Weblog of a “Switcher”

I have been asked by a few people now how I get the screen shots I use in these posts. There is nothing really magical here, I just use a program to capture the images and let WordPress take care of changing their size to fit within the width of my blog. I use a small JavaScript program I found to display the full size images when someone clicks on the thumbnails. That's pretty much it.

For the screen shots I put on the site, I use a program called Snapz Pro X by Ambrosia Software. It may not be the very best program out there, but it's one I purchased a long time ago and have enjoyed it use for quite some time.

The screen shot images are stored in PNG format with a DPI of 72 dots per inch. That's done by Snapz Pro X and I don't have any control over the DPI at all.

Once, I get the screen shots I need, I use WordPress' ability to add media to a blog post to take care of creating thumbnails and smaller sizes so that the images will fit inside the content column of the blog. So if an image is 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, WordPress will shrink the image to 500x375. It also creates an image that is 150x150 cropping it if necessary.

I then place the image also using WordPress to get my initial HTML data. I then remove a part of that data since I don't use WordPress' WYSIWYG editor when writing my posts. I style some of the images so that there is a small transparent border on the side of the image where the text will run up to it. This is done with CSS inside the IMG tag.

The images that are not screen shots that I use in the top right corner of my posts and sometimes sprinkled throughout the post are usually pictures I find on either flickr.com or image.google.com. I try flickr.com first and make sure the image is under Creative Commons before I use it. If I get the image from image.google.com, I'm just hoping that the owner is OK with it. I'm not a huge site like Digg.com or C|Net, so I don't present as big a threat as a larger site would. If I get asked to take down an image, I'll be more than happy to.

If the image I find is too big for what I am going to use it for, I will use Preview (an application that comes with OS X on the Mac) to reduce the size of the image to the correct size. I usually don't make these images bigger than 120 pixels wide. So I try to find an image that will scale to that size nicely.

Also, I never hotlink or "inline link" an image from another site. This is not an ethical practice and most importantly I would have no control over the image being displayed. The problem here is that the image comes from a different site and so the bandwidth it takes to display that image is being charged by that different site. It's well within the rights of the site owner of the hotlinked image to do whatever they want with the image. I have heard some interesting stories of hotlinked images being changed to rather rude images due to this practice. So the person hotlinking the image will now be displaying an image of something rather rude on their site instead of what they had originally intended.

Sometimes the smaller images are screen shots of application icons. They also might be edited with a program called Acorn by Flying Meat Inc. so that I can merge more than one icon together or do some other simple editing. I also use Pixelmator to do some of that editing. I'm no artist, so I don't use Photoshop.

That's pretty much it. I hope that answers the questions I have been asked. If not, please feel free to leave a comment with more questions. I have no problem at all answering questions about the site or the Mac and OS X. It's one of the main reasons for the site in fact.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: screen, Screenshot, shot

Have you ever accidentally dragged an icon off of your Dock thinking it was the actual icon and not the top most icon on a Leopard Stack? Man I have, many times. One thing I really miss switching from Windows XP to OS X is the ability to lock down the Dock so that I can't accidentally remove an icon or change the size of the Dock icons or even move it to a different side of the screen.

DockLock is a shareware program that actually locks the Dock down so that you can't accidentally remove an icon, move an icon to a different location on the Dock, or even change the size of the icon magnification.

The program takes 0 bytes of memory after you run it because all it really does is change some settings in Leopard's Dock process. So, if you have an Applescript or Automator script that does the same thing, or you have a program like MacPilot, you might not feel you need this program. However, this program puts all the adjustments needed to make this work into a nice single little package that eliminates the need to have the other options mentioned.

The DockLock application icon, if stored on the Dock, lets you know the Dock is locked or not.

The program's preferences are pretty extensive considering all it does is modify "default" commands in Leopards Dock process.

As you can see, it even allows you to switch the 3D effect of the Dock on and off.

The best part is that they are only asking $8 for the program. Considering the amount of work that goes into writing Macintosh applications, this is quite a deal.

I'm still evaluating the program myself, but considering the ease of use, I'm probably going to go ahead and purchase the program.

Check it out at: http://www.armelline.com/DockLock_2.0.html

written by Dave M. \\ tags: dock, Leopard, lock, shareware

When Leopard first came out, one of Leopards new features, Stacks, didn't allow for the ability to display the contents of a folder on the Dock in the way that Tiger used to which was to display all the files and folders in a popup list menu. Later versions of Leopard added this feature back in.

Quay is a great replacement for Leopard's (OS X 10.5.x) Stack feature. It was first released in public beta form not long after Leopard was released and has gone through 7 revisions since. I have been using it since Version 1.0.1 and have found it to be a great extension of Leopard's Dock.

First, it does what Leopard should have done from the beginning. Allows you to display the contents of a folder on the Dock in an easy to setup fashion.

As you can see from the above screen shot, Quay lists out all the files in a given folder, nothing really all that different from Leopard. What sets Quay apart from Leopards built-in feature is configurability.

Along with all the options that Leopard supports, Quay allows you to display more information than Leopard like Folder item Counts, Invisible Items, and Package Contents.

You can sort the list in a few more ways that Leopard; Application, Label, File Size. Quay also displays icons for the items in the folder where Apple decided that icons were not necessary.

Quay allows you to adjust the size of the icons or show a preview image which uses the preview images used in CoverFlow.

The best feature of Quay is the ability to display a little more information than just the name of the file. You can display the Date Modified, Date Created, Label, or File Sized of each item in the list.

