Mac Geeks

For some years I used to make full screenshots of Websites with Paparazzi. This is a little free tool wich renders a website and saves it as a image file. In contrast to a normal screenshot you can make a picture of websites which doesn’t fit on your screen. This is very usefull when it comes to blogs and news websites. These often have very long pages.

Paparazzi hasn’t got an update for quite a long time and I was afraid the developer had fiven up. But to my positive suprise I saw an update announcement of Paparazzi at macupdate.com this morning.

The new release is a bug fixing release with a few minor feature enhancements. Paparazzi uses the WebKit rendering engine which is the same as the one from Safari, Apples popular browser.

One of the enhancements I noticed is the capability of Paparazzi to batch render URLs which are read from a text file.

You can do the very same with some add-ons for Firefox. The Screengrab! add-on will render and save the pages from within Firefox. The Pearl Crescent Page Saver add-on has a pro version and is controllable via the command line. I used the latter on to create a website render monitor.

I got a special album on my Ipernity Account for my website screenshots.

I just worked on a software project where subversion is used as version control system. MacOS X has the subversion client (although an slightly old version) already build in. I got some fancy GUI tools as subversion frontend like Versions, Cornerstone or SmartSVN.

In this projekt I have to work on the code on different machines with different operating systems. Some of the machines are Windows, I usually work on a mac and sometime on an Ubuntu Linux machine. This is where the trouble begins.

I always think of MacOS X as BSD like Unix system with a charming graphical front end. But this doesn’t hold true for some very basic facts I’m used to on Unix/Linux systems. Especially the per default case insensitive HFS+ filesystem on my Mac almost drove me nuts these days.

I added some files to the said project when working on my Linux machine. I got these from a developer working on a windows machine as ZIP file, unpacked them and commited them to the subversion repository.

Back on the Mac and Windows systems I wasn’t able to check out the new revision of the project. This is because the one developer used capital letter filenames of some already there files. No problem on windows as cases doesn’t matter. But the linux system recognized these files as new and added them as additional files to the repository.

If I try to check out or update on a case insensetive system then of course I got errors from the subversion as it tries to check out two files with the same name but different meta data.

So be warned when working in heterogenous environments. A Mac with default filesystem settings is not case sensitiv which might be unusual if you come from the Unix/Linux world.

I once tried the case sensitive HFS+ filesystem under Tiger (MacOS X 10.4) but remember vague that there where some problems. Maybe I check that out again on Leopard.

MacGeek sind soeben auf einen neuen Server umgezogen. Sollte sich ein bisschen schneller anfühlen

This is the 7th episode of our podcast. I did an outdoor recording on online backup services. Please bear with me when I’m a little breathless some times. I was pushing my little boy Hugo around in the Volkspark Friedrichshain. He was sitting on his three wheeler and there are some hills..

I talk about my recent experiences with some Online Storage/Backup Services like Amazon S3, Mozy Home and Backblaze.

Podcast URL: http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml
Audio-File: http://media.mac-geeks.de/MGPC7.mp3

As every year a several Software Sites offering the famous christmas bundles with a bunch of software you may need for your Mac. Most of them are selling a very similar set of tools which are mostly useless. But there is often one or two pieces of Software for which you may consider buying the whole bundle.

Here are an overview of some Bundle offers and my personal ratings (like iTunes stars):

• MacUpdate Promo Winter Bundle: $49.99 (89% off, $447.69)
  • KeyCue (★)
  • MacPilot (★★)
  • WhatSize (★★)
  • iVolume (-)
  • RapidWeaver (★)
  • LittleSnitch (★★★★★)
  • MacGourmet Deluxe (★★)
  • Virus Barrier X5 (★)
  • Drive Genius (★)
  • Default Folder X (★)
• Mac Switcher Bundle: $49,59 USD (50% off)
  • 1Password (★★★★★)
  • TextExpander (★★★★★)
  • Witch (-)
  • ScreenCast Online Abo (-)
• Mac Bundle Box : $39
  • KavaTunes (★)
  • Librarian Pro (★★)
  • AlarmClock (★)
  • HyperImage (★)
  • MacCleanse (★)
• Limit Point Software: $69 USD (76% off) (★★)
  • Utility Bundly
  • BlueCrab
  • Mailings
  • iForms
  • Boolean Search
  • Icon2Image
  • Aqueiss
  • FTPortal
  • Touvaly
  • MenuMinder
  • SwitchTop
  • QuickTop
  • PictureSwitch

This time I show you a nice little drawing application for kids. Doozla comes from the makers of Skitch at plasq.com and is a easy and funny application to draw and colour with for your kids. It’s not just a drawing application like Scribbles but instead offers 4 major modes of drawing. Simple drawing on a plain white ground, coloring pre sketched drawings, draw on a background or take pictures from your iSight and draw on the picture.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

All actions are supported by funny sounds which pronounce the tool names or the colors you use.

All together a nice little application for kids to draw with a computer. And if you got a graphic tablet like the Wacom Bamboo you can make real art work

Yesterday I made the drawing for the 1Password license. Here is a short video of this. At the end some frames are missing as my mobile phone (Nokia N95) doesn’t seems to like too long movies. But you get the idea I think.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The lucky winner is….. snoske. Drawn by the untouchable Hugo

Agile Web Solutions is giving me a free license of their password management tool 1Password to give away. So you are invited to apply for this free license.

Please just leave a comment on this posting and we will find a winner by Nov. 29th 2008. Don’t forget your email address to get notified.

I use 1Password for a while and don’t wanna miss it. It’s one central place to store passwords and web forms and these data are accessible in almost any browser on my Mac.

Here’s a little ScreenCast (note: the audio is german) to introduce “Versions” – the subversion interface for MacOS X.

Versions is a graphical user interface for Subversion. Subversion is a free and very popular Version-Controll-System.

I used to send me eMails with Tasks when I’m on the run. OmniFocus is able to fetch these Mails automatically into it’s Inbox. But not so Things. I always missed this feature and looked around for a possible Solution.

Now I found one in the CulturedCode Wiki to Things. They provide an AppleScript to do exactly this. You just have to create a rule in Mail.app to filter the eMails you want to send to Things and execute the script. Things must be running to work.