StyleMac.com

InstaDesk with FX Photo Studio Pro and Color Splash Studio in stunning StackSocial bundle!

B. Terhechte — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:53:06 +0000

On http://www.stacksocial.com, InstaDesk can now be bought as part of a fantastic Mac bundle. Say hello to the Mac Photo Effects Mini-Bundle!

You get three cutting-edge Mac Photography Apps for less than the price of just one:

FX Photo Studio Pro ($39.99 retail) – Bring a brand new image processing experience to your Mac. Get access to over 170 magnificent photography effects.

Color Splash Studio ($1.99 retail) – A brand-spanking new Mac App lets you create amazing photos with selective colors in a snap. No similar app offers the same!

InstaDesk ($4.99 retail) – This Instragram Client for Mac OS lets you easily browse your photos or explore your friends and not only that, but you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows to boot.

That’s right, you can get all three of these stellar apps for a measly $35. That’s $5 less than the cost of FX Photo Studio Pro alone!

AND if you’re one of the first 500 people to buy this bundle, you’ll get *four extra licenses* for both FX Studio Pro and Color Splash Studio to share with your friends.

This bundle ends on Oct 26, 2011.

Get it here:
http://www.stacksocial.com/

InstaMac Shared in Brazilian Magazine Mac+

B. Terhechte — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:39:22 +0000

The current issue of the biggest Brazilian Mac Magazine, Mac+, features a review of InstaDesk.

Also, The Unofficial Apple Weblog just chose InstaDesk to be the App Of The Day today. We’re so excited about this.

New Mac App: InstaDesk

B. Terhechte — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:57:39 +0000

We just released InstaDesk, an Instagram Client for the Mac. It can be bought on the Mac OS X App Store.

InstaDesk lets you not only browse your or your friends Instagram pictures, but easily explore the social graph and find new people to follow. With InstaDesk you can browse beautiful pictures, newest uploads of your friends, or interesting people to follow. Furthermore, you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows.
More Information

New App: GlobeTrotter – The Timezone Calculator

B. Terhechte — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:42:56 +0000

GlobeTrotter is a new iPhone app for everyone who frequently has to work with or depends on people in different timezones. It offers easy and quick timezone calculations. Without hassle, without calculation errors. Set up unlimited timezones and see how they relate to each other:

What time is it in Tokio if it is 3PM in New York.

For everyone who finds himself calculating timezone differences ever so often because the built-in iPhone app doesn’t cut it, Globetrotter is the perfect, solution. Guaranteed.

Find out more about GlobeTrotter for iPhone or iPod Touch

Snow Leopard, hidden folder switching gem

B. Terhechte — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:22:48 +0000

There’s a neat new function in Snow Leopard, that I haven’t seen reported anywhere else yet. In previous incarnations of Mac OS X, some apps allowed you to access a specific folder by typing cmd+shift+G. This keystroke would reveal a small layer, where you could simply enter the directory you wanted to switch to (i.e. /Users or /usr/lib or /tmp). This didn’t work in all applications, though. Now with Snow Leopard and the Cocoa Finder, this works across the OS – even in Carbon applications like iTunes. Just press cmd+shift+G, and you can enter any (even hidden) directory on your system. Oh, and you’ve got full tab completition, just like on the Terminal app.

Update: A co-worker just told me that this feature has already been in the Finder before Snow Leopard. My fault. It may be new, though, that it works in every open- and save-dialogue now.

StyleMac 2.0

B. Terhechte — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:25:06 +0000

Back in 2005, when StyleMac started, we had high expectations. We wanted to create a Weblog that was primary based on the topics of Apple / Mac OS X, Design and Software Development / Unix. Touching all subjects that someone interested in creative work might find interesting. As StyleMac started to grow, however, it became ever more clear, that continuing on said ideals was impossible next to a day-job as StyleMac has always just been a evening project. And since the Site couldn’t hardly pay our rent, we decided to cut the time we spent in the site. From that point onward, StyleMac has seen ups and downs – mostly downs. With little content having been added since the inital first 5 months.
Now, almost 4 years after going life, StyleMac will change. Instead of trying to offer news on above topics, it will lead as the hub for all the Mac and iPhone applications we developed over the years. So the StyleMac News Blog will transform into StyleMac – Joyful Apple Software.
In addition to that, there’ll be interesting tidbits on Cocoa, Apple, Unix or Software Development. But always only then, if we encounter it in one of our projects.
Wrapping it all up: StyleMac is Dead, long live StyleMac. From now on this site will function as the information hub for our Software Developments. And since we needed something to celebrate this event, we rewrote our Safarilicious Software from the ground up, and released it just as well today:

Safarilicious 1.0
Rewritten from the ground up, universal binary, Leopard compatible, way better UI and lots of new features. Enjoy!

And a major update for OweMe is also in the works.

PS: You’ll notice that the links for our products will lead to subdomains of www.terhech.de. That’s an unfortunate side-effect of the previous state of the old StyleMac but will be resolved soon.

