“” by Steven Fernandez
This post is entirely about MacBooks on sofas. Or couches. Or settees. Or whatever it is you call them in your house. In our house, they are sofas. Anyway. Here are some more pictures of MacBooks on sofas. If you have your own pictures of MacBooks on sofas to contribute, please do let us know in the comments.
Steven’s picture is by far the best, the most MacBook-plus-sofary picture we’ve seen. But there are more…
First: Try My Nose!! No, really! Try it!
“Just select a nose you like, hold it next to you current nose and surprise your friends!”
Or – now here’s a radical thought – just stick with the nose you were born with! Maybe it suits you just fine! Maybe – oh never mind. Next!
Eelke Dekker has found a way to transform ordinary everyday clothing into functional, wearable notebook computer sleeves. Wrap a hoodie around your MacBook and hey presto!
Coming soon: trousers for G4 Cubes, dresses for G4 iMacs, and socks for iPods. Oh, that’s already been done hasn’t it?
Eelke explains his thinking in Dutch on his blog post, so I’ve used Google Translate to turn it into English. Apologies, therefore, for the rough-and-ready nature of the translation:
“After the blog post on jerseys that are transformed into the MacBook Sleeve, a friend came along with an old sweater. While he was in the kitchen to toil on a delicious Italian pasta, I stickte jersey quickly to a precise appropriate, unique laptop sleeve.”
(Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to eelke dekker.)
This, lovely readers, is the Girl Who Balanced A MacBook Air On Her Head. Her name is Holden and she’s in San Francisco.
Next week, we shall show you The Man Who Wore An iPhone As A Tie (he lives in Edinburgh), and the Parisian Who Used A Pair Of Old G3 Blue-And-Whites As Boots.
(Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks holden_helena.)
Soooo, this 3D interface that everyone’s been going crazy about; allow me to add a brief comment:
Arrrrrrrrgghghggghghhhhh.
Gizmodo has the scoop on the launch of Pastebud, a third-party workaround for basic copy/paste on the iPhone using a couple of clever bookmarks and a webapp.
I say basic, because it is dependent on the bookmarks and so will only work with Safari, or with webapps that run within it.
I think the most interesting thing about Gizmodo’s scoop is the comment by Bandit underneath:
“No gadget in 2008 should require someone to create a workaround like this, let alone a gadget from a company as prominent as Apple. Apple should be embarrassed.”
You said it, Bandit. You said it.
Oh look, Delicious (or del.icio.us for us old-skool users) has gone all mobile-friendly with a new site at m.delicious.com.
It works well on an iPhone, complete with a shiny icon if you decide to add it as a home screen bookmark. It’s great if you want to access your bookmarks on the move; what’s missing (and is equally important in my opinion) is a view of your network’s bookmarks.
I agree with Fraser Speirs – my Delicious network is a fabulous source of links, news, ideas and stuff of interest, and it’s compiled automagically for me every day by 58 people I know, like, and admire. I couldn’t live without it.
iPhone beatbox app Beatmaker has been updated to version 1.3, which brings with it some nice new features.
This release is about detail: there’s more detailed edit options in the step sequencer. You can do more with your patterns, they can be more complicated and mixed in more interesting ways.
Editing the whole song is easier thanks to a zoom control and an access bar that lets you jump from one part of the song to another.
Best of all, it’s now a proper sampler. Beatmaker will let you record sounds using the iPhone’s built-in mic, assign them to pads, and use them in songs without any extra fussing about.
Wait, though, there’s more! Have you wanted a pocket Stylophone ever since the 1970s ended? Me too!
Weeeeelllllll…
I like the look of word game Giant Crayon WordSoup – it reminds me of Wurdle on the iPhone, which keeps me occupied for hours, when I can wrench it from my wife’s fingers (she gets addicted and spends the whole evening playing if I’m not careful).
But, um, guys? That moment at 0:54? How can I put this?
Got a big fat PDF? Rather have it split into lots of little jpgs, one for each page in the PDF?
That happens to me a lot.
Jim DeVona’s Save PDFs pages as images Automator app is what you and I need.
It does all the chopping-up-and-separating, then it neatly saves the images in a numbered sequence so you know which one’s which.
You should check out his software page too, it’s got all sorts of goodies for your Mac, especially for Yojimbo users.
Everybody say: “Yojimbo!” There, that feels better doesn’t it?
Some people are frantically asking “WHY GOOGLE, WHY?” but to me it makes perfect sense. Gmail now has a simple task manager and I love it. It works nicely within my copy of Mailplane, as do the keyboard shortcuts. You can enable it from inside the Labs settings tab (which is where you can mess with keyboard shortcuts too).
