Forget WWDC, the iPhone App Store and the Apple Design Awards. The one thing we want to see this summer is the new Indiana Jones movie!
We're sure some of you feel the same anticipation, so why not let your Mac in on the fun? The workers at The Iconfactory have launched their month-long tribute to Dr. Jones with Indy-themed freeware icon sets, one for each movie. So far, the Raiders of the Lost Ark set has been released, while The Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull icon sets will debut later this month.
If your using CandyBar (we've written about CandyBar several times), you can make use of the Indy-themed Dock. Finally, round things of with this great desktop picture (it's also available for the iPhone!).
Craig Hockenberry is the man, the myth, and the legend behind the absolute best Twitter application on the Mac (he works for the Iconfactory). We would all love to see Twitterrific on the iPhone, but Craig offers up a "healthy dose of reality" regarding the iPhone SDK and backgrounding services (applications that run in the background even though the phone is running a different foreground app).
In a recent blog post, Craig attempts to explain why Apple will not be giving developers access to backgrounding services on the iPhone. He points out that in a mockup design of "Mobile Twitterrific," based on the jailbreak/community toolchain, refreshing the XML data from Twitter every 5 minutes led to a dead iPhone battery in only 4 hours.
"The heart of the problem [is] the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements," he says. "Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to suck."
He also reiterated what Apple said about the "Core Location" feature that Apple provided in the SDK: use it only on an "as-needed" basis. Craig said that the issue of backgrounding services may get addressed later on, but right now Apple is preventing iPhone developers from "shooting themselves in the foot." He said that it will take months before the desktop developers have gotten the mindset of an iPhone developer, and that thinking like a desktop developer will lead to bad designs.
Sunday night's talkcast was a delightful discussion, as we were joined by the personable and knowledgeable duo of Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux from Iconfactory. Ged and Craig gave us the lowdown on the history of the company, the origins of Twitterrific (it's amazing what inspiration comes to you in the shower), the coevolution of Twitter with the now-dominant Mac client, and the promise of the upcoming iPhone development explosion.
We even gave away a few copies of Frenzic to our lucky listeners, courtesy of our guests. Great questions and contributions from Brett, Christina, Dave, Cory, and last-minute contributor Erica rounded out an extra-long (1:15!) show. Download direct, listen in your browser or subscribe to the TalkShoe feed in iTunes.
Join us again on Sunday night for our next live show, 10 pm ET, where we'll be reviewing Thursday's press event and the upcoming roadmap for iPhone development. Assuming that UPS gets its act together, I should be able to offer some impressions of the new MacBook Pro as well.
Earlier this week, The Iconfactory released iPulse version 2.1.9 (we've written about iPulse before). For the uninitiated, iPulse is a great system-monitoring utility which tracks information like CPU usage, motherboard temperature, available disk space and a whole lot more.
As you would expect from Iconfactory software, its appearance is customizable by applying any of a great number of skins, or "jackets," from the jacket gallery. Changes to v. 2.1.9 include
Support for reading temperature on all Intel Macs
A new Dock menu
A global preference to hide the dock icon
There's more, of course; you can get the full run-down here.
iPulse requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and can be downloaded from the Iconfactory website. A single license costs $12.95 USD. Version 2.1.9 is a free upgrade for registered users.
If I had any talent whatsoever in the area of graphic design xScope would be a go to app in my toolbox. xScope, for those not in the know, is a great little app that makes measuring onscreen elements a snap. xScope 2.0 raises the ante by adding a Dimensions tool that works as if by magic. Turning on the Dimensions tool lets you find dimensions between various elements (or using a lasso tool) quickly and easily. It is tough to describe, but check out this cool video of it in action.
There are a bunch of new features and improvements, all of which are listed here, which make xScope 2 more than worth the $26.95 for you pixel pushers out there.
The developers at Panic have released CandyBar version 3.1.2. If you're unfamiliar, CandyBar 3 is a super simple and fun way to customize Mac OS X's icons and dock (Leopard required). Version 3 introduced some very cool features - like Pixadex integration - that make this killer app even cooler.
Changes to version 3.1.2 include:
Importing Pixadex libraries on first launch is more reliable
Application and volume icons update more reliably in the Finder
Fixed a potential problem with generic file icons
There's more, of course, and you can read the change log here. CandyBar 3.1.2 is a free upgrade for registered users for version 3.x (a single license will cost you $29US).
Phill Ryu did us a solid and dropped a quick note about an early preview of Dine-o-Matic 2 from Iconfactory. Just install the widget, punch in the names and numbers of your favorite restaurants, and a meal decision is only one click away. New in this version is categorization of the different places, more restaurant information, price filtering, and Google maps integration. I don't know if the original version had this, but the satisfying coin click and the neon buzzing are nice touches.
No more arguing about what to eat, or passive-aggressive "I don't care, whatever you're in the mood for is fine" back-and-forth. It is kind of a bummer that you have to type everything in (would be nice to integrate it with Grubhub or some other site like that) but considering that I only order from maybe five or six different places anyway, it's easy enough to punch them all in and have them ready to go when I'm up for some random ordering. If you're the type that orders out almost as much as you eat in (guilty as charged), Dine-O-Matic is worth checking out.