Thanks for your patience,
Benedikt Terhechte

OweMe – Money Lending Manager for iPhone

B. Terhechte — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:04:53 +0000

So after a small hiatus the first serious StyleMac iPhone application is out. OweMe, the Money Lending Manager has been created with a lot of attention to detail and based on a specific problem: I often experienced the situation that I lend someone a small amount of money (say $5) and forgot about it later on. On the other hand it just as often happened that I lend money from someone and forgot about it too – until I got a disappointed or even enraged call.
That’s where OweMe comes in. A slick and easy to use interface helps in quickly jotting down all these small amounts of money one owes or lends from time to time.

I’ve been testing the application for about 4 weeks now as I wanted to make sure it works as advertised before I submit it to the App Store. And I’ve already used it a dozen times. It really, really helps me in keeping track of all the small amounts of money I tend to get or give. I wouldn’t want to miss it on my iPhone.
Features:

Clean, simple and FAST UI, optimized for the task at hand featuring
seperate lists for Credit and Debit values
Add notes, names and due dates
Use the iPhones location info to gain additional information on the whereabouts of an entry
Secure your data with an optional access code
Set detailed options like sort order or currenc
Select between different wallpapers
…and more

You can find more information on the OweMe Website. The direct iTunes App Store entry can be found here.

Cocoa, Cappuccino and the Palm Pre

B. Terhechte — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:42:42 +0000

Palm’s Andrew Shebanow (former Adobe) on Cocoa on iPhone versus JS on the Palm Pre and it’s effect on application quality and developer interest:

That’s a complex question to answer. But the thing to keep in mind is that is not a zero-sum game: I expect many developers will work with both webOS and iPhone, and that is perfectly fine. But I also believe that we will be able to attract additional developers who want to leverage their HTML/CSS/JavaScript knowledge but can’t or won’t deal with the strictures of iPhone development.

I do think he’s right in that many developers will want to target both plattforms. In this case the Cappuccino Web Framework seems to be godsend.

It doesn’t feature everything that Objective-C 2.0 and Cocoa on the iPhone offer, but it should seriously ease transitions. Actually, if I was 280 North, I’d try to add the Palm Pre Javascript extensions to Cappuccino as quickly as possible in order to attract that horde of iPhone developers on their gold rush.

I for one am happy that I can target Mac OS X, the iPhone and Web Applications with one framework (more or less) and one language (more or less). Sometimes it drives me crazy to jump between PHP/Symfony, Python/Django, JS/Prototype/Ext and Objective-C/Cocoa.

Twitter clients

B. Terhechte — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:43:41 +0000

A detailed (actually even a brief) look at the field of Twitter clients for different systems leads to an interesting observation: There’re not only more but especially far better Twitter clients available for iPhone than for any other device. Take Tweetsville or Tweetie as the dominant examples. They’re a joy to use, offer great functionality and one can just feel the attention to detail and thought gone into their development.
A look at Mac OS X or Windows, on the other hand, reveals just mediocre clients which lack a lot of functions I’d take for granted, given the size of the userbase and importance of Twitter.

There is no simple monocausal reason to explain this. It might in parts be the (monetary) appeal of the App Store. Another aspect might be a strong usage of the standard Twitter website as a substitute for unnecessary advanced clients.
I do think though, that the primary reason is a direct hint at the latent needs, people solve via Twitter. Even more, I do think that the current state of Twitter clients offers a glimpse at the future of Twitter (or Microblogging, for that matter):
Twitter is the archetypical mobile application.
Currently, a lot of people still twitter while they’re browsing the web. Publishing liks to interesting pages. I do think though, that there’ll be more and more mobile tweeting. Think about it – as soon as Twitter moves beyond being just a tool to publish links; as soon as you start talking about your life, politics, business or local news; that is: as soon as you start using Twitter as it was intended to be, you’ll most likely need it when you’re not at home. The Mumbai terror attacks offer an insight into such a usage scenario (and I will use this example in more posts to come, as it serves as a very good example to understand the nature of Twitter).

This, of course, doesn’t mean, that there’s no need for a sophisticated desktop client. I’m pretty sure, that The Killer Client is already in the works (presumably for Leopard). The interesting conclusion to draw from the above observation is that, in the future, Twitter might very well become ubiquitous.

Google Objective-C Toolbox for Mac / iPhone

B. Terhechte — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:31:19 +0000

Google offers a potpourri of source code snippets from their varying Mac projects qua Google Objective-C Toolbox.
The Box contains Mac and iPhone compatible sources and offers several additions to Foundation and Appkit as well as new classes to aid in integrating Google services. In brief:

- Geometry libraries to manipulate NSRect, NSPoint, and similar.
- Additions to NSBezierPath, including GCPath conversions, round rects, and shading
- gzip for NSData
- HTTP Server
- HTTP URL Fetcher
- Regex Library
and much much more.

Especially the regex library is just what I need. There are several other external regex libraries for Cocoa, but just recently I tried to use one of those and they were either outdated, not maintained anymore, didn’t compile or lacked certain features. I didn’t try to Google library yet, but I’m hoping for a good solution. This comes in very handy, especially for iPhone.
You can find the library here.