The Author – Bart Busschots
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Nov
7
iTunes 7.5 Quietly and Subtly Improves iPod Touch
Filed Under Computers & Tech on November 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment
When I got my iPod Touch I started by outlining in detail all the little gripes I had with it. I did note that most of these little things could be fixed by future software updates. When I wrote that I envisioned these updates coming in the form of firmware updates to the iPod itself, I hadn’t expected that something as simple as an iTunes update could make any sort of change. Today Apple proved me wrong.
Probably the biggest gripe I had the with the photos feature was that the iPod Touch ignored the new Events feature added by iPhoto 7 (the version of iPhoto in iLife 08). This has now been fixed in a trivially simple way. When iTunes imports your photos it adds each event as an album. This is a very simple hack that is near-perfect. The only minor drawback it has it that it’s not possible to tell which albums are real albums and which are events. But, like I said, that’s a very minor thing. I’m really happy with this update as it makes photos much easier to find on the iPod but if I could really have my way I’d change one more thing. At the moment events are sorted with the oldest events at the top of the list and the newest at the bottom. I’d flip that the other way round.
P.S. This is my first test post with MarsEdit. I’ll be reporting on how I get on with it soon.
[tags]Apple, Mac, iPod Touch, iTunes, iPhoto, iTunes, iLife[/tags]
Oct
25
Pipette – Easy Colour Grabbing On OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 25, 2007 | 1 Comment
I heard about this app on a recent episode of the Nosilla Cast by my good friend Allison Sheridan and my immediate reaction was “this app shouldn’t need to exist”. I’ll admit it’s a strange reaction but bear with me. OS X comes with a built in utility, Digial Colour Meter (which resides in Applications->Utilities), which does literally everything Pipette does, and more! So, there really shouldn’t be a need for Pipette, and yet, there is. Why? Because Apple did an uncharacteristically bad job of making the the Digital Colour Meter intuitive, whereas Charcoal Design (who wrote Pipette) didn’t. Visually the interfaces have the same components, a windows showing the area around your mouse pointer zoomed in to aid precise selection, and a readout of the colour you are currently over. The difference is entirely in the interaction.
[tags]Pipette, Apple, OS X, Freeware, HTML Colour Codes[/tags]
Oct
21
Bleezer Test Post
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 21, 2007 | 8 Comments
This is a test post from within Bleezer to give it a test run. First impressions are not good. It has messed up my categories because it doesn’t support hierarchical categories, or if it does, it’s buggy as hell with WordPress. The GUI feels typical of free software, it feels crude and un-polished. As a Mac user I’m not at all impressed.
Oct
1
Two Nice Photo Editing Tips for the GIMP
Filed Under Photography on October 1, 2007 | 1 Comment
Those of you who actually poke around my Photo Gallery may have noticed that I’ve had a section for desktop wallpapers there for a while now. You may have wondered why I’d never blogged about it before. Well, the reason is that I wasn’t happy with my wallpapers. They all looked a bit flat to me. I spent a few hours this evening tweaking them and now I’m finally happy enough to announce them. They are still far from perfect. I still consider them amateur creations, but I’m not ashamed to announce them any more. So, here’s the link.
While trying to get these wallpapers into a descent state I came across two very cool GIMP tutorials, one which really lets you boost the colour intensity of your images, and another that lets you create really cool partly colourised black and white images.
[tags]GIMP, Image Processing, Photo Editing, Wallpapers[/tags]
Sep
30
Getting Things Done with iGTD
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 30, 2007 | 5 Comments
iGTD is a donation-ware program which implements the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) philosophy or methodology or what ever it is. However, I didn’t start experimenting with iGTD because it does the whole GTD thing, I started experimenting with it because I wanted a better way of keeping myself organised than a combination of iCal and Stickies! As it turns out though, I quite like the GTD way of doing things. It makes sense to give each task two classifcations, a project to which it belongs, and the context in which the task has to be done. For example, I put an entry into iGTD to remind me to write this post. It is filed under the project “Blog/NosillaCast” and the context “Home”. It’s this ability to see your tasks by both Context and Project that appeals to me.
