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DynDNS Wide Area Bonjour Support Goes Beta

Bed — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:27:53 +0000

Last week DynDNS released its beta support for Wide Area Bonjour and DNS Service Discovery. This means that if you own your own domain name, and you have a Custom DNS service with DynDNS, you can configure your Apple AirPort device (AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express and Time Capsule) to present itself as part of that domain, automatically updating your domain name and broadcasting configured services.

Read more at The Apple Blog

How-To: Expand Wake On Demand Support Under OS X 10.6

Bed — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:41:12 +0000

Recently, I’ve been migrating the functionality of my old Ubuntu Linux server to my wife’s old iMac. Since a big part of the reason to decommission my old Linux PC was to reduce my total power consumption, I wanted to fully utilize Snow Leopard’s Wake On Demand functionality with as many services as possible.

Wake On Demand is a relatively new feature that arrived with Snow Leopard. It allows your Mac to be put into sleep mode and then be woken up on demand when one of its services is required. This feature requires a compatible Apple AirPort Base Station (or Time Capsule) and OS X 10.6 running on the Mac. Most of the standard system services (File Sharing, Screen Sharing, Scanner & Printer Sharing etc.) will work automagically with this setup, but custom services such a my subversion and the built-in web sharing do not. However it’s not hard to make these services compatible with Wake On Demand with only a little bit of work to set it up. Here’s how I did it. Read more at The Apple Blog

How-To: Setup a SVN Server Under OS X 10.6

Bed — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:41:14 +0000

Last year I took a look at a number of Subversion clients for OS X, finally settling on Versions as my client of choice for my personal coding needs. At the time, I was running a Linux server on some old generic hardware from the days before I drank the Apple Koolaid. After deciding to upgrade my wife’s 17″ iMac with the new i5 27″ model, I realized I could ditch the old Linux hardware and get some great power savings (and hence reduced electricity bill) in the process. The first task I had was moving my SVN repository over from the Linux machine (Ubuntu 9.10) to the iMac running OS X 10.6…and this is how I did it.

21 iPhone Puzzle Games to Kill Time With

Bed — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:14:23 +0000

I think I’ve spent more time playing games on my iPhone than I have on my old Playstation, Playstation 2 or Wii. It simply boils down to the fact that whenever I’m standing around waiting in a line, waiting for the train or in a dentist’s office, I can pull out my phone and have a quick game of something. Having a great choice of games in your pocket means you never need to be bored again while waiting around.

Here are my 21 favorite games to wait around with. The key common features for these games are that they’re quick to start playing and that you can achieve goals quickly with available playtime of as little as a minute. There are no long drawn out strategic battles, epic adventures or quests to get absorbed into.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Last.fm: 12 Ways to Scrobble

Bed — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:35:13 +0000

“Audio Scrobbling,” as defined by Last.fm, is the act of submitting to a central database the details of what songs you’ve been listening to (what album, by who and when you listened). Scrobbling to Last.fm is the main reason I use the service these days, especially since it made the internet radio part of it a paid subscription only service for Australia. I think that being able to easily track and visualise my listening history and share that with friends is a great example of the social internet revolution.

There are a number of ways to have your music scrobbled to Last.fm from your Mac. Which one you chose depends on which fits into your music workflow the best. Read more at The Apple Blog

Cut the Drama: Private APIs, the App Store & You

Bed — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:26:00 +0000

I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain about the poor, unfair treatment they get, carrying their bleeding hearts in their palms while claiming Apple is bludgeoning the life out of them.

Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform.

EyeTV on the iPhone: In-Depth

Bed — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:22:47 +0000

Recently, Elgato released EyeTV for the iPhone (AppStore Link). At a cost of $4.99, its marketing blurb offers the following functionality:

With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.

