My first thought was “Hey, that’s fun! I wonder how many letter icons there are to build words in the dock. There could be an app for that.”

That was the moment Iconscrabble was born.

Unfortunately, I’m not a pioneer with this idea. Somebody put iPhone app icons in alphabetical order as a nice effect. Also, Mario Georgiou had the idea of designing an Adobe Icon Scrabble using the two-lettered app icons from the Creative Suite in 2006.

But no concept combined this idea in an art project that also incorporates informational value.

Warning: Tech Content

An hour after my initial idea, I had cobbled together a small PHP script that generates a composite image from single icon files and a given word. Every icon has its letter equivalent mapped in an associative array and the script uses GDlib to stitch the single icons together.

A central concept also includes the possibility to cover two letters e.g. by an Adobe application icon (like “Ps” from Photoshop). The webapp basically checks from the longest possible word fragment down to a single character and randomly decides which parts are used to render the composite.

The first simple script was extended with a user input field as well as a database backend to save the generated images. A unique permalink is assigned to each image so a composite can be saved or shared on the Internet. The implementation was done with CakePHP – my framework of choice when it comes to database-driven projects of this size.

Discovering new apps

A great side effect of the database support was the fact that every icon and logo could hold a name, description and URL of the service or brand associated with it. The concept was quickly adopted to implement an informational value for the user — Icons that are linked to the specific company, and tooltips that show you the brand behind the logo.

What users are scrabbling

In 10 days of uptime, 5.351 icon composites were generated. The top 3 entries are Love, Hello and I love you, followed by the most common swearwords and raunchy terms on the Internet. However, most people just seem to feed their name to the generator which brings forward the obvious application of using an iconscrabbled name as doorplate.

I hope you like the arty and diffuse approach of Iconscrabble. We’re looking for letter-based icons from computer-related brands and companies all the time. If you’d like to help us, I’d suggest submitting your recommendations or comments via the Leave Feedback tab on the app’s site.

You can try out the actual application on ecomagination.com.

Update: The concept of using Augmented Reality in advertising has also been used in this ad for the Mini Cabrio.
Update 2: The microsite has apparently been created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in cooperation with North Kingdom (Source).

However, since I switched to Leopard, available SMB shares did not appear before they weren’t connected (except the host was an active windows machine). I always had to manually connect to servers with Cmd+K — A step back compared to the ease of the one click it needed before.

Various researches throughout the MacRumors forums at least pointed out the fact that the SMB workgroup has to be set correctly under the WINS-tab in the OS X network settings, but this alone didn’t to the trick.

In order to make it work as expected you have to activate file sharing with SMB on the Mac side, even though you don’t have to share any folders on your OS X machine.

To activate SMB sharing under OS X Leopard, follow these simple steps:

1. Open System Preferences > Sharing.
2. Activate the checkbox for File Sharing.
3. Click the Options button in the File Sharing panel.
4. Make sure the checkbox Share files and folders using SMB is ticked.
5. Then restart your Mac or put it to sleep for a short time to make the changes take effect.
6. All your Samba shares should finally appear in the Finder again.

Marking the checkbox for a specific account is not necessary unless you want to connect to shares located on the OS X machine from a Windows client. This option apparently activates Microsoft-specific network services so the NetBIOS names of SMB shares are resolved.

What I’m still wondering is why the SMB shares generally show in lowercase.

This list represents three very popular graphical user interfaces for the Subversion client svn. The applications help developers to manage their repositories without being a bash or shell champion. Feel free to leave a comment in case I forgot an essential tool.

svnX

svnX is an open source GUI for most features of the svn client binary. It allows you to browse your working copies, spot changes and operate on them but also to browse logs and revisions of your repositories.

The tool comes in handy for a quick look on all changes or to export a new working copy or revision.
Its approach focuses on the management of existing repositories.

Subclipse

Subclipse is an open source Eclipse plug-in providing support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE. Compared to the other tools, this plugin really integrates with your development process. Also branching and tagging is less complicated because of the extensive context menu additions.

Versions

A fresh released, promising looking application is Versions. It’s almost like svnX but comes with an extra style factor. Regarding it’s still in beta, I’ve got more experience with the other apps. But Versions has potential to be the Coda of SVN management.