[tags]iGTD, GTD, Getting Things Done, Apple, OS X.[/tags]
Sep
21
Teleport – Synergy the Mac Way
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A long time ago I discussed an easy way to run Synergy on OS X. This is a good solution if you want to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple machines with multiple OSes. However, if all the machines you want to share are Macs there is a better solution, Teleport. Teleport does everything Synergy does and some more besides. To be honest, I’m pretty sure Teleport is just Synergy with some Mac-specific features added in. However, they are good extra features and Teleport had the kind of fantastic user interface Mac users have come to demand. The entire program is contained within a System Preferences preference pane. You just install this pane (by double clicking it) and open up two ports on your firewall and you’re ready to go (you have to do this on all machines that will use Teleport).
The big improvements for me over the Synergy option described in my original post are:
- Simple Drag-and-Drop arrangement of displays
- An actual security model and support for encryption
- The ability to sync clip boards between machines
- The ability to transfer files by dragging them from one machine to another (only works well with small files)
- An overlay is displayed the main display when the mouse and keyboard are ‘teleported’ to another display. This overlay shows the teleporter logo, the name of the computer that the keyboard and mouse have been ‘teleported’ to and an arrow showing where that display is in relation to the master. (This feature alone was enough to convince me to switch.)
Teleport can be easily controlled via a menu bar icon and to really sweeten the deal it’s freeware 🙂
[tags]Teleport, Synergy, OS X[/tags]
Sep
16
Writing Presentations With Keynote ’08
Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 16, 2007 | 12 Comments
I have been an iLife user for years but hadn’t previously bought iWork because it was lacking a spreadsheet program. When iWork ’08 came out with Numbers I decided the time was right to give it a go. Just to put things into perspective, at work I use Microsoft Office (the Mac version), and at home I’ve been using OpenOffice and NeoOffice. OpenOffice and NeoOffice always strike me a striving to emulate MS Office, iWork doesn’t do this. It sets out to do Presentations, Documents and Spreadsheets in a simple and accessible way. It’s refreshing to use an office package with a simple interface instead of the usual glut of buttons everywhere. I’ll be writing about Pages and Numbers in the future but today I want to talk about the oldest of the iWork applications, the presentation app Keynote. This review is based on my experiences creating and then presenting a talk about science to students at my old secondary school the week before last. You can read about how I got on here see a PDF of my slides here.
[tags]Apple, iWork, KeyNote[/tags]
Sep
2
iPhoto 7 – A Closer Look
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography on September 2, 2007 | 7 Comments
In a follow up to my initial thoughts on the new iLife I want to have a more detailed look at the new iPhoto now that I’ve had some time to really get to use it. Although my overall impression is that this version of iPhoto offers significant improvements over the previous version, it is not perfect. One part of my work flow has become less intuitive in one sense, yet more intuitive in another. There is also still one very annoying omission from iPhoto.
[tags]iLife, iPhoto, Apple[/tags]
Aug
16
My Very First Thoughts on iLife ’08
Filed Under Computers & Tech on August 16, 2007 | 1 Comment
I literally just installed iLife ’08 an hour or so ago but already I’m happy with what I’m getting for my money. I would consider myself a power user of two of the iLife Apps: iPhoto, and Garage Band (but only for creating podcasts). I don’t have a video camera so I have no real use for iMovie or iDVD. Since iTunes is now updated separately from iLife and free I don’t consider it part of iLife any more. I was a very happy with the previous version of iLife, it worked very well for me but there were five things about it that annoyed me a bit. Even at this early stage I can see that at least four of those have been fixed. Those four fixes alone make me very happy but on top of that the whole suite has had a face-lift. It looks even slicker than it did before. There have been a lot of subtle UI tweaks which make things simpler and clearer as well as shinier. The bottom line is that my first impressions of iLife ’08 are all good, no nasty surprises, and no major disappointments. That really is the bottom line. If you want to find out what the four fixes are I’m so happy with read on, if not, you’re done 🙂
[tags]Apple, iLife[/tags]
Jul
20
Figure Out Where All Your Disk Space Went With Disk Inventory X
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on July 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Although we should all be very well organised and we should never forget about files on our disk, we all leave files lying around where we shouldn’t. Then we forget about the files, and a few months later we’re wondering just where all our disk space has gone! Ideally you’d want to be able to get a visual representation of your disk where large files stand out no matter where they’re hidden. Windows users have had a solution to this problem for a long time with WinDirStat. There is now a port of WinDirStat for OS X called Disk Inventory X. This is very simple and very intuitive program and what’s even better is that it’s free and open source! Although it’s a port of a Windows program the port is well done so it looks like a proper OS X application.
[tags]Apple, OS X, Disk Inventory X, WinDirStat, Freeware[/tags]