The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your iPhone:

Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (Wi-Fi connection required)

Watch your EyeTV recordings

Browse the comprehensive Program Guide

Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later

View and edit your recording schedules

Now that we know the promises, how does the functionality work in practise and does it live up to the hype? To set the picture accurately; my set up is a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini with 2GB of RAM and two Elgato Digital USB Tuner sticks. This is hooked up to an Airport Express, which extends my existing wireless connection from another room. Between myself and my wife, we have an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 2nd Gen, so I will be testing EyeTV on all three looking for differences.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Retro Gaming Roundup: 40 iPhone Games to Take You Back in Time

Bed — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:11:34 +0000

There are few iPhone games that I will immediately buy. Most of the ones I do, however, are the classic games I played as a teenager.

The iPhone/iPod touch is more than powerful enough to handle these games and it seems that there are many people like me who are keen to experience these classics again. So, here’s a roundup of modern ports of classic games. Only official ports of classic games are detailed here — clones and the like do exist but I had to draw a line in the sand. I’ve also included links to Wikipedia for those interested in the history of the games

See the list at The Apple Blog

iTunes 9: Smart Playlists Are Now Smarter

Bed — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:01:26 +0000

Smart Playlists in iTunes have always been a powerful way to create specific playlists to meet your needs, from creating a rotating fresh playlist for syncing to an iDevice to creating a specific playlist for a party. Being able to say “give me my music that hasn’t been played in the last month, that is of at least 320kbps and is rated 5 stars” is pretty sweet.

In iTunes 8 and earlier you could create all of these multiple rules and have them applied with a ‘match operator,’ which could be ALL (all rules have to match for a track to be included) or ANY (if any of the single rules apply the track will be included).

iTunes 9 has quietly and substantially expanded the level of complexity that you can create in these rules by allowing you to create nested rules. This lets you build up substantial logic with multiple ANY and ALL match operators being applied.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Apple Open-Sources Grand Central Dispatch

Bed — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:38:50 +0000

One of the most compelling new feature in Snow Leopard is Grand Central Dispatch, which can make it easier for developers to write software taking advantage of the multiple cores in our computers. On Sept., 10 Apple released the user library component of Grand Central to the open source community.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Sequel Pro 0.96 Released

Bed — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:39:27 +0000

The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the application, making working with it more pleasurable — if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable.

They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.

Read more at The Apple Blog

How-To: Making The Most Of Apple TV With XBMC And Boxee

Bed — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:41:32 +0000

The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from iTunes on a computer, but when trying to stream from a central generic media device, the out of the box software just doesn’t cut it.

It is, however, possible to customize your Apple TV with unauthorized third party software (much like a jailbreak for iPhones/iPod touches) to transform it into a fantastic cheap media player (with certain limitations).

Read how at The Apple Blog

Smultron and Lingon Developer Hangs Up Hat

Bed — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:30:25 +0000

If you were to navigate to lingon.sourceforge.net or smultron.sourceforge.net today, you would see the following text on your screen:

“Hi!

First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable future.

Cheers,

Peter Borg”

Read more at The Apple Blog

Rumor Has It: iTunes 9 Coming Next Month With Blu-ray Support

Bed — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:34:16 +0000

The Boy Genius Report is claiming to have received a tip that Blu-ray support will be coming to iTunes 9, which may be arriving as soon as next month. Also reportedly in iTunes 9 is the long sought after ability to arrange iPhone/iPod touch icon positions from within iTunes, instead of having to do it on the device itself. In addition there will be some kind of integration with Twitter/Facebook and Last.FM — presumably this would allow sending the currently playing song to the social networking sites, removing the need to run a separate application to do this.

Read more at The Apple Blog

CoRD: Remote Desktop 0.5 Released

Bed — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:14:36 +0000

As much as we all love our Macs, we still generally live in a Microsoft business world and need to connect and work with Windows boxes. While Microsoft does release its own Remote Desktop application to facilitate Mac users connecting to Windows machine, I’ve never been impressed with the interface for it (on either Mac or Windows). I’ve much preferred using the open source CoRD project.