Quay also allows you to customize the icon that will appear in the Dock after it's added. You can add an icon or badge over the folder image, change the color of the folder, and even choose a different image for the folder itself. This is done from within the application that is run from the first menu item of a Quay options menu.

You can even place the folder on the left side of the Dock usually reserved for Application icons.

If this was all that Quay did, the €7 or about $10 being asked for the program would be a steal. However, Quay does a few more things.

If you hold down Command and Option when clicking on a running program in the Dock, Quay displays some statistics about that running program. The version of the program, the memory it is currently using, Average and current CPU percentage.

Lastly, Quay supports Leopard's Smart Folders. Just drag a smart folder into the Dock and Quay displays it just like any other folder. Leopard doesn't support this at all. You can place a smart folder in the Dock, but when you click on it, it just opens the folder in the Finder.

This is one of my "must have" programs for the Mac. Before Quay, I had very little in the on the right side of my Dock. Now I have 10 Quay folders helping me find documents and applications I open/run frequently.

It's a great buy for the €7 or ~$10 being asked. There isn't a trial version, but the first folder on each side of the Dock will work until registered.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: dock, Leopard, popup menu, quay, Stacks

This is going to be a really unfortunate review. I had some high hopes for this reader. It has a gorgeous interface. Way better than any I have seen in any other feed reader. It's not for all the feeds you would be reading since the format of the UI is a newspaper. But there was one nagging problem that made me remove the program from my Hard Drive.

It has certainly received high praise from many other bloggers. As well as a bunch of Twitter posts.

Times, by Acrylic software, is a really unique idea in RSS Feed readers.

The main User Interface is a newspaper. All the stories from many feeds are displayed on the front page of this newspaper and when there are more stories that can fit in one section, there will be a scroll bar that will allow you to scroll down to the rest of the stories.

When you find a story that you are interested in reading, you simply click on the story and the front page curls down to reveal the story on a full page behind the front page. If there is a picture in the story, you can click on a small eyeball icon to do a QuickLook on the picture to see a bigger version of the picture. Not the best way to do that. I would prefer just clicking anywhere on the picture. Still, a really nice touch.

It's really pretty.

However, there is one nagging problem that really bothered me to the point that I removed it. Managing the subscriptions. The only way I could find to manage the subscriptions that Times uses a small slide down section of the interface that shows about 15 subscriptions that look like buttons. There are a couple of controls at the top of the section:

Here is the problem here. I wanted to remove all the subscriptions that come with the program. There is no way to multi-select the list of feeds currently subscribed to. So removing all the feeds at once was not an option. So, I had to select one at a time and hit the delete key for each and acknowledge the delete for each feed. I wasn't happy about this, but I only had to do it once. However, as I was deleting the feeds, the program would crash. This happened several times. So I gave up on Times.

I suspect that when 2.0 comes out, Times will be a very cool program. I'll certainly give them another chance when 2.0 comes out, but until then, I'm going to have to pass on it.

Good luck Acrylic, keep up the great work with such a unique interface. Something lacking in a lot of software and other forms of entertainment.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: feed, newspaper, reader, rss, times

Well, actually for users of all web browsers that 1Password supports, which is pretty much all the mainstream and even some of the not so mainstream browsers.

The great program 1Password has updated their software to version 2.6 and added a great new feature to it's program that allows it's browser extension to test visited web sites against an online database of known Phishing sites called PhishTank.

It's great to see 3rd party software stepping up to the plate to help make our World Wide Web experience and enjoyable and safe as possible.

I have been a very happy user of 1Password for quite some time now and use it to hold Credit Card info as well as my wife's Social Security Number (I get asked for that number quite a bit since I have been seeing quite a few doctors lately).

With 1Password, you can take all your secure information and store it on your mobile device or iPhone in such a way that only you can access it. This feature has saved my behind several times now!

The program is only $34.95 and well worth every penny.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 1password, anti-phishing, iPhone, Safari, Security

At first read, Adobe had me thinking that they had decided to treat Macintosh as second class citizens for some strange reason. I recently read that Adobe was going to release it's next version of Creative Suite including Photoshop in 64-bit and for Windows only.

I was shocked since it seemed to me that the majority of sales for Creative Suite comes from the Macintosh side. I really was left scratching my head at such move.
Then I read this short little blurb from John Gruber's Daring Fireball and found out why.

What happened? In short, Apple cancelled 64-bit Carbon:

As we wrapped up Photoshop CS3, our plan was to ship 64-bit versions of the next version of Photoshop for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac Photoshop (like the rest of the Creative Suite, not to mention applications like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and iTunes) relies on Apple’s Carbon technology. Apple’s OS team was busy enabling a 64-bit version of Carbon, a prerequisite for letting Carbon-based apps run 64-bit-native.

At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe and other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.

It’s a great post; Nack does a good job dispelling any potential notion that this is a sign that Adobe’s commitment to the Mac is any way flagging.

It's a shame that Photoshop and other Creative Suite products are written in Carbon for the Mac. It probably got them into OS X very quickly some 7 years back, but not it's biting them.

On the other hand, you really can't blame them. Apple still has quite a few products in Carbon including iTunes and Finder. If Apple expects others to switch to Cocoa, they really should shine a light on the path and make the move themselves. With the news that Apple has dropped 64-bit Carbon, I suspect that Apple will be making that move soon for iTunes, Finder and the rest of the software that is still Carbon.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Adobe Creative Suite, Blurb, Carbon Technology, Class Citizens, Cocoa, Daring Fireball, Final Cut, Good Job, iTunes, John Gruber, Light On The Path, Lightroom, Macintosh Side, Nack, Os X, Plug Ins, Prerequisite, Scare, Strange Reason, Wwdc