If you stay a lot of time away from your Macbook but you’ve always wanted to control what’s happening to your Mac while you’re not there, this tutorial is aimed at you.
Today I’ll teach you how you can easily turn your iSight into a security camera system, with automatic refresh time and FTP upload.
Enjoy!
“Hoddie compared Windows Mobile to the iPhone, whose apps he described as “beautiful,” which encourages third-party developers to produce apps of similar quality.
He added that Microsoft’s second problem is segmentation in the hardware ecosystem. Windows Mobile ships with several different manufacturers’ hardware, including HTC, LG and Samsung. The problem? From a developer perspective, that requires coding an app for several phones with different UI styles, buttons and screen sizes. (The same problem, incidentally, has started to plague Android developers.)
That would give the iPhone another advantage: The iPhone operates on a closed system, which can only run on Apple hardware, meaning third-party developers can produce apps and games that work exclusively with the iPhone. Therefore, despite Apple’s questionable and controversial approval policy for iPhone apps, developers can code one app that works with 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices, which is less time consuming than developing several versions of one app for a variety of Windows Mobile smartphones. In turn, that spells out to a larger number of apps in the App Store, which enables Apple’s hardware to cater to a larger and broader audience.
The inability to recognize the new smartphone audience is another one of Microsoft’s flaws, Rubin said. Microsoft’s mobile OS history is rooted in personal digital assistants, which were marketed toward enterprise audiences. Today, the smartphone has shifted into the mainstream as a consumer device, and yet Windows Mobile is still largely focused on enterprise features.”
Great piece from Brian Chen (Wired) which describes very well the situation of Windows Mobile. You know, closed systems are better sometimes.
I really don’t know how many Twitter clients for iPhone are available in the AppStore. 2000? 3000? Most of them are unusable apps, Twitter.com ripoffs sold as native apps or even ugly copies of other applications. Then there’s the elite, the “Upper East Side” of Twitter clients: you can see Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twittelator, Birdbrain and Twitbit walking there. They’re feature rich apps, with awesome interfaces and great ideas.
Now, developing an elitè Twitter app for iPhone nowadays is hard: I mean, you have to face Loren Brichter, and this is not exactly what people call “an easy task”. But a few developers understood that the big deal is not goin’ against Tweetie: it’s developing an application users would use together with Tweetie. Something different, yet usable and sexy.
Meet Reportage.
There’s something great about indipendent Mac developers: sometimes they exactly know which application would be interesting. That’s what Malarkey Software did: they knew it would be awesome to download entire Flickr photosets.
And here comes Photo Grabbr.
AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:
Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
Support for native code integration.
The ability to open a file with its default application.
Multi-touch and gesture support.
New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
Global error handling.
Improved cross-platform printing
Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.
Time for decent AIR apps?
Thanks to Silvio Rizzi I’m very happy to announce a new giveaway on MacStories: we have 5 promo codes of Reeder up for grabs!
Did you miss my review of Reeder? Here it is.
You’d like to enter the contest? Details after the jump!
Thanks to MacHeist, I had the chance to download and test Shovebox, a lightweight organizer for Mac OS X. Then, I found out that there was a Shovebox app for iPhone too, so I decided to give it a try. Expect a review soon.
Anyway, this is not a review of Shovebox mobile. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can export items from Shovebox mobile and import them into Yojimbo on your Mac. As you can guess, Shovebox mobile + Yojimbo could become the ultimate data organizer setup: every data you shove on the go can be easily imported into Yojimbo on your desktop.
The process is a little bit complex and it’s based on an Automator workflow I created, but once you’ve set up everything it will take 2 seconds to export/import all the files.
Enjoy!
Say you own a Magic Mouse or a multitouch Macbook: gestures are great, aren’t they? You can perform actions by simply tapping / moving your fingers on the multitouch surface and this is a huge time saver in my opinion. Gestures are even better than keyboard shortcuts sometimes.
Now, Mac OS has a big problem with gestures: you can’t assign custom gestures to the applications you like. I mean, why can’t I tell Tweetie to refresh with a simple gesture? Now, I’d hate to say so but..
..There’s an app for that.
There’s a keyboard shortcut I use everyday, hundreds of times: Cmd + C, Copy. Everyone copies something every single day. Now, if you copy a lot of stuff and you use Mac OS, you should have noticed the lack of a built in clipboard manager which stores all of your copied data enabling you to paste them later.
Fortunately there are many 3rd party clipboard managers that can do this: in this roundup I’ve collected 15 of the most famous clipboard apps available for Mac OS X.
What I was looking while searching for a good clipboard manager was an easy to use app, yet powerful and with a good user interface.
Enjoy!
