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Aug 15
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iVandal
Well MerchTech has done it again. This is a super app for filling time and just having fun! The best thing of all is that you can take care of anyone or anything that needs it! Check it out on the AppStore.
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Jul 06
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Icon Composer is a must have if you are building applications. It comes as part of the Apple Development Kit. You can download a copy of the developer kit from the Apple Developer site. You will just need to register. There is no cost for the basic account. Once you have the kit installed then go to Spotlight and type in icon, it will pop up and you can launch it.
You will then see a pallet displayed with five boxes of the following sizes 512, 256, 128, 36, and 16 pixels. To create your icons, just drop the picture that you want to use in the 512 box. Icon Composer will now resize in to all the other options. Then choose File, Export, and save. When you open the saved file you will see copies of all your file in the various sizes that you can now use. Just drag and drop them to where they are needed. They will be in tiff format, but that can be changed by just opening and saving as another format.
This is a simple but very useful tool when you need any of these specific sized icons and you will as you progress doing development for the various Apple platforms.
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May 15
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Pages Certificate and Mail Merge
This is the third year that it has been my pleasure to create certificates for a bunch of middle schoolers taking time to study science via model rocketry. In previous years, I have used Word and OpenOffice’s Writer. I found both of them most aggravating when trying to get the objects laid out properly. With Pages, it was just dead easy! Using last years as a visual aid, I created this in less than 30 minutes, could have done it faster, but I had to play with lines, colors, fonts, and anything else I could adjust.
Never being comfortable with the way Word works in general, OK maybe I am just not a M$ fan, but I have tried to like Word, I choose OpenOffice to create this last year. It took me over four hours to create and mail merge it with OpenOffice. It took me about the same amount of time the year before when I was using Word. Now before you think this was the only time that I have ever done something like this with Word, it is not. I have worked with M$ Office like this many times, and I always come away frustrated. M$ always spends more time throwing in the kitchen sink and not enough time making sure the plumbing is up to standards, if you get my drift.
As you see, I am not a M$ fan, but I am a fan of OpenOffice. They have done an excellent job of giving us an excellent alternative to M$ Office, at a great price point. I hope they will not only survive the Oracle SUN merger, but will actually thrive.
As a side note, if you would like to know more about the rocketry hobby check out , The Birmingham Rocket Boys website.
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May 08
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I found it! I have so many groups that I need to keep in touch with and until now, I did not have anything natively to make this happen in such an intuitive way from my iPhone. This application allows you to save an unlimited list of groups and add people from your address book. I have been looking for something like this for quiet some time. Until now, nothing that I found allowed me to be as productive as this little application. Get your copy here, and give it a try, I think you will really love it. Just like the color of the envelops on the icon, it gets my gold seal of five stars.
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May 06
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Not quite yet, but maybe soon. With all the rumors swrilling these days about Apple-Twitter, Apple-EA, etc, it is hard to keep up! The rumor mill is churning, ferociously, on many fronts, which usually means there is some truth in there somewhere, but we are not looking at exactly what that is, at the moment.
What I am looking at is the idea that Apple could become a gaming empire apart from whether or not they buy EA. There are two paths one could take down this path, buy a company, or build relationships with current game developers. Both have their risks and rewards. I would submit that Apple has been building their gaming portfolio one small iPhone application at the time. Well done games for the iPhone are very appealing. I have been surprised how compelling some of the best games on the iPhone are. I didn’t think you could create a real interactive feel for complex games in such a compact environment. Boy, was I wrong.
Games on the iPhone produce a great gaming experience. The graphics, response, inputs, and sound, with head phones, are all great! I know, sound is awful on the iPhone. I don’t know what you can do with speakers on such a small device, but maybe someday they will solve this issue, but I digress. Myself and others, really enjoy playing games via the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Now on the building front. There has been hiring going on at One Infinite Loop that leads the keen eye to see a heavier focus being put on gaming. They just hired, Richard Teversham, the senior director of business, insights and strategy for Xbox’s European division. There have also been several jobs postings of late that were gaming related. Could be nothing, but it could be the silent building of an empire.
Look, I know that there is no guarantee of success here, remember the Pippin? I do. Well, I also remember the first Apple PDA, the Newton, at the time, it was not a roaring success, but it laid the groundwork for what we now have, the iPhone. So, lets not read too much into a failure at a company that over time has had great success in so many things!
Game on!!!
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May 04
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With cheap PCs moving at a very nice pace from store shelves, should Apple cut prices on some low end Macs and MacBooks in order to grow their market share? Their profit margins from last quarter would lead you to believe they can. Also if you look at the iPod model, it would also seem to be a viable model even for Apple, who typically like to be known as designing and selling high end products. Some interesting figures can be found on this CNNMoney article.
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Apr 23
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Release 0.9 of NixCookies has been released on the app store. It is a port of the old UNIX/Linux command line cookie program. It is a free download and comes with three cookie packs, Fortunes, Perl, and Computer. I plan on adding more in future releases. Check it out here on the app store.
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Mar 28
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Here it comes! WWDC! The people in Cupertino have been super busy of late and it seems it is only going to get busier. From all indications, it looks like there will be new iPhone hardware, so what better time to announce it. Snow Leopard should also be getting close to release. The new rev of the iPhone OS will be ready to go. As I said, they have been busy! So who’s going?
Blake