It made me smile when I looked at the hints. Gmail knew I was using a Mac and showed me the appropriate Command keystrokes to make stuff happen. Move items up and down the list with Command+Up or Command+Down, indent them with Tab, unindent with Shift+Tab. All makes sense.
But my favorite feature is that any email can be turned into a task. These tasks appear with a little “Related email” link so you can instantly see their context.
Bravo Gmail team, a job well done.
Spawn Illuminati (App Store)is a fun and cheap little app for your iPhone/iTouch. You can see what it does; it spawns little blobs of light that respond, in a manner of speaking, to your touch commands.
The commands aren’t terribly intuitive, and the app seems to have a mind of its own half the time, but that doesn’t stop it being fun to play with, especially for little ones. With a bit of practice, you can get some very nice results with it (as evidenced in the official gallery).
And it’s a great way to make a wallpaper image for your iPhone that’s completely unique.
There’s no Flickr grounp yet – gasp! Perhaps one will pop up later on. I would have made one myself, but I’ve got tea to drink.
More floopy screenies after the clicky thing.
Apple Store Munich Opening from rckrz.de on Vimeo.
So here’s some footage from this weekend’s opening of the first German Apple Store in Munich. If you’ve attended one of these before, there won’t be much that’s new in this video; you know about the line outside, about the cheering, whooping staff, about the free t-shirts, about the buzz inside where everyone’s either looking at Macs, or photographing people looking at Macs.
It’s so dismally identical to all the other Apple Store openings that it’s a little depressing. Isn’t this in danger of becoming a parody of itself? Maybe that fridge has already been nuked.
I don’t mean to sound all curmudgeonly here, but a thought occurs to me: if you’ve ever defended Apple in a web forum, then been set upon by a rabid hoard of Mac-haters who tear your opinions to shreds and call you a nutter, and you’ve wondered WHY they do that – well, this is why.
I wrote my last “OS9 – Blimey Some People Still Use It” article for Mac DevCenter back in 2004 (see OS9, Mine All Mine); it was fun to write and nostalgic too, but I didn’t imagine I’d be writing a similar piece four years later.
But – blimey – there are STILL some people out there using OS9 and very happy with it too, thank you very much.
One of them is Jerad Walters, who runs publishing house Centipede Press and does so using a mirror-door 1.2 GHz G4, 1.25 GB RAM and 1.7TB of hard disk space spread across four hard drives.
But why, Jerad, why?
“My books are built with InDesign 1.5 and Photoshop 6 running Suitcase 8. The G4 boots up in about 30 seconds and then I have a QuicKey sequence that loads all applications in largest-chunk–of-RAM-required order (Photoshop first, InDesign second, etc). It is all up and running in a couple minutes.
“The speed of the Finder is simply draw-dropping. However, the speed of the Finder is OS X is also pretty quick, but there is just a responsiveness in 9 that cannot be matched by X.
“Menu and window actions all take place so quickly. Plus it is easier to tell windows from background from menus. There is a clarity to the OS 9 display that is lacking in OS X.”
For email, he uses Claris Emailer. For word processing, TexEdit. He makes use of the DragAnyWindow control panel for easier window management, and of HoverBar, a precursor to the OS X Dock.
Jerad does use OS X occasionally – it has a drive all to itself – but when he’s using it he misses things only found in OS9.
“I miss the Put Away command, and the regular trash can more than anything. There’s one thing I wish OS 9 had: an option for a toolbar for Finder windows; that is a really nice feature of OS X.”
So, OS9 users, this is your comments thread. Tell us why we’re all wrong to be using this newfangled OS X stuff.
Today is a day for Mac users to be happy. Why?
ONE: It turns out that we’re not the meanest bunch of technology users when our beloved kit is harshly criticized in the media. The Cult of Mac is a peaceful one compared to the rapid spine-chilling rage of the Church of Blackberry. It’s true. David Pogue said so.
TWO: Chris Pirillo is a kindly soul, and decided that today he would spell out five good reasons for switching to Mac. I’m not sure I agree with all of them (“social benefits?” euw, no thanks), but it’s always good to see former Windows users and prominent bloggers spelling out what a good idea it is to be running OS X.
THREE: At long last, we know how to create a text clipping containing the “@” character. Bring on the dancing girls! The band! Anyone got a spare barn we can use to put on a show?
In other news: that new Opera 10 alpha is really quite spiffy isn’t it?
(Photo used under Creative Commons license; thanks chrismear.)
The New Mac Mini Concept from Sait Alanyali on Vimeo.
Behold, the work of Sait Alanyali, designer of things. His plan for an L-shaped Mac mini might leave you a little bemused, to put it mildly, but apart from the hemisphere, what other shapes have been cruelly ignored by Jonathan Ive and his Mac design minions in recent years? Why haven’t we seen a tetrahedron iMac? A rhomboidal iPod? What about iWork packaging that takes the form of a Möbius strip?
