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Posts tagged with "mac"

Reminder: Macworld 2011 Kicks Off Today

Apple may have stopped attending Macworld and announcing new products there, but the expo is doing well. So well that, according to stats provided by CultOfMac, more than 25,000 attendees are expected to walk around booths at the Moscone Center where 230 exhibitors will launch 100 new products. The show’s numbers are up from last year, when they dramatically dropped since Apple confirmed they wouldn’t go to Macworld anymore.

The show is shaping up good,” Macworld general manager Paul Kent told CultofMac.com. “If the numbers go right, we’re going to have about a 25% increase in attendance.

It’s a really fun time,” said Kent. “Macworld is a celebration. There’s a high joy quotient. It’s a fun place to be. There’s not a lot of places were people can do this any more.

We won’t be at Macworld, but we will try to aggregate, starting today through Saturday, the best new accessories, apps and Mac software we’ll be notified of. For all the details about the expo and the schedule of events, go here.

Power Mac Wall Clock & The Mighty Pendulum

No, what you’re reading above isn’t the title of a new movie or a web comic, it’s an actual mod realized by Justin Tyler Moore. He took a Power  Mac G4, cut it down on the side, place a “cheap clock mechanism” inside and made it all work together with a “Mighty Pendulum” – that is, a Mighty Mouse becoming a pendulum.

Full album can be viewed here. Now somebody please make me a Magic Clock. [Engadget via Justin Tyler Moore]

The Finder’s Legendary Selections→

The Finder’s Legendary Selections

Terrific post by Mike Lee on the Finder’s selection behavior. Lots of things I didn’t know in there:

If you’re not a software engineer building apps for the Mac, none of this really matters. It’s just an interesting bit of trivia you can use to not really impress anyone.

If you are a software engineer building apps for the Mac, buckle up, because like Past Me, you have no fucking idea how these selections work, which is a real problem, because one day you are going to implement selection behavior in your app and completely fuck it up.

I say go read it no matter if you’re a software engineer or not.

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Cathode Is A Vintage Terminal For OS X

Here’s an interesting new Mac app for you Terminal junkies looking for new shiny this morning. Cathode came out of beta a few weeks ago, and it’s an alternative Terminal app for OS X with lots of “vintage” themes to apply to the regular session window. As the name suggests, Cathode emulates those old TV screens you might have seen (and owned, too) in the 1970s and 1980s – indeed cathodic monitors.

In spite of its vintage look, the app is entirely written in modern OpenGL and Cocoa, with graphic processing done by the Mac’s GPU. The app, in fact, uses a lot of animations to replicate the behavior of old televisions with flickering fonts, interlacing, curvatures and flashes. It really resembles the old monitor your grandparents might still be using today. You can choose between different themes and adjust fonts and colors, enter fullscreen mode and set the curvature of the screen to your liking.

The licensing method is clever as well: you can use the app for free, but the picture quality will slowly degrade until Cathode is relaunched. If you purchase a license ($20), you can customize the interface and avoid picture degradation.

Go download Cathode here. More screenshots below. Read more

BootXChanger Revitalizes Your Mac Boot Screen

Apple’s default boot screen is an admittedly bland and very grey affair, luckily BootXChanger (which has had more than three years of development) offers a simple drag and drop way to add your own image and change the background color.

It’s recommended that the image you use to replace the Apple logo should be 90x90 pixels, any larger and depending on your Mac it may be resized or not show up at all. Images can have transparency and this is a good way to ensure the image matches the background. As a nice extra touch, BootXChanger comes with some sample images such as the old rainbow Apple logo and the Finder logo.

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Free “Plus” Widget Turns Dashboard Into A Launchpad

Launchpad is a feature of the upcoming Lion operating system that will allow users to have quick access to all their apps and folders through an iPad-like overlay interface. A few weeks ago, we saw developers already trying to imitate this functionality on Snow Leopard as I covered QuickPick, an app that brings a Launchpad-like UI to OS X 10.6. Plus, a new widget by Junecloud, takes a similar approach to QuickPick but it’s free and works with the system’s Dashboard.

Plus can turn anything into a Dashboard widget. That’s right: a widget to create other widgets; sort of meta, and it works. You can in fact drop multiple instances of Plus on to the Dashboard, and make each one a different shortcut to something else. Like an app, a screenshot, a document, a web address or a folder. Anything that you can drag out of the Finder can be dropped into Plus and become a widget of its own; Plus even lets you decide the size of the item’s preview. With a bit of organization and time, you can thus turn the Dashboard into a grid of most used apps and shortcuts, although you won’t be able to expand folders within the overlay the way we’ve seen in the Launchpad preview.

All things considered, Plus is a cool widget that’s being given away for free and definitely works as expected. Give it a try.

NoteTote: Download Files Remotely Using Simplenote

Previously known as MobileDL and now available at $8.99 in the Mac App Store, NoteTote is an interesting solution to trigger downloads remotely on your Mac using the iPhone, iPad or any other device that has access to Simplenote. For as simple as it sounds, all you have to do to start a download on your Mac is paste a URL into a specific note. NoteTote, in fact, upon logging into the service with your credentials will create a “special” NoteTote_Downloads note that will always stay there, monitored by the app running on your Mac’s menubar. While you’re away from your Mac and you want to start a download remotely, open the Simplenote app, paste the link and that’s it. On a regular interval (which can be adjusted in the Preferences) NoteTote will look for URLs inserted in the special note and try to download them. All of this while you don’t have access to your Mac. Read more