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With the advent of Leopard CoverFlow has been integrated as a main part of the Mac OS X user interface. This elegant way off displaying graphical data is not only rather helpful but also very beautiful to watch. If you’d love to include CoverFlow like animations into your Motion or Final Cut projects without the hazzle of manually aligning / creating all the tweens, CoverFlux comes to your rescue. This free plugin from industrial revolution offers many a option to create stunning coverflow-esque animations in minutes. 

You need, however, to install the free FxFactory2 plugin, in order to use CoverFlux, as CoverFlux is a FxFactory Plugin itself.

Although Time Machine offers a very slick and intuitive interface to your past data, there can be situations, where you’d rather like a much more common list style approach to the changes off a specific file. Tms, a neat commandline tool from FernLightning does just that. It offers a cvs / svn like interface to your Time Machine data. Among the most interesting features is being able to Diff between two versions, being able to list the difference between two snapshops and listing all unique versions of a file.

The tool as well as the corresponding documentation can be found here.

I found this site a long time ago, bookmarked it, forgot about it, and just got remembered of it’s existance by a post on Daring Fireball. One can upload a picture, and they’ll analyze it in order to tell you which font is being used in the picture. Really Good.

Google’s Android, the imho only real competitor to the iPhone SDK, if it comes to the future of mobile computing, has so far been lacking information regarding usability and its interface. However yesterday, on the Google IO Keynote, lots of details were revealed. They demonstrated the Android touchscreen prototype and explained how the main interface, webbrowser and more works. You can find demonstration videos and pictures on slashgear. Out of all “so called” iPhone Competitors, this is in my opinion the first serious solution. The interface seems to be thoughtfuly designed and easily navigable by hand / touch. The Browser has interesting options to ease the information overload on such a small device.

The iPhone has obviously stirred the mobile marked in a big way (judge for example how suddenly every new phone is being compared to the iPhone, sometimes even by the manufacturer himself), competitors haven’t currently been able to offer a serious competitor though. The reason for this is rather simple: The lack of software. A quickly hacked and enhanced interface based on Symbian or Windows Mobile can’t compete with a Plattform like OS X iPhone, which is on the one hand based on years of Mac OS X experience, and on the other hand has been thoughtfully designed over years.

Android however seems to adress these issues. Google has the manpower, will and backing to develop a serious plattform, and smart decisions, like building on Linux, stress the future significance of this plattform. If Apple and Google play their moves right, there might be two major mobile plattforms in the future: OS X iPhone and Android - Symbian, Windows Mobile et al moving more and more out of significance.

Following on the fresh release of Mac OS X 10.5.3, version 6 of the iPhone SDK just arrived. Details regarding changes and additions can be found in TUAW’s liveblog. As we already speculated, there seems to be a strong correlation between the new SDK and 10.5.3, as it is a prequisite for installing.

After a rather long wait, 10.5.3 is finally out. The update is 420MB big, so it seems to have a rather big effect on the system. You can find Apple’s detailed notes about the update here. The included graphics fixes should enhance scrolling not only in Apple’s own applications (like for example iPhoto) but also in newer third party applications like Delicious Library 2.

Its interesting to note, that Deric Horn, Apple’s Application Frameworks Evangelist, announced the update on Twitter noting that “iPhone developers take note”. Since there’s no word about anything iPhone in the Apple Release Notes, I wonder if somewhere hidden in the update is additional software to support the upcoming iPhone OS X 2.0 launch.

There’re by now quite many sites offering ways to browse and create custom color palettes online. ColourLovers, Colorcombos or Kuler - just to name a few. Wear palettes is a service which I’ve been using for a rather long time now that offers similar results by means of a different approach: Instead of listing user-contributed palettes, the author examines pictures from the well-known style-blog “The Sartorialist” and identifies the main colours of the protagonists’ clothes.

What I like most about this idea is that I, in addition to finding a nice color palette, can just as well browse through interesting clothes or style combinations.

Wear Palettes.

The Blender Foundation just released the newest Version of the popular and very powerful open source 3d Modeller “Blender 3D”. The work on their second open source movie “Big Buck Bunny” has resulted in a new version with a greatly improved feature set. There’s a new “Hair and Fur” System, with astonishing capabilities, a completely rewritten Particle system, Cloth Simulation, improved Render Baking, Approximate Ambient Occlusion (awesome speed & quality), raytraced soft shaows, and much much more. So if you’re into 3D, or just want to experiment with it, you should definately try Blender, since it’s not only free but also very competetive. 

The Web 2.0, with it’s simplified and enhanced usability paradigms, relies heavily on Ajax, as it’s main tool for managing the communication between client and server. In comparison to the old Web 1.0 way of sending a HTTP Request and recieving the complete site, Ajax, of course, allows to communicate just the changes and moves the view part of the process from the server to the client via Javascript. However, this makes it sometimes difficult to debug and especially to find ressource and performance hogs. If you ever created a web app which suddenly didn’t work at all anymore, because you have two concurrent never-ending HTTP connections going on via Ajax, you probably know what I’m talking about. 

The IBM developerWorks has an excellent article describing various tools which help in identifying those ressource hogs and performance problems, just as well as describing how to circumvent them. So if you’re into lowlevel Ajax programming, this could be worthwhile information for you.

In order to create stunning HDR Pictures, one needs a tool which allows to combine pictures of different exposures into one composition. This is possible with Photoshop or Gimp but way more difficult than achieving the same effect with a dedicated software. The standard tool for this task is Photomatix Pro. However, with Hydra there’s a new contender, and it supports integration in Apple Aperture (although still in beta). So if you’re interested in creating stunning HDR Pictures, you might hop over to www.creaceed.com/hydra and see if it’s the right tool for you. Hydra costs $59.95