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Hey, Developers! How Can We Improve the Installation of Mac Apps?

There an interesting debate which is going on since many years about how Mac apps should be distributed an installed. Back in September John Gruber wrote this interesting piece, outlining the pros and cons of three popular formats of delivering Mac apps: .zip, .dmg and installer. He was inspired by this post where Alexander Limi (founder of Plone, working at Mozilla now) discussed the problems of the installation process of Firefox on the Mac platform.

In this post I’ll discuss all the possible scenarios, referring to other articles found on the web to give you my idea of how Mac applications should be distributed.

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That’s Why Cydia Store Is Great: Multifl0w and Overboard

Though the App Store was a revolution for Apple, and besides the fact that everybody uses the App Store, there are many apps which Apple will never approve. You know, SDK. Backgrounder, BiteSMS, Twidget,Winterboard: the best hacks for your iPhone can only be installed with Cydia, the amazing “alternative App Store” from Saurik. Obviously, you’ll have to jailbreak to install and use Cydia.

But anyway, if you already have a jailbroken phone, you should know that Saurik launched a few months ago the Cydia Store, a real store within Cydia where you can purchase paid apps. Today, I’d like to talk about two new apps from the Cydia Store, Overboard and Multifl0w.

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How To Export Notes from Yojimbo and Convert Them to .rtf

You know how much I love Yojimbo. It’s great information organizer for Mac OS X which lets you store all your data like text, photos and password in one big Library. I wrote a couple of posts about Yojimbo here and here, be sure to read them to get an overview of this amazing application.

Anyway, Yojimbo has one drawback: sync and export. The developers (BareBones Software) don’t seem to be willing to release an iPhone app anytime soon, so the only way to “sync” Yojimbo would be that of exporting the whole database to Dropbox and import it later on another machine. But still, this is not a real sync, nor ax export feature: you can’t view single items in the database.

So, I wrote an Automator workflow to export notes from Yojimbo and convert them to .rtf. It uses the textutil shell script (which should come by default on any Mac OS computer) and lets you view and edit all the notes you have in Yojimbo in external apps such as TextEdit. It has some limitations anyway, we’ll see them together.

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