Mike Cohen

LOLCats 1.1

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I just submitted LOLCats 1.1, although it will probably take a few days before the update becomes available.

New in this version:

  1. You can now choose sort order: interestingness, relevance, or date. Date works the same as the previous version.
  2. Purges cached images on low memory warning
  3. Displays an alert if no network connecton or Flickr is unreachable
  4. Bug Fixes

Sorting by interestingness or relevance should avoid bringing up some of the inappropriate images a few people reported, although new images don’t appear as frequently. If you prefer, you can still view by date, which will work the same way as 1.0 did.

I’m now working on another Flickr-related application, as well as discussing the details of the official LOLcats app, which will use the RSS feed from icanhascheezburger.com instead of Flickr.

A note about LOLCats

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I’ve received a few complaints about some images that showed up in the LOLCats application.

Unfortunately I have very little control over which images appear (except for the one that appears in the initial loading screen, which is my own cat, Cody). I simply search Flickr for the tags ‘LOLCAT’ or ‘LOLCATS’ and present any images it returns. Since I’m not logging into Flickr, it will always do a safe search, although that depends on the images being tagged as not safe. Perhaps requesting the results sorted by relevance or interestingness may improve the results; I’ll experiment with that for the next version.

I’ve been asked to make the OFFISHUL LOLCATS application, which will use the feed from icanhascheezburger.com and several related sites. I will continue to maintain both applications.

I have a few fixes planned for an upgrade. Most importantly, it will verify Flickr’s reachability, so it won’t simply hang if it has no network connection. Since it can take long to load images over an Edge connection, I’ve also disabled user interaction while the image is loaded, since swiping during that time can cause the image to disappear.

Checking Apple’s daily stats, it ‘sold’ almost 2400 copies in one day, including 2200 in the US, 159 in Canada, 19 in Mexico, and a few in several other countries. Since this is a free app, I’m not getting paid for it, of course. Not bad for something I just wrote for fun and as a proof of concept for testing the Flickr API 🙂

Running a virtualized Mac

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VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is out and it lets you run Mac OS X Server (not client) in a virtual machine. It took some work, but I finally maaged to get it working.

Although I don’t have a Server license, Apple makes it available to Apple Developer Connection members, so I was able to download the disk image from the ADC member site.

If you try to install directly from the Leopard Server DVD image, you’ll find that VMWare doesn’t let you choose a .dmg file. To get around that, open the image in Disk Utility and convert to DVD/CDR Master. VMWare will then let you install from the resulting .cdr image.

If you try to use the default settings for the virtual machine, the installation will fail. VMWare has posted instructions for successfully installing Mac OS X Server. The important thing is to customize the VM settings, remove the IDE hard drive and add a 30GB SCSI hard drive.

When you start the installation, the installer won’t find any drives to install the operating system, so you’ll have to open Disk Utility in the VM and erase the virtual drive. Once you do that, the installation will proceed smoothly.

MacOSX Server in VMWare
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

GMail tip

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This probably isn’t new but I never realized it until now. You can find all unread messages by entering “is:unread” in the search box. I use lots of filters to label messages and keep them out of the inbox, so I usually have to look in lots of different labels to find all of my new messages.

LOLCats is live!

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LOLCats is now available in the App Store. This is a fun, free application I wrote to try out the Flickr API. It simply searches Flickr for public images tagged LOLCAT and lets you browse them. You can also open the Flickr page for any image in Safari.

Another Photowalk

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Paulo is planning another photowalk on August 23 in connection with Scott Kelby‘s Worldwide Photo Walk. This one will be in Lauderdale-by-the-sea, a quaint beach town only a few miles from me, at the end of Commercial Blvd. I’ve been there many times.