Divvyshot is a very promising new photo sharing site, still in beta. It’s based on public events. Members can create an event such as Macworld Expo, and other people who attended the same event can add their pictures to the event.
Mike Cohen
iDjembe 2.0 is now available
iDjembe 2.0 is ready for sale in the app store. I have a few promo codes available for anyone interested.
Here’s a demo video showing virtual drum circle and the ability to play along with the iPod.
links for 2009-03-05
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Short story: Parallels completely pwns VMware
XML View plugin for Safari
One thing that always bothered me about Safari was the inability to display formatted XML as Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers do. Thanks to Marc Liyanage’s XML View Plugin, that’s no longer the case. Simply drop the plugin in ~/Library/Internet Plugins and restart Safari.
Expanding a Drobo
I use my Drobo for Time Machine backups, which very quickly eats up disk space. With 2 drives installed, the Drobo had a capacity of a little less than 1TB, which was about half full. Since it has 4 bays, that leaves plenty of room for expansion.
Last week, a few places were selling the WD Caviar 1TB SATA drive for $95, so I took advantage of that to upgrade my Drobo before I ran out of space. When the drive arrived today, all I had to do was slide it into an open bay and it was immediately recognized. I didn’t even have to shut down the Drobo to install the drive.
It now has 1.2 TB free out of 1.81 TB available space.
 WD 1TB SATA Drive |
 Installing the drive |
 Drive is ready |
 Done! |
links for 2009-03-04
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Useful shell script to open the document folder or preferences for an application in the iPhone Simulator.
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In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income. The people ABC quoted don't seem to understand that. Worse, ABC doesn't seem to understand it, either.
New Airport Extreme looks good
In addition to the new Mac Minis & iMacs, Apple also introduced a new Airport Extreme Base Station & Time Machine today. The new base station adds two very appealing features: the ability to use 2.4GHz & 5GHz bands at the same time, and ability to set up a guest network for internet access only without being able to access other machines on the local network.
I usually let my “snowbird” neighbor use my wireless network when he’s here, which is usually for a week every few months. I would feel a lot more comfortable setting it up without access to my local network, so I’ll probably get the new base station for that feature alone.
links for 2009-03-03
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To be successful at this endeavor, you need to monitor your sales and plan development around the revenue.
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Useful code tidbits for quick reference.
A few software updates
Two very nice software updates came out today. First, MarsEdit 3.2b14 added Tumblr support. Also, Connected Flow released FlickrExport 3.0 for iPhoto & Aperture. For anyone who bought any version of FlickrExport since January 2008, this is a free upgrade. Later tonight, Tap Tap Revolution 2 should be available in the app store.
iDjembe 2.0 submitted
I just submitted iDjembe 2.0 to the app store. I decided to change the version number to 2.0 because I did a major rewrite of the audio player code.
For the first version, I just wanted to make something quick that hopefully would cash in on the app craze and make some money. This time I’m serious about making it good.
The major new feature is Virtual Drum Circle, which lets you connect to other players on the local network and broadcast your beats to them.
The major under the hood change is that it now uses OpenAL instead of the simple audio player (which pretty much sucked). I tried several sound APIs including Audio Queue and AVAudioPlayer, but I found that OpenAL is the most straightforward and gives the best performance.
Unfortunately Apple’s iPhone developer documentation doesn’t cover OpenAL, although there are several code samples that use it. I found the best information to be at Ben Britten’s blog and the official OpenAL site.
After some experimentation, I determined the best strategy is to use a pool of OpenAL sources and prepare a buffer for each sound. Instead of using a single source for each sound, when I need to play a sound, I get the next available source, and add the desired sound buffer to it. As a result, it can now play more than one sound at a time and can play the same one repeatedly without a click.