joseaguilar.org

Dropbox

From this thread over at Macrumors I found out about this new file synchronization service called Dropbox. They give you 2GB of space for you to store files, and whatever you upload is replicated automagically to all the computers associated with your account that have the client installed. And, the most important thing, it works!!

Check out the video at their site. I’m already using to backup some files from my Mac at home, to sync the university assignments between my work laptop and the Mac when I am on the road, and to share files with a couple of friends (the shared folders feature is a killer). And so far, so good. Let me know if you need an invite for the Beta program, I still have a couple left.

At last! A great tutorial for developing OSX applications

Over at Wikibooks I found this gem, called Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners. So far, it is the best tutorial I’ve found on the web for developing Cocoa-based OSX applications. It takes you step-by-step on the process of writing a small sample app, illustrating the different concepts of both Objective-C and the Cocoa API.

So far, from what I’ve seen,. Objective-C is a nice language to work with. The syntax may throw you off a little bit at the beginning, but once you start playing with it, you’ll learn to appreciate features like having the parameter names as part of the method’s signatures. I also liked (for no particular reason, just personal preference) the syntax for message passing.

I think that more resources like this will increase the amount of applications available for OSX. One of the big advantages of developing for Microsoft or Java platforms is the vast amount of resources available in websites like MSDN or Sun’s and IBM’s websites. Apple’s Developer Connection, on the other hand, is not as neatly organized, and it is my opinion that it is missing more concrete examples and introductory material.

I also think that XCode could improve quite a bit. Now that I understand how Interface Builder integrates with XCode, one of my main isssues with it is gone (GUI-driven development a-la-Visual Studio). Still, it is missing features like a more robust Intellisense-like code completion, and a more intuitive interface. Maybe it is the fact that I am more familiar with tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio .NET – but still, maybe version 3.0 will bring it up to par with more mature development IDEs.

Check out the tutorial at this link: Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners

On Picasa and working with pictures

Why the hell hasn’t Google released a version of Picasa for the Mac? I know, we have iPhoto, but Picasa leaves iPhoto in the dust in terms of managing pictures, in its performance, and its image enhancement capabilities - 90% of the time a “I’m feeling lucky” will improve my pictures to a level that I could never reach with iPhoto.

Picasa is one of the few apps I have installed on Virtual PC for the Mac (the others are mostly .NET-development related). Today I imported several pictures from a trip to the Tapanti National Park here in Costa Rica. I enhanced my pictures to my liking, and exported them to a web page, as I have done several times before. Well, the @#!@# program created a bunch of thumbnails that look something like this:

Yes, that is the output of the Folder->Export as Web Page command. This is incredibly frustrating, as now I will have to re-import the pictures on a physical (non-virtual) machine, probably redo the changes (I’ll try Export to folder first…), and THEN create the web-pages. All of this could be avoided if I could use Picasa natively (hell, there’s even a linux version out now!), but no, I’m stuck with iPhoto and its stupid iWeb integration.

And you know what the irony is?? This is pretty much the only software from Google that is NOT BETA, and it is the one giving me a big headache today!!

Ecto is pretty good under OSX …

… but doesn’t work that great under Windows.

This is my first post done using ecto. Pretty cool program, I’ll probably start using on the Mac. I’ll stick with Blogjet on the PC, though.

OSX software I use

I just finished updating my Powerbook to OSX 10.4.7, and I decided to make a list of the applications that I can’t live without when using OSX:

Mail.appetizer: Plugin for Mail.app that shows a transparent pane with the details of incoming messages.

Electric Sheep: Awesome screensaver.

Widescreen Plugin for Mail.app: As much as I dislike Outlook’s three-panel view, I have to accept that I enjoy using this recently released plugin on my widescreen Powerbook. Com to think of it, maybe if I didn’t have a 1024×768 screen at work I wouldn’t depise the Outlook layout as much.

Unison / Macpar / Split & Concat: A MUST if you use newsgroups.

Transmit / Cyberduck: Best FTP applications out there. Can’t beat the price on Cyberduck ($0!!).

Viena: I’ve already blogged about this. This is probably the best RSS reader on the Mac. It has an “iTunes-like” UI that I really like.

Azureus: No comments…

Deerpark: For those pages that Safari doesn’t like (demonoid, I’m looking at your Javascript…), it doesn’t get better than Deerpark.

This list will probably grow as I realize applications that I take for granted but use every day. I’ll update it with a new post at a later date.

RSS on OS X

I am in love with RSS feeds. It (at least partially) solved one of the biggest issues of the internet - the large amount of information that comes out every single day. With RSS, you’re able to quickly scan tons of headlines.
On my Windows work machine, I use Firefox as my main browser, and I love the RSS implementation it has - I have my favorite feeds as Live bookmarks up there on the Bookmarks toolbar. On OS X, however, I use Safari as my main browser, and, to tell you truth, Safari’s RSS implementation sucks. So I’ve been looking for a good RSS reader for a while, and finally, I think I found it!!
The past couple of of days I’ve been using a RSS reader called Viena, which a friend recommended. Before this, I used Slashdock and tried out NetNewsWire, and this just blows them out of the water. Give it a try!!