StyleMac.com

Neat idea. When designing something, the search for a fitting color palette is always an obligatory important first step. Sites like Adobe kuler help you here insofar as they offer the ability to share beautiful color palettes between users.

Mondrianum goes one step further in that it allows to access the kuler palettes directly from the Mac OS X system-wide color-picker. Which means that the colors are available from (for example) iLife, iWork, Photoshop, Coda, CSSEdit, and more.

Mondrianum is 10.5 only and can be found over at Lthoglyph Software.

During one of the newer OS X software updates Apple extended the list of compatible RAW Cameras by the Sony Alpha a 200 and the a 350. The a 300 however was omitted. This is insofar weird, as the hardware differences between the a 200 and the a 300 have no effect neither on the ccd nor on the exposure / shutter options. The only difference is the tiltable LCD-Screen as well as the option to shoot using LiveView.
Thus the basic RAW picture from a a 300 should be similar to a picture from a a 200. I researched this a bit and found that that’s mostly the case. Thus I present a small script which will convert Alpha a 300 RAW Files to Alpha a 200 RAW Files. The process is rather simple.

You can download it either as a commandline script, or as a Automator Action. The commandline script can be used in the following way:
“python ./A300fix.py DSC0001.ARW” in order to convert the file DSC0001.ARW to A200 raw. Please note that the script doesn’t create copies but changes the original file. So you’re advised to create copies of your original RAW files in case anything doesn’t work out as expected - although this never happened to me so far.
Alternatively you can use “python ./A300fix.py all” to convert all scripts in the current directory.

The usage of the automator action should be rather clear.

Download the commandline script here

Download the Automator Action here

Tomorrow, June 17, 2008, the Mozilla Foundation aims to release Firefox 3 for download.

Nearly one and a half million people around the world have pledged on their website (link below) to download Firefox 3 as part of Mozilla Foundation’s attempt to get into the Guiness Book of World Records for most software downloads in a 24 hour period.

Firefox currently is in the #2 spot as far as Internet browsers go. Over the years it has steadily creeped up on the #1 title holder, Internet Explorer.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

When it comes down to feature-richness in UI Libraries Cocoa really shines. Especially the 10.5 bump, bringing Core Animation to the table, really extended the graphicall capabilities of Cocoa. The Windows Vista pendant, “Avalon”, for example, offers a wide set of features just as well, but still lacks a extensive integrated animation package (apart from many other smaller details).
Avalon however, just as well as Cocoa, is bound to the underlying operating system and thus not available for other platforms.

So if one intends to write a multiplatform graphically extensive application, one either has to write seperate backends for each operating system, or use a agnostic framework, like for example Trolltech’s Qt or the open source Clutter.

Clutter has a lot to offer:

• OpenGL / OpenGL ES compatible
• 2D Layered scenes with possible 3D transformations
• Built-in Effects and Filters
• Media Playback
• WebKit Support, meaning one can mix WebKit with UI Elements just as with Cocoa
• Built-In Animation engine, much like Core Animation (albeit less powerfull)
• Linux, Windows, MacOSX and even iPhone Support
• Written in C, bindings for Perl, Python, C#, C++, Vala and Ruby

And much more. As you can see, Clutter has a lot to offer. It’s still at version 0.6.2, so maybe not yet ready for production use. However, if you’re thinking about developing a graphically extensive application that has to be deployed to several platforms at the same time, including iPhone, Clutter could come to the rescue.

Ok, mind you, the title of this post is not entirely true, I sort bend the information so it sounded more interesting, but nevertheless:

One thing which always bugged me under Mac OS X was that I needed to have 3 Mediaplayers installed in order to play all the kinds of videofiles which are available out there: Quicktime, Videolan(VLC) and Windows Media Player
Now, thanks to those kind people from Microsoft, Windows Media Player files can be played in quicktime via Flip4Mac. But one still needs VLC in order to play most of the other formats which Quicktime doesn’t handle very well (I always have problems with Mpeg2 files in Quicktime).

And here’s a solution to the above problem: FFusion is a version of the libavcodec library (that’s the library which contains most of VLC’s media support codecs) which has been compiled so it can be used as a Quicktime Component. This enables you to play even more Videofiles with Quicktime, no need to switch to VLC (although VLC is a really good software, it’s just an added burden to start VLC after realizing that Quicktime once again couldn’t play a file). And apart from that it makes all those Videos Frontrow compatible, too! (at least that’s what I think, my Frontrow experiences are.. limited).