Two years since the last release of CoRD, its development team have finally released version 0.5 bringing a whole heap of polish to an already excellent software package. For me the killer feature that CoRD has over Microsoft’s official client is the ability to have multiple connections going at once, all selectable from a list. The work flow becomes similar to a tabbed interface (although its not actually tabs).

Read more at The Apple Blog

NetNewsWire 3.2 Beta: Google Reader Replaces NewsGator

Bed — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:06:23 +0000

The folks over at NewsGator have seemingly given up on consumer news feed syncing and have seceded to the superiority of Google Reader.

First it was NewsGator’s Windows syncing feed reader Feed Demon that got the switch from NewsGator syncing to Google Reader syncing. Now its the Mac client’s turn and the esteemed reader NetNewsWire has now switched syncing services too. Yeterday’s announcement by NewsGator states that its will be taking its NewsGator Online news feed reading and syncing service offline by the end of August. This leaves little time for NetNewsWire to fast track a stable switch to Google Reader syncing, but yesterday the first public beta of NetNewsWire 3.2 was made available.

Read more at The Apple Blog

27 Bluetooth-enabled Multiplayer iPhone Games

Bed — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:25:14 +0000

The iPhone/iPod 3.0 OS allows third-party applications to utilize the device’s Bluetooth capabilities for two-player games. The first (and only) application I had that supported this in an update was Flight Control, and since then, whenever my wife and I are on a train, we occupy our time playing this.

The huge advantage of multiplayer Bluetooth compared with Wi-Fi is that you just need the two devices, no Wi-Fi access points or Internet connectivity is required. This is truly awesome, although as we cry, “Arrrgh sooo close!” loudly on public transport we can get some strange looks. We’ve loved playing Flight Control, but I thought that by now there must be a good number of other Bluetooth-enabled games. So I’ve searched the App Store and found the following games are the only ones that support multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth. This list will hopefully grow soon with more complex quality titles.

Check out what I found at The Apple Blog

App Review: Phaze — Futuristic Racing Action

Bed — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:21:31 +0000

Years ago I discovered a little futuristic hovercraft racing game on the PlayStation called Wipeout. The concept was simple, and in many ways it was pretty much the same gameplay as Mario Kart or Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart. What set it apart was that there were no cartoon graphics, and no toy weapons, just stunning futuristic graphics, unique craft handling (being hovercrafts) and the most important element: speed. These crafts could go really fast.

So as an avid fan of the Wipeout series, when I found out about Phaze I immediately had to try it. Phaze is pretty much a Wipeout clone for the iPhone. There’s nothing new added, it just takes the concept and translates it. This suits me fine. The question is how good the implementation is. Does it capture the magic that got me hooked to Wipeout all those years ago?

Read my review at The Apple Blog

Interview: Steve Gehrman of Path Finder/CocoaTech

Bed — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:31:07 +0000

I love reading interviews with developers, finding out some of the behind the scenes information on the makings of their products. Even more so when they’re my favorite products, the ones I use every day. Being able to put a personal face and story behind an end-user application puts a human story on the technology that I find fascinating. So, in the first of hopefully many such interviews, I caught up with Steve Gehrman, founder of CocoaTech, maker of the esteemed Path Finder application — a super charged alternative to Apple’s own Finder.

Read my interview with Steve over at The Apple Blog

First Look: Spanning Tools Public Beta

Bed — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:09:56 +0000

I’ve never been as organized as I am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple, I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile phone, but it was always clunky and slow and not worth the effort when things didn’t “Just Work.” Since tasting the sweet Apple pie, I now have multiple Google calendars shared with my wife and synced to both of our Macs and iPod touch/iPhones with Spanning Sync. We are now totally organized and its awesome.

However, like any data system, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The combination of data corruption and synchronization is one that can wreak total and utter havoc on the most organized of people, rendering us as useless as a fish out of water. To combat the potential of this scenario, the folks over at Spanning Sync have released a public beta of its new utility, Spanning Tools.

Read more at The Apple Blog