While you’re pondering that, have a look at Sait’s Ikea-hacked work station. He even painted the plastic surrounds of his cheap monitors white, so that they’d look the part.
Long term users of fabulous text editor TextMate could be forgiven for feeling a little miffed. Before Apple released Leopard, there was excited talk of TextMate 2, and much discussion about the fact that it would be Leopard-only.
But Leopard appeared and became old news and there was still no sign of TextMate. Updates on the TextMate blog were few and far between.
What’s up? Is TextMate 2 still going to happen?
The answer is a definite YES, but with the simple caveat: BE PATIENT.
This topic has bubbled up several times on the TextMate mailing list and developer Allan Odgaard has made it plain that TM2 is in ongoing development. But like anyone who takes pride in his work, he doesn’t want to release it (or even talk about releasing it) until he’s got it up to a certain standard.
Alex Payne made passing reference to this yesterday, in his post How I use TextMate, saying he feared it had turned into abandonware. A minor update over Thanksgiving put his mind at rest, but still raised the TM2 question for others. As for what it might include, see Peter Haza’s informed posts here and here.
So, just to be clear: TM2 is coming. It’s not abandonware. It’s hang-in-there-ware.
Or, in Odgaard’s own words: “Put TM 2.0 up there with Duke Nukem Forever and be positively surprised the day it is released :)”
(Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to Dmitry Baranovskiy)
First: here’s Dong Chang! (App Store) What is it, and what does it do? I think we’d better let the developer explain:
“It is every funny and easier to play. Try to sway your iphone/itouch Three dimensional direction, You can get three Hip-Hop’s accompanist. Whenever, any where you can dancing with your iphone/itouch. Come on, Move your body, geting Exercises! You will be enjoy it.”
Fantastic! Next!
Whacket! (App Store) “replicates the experience of playing your favorite racket sports – without the hassle of all those silly rackets.” Thank goodness for that. Rackets, eh? Who needs ’em?
The guys at Tap Tap Tap, responsible for the gorgeous Classics app, churned out this extra gorgeousness – made entirely out of iPhone app icons – to celebrate the App Store reaching 10,000 apps.
That’s 10,000 apps in less than half a year.
Just imagine what amazing stuff we’re going to see in 2009. I can’t wait.
We’re really going to need a better way to manage all our iPhone apps, though. All this flippy-flapping between screens is going to get really boring really quickly once there’s 50,000 apps competing for space there.
(Pic re-used here with Tap Tap Tap’s permission. Thanks guys!)
The thing about Apple Stores – the thing that makes them such a perfect target for the writers of The Simpsons – is the vibe they have about them. They’re not like most stores; entering the Apple Store is supposed to be an experience beyond that of simply handing over money to Steve Jobs. There’s supposed to be a wow factor. And the architecture and interior design is essential to that.
Chapas de Apple (Stop in Motion) from Fernando Rueda on Vimeo.
This is what Cultism is all about. Not merely that you make a stop motion movie using your Mac; not merely that you make one featuring dancing Mac buttons; but that you own five of the things in the first place.
Heh.
Sigur Ros by richjm
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the iPhone camera is technically rubbish, but I’m endlessly impressed by the ingenuity and creativity people show with it.
This morning I browsed around Flickr for images of gigs and concerts taken with iPhones; there are some really atmospheric shots to be found.
Stuff Tech 1 from Stuff Tech on Vimeo.
This is ace. James Jobs and Louis Mirra are junior video podcasters who know what they like and know how to tell the world about it.
Things I like about Tech Stuff Podcast episode 1:
Things I don’t like about Tech Stuff Podcast:
Things that concern me about Tech Stuff Podcast:
Have your kids made a rockin’ tech podcast recently?
Planning a banquet? Got royals coming to dinner? Or just hosting your daughter’s wedding? TablePlan is the app you had no idea even existed, and turns the nightmare that is making-sure-Aunt-Clara-doesn’t-sit-next-to-any-vegetarians into a delight!
Drag-and-drop re-seating on the fly. Built-in RSVP management. Faster than Excel. (Let’s face it, almost anything on Earth is faster than Excel.) And only 20 bucks.
When I got married, we didn’t bother with a table plan. We just stood up and said: “Sit wherever you like!” It was almost not a total disaster.
MacBook Air from Yurii Smitana on Vimeo.
Yurii loves his MacBook Air so much, he made an advertisement for it. I like the moment at 1:33, when he compares the thickness of an old Acer machine with the thinness of an Air.
Have you made any Apple product advertisements recently?
Come to think of it, have you made any advertisements for products you like recently? Even Acers? Just wondered.
