penguin sounds

This is pretty cool. A way to set the opacity on your Textmate window.

I’m usually against this sort of transparency-everywhere mentality; it reminds me of the Enlightenment window manager for Linux.

But this works really nicely.

I found this today and it’s too useful to not link to.

1. A bundle for editing zsh scripts
2. A terminal command for going to the directory the front textmate document resides in

Panic is looking for a bugtracker.

I’ve used Mantis to good effect. You can check out how Ardour uses it here.

Red Sweater Blog - It Should Be Free

I don’t care if someone charges for an app or not. But one thing that has always puzzled me is why there are so many free (as in beer) applications for the mac that aren’t also open source. If you’re giving your application away for free, why not show the source too?

My only guess is that the default-to-open-source attitude isn’t as in-grained in the mac world as is it elsewhere.

Well, I was wrong. Apple seems to think that signing all apps is more important than anything resembling a sane test+deployment strategy.

That better be a good iPhone simulator.

John Gruber writes about the iLounge article about the rumors about the upcoming iPhone SDK release.He makes it sound as if the only way to get an application is from the iTunes Store which Apple will be the gatekeeper of.

Here is why he is wrong: developers will need a way to get an application onto the iPhone before it has been released for sale. There will have to be a way to get incomplete applications onto the iPhone before their release to the iTunes Store. I haven’t seen anything in the rumors that say a developer or user can’t simply drag the application into iTunes like any music file for loading into the iPhone.

Tiered SDKs? Sure. Apple’s approval required for selling apps in the iTunes Store? Sure. Not being able to write and test a deployment of an app to the iPhone before getting Apple’s approval? So impractical, I don’t see how it would be workable for any developer at all. And if a developer can deploy an app, I don’t see any reason a user couldn’t use the same mechanism.

Matt Ball writes about the tendency of “delicious generation” apps to become abandonware.

That’s fine by me. My biggest problem with them is that they seem to be composed almost entirely of lightweight to-do list applications and other such “my first real program” homework assignments.

http://www.anxietyapp.com/
http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper
http://www.culturedcode.com/things/
http://www.objectivesatisfaction.com/what_todo/
http://www.jimmcgowan.net/Site/DoIt.html
http://www.nomicro.com/Products/ToDo/
http://www.magnetismstudios.com/MonkeyBusinessLabs/Checkmarker
http://www.bluehenley.com/products/dobedo/
http://www.mygnu.com/julius/proj_todo.html
http://www.myownapp.com/istk_app.html
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/MacOSX/HotPlan/
http://www.myownapp.com/meinkopp_app.html
http://www.desertsandsoftware.com/?todo_home
http://www.orionbelt.com/productMac.php
http://a-sharp.com/opal/opal

Nice icons and websites though. Makes me wonder where the developers’ real strengths lay.

They finally fixed threading. You heard it here first.

Taskpaper has a nice idea, using a plaintext microformat to store TODO lists. Seems unfortunate that it’s getting so much press a week before Leopard comes out with the same feature with presumably the same implementation.

I’ve long thought that TODO lists were overdue for an IMAP style, access this anywhere from any client, protocol. Nice to see Apple implementing it and it looks like they’re skipping the design-a-new-protocol phase and just using IMAP for the TODO list.

Next up, a standard way of syncing read RSS feeds? I’d like that very much, kthxbye.

I’m just staring at iMovie ‘08 and I gotta say, the interface is a mess. You’ve got this one button that reorders arrangement of the panes in the window. The animation is nice, but is that option really needed? I don’t see a way to hide the library even though it takes up have the window.

Likes

1. The scrubbing is pretty nice
2. I like the idea of having a cross-project video clip library

Dislikes

1. The timeline is missing, as feared
2. You can’t extract the audio from a video clip anymore
3. It doesn’t scan iTunes for video clips
4. clip selection is a little weird

The Programmer’s Perspective
iMovie has been around for a while. It used to run on OS 9. I’m sure it was getting pretty crufty, internally. It probably needed a rewrite and I’m sure the programmers were excited.

I’m not sure why the timeline was cut. It was possible to completely avoid the timeline in the old iMovie. Timelines are a major feature and should be planned into the UI from the start, but if the new iMovie was written with an eye to the Model-View-Controller pattern, and it was just rewritten from scratch, so it should have been, it shouldn’t be difficult to add another view of the underlying data.

I think that a lot of the people who don’t care about the killing of iMovie just don’t care about movie making. I’m not sure what their favorite programs are, but I can guess that someone like John Gruber would complain if Apple removed the Kern and Ligature items from the Text menu, confusing as those features are. Apple doesn’t make great software because they dumb it down. They make great software because they figure out the best way to expose features.

I also think that the “let them use Final Cut Pro/Express/iMovie ‘06″ sentiment is bullshit. Final Cut has a completely different UI. I should know; I own it. iMovie ‘06 is a great program, but I don’t think it’s wrong of me to want to see it continue to be updated. The scrubbing in the new iMovie ‘08 is great. I’d love to see that added.

Also, I don’t think that Apple is providing iMovie ‘06 out of consideration to those of us affected by the change in workflow. It’s doing it because the new iMovie ‘08 won’t run on Macs that are only 1.5 years old.

So in summation:
iMovie ‘08 is great if all you want to do is produce the moral equivelent of this clip:

Yeah. Have fun with that. Actually, you can’t even do that because the song is timed to start when the goalie throws the first punch.

People who care about timing and soundtracks and generally have taste about these things, well, we’re screwed.