Frenzic is a frantic game which has the player match and then move colored game pieces to form pies. Trust me, it is a lot more fun than that sounds, and it is even more fun when you play against someone else.
Sadly, as with any game based on color recognition, there was a small portion of society that couldn't play Frenzic (or at least not very well). That's right, I'm talking about the color blind people of the world, of which I am one. Happily Frenzic 1.2 introduced a new option to help those of us who have trouble distinguishing colors.
The current version of Frenzic is 1.2.1, the most recent update fixed an issue with the demo timing out. Frenzic costs $14.95 (though there is a guru package which includes an lifetime of online play for $24.95).
Here's a fun little tutorial by Ged from Iconfactory, showing how to easily use icons (exported to a certain size) as contact images for the iPhone. His example is with the Dino-o-Matic icons from IF, which are (cheer!) free this week, but the fact is that this is a great idea for almost any contacts that you don't have a readily available picture for. You could use any icon you like, use Pixadex to get it in the right form, and then plug it right into your Address Book.
As Ged notes in an update, while this is perfect for iPhone, it could be used for anything, including just Address Book itself. Because why say with a crappy, out-of-focus picture what you could say with a beautiful icon?
Last week, we pointed out the good news that The Iconfactory had resized their entire collection of desktop images for use with the iPhone (how cool does Nibbler look on my iPhone at right? Very cool). The problem is that it's kind of a pain to get them onto your iPhone.
While you're waiting to get your hands on an iPhone, why not head on over to the Iconfactory? They just announced iPhone versions of each of their free, high quality, wallpaper images. The pixel pushers over there took the time to artfully crop each image into an iPhone worthy piece of art. At least this way you'll be able to find your iPhone in a pile of the little wonders.
Frenzic is an addictive puzzle game from the folks at The Iconfactory and ARTIS, which we took a look at back in February. It's really quite fun, and would be right at home on the iPhone (or iPod for that matter). I can see myself playing Frenzic while sitting on the train.
The folks at The Iconfactory pitched the idea of Frenzic for iPhone to Apple at WWDC, but they could use a little love from you, The People! Check out this post at gedblog to learn how you can pester ask Apple to make Frenzic an iPhone app. Good luck, guys!
You either love or hate Twitter, the simple web phenom that asks, 'What are you doing?' We here at TUAW are unabashedly in the 'love' column, and our love for Twitter is greatly enhanced by the Iconfactory's free Twitter client, Twitterrific.
We wrote about the Twitterrific 2.1 Beta not too long ago, and now the final version of Twitterriffic 2.1 is available for download. New in 2.1 are:
Support for multiple logins
Enhanced Applescripting
Growl support
Dragging of tweets into other apps (it pastes the tweet's permalink into the app)
And a host of other small enhancements. Twitterriffic 2.1 is free, Universal, and available now.
The Iconfactory has announced a new public beta of Twitterrific 2.0, their killer Twitter client. Glen Wosley got a sneak peek last Friday just before the public beta was announced, and this 2.0 beta v6 update addresses a number of issues with the new version as well as dealing with Twitter's own growing pains, as well as hints at the possibility of future Growl support. As with the previous version, we echo The Iconfactory and highly recommend reading through the What's New file to learn about the changes, but the gist of the story is that this version adds Quit/Configure buttons to Twitterrific's startup screen (the one you see while its downloading the first batch of tweets), and it also adds some logging and fixes for the network issues everyone is experiencing due to Twitter's exploding popularity. The end of this What's New file is also where the company hints at Growl support in a future version, though it merely states they're reading the SDK (Software Development Kit) for now.
To grab a copy of this latest beta, hit up the announcement tweet from the Twitterrific Twitter account.
It's an understatement to say that we TUAW bloggers have caught the Twitter bug, as many of us have personal accounts in addition to our main TUAW twitterings. With our latest web 2.0 obsession live and kicking, Glenn Wolsey just made our day by posting some sneak peek screenshots of a Twitterrific 2.0 beta (what, Iconfactory: no TUAW private beta love?). There are apparently over 25 new features and changes in this major upgrade to The Iconfactory's slick and sexy client, and I can personally say I'm the most excited for the option to have names and tweets both in-line (pictured). I'm not quite so hip on the decision to leave the username on its own line though; why not simply bump the tweet up next to their name like most IM clients? This would save a lot of space by compacting updates and leaving room for more tweets.
Personal UI design requests aside, head over to Glenn's post for details and screenshots on some other big changes, including an expandable text entry area and the ability to chose between a few update sounds. If you're just as excited as we are to get your hands on Twitterrific 2.0, stay tuned here or follow their Twitter account for the news of when it drops.
Forget WWDC, the iPhone App Store and the Apple Design Awards. The one thing we want to see this summer is the new Indiana Jones movie!
Craig Hockenberry is the man, the myth, and the legend behind 
Sunday night's 
Earlier this week, The Iconfactory released 
If I had any talent whatsoever in the area of graphic design 
The developers at Panic have released 
Phill Ryu did us a solid and dropped a quick note about 
Last week, 
While you're waiting to get your hands on an iPhone, why not head on over to the Iconfactory? They just 
You either love or hate 
The Iconfactory has 
