Imagewell

A nice little image editor utility that I recently started using is Imagewell.. Thoroughly easy to use. Just drag and drop an image onto its window to manipulate the image. You can rename it, change the format (say to jpg), alter the image size and quality, rotate and even add a watermark.

When it comes to saving the image it has a neat concept of locations. You build a list of common locations, and these can be folders on any local disk, remote disk, or a remote directory on an FTP or SFTP server, and it also supports other special cases like Flikr. I find it extremely handy for resizing huge iPhoto images and then automatically uploading to the appropriate folder on my web site in one click.

Easy to use, simple, fast, no fancy features: To me the perfect Mac app.

Neo Office

One of the power apps I miss most on the Mac, and is preventing the completion of my move from Windows is Microsoft Office. I have a lot of spreadsheets and Word docs, both privately and as part of my work.

At work I have Office for Mac and it is really nice – in fact I prefer it to the native Windows version because of the more intuitive interface. But at home I baulk at coughing up $300 for it. Like most people I have never bought Office directly but always had it installed on a new machine. I know that one day I am going to have to pay the big bucks. I can’t live without Office.

I might decide that it is cheaper to run parallels and continue to use the Windows Office, but something about that option bugs me. It’s wrong somehow to have a yummy Mac and then revert to the clumsy Windows interface. I still need to think that one over.

In the past I have tried AbiWord but found it really really slow, and it does not faithfully reproduce Word docs, particularly bullet points and complicated tables of contents. A while ago I installed NeoOffice. So far I have been very impressed with its speed and accuracy, the only bugaboo being that it always tries to save in a native file format and most of my docs and xls’s tend to be shared with other, Windows, users. I shall continue to use it and see if I come across any cases where it fails to reproduce Windows Office formatting.

Web site – Smultron and Cyberduck

I finally moved my web site from th Windows box entirely to the Mac. Since I haven’t committed enough to TexMate to buy it, I decided to go with the free Smultron which is a nice, if simple editor.

Fugu, my previous FTP client wasn’t really doing what I wanted. I have been using Cyberduck at work very successfully, and it seems very fast, so I uninstalled Fugu and went with Cyberduck at home too.

My web editing isn’t very sophisticated. I’m not a Dreamweaver or Flash person or in to any of those powerful apps that do css and everything. I prefer to hand code everything, so a text editor like Smultron is fine for me needs.

The only thing I am missing on the Mac now, with regards web site maintenance, is a cheap photo and graphic app like Paint Shop Pro on Windows. I have yet to find an app on the Mac yet that allows both the creation of web graphics, buttons and text and so on, AND thw ability to manipulate photos.

Sticky Windows

This is probably the most useful utility I have on my Mac so far. Sticky Windows is a cross between the Dock and the Windows minimized taskbar. Once installed, you can drag a window to any or all of the 4 sides of your monitor, or even on multiple monitors, and it will minimize to a tab there, horizontal or vertical as appropriate. Simply click again to unminimize. It’s a fantastic way to gain more minimizing than the Dock which if it is anything like mine, fills up the entire side of the monitor even when the icons are tiny.

Another cool thing is that the minimized tabs are text, making it much easier to locate what you need than the minimized icons on the Dock. With 2 monitors it is great because you get 5 screen edges to stick tabs too and still leave one edge clear for your Dock.

You can choose manual mode or auto-mode. In auto-mode, restoring a minimized tab automatically minimizes all the others, for maximum neatness. You can mix manual and auto if you like.

Try it out and then buy it for $25, a very fair sum for a fantastic utility. The author maintains it well too, with at least a couple of bug fix updates a month, although I have found it very stable.

Eclipse, PHP, MySql, oh my!

LAMP: (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP). I’ve been using this configuration on and off for a long time, as have most people in the industry. My home web site is based upon it. At my new job I use LAMP more than ever before (rather than C++) so after my recent adventures with XCode and Cocoa on my Mac (see a recent post), I thought I should set up LAMP on my trusty Mac.

Well OS X is a breed of unix, and Apache comes installed, so that’s half of the configuration taken care of. I’ve been wanting to try out Eclipse and PHP for some time, so this was my perfect opportunity. Eclipse is a very powerful open-source IDE, and they have a subproject dedicated to Eclipse with PHP, called PDT. It was simple enough to install PDT, but Eclipse itself took a little working out. It is such a powerful and comprehensive multi-language IDE that you have to spend time figuring out how little you need to know to get started.

I also had to get Apache working with PHP. I foound an excellent tutorial on the subject. The same tutorial also sets you up with MySql 5.x. Actually it proved tougher than that and there were a few manual configuration steps I had to go through to get PHP talking to MySql.