You can download the package at the official FFusion page. http://aldorandenet.free.fr/codecs/, however, those are a tad outdated, a newer version can be found on “Dr. Feelgood’s” (couldn’t find his real name) page: http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~feelgood/ (somewhere around the middle of the page)

Not to be confused with its Office line of software, Office is Microsoft’s latest foray into offering web based services.

The service is mainly for the small company of less than 25 people whose IT department is that one guy who took a introduction to computers class in college.

Office Live comes in three flavors of varying prices (all are free in the beta though). First there’s the Basic Live edition (which will remain free even when it goes Gold). This one contains general website development tools, the ability to have your own domain name, like, www.website.com, instead of something like www.bigwebsite.com/thing/ohwow/768865554.htm, five email accounts, and a website traffic report.

The next version of the software…. wait, is this software? It does not install on your computer. I hereby call it “serverware.” The next version is the Collaboration edition. It will cost around $30 once the beta ends and does not add much more to the Basic edition to justify its price.

The last one is Essentials, cost starts at $30 and it adds a whole slew of more email addresses (50), keyword reports, and more online workspace.

I signed up for the service, but since it’s a beta test, Microsoft itself picks who it wants to participate. If selected, I’ll report on the creation process with a self-made website.

Ok this is not directly Mac related, but the K750i is an awesome phone, pity it lacks some mediaplayer capabilities which the w800i offers, like for example playback of unencrypted AAC files. Now Jaran of JaranBlog managed to flash his K750i with a W800i Firmware (the 2 phones are technology-wise really similar). There’s no tutorial on how to do it, yet, but I guess it’s just a matter of downloading the Firmware and flashing it. So in case you’re a tad adventurous and would really like to play all your ripped AAC files on your K750i, follow this link

There’s been a small problem in the multimedia par of Mac OS X for a long time now: If you wanted to watch Windows Media Files (WMV) you had to use Microsofts proprietary Windows Media Player 10 for Mac which had a rather limited featureset: No playlists, no videoformats besides WMV (not even things like Microsofts own ASF), an ugly interface, no real drag and drop support, and apart of all that an ugly install mechanism that places files in so many folders so it’s really difficult to uninstall it again. But on the other hand, at least watching WMV files worked. Mac Users, as Macs used PowerPC processors, couldn’t use hacked Windows DLL’s unlike Linux users do so they can watch WMV content.

Just some weeks ago, Flip4Mac made it’s debut: A great Quicktime plugin which allows to play WMV content using every available Quicktime application (Quicktime, Finder, etc), but the only drawback was that it cost $9.99.

And now Microsoft bought Flip4Mac and released it for free for all Mac users. Yep, you read that right. Microsoft bought it, released it for free, and even more than that: Replaced the old Windows Media Player for Mac with this nice app.

Great.

Get it here
trackback:http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000445.php

I’ve been quite busy lately (workwise) and thus couldn’t invest enough time into Safarilicous to include everything which popped up latelty, but, judging by my current schedule, I think that I’ll make major progress this weekend so that I hope to release 0.79 within the next week. Still no Panther compatibility as I’ve yet to find time (and a machine) to install Panther onto. But I think a friend has an older iMac 233 (yes, Blueberry) which runs Panther, so I might find a solution here too.

The next version won’t be a Universal Binary either, although it shouldn’t be more than the switch of a button, but I might have access to an Mac OS X86 system soon, so I’ll just wait that bit so that I can actually test on X86. (Not that anybody would need an X86 version as Rosetta runs just fine ;) )

There’re some widgets which deserve to coexist with your other desktop applications all the time as one require’s them so frequently that the F12-Click turns into a tedious task after time.

For example if you want to see your TagBag tags all the time, it’d be usefull to put the widget somewhere on the left side of your gourgeous Apple Cinema Display

There’s even a simple solution for this. If you activate the dashboard developer mode, you can drag’n drop dashboard widgets onto your desktop, so they’re always available. I do this a lot with the stickies widget as it’s a great way to save quick notes

Or read the corresponding article at macosxhints.com:

macosxhints - 10.4: Detach widgets from the Dashboard
Mac OS X, Tiger, dashboard, development, apple, mac, tagbag