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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

Isolator is a rather simple Freeware application that helps you gaining focus through covering everything on your screen except for the task at hand. This allows to concentrate on what you’re doing instead of repeated distractions by means of IM, Twitter, Mail or others.

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.

If you’re using Safarilicious to export your Safari Bookmarks to Delicious, then you’ve probably been searching for a simple way to access these bookmarks from within your Safari Browser or even the operating system.

Matteo Rattotti wrote a software called ‘Delibar’ which allows to reach your Delicious Bookmarks from within your Menubar. Nifty

Delibar - A cocoa delicious client -

[via www.tuaw.com]

Soon you all may be able to use Gimp without that nasty X11 starting in the background (and slowing down your Mac).
Gimp uses the so-called Gtk+ toolkit to display it’s widgets & visible elements. Gtk had originaly been developed for use in Gimp but then continued on a bright path conquering all kinds of territory; it’s now Gnome’s official toolkit, used as the standard-toolkit for Mono (an Open Source .net development) and thus drives a lot of open source applications. Now some people have been working hard on porting it to Mac OS X - natively, that is without any X11. The benefit of this would be that, next to Gimp, a gigantic amount of Gnome-Applications would be available on Mac OS X. And since Gnome proposes and follow a HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) which is quite close to Apple’s, there’s a good reason to look forward to this event.

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

Although Mac OS X has built-in Zip-Support, Spotlight doesn’t index or search those files. It would of course be a very usefull feature if Spotlight would index Zip-Files just as well.

And that’s just what Ziplight is for. It indexes your Zip-Files, and allows to search them via Spotlight. One drawback is that it doesn’t index the contents of those files as that would require to unzip each file in order to parse it.

Bartas Technologies - Ziplight

browse.delicious is a visual browser to explore and experience the del.icio.us community network

browse.delicious

If there’s one thing which I don’t like about iCal (well there’re actually 2 things, but I’ll only talk about one of those now) then it’s that newly created events don’t contain an alarm. On the one hand it’s tedious task to select 10 new events by hand and set an alarm for each of them, and on the other I frequently even forget that and thus accordingly forget the actual event as iCal never informs me

Now Robert Blum wrote a small iCal Fix which adresses just this issue: Newly created events now automatically haven an alarm set.
Great.

Making a better iCal

I just updated Safarilicious to 0.7.7. The update includes a number of small bugfixes:

The app can be found here