BetaKit - Helps You Prepare Your App Before App Store.

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“The whole idea behind DemoKit and the bit I’m working on now, which is BetaKit, is a suite of developer libraries that help you prepare your application before app store. BetaKit, which I’m still writing consists of a floating invisible windows with buttons at the corners that let your beta testers send in screen shots, console logs, device details, feedback, etc. directly from within the application.

The idea is that you add this to any app you’re sending out for beta testing, allowing users to send you screen shots and feedback while they are using the app.”

If you’re a developer, or you simply beta test a lot of apps, you know how much this is important. The problem is, Apple completely ignores the “beta apps before the AppStore” scene.

The cool thing is, the make money with them later.

Parachute: Automated Backups the Easy Way

I’ve never used Time Machine.

Ok, this can sound crazy, but I never felt the need of goin’ through the whole Time Machine process to backup files I can manually backup when I want. But you know, everyone has his favorite tools, so the choice it’s up to you.

Anyway, I think developing a backup utility for Mac should be a very hard task: I mean, even if I don’t use Time Machine, the rest of the world seems to love it. For this reason, creating from scratch an application to backup your Mac files it’s definitely difficult: you have to create something unique and make people want it.

Today I’d like to talk about a beta application I discovered yesterday, Parachute.

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Twitter Client Comes to Mac OS 9. Retroapps.

Grackle68k is a Twitter client which supports Mac OS 6 to Mac OS 9. Here are some screenshots:

And here’s a mockup of Tweetie running on Mac OS 9:

I remember I heard of someone many years ago who was tryin’ to port Nintendo GC games to the old NES. They called him “crazy”.

Is this the beginning of retroapps?

MacRuby

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MacRuby is a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector, and the CoreFoundation framework. While still a work in progress, it is the goal of MacRuby to enable the creation of full-fledged Mac OS X applications which do not sacrifice performance in order to enjoy the benefits of using Ruby.

Hey developers, this seems interesting.

Camino 2.0 Available

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Firefox little brother for Mac, Camino, has finally reached version 2.0. There are many improvements, including a tab overview feature and a better Applescript support. I never used Camino for more than 2 hours, mostly beacuse it was just a little copy of its older brother.

I’m curious about this 2.0 update.

If you use Camino, be sure to check out these beautiful toolbar icons by Matthew Rex.

iTunes Pro

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“They can keep growing the free iTunes in other directions if they want to, such as the App Store, movies, etc. But for serious music lovers with an appetite for pro-level music library management software, there needs to be an alternative.”

Great post from Betalogue, though I believe Apple won’t release such a thing anytime soon.

The problem is, music library organising isn’t seen as “professional task” (it is for me, I’d pay for someone to organise my music library. God knows how many times I wished I had a well sorted iTunes while recording with my band) and for this reason Cupertino doesn’t think people would ever need a pro version of iTunes. More important, they don’t care about the fact that iTunes has many problems and needs serious fixes, so it’s not all about “more actions”.

It’s about more stability. And of course, a pro look.

I’d love to have my own music encyclopedia.

Quicksilver b57 Available

Thanks to @elasticthreads I’ve just found out that Quicksilver b57 is available. The popular app launcher has finally gone out of the alpha and seems like it re-emerged with a group of open source developers. I’m gonna look into this.

I’m testing this new beta right now and it feels faster than ever. QS has indexed my Mac in less than 1 minute and overall the app is so very stable.

Anyway, here’s the official discussion. You can download the latest build here.