/dev/random

50% off sale on PicSlide

mike — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:43:23 +0000

From now through next Saturday, November 28, PicSlide is selling for only $1 (that’s 50% off) to celebrate my birthday and US Thanksgiving.

Buy it here.

DSC_8310.JPG [Flickr]

mike3k — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:27:09 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Effortlessly uploaded by Eye-Fi

DSC_8314.JPG [Flickr]

mike3k — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:26:36 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Effortlessly uploaded by Eye-Fi

New PicSlide 1.1 Features

mike — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:08:14 +0000

I’m adding Facebook connect to PicSlide 1.1. There will be a connect button on the main menu, and when you complete a puzzle it will post a message to your stream with the time & number of moves.

It will also have a score board listing the 10 best times & fewest moves instead of the current ‘game over’ alert. I haven’t finalized the appearance of the scoreboard yet.

I’m also working on a new application icon which is more suggestive of the actual application with a wooden frame & a real picture instead of colored blocks.

New PicSlide Feature [Flickr]

mike3k — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:53:36 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Uploaded with Realmac Software's LittleSnapper.

Facebook connect in PicSlide [Flickr]

mike3k — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:53:32 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Uploaded with Realmac Software's LittleSnapper.

links for 2009-11-19

del.icio.us auto poster — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:01:08 +0000

Cocoa open source

Collection of open source cocoa projects

(tags: cocoa iphone)

27″ iMac

mike — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:56:27 +0000

I ordered the 27″ i7 quad core 2.8GHz iMac last week. It still hasn’t shipped – the order status still says “Ships: November”. A lot of people who ordered them earlier are starting to receive them, and from early reports, the performance is outstanding.

For the last few years, I’ve been using laptops with 15″ or smaller screens & speeds of 2.5 GHz or less exclusively, so this will be a nice upgrade. I’m really starting to feel the limitations of the MacBook Pro when running a Windows 7 VM and trying to do useful work like XCode builds in OS X with 4GB of RAM.

I’ll be keeping only the 13″ MacBook, since I prefer it to the 15″ for traveling.

links for 2009-11-16

del.icio.us auto poster — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:00:57 +0000

mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2009-11-13: Dangerous Cocoa Calls

Cocoa calls which are subtly dangerous, things which you might easily use in an innocent manner, only to discover later that bad things can occur.

(tags: cocoa development macosx)
Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.

(tags: wireframes design prototyping web tools webdesign)

links for 2009-11-11

del.icio.us auto poster — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:01:01 +0000

Top 10 photography tips to turn you into a professional

(tags: photography tips)
A Hidden Gem in HTML

I don’t know how one goes about finding these things, but someone noticed a weird source code for this page. It’s a very basic, unspectacular catalog page for Fujinon Binoculars. But take a look at the source code.

This screenshot is but a

(tags: easteregg design funny cool code)

User Interface FAIL

mike — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:57:33 +0000

I’ve set up a new Tumblr blog, User Interface Fail to collect and show off terrible user interface designs. This Tumblr was inspired by mrgan’s post about the many inconsistent sliders used in Photoshop CS4. Public submissions are welcome at http://uifail.tumblr.com/submit. Anyone who would like to make regular posts is welcome to become a member.

Plans for PicSlide 1.1

mike — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:07:27 +0000

I’m starting to work on enhancements for the next version of PicSlide. The major change is that it will now count the number of moves as well as the elapsed time.

I also plan to add a scoreboard and a way to share your best scores online, most likely with FaceBook Connect.

$10

mike — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:58:32 +0000

I’m joining Jonah Grant in a protest this weekend by raising the price of ICanHasCheezburger Pro & iDjembe to $10 and removing ICHC lite from sale until Monday.

You’re surfing through the App Store and come across an awesome app, and then you see the price tag, $.99. What do you think? Way too expensive? Should it be free? or are you willing to pay the price for a great piece of software?

This is the biggest problem in the App Store. People these days are so used to seeing a cool app and then downloading it for free and then they get used to it, not paying developer for their work. They don’t understand that these cool little things take time and money to make, yet they still don’t pay for these utterly cool products that people devote time and money to.

Parallels still beats VMWare

mike — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:23:01 +0000

Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3 were both released in the last week, and as usual I tried both. I find that Parallels is noticeably faster running Windows 7, and it doesn’t slow down my MacBook Pro like VMware does.

When running a Windows 7 VM with 768M RAM allocated, VMWare uses 1GB of physical RAM and at least 20% CPU most of the time. Parallels uses around 632M and almost no CPU time when idle.

Parallels Coherence mode still looks a lot cleaner than VMWare’s Unity. Parallels starts up cleanly in Unity, while VMWare can’t switch to Unity until the virtual machine is fully booted & the VMWare tools are loaded. Dragging windows in Unity tends to be ugly, with desktop artifacts appearing, while dragging seems faster & cleaner in Parallels.

Parallels 5 adds a new crystal view, which resembles Coherence plus it makes the Parallels application disappear completely, with an icon added to the menu bar that lets you launch Windows applications.