Isaac Wankerl

We've moved

2009-09-11T00:26:00.004-05:00

About two weeks ago Carrie and I decided to pack up our bags and move… back to Austin.

Our new house is a little larger and has a great view off of the back deck and we get to avoid the toll roads when driving to and from work.

2008 Year in Review

2009-01-01T17:50:00.007-06:00

It's been several months since I have written anything on this blog so I decided to give a recap of the the past year. There were big changes in my life in 2008. It started off very well when not more than two days into January my second niece, Natalie, was born. Here she is at around eleven months old.

Carrie's friend Wendy came down to visit with us for an extended weekend in early January. She and Carrie both got to see me for the first time without my orthodontic braces. It sure did feel good to get them removed. I had them on for about two and one half years (I was told it would only take twenty-two months).

After spending way too long fixing up and getting it ready, I put my house at Peabody Drive up for sale in February. It only took three days before I got an offer on it at the full asking price which was wonderful. Almost all of my stuff had either been sold or moved into Carrie's house.

Not much happened in March (at least according to my calendar from which I'm referencing for all these events) but I think it's safe to say that we were doing a lot of planning for our upcoming wedding.

On April 1st I started up my software company, Kerlmax LLC. I had been wanting to sell Mac software on the side to bring in some additional income. I'd love to be my own boss and do it full time but I think it's safe to say I'm nowhere close to that point. For one, marketing isn't one of my strong suits; unfortunately procrastination is. I'm also juggling this at home on the side while building my relationship with Carrie. When I was single I didn't mind staying up late working on the computer. I've had to drastically cut back on that but I'm sure Carrie will tell you I could take it even further.

Before my big day, I took a road trip to New Orleans for my bachelor party with a great group of guys. They had even put together a slideshow of pictures to reminisce about before going out for the last time on Bourbon Street as a single man. Luckily I weaseled out of wearing the typical checklist shirt.

The pinnacle of the year was of course on May 3rd when Carrie and I wed each other in Austin. She was such a beautiful bride and I even teared up watching her walk down the aisle towards me. The weather was very cooperative for our outdoor wedding. My only regret is that we didn't mic up the preacher; almost no one in the audience heard him. Oh and I probably should have gone to bed a little sooner the night before instead of partying with friends and family so late after the rehearsal dinner.

After tying the knot, we spent about a week at the Couples Resort in Negril, Jamaica. It was my first time to the Caribbean and Carrie's first outside of the USA (except for a few Mexican border towns). We had a wonderful time of relaxation, touring, and sipping on daiquiris on the beach. It is definitely a place that we want to revisit in the future.

In June, Carrie's nephew Ronnie made his annual summer trip to Texas. I missed the Schlitterbahn trip since they went while I was at work, but I did get to show him a colony of Mexican Free-tailed bats. We also attempted to go camping at McKinney Falls State Park, but our old dog Buddy just couldn't take the sweltering heat so we packed up at around 1 am and drove home. Quite the opposite problem from when the temperature dropped down into the 30s the previous time Carrie, the dogs, and I camped there. After growing increasingly concerned about the reliability and maintenance costs of my Jetta, I bought myself a Camry. It's been a great car so far although I sometimes miss a manual transmission.

In July we took a short trip to Wisconsin to visit Carrie's relatives and attend her cousin Ben's wedding. It was really enjoyable seeing her grandparents' farm and a little bit of Madison too. After coming back home, we threw our second annual luau party at the house. The girls did a really good job with the themed food which was delicious. On the 26th, I started a new batch of beer with my friend Lee filming the process for a documentary. It was all going so well until we found out that his video camera's CCD was malfunctioning. We'll just have to film another time. Not all was lost though because many said my Irish red ale was my best yet.

August was fairly uneventful but I did get lots of work for Kerlmax done. That led up to my September release of Sharpshooter. I also picked up a one day pass and went to the Austin City Limits Festival for the first time to see Flyleaf, Blues Traveler, and Foo Fighters.

We went to our first Oktoberfest in Fredericksburg and had a good time but I was surprised it wasn't a bigger event. The selection of German beers was excellent but the food we got wasn't nearly as good as New Braunfels' Wurstfest. Then we took a trip to Seattle to visit with our good friend Mike. The weather great (relatively speaking) and we got to do touristy things and have Mike show us around Kirkland and some other spots. My mom also came down to visit us in Texas for her birthday and a wedding. We had a nice dinner with her cousin Hamil out at the Oasis.

After Apple released newly update portables, I picked up a MacBook because I was lacking an Intel-based Mac which is required for iPhone development. That led to me releasing Austin Traffic for the iPhone. Now if I could just come up with a good idea that doesn't severely limit my market I might be on to some nice extra income! Carrie and I got to host our first Thanksgiving dinner with her parents, brother, and his girlfriend. I had wanted to cook a turkey in my smoker, but it was cold enough outside that I didn't think my equipment would be able to sustain the proper cooking temperatures. We just baked turkey loaves instead and they turned out great.