After choosing a resolution of your choice it could look something like the following image – a collage of my favorite albums for the last 3 months:

Image from http://macmechanic.com/tips/?p=16

There is also a LargeType enhancement for OS X to activate LargeType in the OS X context menu system wide.

Inspired by this, I recently wrote a quick JavaScript based on prototype that simulates the OS X LargeType functionality by displaying text in a LargeType-like overlay for websites.

View the demo » (Quick’n dirty version)

How to use

1. Download prototype and include with <script>
2. Download LargeType.js and include with <script>
3. Add class name .LargeType to arbitrary HTML-elements.
4. Done. The script now wraps the element’s content in a link and attaches the display event for the LargeType container.

You can download all demo files here. I’m planning to dissect the JavaScript and CSS here soon, but the code has adequate commented sections so that you can get the picture of how it works (I’ll be here in case of questions).

Thoughts

While preparing the script for a public release, a first few ideas came up on how I could enhance the script:

• Implement the same functionality without any JS but with CSS 2.1 selectors
  (adjacent E+F and :focus state)
• Intelligent font-resizing during window resize to avoid line-breaking

If you have suggestions on how one could improve this little script, feel free to submit a comment. Have fun with the script! I hope you can use it.

The 2 following images show an occurence at Amazon.de, the german pendant homepage of the most famous allround-webshop. I’ve taken those while I was peeking around Amazon to see whether Leopard was ready for pre-order and if Tiger would be pricedropped. But they still only had Tiger in their assortement.

Except for…

Huh? Is that a sneaker? I want to see that in detail!

I swear that I didn’t touch those pictures to apply a cheap retouch or anything. It’s the actual webshop I was presented when browsing a category “Max OS X Tiger”.

Probably some product-to-image ID-interference thing occured there. No big thing of course…I’m sure Amazon fixed it the very same day.

As a cake baker, I’ve always been curious about new CakePHP releases. Especially new versions in the 1.2 branch because I’m working on 4-5 projects that are built with 1.2 – tapping the full potential of bulit-in features such as I18n, pagination and advanced HABTM associations.

Since the 1st of January the dev-team of CakePHP published new releases.
Stable 1.1.19.6305 (Changelog) and Beta 1.2.0.631 (Changelog)

Also the homepage of CakePHP got a new rockin’ 2008 design with a sliding content-box.
The new top-level menu button Planet now also features the most important resources for development with this great framework.

Happy baking and a prosperous 2008!

Download files from InsideMacGames forum

I tried it out and copied the example graphics into the instructed folder. You then only need to ‘reset’ the Dock application by executing killall Dock in the Terminal.

The new dock

The new glossy Leopard Dock provides more contrast and visual appeal

The standard Dock

The standard Leopard Dock is also nice, but lacks contrast

I personally like the jet-black glossy version better and will stick with it. Really slick.

This mod also makes the glowing dot indicators for active apps better recognizable. People who like to have the old fashioned black triangle indicators back should read this article on Silver Mac.

Detailed instructions on how and where to replace the neccessary files are included with the download ZIP.

Since MySpace is especially popular among musicians for its audio streaming capability, one could expect that MySpace designers and developers dedicate an extra focus to this functionality.

The user experience I’ve made with their embedded Flash player shows me they don’t.

In the following I compiled a list of things about the MySpace flash player that are completely bogus. But instead of just flaming and ranting about it, I’ll try to propose a possible solution for each design flaw. Maybe some will be regarded within the next makeover at MySpace. ;)

1. Pressing Pause on page load causes confusion

   

   Error: When the flash player has loaded, the first track immediately begins to play. If you press the pause button right after page load, the song as well as the time both stop advancing. But the status in the display says “Playing” anyway and also the equalizer is bumping some ranges.

   Solution: Stop the playback from the beginning or make it a user option. Not every visitor wants to listen to the music when he visits the page.

2. Graphic equalizer is completely fake

   

   Error: You don’t have to be an audio-engineer to recognize that the amplitudes the equalizer virtualizes have nothing to do with the sound that is playing. It just randomly dangles up and down – even when there’s silence at the beginning of a track. This can be tested when you listen to songs that feature calm & loud or slow & fast parts, such as tracks from The Beatsteaks or Peaches.
   You’ll notice that the equalizer always moves at the same speed and shows random amplitudes in random bandwidths. This is more confusing than useful — the equalizer is just for the sake of eye-candy, which is a drop in the polluted ocean of MySpace.

