Mac Geeks

This podcast is about the applications I use the most on my Mac. It starts with browsers like Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari, the goes to gtd applications like OmniFocus and Things, drawing with OmniGraffle, chattings with AdiumX and Skype, mailing with Mail.app and Thunderbird and finally menu extensions like Jumpcut, iStatMenu, LittleSnitch, Shimo and Launchbar.

You can subscribe to the podcast from this url:

http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml

Simply subscribe to this URL in your iTunes and you’ll get the new episodes automatically.

Technorati Tags: Apple, eMail, MacGeeks, MacOS X, Podcast, Software

Yesterday evening Apple introduced the iPhone SDK in a special event. Now everybody is enabled to develop custom applications for the iPhone platform (iPhone and iPod touch). This includes an Apple design guide for the iPhone user interfaces.

I think this SDK has a lot of potential to beat all the other mobile platforms. As a developer of WindowsMobile, Symbian or Java mobile applications you never now on what hardware your app will run. You don’t know if it’s a wide screen or a small display. You don’t know if there is a keyboard or only a touchscreen. You don’t know if there is a camera, music player etc. So you better reduce your requirements to the absolute minimum or risk that your application wont be usable on many devices.
You don’t have to worrie about all that on the iPhone. You now exactly what you can expect and even get design suggestions from the one and only manufacturer. This is a huge advantage of the iPhone platform and I predict a very fast growing market of iPhone apps. As you can also expect that a lot of these will work on the iPod Touch as it’s almost the same hardware platform.

Another interesting announcement was the integration of Microsofts ActiveSync technology so that iPhone can be wireless synced with MS-Exchange email, calendar and contacts. This is very interesting for business users who had to rely on Blackberry or WindowsMobile before.
Although this leaves a bad taste as Apple is selling it’s soul to Microsoft on this. John Gruber always was complaining about this proprietary technology stuff and hoped that Apple wont give in. But that seems to be the fact right now. Anyhow this will open a wider market for the iPhone.

In this company at least 10 people already use an iPhone and asking me to open the MS-Exchange to the internet for them. But surely deny to put an MS-Server directly into the internet or buy another one just to support iPhone. We already have Blackberrys and these are at least useable.

For downloading the new applications to iPhones Apple also introduced the AppStore for iPhone. This is portal site you can access from your iPhone to buy or just download iPhone applications. This is similar to the iTunes Music Store for audio and video content but independent from that and from iTunes. The license model grants 70% of the revenue to the application developer and 30% to Apple. But there will be also free applications.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, eMail, Apple

Here’s the brand new episode of MacGeeks Podcast. I talk about the recent Apple hardware and software updates, some problems with Apple Mail.app and some software I tested recently.

Technically there are some changes with this podcast:

• new audio format is AAC, this format is capable of handling chapter marks and url informations
• audio file is hosted on Amazon S3
• background music is DJ Nicos
• podcast is produced with Apple Garage Band

Podcast URL: http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml
Audio-File: http://media.mac-geeks.de/MGPC3.m4a

PS: the nice boy is Willi – my son

Technorati Tags: MacGeeks, MacOS X, Podcast

Find the following 10 things to annoy your co-works at Ian’s messy desk

1. Page yourself over the intercom. Don’t disguise your voice.
2. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want fries with that.
3. Put your garbage can on your desk and label it “In.”
4. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to Espresso.
5. Finish all your sentences with, “In Accordance With The Prophecy.”
6. Don’t use any punctuation.
7. Type every word in a different font. Alternate really big fonts with really small fonts.
8. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
9. Put mosquito netting around your cubicle and play tropical sounds all day.
10. Insist your co-workers address you by your wrestling name,… Rock Bottom.

Just got “max” and “zero” from The Big Word Project. These link here from now on.

via daringfireball.net

Technorati Tags: The Big Word Project

A nice Adobe AIR application is the Google Analytics Report Suite. You can watch your GA stats in a shiny desktop application.

Technorati Tags: Internet, Leopard, MacGeeks, MacOS X, Google, Adobe AIR, Software

Some guys asked me how to subscribe to the new MacGeeks Podcast. I think it’s time for a little explanation how Podcasting works.

In fact Podcasts are normal RSS feeds as the text entries in a blog. The RSS feed is provided by a XML file which lists all postings in a structured manner. The only things special on Podcasts is that the entries (called episodes in Podcasts) are not of type text but instead are audio entries. The content is not directly embedded inside the XML file (as text entries are) but is linked from the XML file to an URI.

Because of that special content you don’t subscribe to Podcasts with your normal feed reader (like NetNewsWire, Vienna or Google Reader). You MacOS X has the right software for podcasts already preinstalled: iTunes.

You can simply subscribe to Podcasts with iTunes by clicking “Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast…” in the menu bar.

A new Window will open to let you type in the URL of the Podcasts RSS-XML-File. For our new MacGeeks Podcast this is: http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml .

The newly subscribed Podcast will appear in the list of available Podcasts.

iTunes will fetch the RSS-Feed-File and instantly try to load all not already fetched Episodes. It will also regularly reload the Podcast URL to look for new episodes.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, MacGeeks, MacOS X, podcast

I plan to add a semi regular podcast to this blog and started out with a short introduction. But for all you english native speakers this might not be suiteable as it is only available in german by now.

You can subscribe to the podcast via this url: http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml

But as this is still beta watch out for changes in the location or any other related updates.

Your comments about what you think on these podcasts are highly welcome. I also embrace suggestions for themes for the podcast.

Technorati Tags: podcast, MacGeeks

There was a small NeXT box at the CERN science facillity in Bern, switzerland:

© photo by Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble

This is a handwritten tag on the very first www server on the internet. The server where Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web (the thingy ur lookin’ at)

Technorati Tags: CERN, Internet, Scobleizer, Tim Berners Lee, WWW

Some of you asked how to easily copy the location of a selected file in finder to the clipboard. This is a feature of PathFinder but can be setup very easy with Finder + Automator in Leopard (may even work on Tiger).

You simply concatenate three simple items in Automator. First you get the currently selected file from the finder. As you probably don’t want the file location in Apple HFS style (with colons) you have to convert the output. I use the a shell command with sed ( sed ‘s/:/\//g’ )on that and finally put the output to the clipboard. Simply save this workflow as Finder Plug-In in Automator and you have a new context menu entry in Finder to copy the location to your clipboard.

If you messed up your Plugins for Finder you can find them in you home directory under /Users/<username>/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/
Simply delete the workflows you don’t need anymore.

[Update:] here’s an archive of the automator workflow. You can unzip it and open in in Automator or copy to the location I mentioned above.

Copy Path to Clipboard.zip

Technorati Tags: Automator, Clipboard, Finder, Leopard