The Author – Bart Busschots
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Mar
2
Automator + Services = Image Editing Automation Heaven
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on March 2, 2011 | 6 Comments
Some Apple haters just love to say that there is nothing to a Mac except for flashy marketing. There are a million different reasons that’s BS, but one in particular is ease of automation. The learning curve to start automating your Mac is very short and very gentle. Without ever seeing a single line of code you can add your own custom functionality to OS X to relieve you of your most boring repetitive tasks. If you can tolerate seeing a line or two of code, you can take things even further and tie Unix command line tools straight into your GUI. The best candidates for automation are simple repetitive tasks that you do often. You might only save 30 seconds each time, but if do that 10 times a day that soon adds up! In this post I just want to give three simple examples to whet your appetite and hopefully get you thinking about some simple tasks in your computing life that you could easily automate.
Nov
8
Longest Words Followup – Java -v- Perl
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything), Computers & Tech on November 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday I posted about using Perl to solve the question “what’s the longest word I can type with just half a keyboard?”. My self an Connor were joking that it would be a lot more difficult with Java, first to write the code, then to run.
I literally used the identical algorithm for the Java program, even using the same variable names, and printed the results out identically (I verified this with the Unix diff command). I also did my best to use the various built-in Java functionality and java.util classes to minimise the amount of heavy lifting my code had to do.
Nov
8
Longest Word With Just Half a Keyboard?
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything), Computers & Tech on | 2 Comments
As some of you may know, I’ve been ill for the past few weeks now, and hence not working or podcasting. I spend a lot of my time doing nothing because I have no energy and often a headache, but when my head is clear I have a lot of thinking time since doing physical things is not possible. I even need to be careful not to type too much or my arms get very sore!
Anyhow – yesterday Bren Finan was chatting with me when he noticed that ‘yesterday’ uses only keys from one half of the keyboard. Which got him, and hence me, wondering if there was a longer word that can be written with just half a keyboard. (The quick-witted among you will probably spot that ‘Yesterday’ doesn’t actually count because the ‘y’ is on the wrong side of the divide on ergonomic keyboards.)
Jul
24
Review of Money3 by Jumsoft
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 24, 2010 | 12 Comments
THe week before last I posted a description of the final stages of my quest for a new personal finance app, and explained how I came to choose Money3 from Jumsoft, what I didn’t do was actually review the product though, so I thought I’d do that now. On the one hand I’ve only been using this product for a week and a half, but on the other I’ve been using it a LOT during that week and a half. In that time I’ve entered all the transactions for 2010 on six accounts covering all my personal and business transactions so far this year. That’s a lot of time using the software, so I think I’ve got a good flavour of what it’s like to really use it.
Jul
15
My Quest for a New Personal Finance App – Part 2
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 15, 2010 | 7 Comments
A few months ago I started my quest to replace Cha-Ching because of how bad my experience with their 2.0 beta was, and how poor their support response was (I got no response at all). I outlined the choices I’d been considering at that stage in part 1 of this article. Since that post there’s been a few developments, and as of this afternoon, I think my quest is at an end.
May
29
My First Thoughts on the iPad
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 29, 2010 | 10 Comments
I’ve been saying for a long time that the iPad looks cool, but that I wouldn’t be buying this first incarnation of apple’s tablet. I had two reasons for that, firstly, for me, it felt like a solution in search of a problem, and secondly, I’m very grumpy about Apple not allowing the iPad to share the iPhone’s data connection via tethering. Before people jump on me, I want to clarify that I’m not saying that the iPad is a solution in search of a problem in any sort of universal sense, but just in terms of my life at the time. Well, I stuck to my word and didn’t buy an iPad, but I do now own one thanks to the generosity of Allison & Steve Sheridan of the NosillaCast. I’ve had it for a few days now, so I thought it might be worth sharing my first impressions.
Apr
10
Reflections on Apple’s New iPhone Developer Agreement
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on April 10, 2010 | 3 Comments
Apple have added in a few lines of extra language to their Developer Agreement for the latest version of their iPhone SDK. You can read the exact wording changes on Daring Fireball, but the effect of the language is that you have to use Apple’s XCode development environment to compile all your code. This has had the effect of killing some unsupported means of making iPhone apps, most notably MonoTouch and Adobe’s about-to-be-released iPhone Flash bundler in CS5. My initial reaction was very negative (ask my Twitter followers), but that was purely an emotional response because Apple didn’t give us any reason for this change. Because Apple didn’t explain themselves, we were left to come up with our own explanations, and the first few that came to my mind were none too positive. Ultimately, I greatly dislike Objective C, so I was pissed off at the alternatives getting the chop. But, slowly, a different story is emerging. I still haven’t heard anything official from Apple, but I think I understand what’s going on, and it changes my opinions significantly.
Apr
4
Experimenting with Itsy (a native OS X Twitter Client)
Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 4, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’ve lost count of the amount of Twitter clients I’ve tried, and none are perfect. There may well be a client out there that does everything I need exactly how I want it to, but I’ve yet to find it. In recent times I’ve settled on Syrinx because it ticks most of the boxes, but it’s not perfect. I haven’t been actively search for a new client, but I’ve still been keeping my ears open. Hence, when Tim Verpoorten talked about Itsy on a recent episode of the Mac Review Cast I decided to give it a go.
Feb
21
My Aperture 3 Disaster
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on February 21, 2010 | 7 Comments
When Apple announced Aperture 3 I was excited. The more I read about it on their site, and the more video demos I watched, the more I fell in love. The feature-list has everything I really wanted, and more besides. For me the really big deal was a power local adjustments feature, as well as Faces and Places. They also fixed some of my quibbles with Aperture 2. On paper this app was perfect for me. In reality however, it turns out not to be ready for the main-stream yet. The design is spot-on, but the implementation feels like a poor beta. As I write this I’ve down-graded back to Aperture 2.
Feb
13
My Quest for a New Personal Finance App – Part 1
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 13, 2010 | 9 Comments
I have a feeling this is going to be a topic that occupies me for a while. I really want to make the right choice on this one, because firstly, all the options cost money, and secondly, you don’t want to keep swapping finance apps, you lose your historical data that way. So, in this first post I’m going to explain why I’m in the market for a new app, and what apps have come up in my initial trawl of options, and which ones I like enough to look at in great detail.