Then it was a case of setting up a test project in Eclipse. It allows you to group your PHP and HTML files into a project and auto-publish them to Apache’s docroot when you select Run. You can elect to debug the PHP files if you need to troubleshoot. All-in-all a nice environment and I look forward to playing with it further.

Omnigraffle Pro

If you need a great diagraming and flowchart tool, check out OmniGraffle Pro

Here’s an example which I had to obfuscate since it was built for work:

Omnigraffle has built in templates for all the usual suspects: Org charts, Electronic circuits, databases, flowcharts, boolean gates, UML, entity relationships, GUI design, etc. You can export diagrams to PDF, PNG’s and all the standard formats.

XCode and Cocoa Programming

As a software developer, it obviously wasn’t going to take long before I started peering through the beautiful Mac OS X GUI to see how to program the beastie. The obvious place to start was with Apple’s own development tools.

They probably came on the DVD with your Mac, or you can register with the Apple Developer community and download them for free. I was extremely impressed! A huge set of documentation for every Apple SDK and library as well as user manuals for the tools themselves that come under the collective umbrella of XCode, Apple’s free but extremely slick and powerful, IDE, debugger and resource editor. Seriously, this is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 standard for free! Microsoft could learn something here.

There was a pretty steep learning curve for XCode but it helped that the IDE was intuitive. XCode allows all sorts of languages inclusing C++, C, Procedural C and the Apple-specific languages, Cocoa and Carbon. Cocoa seemed to be the way to go since it is a procedural-C based language heavily tied to UI building. To help me I bought a useful (if brief in places) book: “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd edition”, by Aaron Hillegass. He walks you through the basics of procedural-C, Cocoa and the drag-and-drop UI resource editor.

It was fun. I very quickly put together some UI-based apps that offered powerful functionality in very little code. Cocoa offers big bangs for your buck if you want to write some nice OS X apps.

More Hardware

Quite a bit has happened since my last post. First I’ll deal with the hardware changes and then address the software in another post.

Having some spare cash (tax refunds are great things!) I decided to beef up my Mini a bit. I went to Other World Computing who were doing some great deals on mini upgrades. I bought a Superdrive (a DVD-writer) to replace the CD-Writer that came with the mini and I bought 2Gb RAM. OWC offer to exoand your mini for you if you send it in, for a charge of $99, but hey, there’s nothing a geek can’t figure out right?

Taking the mini apart has a few tricks to it and I found a couple of good descriptions and videos online. I forget the links, google it and there are several. The secret to getting the cover off is a metal putty knife. Seriously! Once the cover is off you can see what a marvel of engineering the mini is – everything layered into such a small space. First I removed the antennae (bluetooth and wifi) and unfastened the optical drive. Then I had access to replace the ram and swap out the optical drive. Piece of cake as long as you take it slowly and remember where all the tiny screws go.

So how does it run… nice. Not that it was slow before but it did struggle a little with large multimedia files. The RAM definitely makes a difference. Testing the Superdrive was the first time I had played a DVD on the Mac and I was very impressed. They have a really decent codec. The quality was far superior to what I had seen on the PC, not that I ever bought expensive codecs.

All in all, a very nice upgrade. I have my eyes on the miniStack V2 external drive next. I can buy an “empty” one for about $60 and slot in my own hard drive.

Pages and my new Job

My latest experimentation is with the trial version of Pages which came on my Mac. I built a 3-column double-sided pamphlet. This turned out to be pretty easy since Pages came with the template. It took me a couple of trips to the Help menu to figure out how to change font colour, align images and some other things but it is an extremely easy to use program. Much easier than iCalamus, and easier than most DTP applications I have used under Windows.

The only real problem I had is adjusting the layout (margins and gutters) for A4 paper as opposed to the US Letter paper which is a slightly different size. I would have had this problem with any application though.

Will I buy Pages, which is part of iWork? I believe I will. Pages is a very nice application.

In other news, I started my new job at Adicio a couple of days ago. One of the many nice things about Adicio is that they let the developers choose the machine they want to work on. Since many are already on Macs, I elected to do the same, so now I am using a freshly-reinstalled G5Power Mac as my desktop machine. Very nice indeed. I expect I shall be trying out some new apps over the next couple of weeks like iTerm, TextMate, etc.

Comic Life

This is a really neat program that came with my Mac as part of iLife ‘06. I put together a little comic for my sister to try it out and I am extremely impressed! This is how an app should be. The whole interface was so intuitive that I could just drag and drop and click and everything worked just the way I expected. Top marks to the designers!

It took me about 1 enjoyable hour to make 6 pages full of photos in different formats with plenty of speech and thought bubbles, text boxes, fancy action lettering… all the good comicky things. The only thing that really surprised me was it created a PDF 122Mb large! Wow! But it was all high quality photos.