In December we took a trip to my hometown in Tennessee. We visited Dollywood, shopped at an outlet mall, and of course ate at Big Ed's Pizza for my brother Josef's birthday. We got back on Christmas Eve and drove up to Carrie's parents' house in Kempner which is only about an hour away. I got a lot of golf equipment for Christmas so one of my New Years resolutions is going to have to be improving my score.

All in all I had a wonderful time in 2008 and look forward to what the new year will bring.

Austin Traffic updated

2008-08-30T12:50:00.002-05:00

My company Kerlmax just updated its Austin Traffic iPhone web app. You can read about the changes on the Kerlmax Blog.

Austin Traffic optimized for iPhones

2008-08-24T09:28:00.005-05:00

My company Kerlmax has a just released its first product! It is a free iPhone web application titled Austin Traffic.

The app lists known traffic incidents on Austin's roadways and groups them by some of the major thoroughfares (well, the ones that I often use). It's a work in progress. I plan to update the generic icons, show the time of the incidents, and format them a little better.

If you travel through Austin a lot I hope that you find this web app helpful. Even though it's designed for the iPhone, it still works with desktop browsers (although it might not look as nice in Firefox and Internet Explorer).

Coming soon…

2008-08-07T23:44:00.002-05:00

I've been working on a side project for a while and it's almost ready to be revealed.

I have started up a small business named Kerlmax to sell Mac software. I wanted to finish this a long time ago but got distracted by several things (a big one being the wedding). Running a one man shop has required a lot of work and that's just to get it started!

I'll post more details later.

The Jetta has retired

2008-08-07T23:17:00.002-05:00

About a month ago (can you tell I'm catching up on my posts?) I decided it was time for a new car. My Volkswagen Jetta's track never was never great and after nine years, I was ready to part with it before I needed to pump even more money into it for repairs. Enumerating all of its issues could be the subject for several posts and I'd rather not think about them anymore. My family has had a lot of Toyotas and they have all been very reliable. The Toyota Camry was at the top of my list for the Jetta's replacement and that's what I ended up getting.

I purchased the Camry from a dealership in South Austin which is close to my office. They gave me a insultingly low trade-in offer for the Jetta so I decided that I would sell it myself through craigslist. On the day that my new car was ready, I had driven into work and left my Jetta in the office building's parking garage overnight as I got a ride from a friend to the dealership. The next day as I was walking through the garage, I looked over at my old car from a distance and noticed the window looked like it was down. I almost kept walking in to work but it was just too odd that I would have forgotten to roll up the windows and I started walking over to the car. After getting a little closer I saw broken glass on the ground. Someone had broken the passenger side window and stolen the radio! I was glad that I had already taken everything out of the car to sell it but pissed off that this had happened. All I could think of was how difficult it would be to sell in its current condition. It turns out it didn't really matter that much. I put an ad on craigslist late at night and by the next day I had about 30 inquiries or offers for the car. So by that weekend I had sold the Jetta without needing to fix the window or replace the window. What a relief.

So far the Camry has been wonderful. There is one issue where the leather on the door panel is bubbling out as if they didn't apply enough glue to the backside but I plan on getting that fixed soon. Other than that, I'm really happy with the purchase but I do sometimes miss the standard transmission of the Jetta.

The Bats of Round Rock

2008-08-07T22:46:00.004-05:00

It's fairly well known that Austin has a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats that live under the Congress Avenue bridge. What you may not know, and I didn't either until about a year ago, is that there is a bridge in Round Rock with its own bat colony. At Interstate 35 and McNeil Road, just south of the Highway 620 exit, you can watch the bats emerge just before dusk.

On June 11th, Carrie, our nephew Ronnie, and I spent about forty-five minutes waiting for the bats to emerge from the bridge. I thought they were going to come out sooner but luckily we had a football to throw around and pass the time. It was truly an amazing site seeing so many bats flying through the sky. You can view more pictures of the bats here.

Honeymoon

2008-06-02T22:55:00.003-05:00

We got back from our honeymoon over two weeks ago, but I just now put some pictures online.

Here are a few of them. You can see a lot more at the link above.

Our Wedding

2008-05-06T09:02:00.002-05:00

Saturday May 3rd, 2008 was one of the best days of my life. Carrie and I were married amongst family and friends. She looked absolutely gorgeous!

I will post more about the wedding when I have time. Right now we're packing a few more items for the honeymoon in Jamaica.

The valet broke my car

2008-04-10T19:26:00.007-05:00

Last night I tried out the Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chão here in Austin. I was running a little late and didn't want to fool around with searching for parking so I dropped my car off with the valet. As I was walking away from the car, I hear a loud crack. When I turned around, the valet still had the car door open, a terrified look on his face, and part of my door handle in his hand!

I gave him a really stern stare for a few moments before I started laughing. About a week ago when closing my car door, part of the plastic broke, but just on one side of the handle. Since then, I've been very careful not to pull on the handle because I didn't want to break the other side. Unfortunately I failed to mention this issue to the valet. The guy was pretty sorry it happened, but I suspect he got a good laugh out of it after I was gone. I know I kept chuckling for a while. My poor car. Something is always wrong with it.

