MacDevcenter posts

We here at TUAW are big fans of Twitter, the simple web service that asks, 'What are you doing?' It is pointless, it is a time waster, but above all it is lots of fun. Gordon Meyer over at the Mac DevCenter seems to like Twitter as well, but he seems to be on a quest to make it useful. This article explains how he is using some home automation software, a dash of Applescript, and Twitter to enable his house to let him know when a number of things happen.

I'll just continue having fun on Twitter, but I encourage others to hack away.

It's an idea that, frankly, we wish we had thought of first -- and that's not to say we won't do it anyway, nyah! -- but the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter squad has posted a few candidates for the top applications of 2006. With ten deep-thinking and developer-focused geektributors (including our own Erica Sadun), the nominated apps tend toward the utilitarian: Apple Remote Desktop, Parallels, a smattering of QuickTime codecs and audio tools, and popular favorite Yojimbo.

For my money, Todd Ogasawara has picked it right with Parallels. There's no other product with the impact, press/blogosphere attention, and overall buzz of the multi-OS virtualization app that could. Who knows... perhaps next year we'll be talking about VMware and SketchFighter Alpha as the best apps around.

What's your favorite application from the past 353 days? Let us know below.

Speaking of text (and when am I speaking of anything else?) Giles over that the MacDevCenter has served up a heaping pile of text tips. These tips cover everything from Markdown, to vi, to Textmate. I love plain text, myself, and I was happy to learn a few things (though one of my favorite text to HTML tools, Textile, isn't mentioned) that will help me continue pumping out a seemingly never ending stream of verbiage.

Doesn't that just make you smile?

The feature that got on of the most enthusiastic responses from the crowd the other day was album art retrieval in iTunes 7. This seems like a no brainer, I mean Apple has lots of cover art and it gives users a nice warm fuzzy to get something for free.

Scot Hacker has noticed that album art is handled a bit differently in iTunes 7. All your old album art is actually part of the music file, so you can move the music file and the art will come along for the ride. This is still supported in iTunes 7, but if you download cover art via the built in feature it isn't embedded in the file. Instead it goes to ~Music/iTunes/Album Artwork which holds a bunch of folders filled with files with a format of .itc. This, Scot presumes, allows CoverFlow to work smoothly because it just has to query that folder structure instead of looking in the actual music file. Oh, and we have heard reports from users that if you re-import all your cover art to adhere to this new format OS X's Cover art screen saver no longer works.

Scot isn't the only one at the MacDevcenter wrestling with the new cover art feature. Chris has encountered some hazards with the process. Now, the matches between your music and the iTunes Store have to be fuzzy since there isn't a codified way that all album info is stored. This results in mismatches some of the time (I was trying to get cover art for the 'Best of Queen' last night and iTunes kept assigning the cover to 'The Best of Cat Stevens.' The bottom line? Be careful when using this feature because you might not be getting the cover art you expect.

You have a few spare moments right now (I mean you're at work, or in class) so why not test your Mac trivia knowledge? Chris Adamson has whipped up a javascript based game that he called 'Who Wants to Be a Mac-ionaire?' Take the challenge and post your results in the comment.

I got up to the $50,000 question, how about you? Oh, and no cheating please.

Soundflower, a freeware app that is near and dear to many a podcaster, has been updated and is now a Universal Binary. It'll now shunt audio to places audio wasn't able to go before on Intel Macs, and yet it is still free.

Ahh, Mac developers, how I love you so!

[via MacDevCenter]

Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.

But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.

The MacDevCenter has a nice post up about some of the often over looked UI niceties of iTunes. I didn't know that you could convert video to an iPod friendly format right in iTunes. Genius!

Additional columns, pop out windows, and that little triangle in the main status window are also covered. One thing that was overlooked (though perhaps it is so obvious that it wasn't worth a mention) is the 'Browse' button. I can't tell you how many people just use iTunes with the default view of the song library. They lament that they can't find any of their music so I point out the Browse view and it is like I am their iTunes superhero.

What features in iTunes do you think deserve more praise? What would you like to see in future versions of iTunes?

We've mentioned Path Finder, the full featured Finder alternative from Cocoatech, a number of times here on TUAW. I am sure there are a few of you that were upset because the latest version of Path Finder only works with OS X 10.4. The MacDevCenter sat down with Steve Gehrman and Neil Lee, the men behind the app, to talk about the decision to only support Tiger with Pathfinder 4.

They both make compelling arguments for Tiger only support (mostly they wanted to include the latest and greatest Cocoa features, and since there is only one guy coding it didn't seem sensible to support two different versions of Path Fider, a Tiger specific version and a pre-Tiger version). Well worth a read, if you are interested in Mac development.

In his latest podcast, Mac author David Pogue takes a look at Automator. In the course of the four and-a-half minute podcast David discusses Automator's basic functions, the drag-and-drop interface and some potential usages (stand alone workflows, plug-ins and iCal events). He also briefly compares Automator and Applescript, and mentions Apple's Automator webpage and Automatorworld.com as good online resources (Scott took a look at Automatorworld a little while ago).

I've got a small collection of Automator plug-ins that I use regularly. One to resize images I call "Width to 150," one to send files to my folder on our fileserver at work that I call "To Recently Imported" and finally one that makes email attachments of selected files, called "Attach." What are you doing with Automator? Let us know.