Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ category
Posted on August 2, 2006 at 05:59 UTC,
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Well, if you haven’t noticed, many things are moving over (including this blog) from the iris-studios.com domain to the bluestatic.org domain. This transition reflects the shift of organization. Iris Studios used to be a more art-based site and grew into a more software-oriented site. However, with the advent of the GNU GPL usage in most Iris Studios products, I thought that a .com domain was no longer suitable (and I was growing tired of explaining the iris-studios.com domain to people), so I created Blue Static. All of the projects (except Cryption and SimpleCalc) will be coming over when Bugdar 1.1.0 Final is released.
Basically, it’s all the same stuff under a new domain.
Posted on June 12, 2006 at 08:50 UTC,
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Per the request of a few switcher friends, I’m posting great Mac software that I use in my regular day-to-day life:
- BBEdit – Even though it does look a tad retro, it’s an amazing text editor that does everything I want and then some. Other editors do have some similar big-name features but the fact that BBEdit has everything a text editor needs is just perfect. From snipits, to a full HTML tag library, to HTML Tidy, to the most amazing search tool ever made, to all kinds of text-processing features, BBEdit has everything.
- Yojimbo – Made by the same great people who wrote BBEdit, Yojimbo is a personal information manager. It can hold PDFs, notes, passwords, and serial numbers. I previous used Apple’s Keychain for the last two, but things got all muddied because of auto-save information, etc. Yojimbo may not be feature-heavy, but it does things right. It’s simple, has Spotlight integration, and just quite simply works without having to give it a second thought.
- Quicksilver – A lot of people are just now starting to talk about QuickSilver, but it has been a favourite of mine for quite a while. It’s hard to explain this application, but basically, it allows you to control your entire computer without ever having to navigate via mouse. It has stunning visual effects and what’s great is that you can always find new ways to use it with plugins.
- NewsFire – NewFire is an RSS reader that just looks and feels like it belongs on the Mac. Unlike other readers, there’s no toolbar buttons or complex preferences. It just displays the information in a way that’s quick-to-access and very clean. This is the kind of application that takes five minutes to learn and then you’re off–no reading a manual or help files necessary. It’s a great alternative to Safari which has a tendency to add duplicate items on frequently-updated feeds.
- Synergy – Quite possibly the best $5 I’ve ever spent on shareware. There’s a lot of applications that allow you to control iTunes via the keyboard, but this is the best one that I’ve found. It fetches album art covers from Amazon, too!
- SpamSieve – If Apple’s junk mail filtering doesn’t do enough for your inbox, take a look at this application. Since training it, I’ve had absolutely no spam reach my inbox and only the rare false positive. Currently, it sits at 99.8% accuracy and it’s been that way for over a year.
- SSHKeychain – It crashes occasionally but it’s usefulness is far more important. SSHKeychain will load and save your SSH keys to allow password-less connection to remote servers. It’s essential for me because this is how I backup a lot of my things with CRON.
- SuperDuper! – I used to use EMZ/Dantz’s Retrospect backup to perform the incredibly important function of nightly backups (yes, nightly). However, in the now-famous comparison of backup software (which I happen to have lost the link for), SuperDuper came out on top. I also changed because SuperDuper allows you to clone your entire drive so you have a bootable backup in case the stuff hits the fan. All you do is change your startup volume and go (it also makes testing your backups much easier).
- Awaken – What’s better than waking up on a Monday morning than getting your favourite tunes played to your groggy self? Awake in an alarm clock that plays iTunes playlists when it wakes you (and your computer) up from sleep. You can schedule playlists for different days and times (for instance, I make sure “Walking on Sunshine” is played on Monday mornings to help take the edge off of having to go back to school).
Of course, Apple Mail, Adium, Interarchy, Photoshop, Xcode, MS Office 2004, and Keynote are all essential applications, but those are all fairly common and well-known.
Posted on March 30, 2006 at 03:03 UTC,
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Because I have now received a few requests to open up my SVN repositories (the earliest one was today), I have done so now that I’m nearing the time to release Edoc 2 and ISSO2.
So, I have opened up the following repositories:
It should be noted, however, that Bugdar’s development for 1.1 has not yet started in full-swing. This will happen once Edoc 2 is released.
As for the release of Bugdar 1.1: development will go into full-swing in about two weeks from today (I am extremely busy this week and will not be here at all next week). In that time, Edoc should be finished up so that will be released (I’m extremely close). And as the most requested feature is notifications, I will be sure to work on implementing that as the first feature. Once Bugdar 1.1 development commences, I’ll be posting more regular updates here to inform you on it’s progress. I’d expect the final version of 1.1 out sometime in early-to-mid July, but you’ll be welcome to get the SVN version any time.
And finally, a note about SVN versions: any of the code that is checked into SVN is not guaranteed to work. I don’t have a strict committing policy of only checking in fully-functioning items. You have been warned.
Posted on January 31, 2006 at 06:56 UTC,
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If you have ever opened an Iris Studios source file, you see something that looks like this:
/*=====================================================================*\
|| ###################################################################
|| # $HeadURL: https://dev.iris-studios.com/svn/isiwww/trunk/index.php $
|| # $Id: index.php 273 2006-01-03 05:44:57Z rsesek $
|| ###################################################################
\*=====================================================================*/
If you have ever visited the URL, you’ll know that you are greeted with a password prompt (after getting the unsigned certificate notice :D). In the next few days, I think I’ll be opening up the source repositories to Bugdar, ISSO, and Edoc.
I figure that it’s in the open source tradition to open up source trees, and such I feel that since those three products will all be released under the GNU GPL upon their next major release, it is fitting to follow tradition.
Stay tuned for when the repositories open up!
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