   Solution: Fix it or leave it out. Binding an equalizer to sound should be easy to do. I can remember doing tutorials for such thing in the days of Flash 5. More useful though would be a display of the remaining playback time or sth. like that.

3. Inconsistent Button Design

   

   Error: Why is there a “Pause” button? I could agree with the argument that people might look for such a button when they want to stop playback temporarily. But when a track is paused, you currently can resume it either by pressing “Pause” again or by pressing “Play” (the redundancy makes sense somehow). But when the player is in “Playing” mode the only button without a function is the “Play” button — this, however, is bad design because the redundancy gets inconsistent there.

   Solution: A better design would be to fuse the “Pause” and “Play” function into one button. When the playback is stopped, the button shows “Play”. When a song plays, it shows “Pause”. The playback buttons in iTunes also work like this (because Apple employs UI designers who know about interface modes).

   For further reading on modes (or states) of interfaces, I recommend the book Jef Raskin – The Humane Interface (Page 37 ff. Chapter 3.2 – “Modes”).

4. Progress Slider overshoots

   

   Error: I was surprised by this fact recently when I listened to a new mix from Diplo. When the track played until 4 minutes, 11 seconds the handle of the progress slider reached the end of the line. I thought “Hey, it does not sound like the song will end here every second…”, but the handle kept going and going. The song went on for 2 minutes and the progress handle was never to be seen again until I hit the stop button.
   It almost appears like this is coded “straightforward” into the player as 1 pixel per second: x_position_of_handle = song.played_time_in_seconds.
   Scrubbing the progress slider is disabled on most pages anyway (Don’t know if that’s a user option). So this element of the interface could possibly be dropped after the next makeover.

   Solution: Fix it, or leave the slider out of the GUI completely when scrubbing is disabled – only showing the progress bar.

5. Volume control indicator

   

   Situation: When you scrub the volume slider, a green indicator with growing vertical bars below the volume slider shows you where the volume really is. Does one really need this as feedback? In my opinion it’s absolutely superfluous, combined with the slider design.

   Solution: A better design would implement to replace the current slider track (the background) with a linear growing indicator. It’s color filling grows as you drag the volume handle.
   2nd alternative: Leave out the indicator completely or move it into the display area.

A Quick re-designed Mockup

While I had Photoshop opened, it took about 20 minutes dragging and removing a few elements to realize my improvement suggestions:

There’s now one button for play&pause, the volume indicator has moved inside the display with the look of the equalizer (which is now gone), the played time has moved inside the display, the volume slider is held as a plain slider, and there’s even slightly more space to each side of the button group. That’s it.

I wouldn’t even start researching design flaws in the rest of the MySpace site. That system seems so incrementally developed and patched everywhere that I’m sorry for the developers who will re-code it one day.

The filename includes special Vietnamese characters and therefore is hard to handle for UNIX when rewriting the directory contents.

How to get rid of this file? Research showed me that there are at least 6 ways to accomplish the deletion of the localized file.

• Creating a new temporary user account in OS X, move the undeletable file/directory in that account. Then delete the temp account.
• Do a sudo rm -R “forced” deletion via the Terminal
• Reset permissions via the Get Info-panel or repair them by doing a chflags nouchg nameoffile in the Terminal
• Repair permissions with the Disk Utility
• Simply rename the file
• Install special third-party system-modifying tools.

Unfortunately, none of these methods worked out in my case. The file was still there and I got errors that the file was not editable or “not available” (surely I moved it out of the trash folder).

Googling a bit further led me to this guide on MacRumors for repairing permissions or zapping the PRAM. The last mentioned method there finally worked for me!

The solution: Run fsck -f

The system utility fsck (for “file system check” or “file system consistency check”) is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix systems and derivates.

1. Restart your Mac holding down Command(⌘)+S key to enter Single user mode. You’ll be booted into nothing but a shell.
2. Enter the command fsck -f
3. Now the file consistency check begins. After I ran the command, the process quickly spotted 4 entries where it alerted “Illegal filename” – so far so good. The whole process took about 15 minutes to finish, so you might grab a cup of tea or coffee while the check runs.
4. Once complete, type reboot and hit return to reboot you Mac back in to OS X as normal.
5. You should now be able to really empty the trash.