choice companies in on development for it. This is exactly the plan Apple has used with the iPod, and it’s worked beautifully. I don’t blame them for wanting to repeat it with the iPhone. But why can’t they just say it?
Safari on Windows was a nice surprise. Doesn’t affect me a lot personally, but I’m glad to see it happen.
And finally: does anyone else think that Steve Jobs is personally obsessed with Cover Flow? In reading the MacRumorsLive coverage of the Keynote today, almost every line ended with “Cover Flow.” Pretty much every app on Leopard and the iPhone now include some for of Cover Flow. Hell, even the Apple website now includes Cover Flow as a means of navigation. It’s just starting to feel like Steve’s pet gadget and I just have this impression of the designers at Apple rolling their eyes every time Steve asks for it again. “Well, guys, Steve pretty much liked the new version of iCal. However, he wants you to be able to browser your to-dos using Cover Flow. Yeah, I know. But, Steve said. Sorry, guys.”
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Pixelmator
Cool-looking OS X app. Like most cool-looking things, it’s not available yet.
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Microsoft Surface: Behind the Scenes with video
Gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one — thing looks incredible.
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Panic Coda: One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
Okay, okay — let’s everyone just chill out a minute. I love Panic, and I’ve bought every app they’ve ever released. I think they’re probably the single best Mac development company in the world. But hot damn, this app has been out for all of five minutes and my feed reader is already overflowing with jizz coming out of every web developer’s pants. Yes, it look very cool, but let’s wait a few more than five minutes before we proclaim it the next coming of the Lord himself, okay? Has anyone actually built anything with it yet?
I live in TextMate. It’s my everything. It’s going to be really hard to get me to switch away from it. But if anyone can do it, Panic can. Initially, I feel like Coda has some really kick ass tools built in, and I’m definitely going to give it a shot. But it’s missing two very big TextMate features (for me personally): Subversion integration and a Django bundle. I rely pretty heavily on my Subversion repository, and not having tab completion and syntax coloring for Django would be pretty hard to get used to at this point.
We’ll see. This does look like an awesome app, especially if you just do HTML/CSS and not so much programming. But TextMate it is not — at least not yet, and not rom my initial five-minute glance at Coda. I’ll be keeping my eye on it, though.
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Adobe Creative Suite 3
Adobe now has full information about CS3 on their website. I want, I want.
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E - TextEditor: The power of TextMate on Windows
There are a lot of bad things about being stuck on Windows, but the worst one I can think of is not having TextMate (by far the single application I use most on my Mac). E - TextEditor aims to solve the problem (albeit with a really silly name).
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Slife and Slifeshare
Holy shit. Onlife becomes Slife, adds a web service, and a REST API. I see a lot of additions to my lifestream in the near future. Awesome.
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Old Skool
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Old Skool
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Humanized: Enso
A very nice looking Quicksilver-slike app for Windows, which also happens to be written in Python. Looks like it would make Windows at least 100% more bearable. I couldn’t help but noticing that some of the developers were on Macs. Heh.
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CNET reviews Windows Vista Ultimate
Overall, it sounds like Vista is a good, solid upgrade to Windows XP, but when CNET (who hates Apple) says, “Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive,” you know us Mac fans won’t be getting jealous of Vista users anytime soon.
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KeyCue
Sweet little Mac app for helping you find and remember keyboard shortcuts for menu commands in any app. Via Lisa McMillan.
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Leopard’s Terminal.app has tabs.
w00t.
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Onlife
Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with sofware applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the related data. This looks looks awesome, but it’s missing the one feature I want the most: the ability to export the data (so that I can import it into my Django apps, of course, and make more fun stuff on this website).
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Microsoft reveals details of Office 2008 for Mac
Universal binaries, with a heavily reworked version of PowerPoint and a UI that looks like a significant improvement, indeed.
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Habari
I’ve noticed several bloggers recently jumped the WordPress ship to try out Habari, a new blogging platform built on PHP5 using more modern programming concepts (read: object-oriented) and giving you more flexibility in databases (read: PostgreSQL support). Good to hear this is out there, because frankly, most of the existing crop of blogging tools (MT, WordPress, etc.) are not “modern” in any sense of the word. Habari isn’t for me (I’m too hooked on Python now), but it may be worth looking into if you want a nice PHP-based blogging platform.
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TubeSock - Rip videos from YouTube
$15 for a Mac app that will convert YouTube videos to iPod/iTunes/FrontRow formats for me? Yes, please!
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Rutter on Mac browser font rendering
Just recently Jeffrey Zeldman has been bemoaning the sub-standard state of text rendering in Firefox on a Mac. And the sad truth is he only skimmed the surface; Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino may render even the same font differently.
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Jon HIcks: Cairo beats Safari
Jon Hicks points out that new versions of Firefox and Camino will use Cairo, a improved graphics library that makes text rendering far, far better than the current Gecko engine — and maybe even better than WebKit. This may just be the thing that finally convinces me to switch to Firefox or Camino full time.
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Browser Smackdown: Firefox vs. IE vs. Opera vs. Safari
“Four experts go head-to-head (to-head-to-head) to defend their Web browser of choice in an opinionated free-for-all.” Decent article. I’m still firmly in the Safari camp for everyday browsing, but I often switch to FF when in development mode.
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IE7 running in Parallels “coherence” mode
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IE7 running in Parallels “coherence” mode
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Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3036 Beta
Wow. There are a lot of killer new features in Parallels. This is one seriously ambitious release. Can’t wait to give it a shot.
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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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