Greenflame » Mac

Mobile Flickr for iPhone

stepheng — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:04:47 +0000

While I won’t be owning an iPhone in the near future I was interested to stumble across this Flickr app for it created by my ‘cousin-in-law’ : Mobile Flickr, coming to an iPhone near you — Sneak.

Videos of it working over at Mobile Flickr | Apple iPhone School

Being an old UNIX programmer I love the idea of assembling your own set of small, powerful applications doing one task well rather than monolithic applications that try to do too much and fail at doing everything well. I don’t use Flickr but I like the look of this small app.

iTunes and navigable MP3 discs

stepheng — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:26:08 +0000

Something I didn’t know when making MP3 disks in iTunes - Macworld | Playlist | Creating navigable MP3 discs.

Blast from the past

stepheng — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:37:18 +0000

Ages ago (way back in 1990-91, I think) one of my flatmates had the game OIDS on his computer. It ran just fine on a Mac Plus and on the new Mac LC’s that had just come out. Good memories of the flat all taking turns to see who could get the highest score.

Any now I find that there’s a version for Mac OS X available from Xavagus Prime Software. I downloaded it and all the game playing memories came back. Unfortunately, the old game playing reflexes haven’t come back with the memories - can’t seem to fly anywhere near as well as I once did.

Back online - it’s alive (again)

stepheng — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:01:37 +0000

The iBook power adaptor died. After years of faithful service the cable that wrapped around the yo-yo adaptor broke, and I’ve spent a reasonable bit of time trying to find an old style iBook adaptor to plug in. However, I found one this morning and we’re up and charging. Luckily, backups had been made so no worries there mostly. I can’t belief how expensive both Apple and third-party adaptors are, though.

The G3 lives on - and is still fine for word processing, music and podcasts, email, blogging, DVDs, presentations and basic web browsing. Not so good for video play back (Flash or MP4) though - and web pages with lots of Flash items etc. tend to drag.

The screen may die in a little bit though, so it may become limited to a desk with a monitor and keyboard for chidren’s homework in the near future

Bean: An OS X Word Processor

stepheng — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:05:11 +0000

To add to my mostly Mac OS X based list of writing tools -
Bean: An OS X Word Processor.

(Oh, and I think I left NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) off the original list too.)

Flying with the MacBook Air

stepheng — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:58:07 +0000

Not that I’m going to buy a MacBook Air in the near future, but this might make some people think twice - Wide Awake Developers: Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight.

Mac users make the big screen

stepheng — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:41:12 +0000

A new documentary about Mac users and their love affair with the Apple brand. See Doco puts Macheads under the microscope - Stuff.co.nz. Trailer available here and movie web site at MacHEADS.

When Apple got it wrong, we got it right later?

stepheng — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:44:45 +0000

A list (with pictures) of some of the times Apple didn’t get it right. Of course, the definition of not getting something right is often in the eye of the beholder (or user), and items like the Newton, Apple IIc and Lisa (all of which I’ve used) all contained elements that contributed to better designs in the future (for Apple and its competitors). I think the MacBook Air might be in this category of a niche-product that helps stimulate all sorts of developments down the line, independent of how successful a system it is in its own right.

See Learning From Failure: Apple’s Most Notorious Flops

Word 2008 and pasting plain text

stepheng — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:45:39 +0000

Useful article (with AppleScript snippet) for adding some helpful functionality to Word 2008 for Mac for pasting plain text into a document. Pasting plain text is something I do fairly frequently, so I’ve filed this link away for the possible time I have to use Word 2008. See TidBITS Problem Solving: Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance.

Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers

stepheng — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:38:07 +0000

Problogger, Darren Rowse, publishes his list of useful blogging tools for Mac OS X. I use (or have tried many of them) - Ecto (article editor which I have on both Mac and Windows), CyberDuck (FTP client), ImageWell (for quick manipulation and posting of images) and Firefox. I prefer TextWrangler over TextEdit though (I used BBEdit Lite from way back)

The full list is at 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers

There’s no standalone newsreader application in there though because he uses Google Reader to do that. See Greenflame · NetNewsWire (Free now!) for my preference there. I used the Sage plug-in for Firefox for ages, as well as Bloglines, but I really like having one app that does a single job well, but can talk to other apps if need be.