As for the restaurant, it was very delicious. They have about fifteen different types of meat that they bring around to the tables for you to try. My favorites were the Picanha and Fraldinha. Next time I will try Estância Churrascaria as I was told the quality was just as good and it's a little bit cheaper in price.

Frustration with the Post Office

2008-03-05T10:11:00.005-06:00

Who knew that sending out wedding invitations could be such a hassle?

On Saturday Carrie and I stopped by the local post office branch to purchase some stamps. We didn't have the invitations with us (they didn't come until Monday) so we described them to the clerk. He showed us the special 58¢ stamps with hearts on them for this purpose. He said as long as the invitation is normal size and not too heavy, those would work. We had them save the stamps for us until we could come back with an assembled invitation.

On Tuesday morning, I arrived at the same branch but it was closed. They neglected to mention that the hours on the business card they gave me are no longer correct. I didn't have time to wait so I drove over to another small branch (I was headed that way for an orthodontic checkup anyway). The clerk there weighed the invitation and said that it falls into the 58¢ range, but because it is square and not letter shaped, it can not be machine-processed and requires the 75¢ stamp. They weren't wedding-like, but they did feature the Great Smokey Mountains which I'm a fan of so I went ahead and purchased them.

So last night Carrie and I assembled all of the invitations complete with the stamps and I stopped by the post office this morning. This time a different clerk said that they would need a 97¢ stamp! I was really ticked off at that point. He said that it's possible for them to go through without any problems, but there was still a chance someone would flag them and return them to us for more postage. I pulled a few envelopes from my pile and mailed them off today and will wait and see what happens before either sending off the others as is or reluctantly adding more stamps.

Update:
After a little online investigating, our invitations should have no problems based on this USPS memo from May 2007. It says

"The cost of postage for a 2-ounce wedding invitation has been reduced from 63 cents down to 58 cents*"

and the asterisk

"*Your letter must be with letter shape dimensions: maximum weight, 3.5 ounces; maximum length, 11 1/2"; maximum height, 6 1/8"; maximum thickness, 1/4". All First-Class Mail nonmachinable letters are subject to the 17-cent nomachinable surcharge."

I will make sure and point this out to the employees when I drop off the rest of the invitations tomorrow morning.

The house has been sold!

2008-02-28T18:00:00.005-06:00

Earlier this morning I closed the deal on the sale of my house. It had been a long process, even if it wasn't on the market for very long. In fact, I got and accepted the first offer which came in about two days after putting the house up for sale! The long and tedious part was getting it ready. Among the improvements I put in were ceramic tile floors in the bathrooms (which I installed myself with the wonderful help of Tommy, Tina, and Carrie), replaced the nasty green carpet, fixed a leaning over fence, updated some light fixtures, faucets, and shower heads, had the interior and exterior painted, cleaned just about everything, and did a whole lot of yard work. If you're having a problem with your toilet, I'm pretty sure I can fix it now because I had to learn about all the different parts and connections, and how each of them can break or leak. Overall, I'm really pleased with how the house cleaned up. One of the issues that I just learned to live with was a couple of broken window blinds which would not stay up. After taking one unit down and fiddling with the string catch mechanism for a bit, I learned how simple it would have been to fix the blinds five years ago!

The biggest problem I had was with the painters. I seriously recommend avoiding Low Cost Painting of Austin which is owned by Brad Jones. The workers he employed drank beer on the job and left empty bottles in the cabinets. They also used my microwave during the day but failed to clean up the mess they made inside of it. Cleaning must be a foreign concept to them because they didn't use any drop-cloths and left paint specs everywhere. The job was nowhere near been complete when they called me at work to let me know they were finished and for me to do a walkthrough to find any issues. Ha! Complete walls were unpainted. I found close to one hundred different missed spots. One of my newly tiled bathroom floors was left covered in wall compound. I could go on and on about their shitty work. I probably summoned them back to the house four or five times and they still didn't fix things appropriately. Surprisingly, they did a decent job on the exterior of the house. Nevertheless, now matter how cheap their bid is, I will never use Brad Jones' Low Cost Painting again.

For now, I'm off to get a new dishwasher for Carrie's house. I promised I would get a better one once my house got sold. I grew tired of washing everything by hand before loading them into the old dishwasher.

Aspyr Media games

2008-02-26T21:50:00.003-06:00

It has been a while since I posted anything about my day job as a programmer at Aspyr Media so I have decided to update the list of games that I have worked on.

There were a few Sims products that I helped ship, the rocking Guitar Hero game, and the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game Neverwinter Nights 2.

The Sims 2 Glamour Life Stuff pack ended up being the first Sims SKU to ship with all three applications (Body Shop, Package Installer, and the game itself) as Universal Binaries.

The Sims 2 Happy Holiday Stuff pack was a quick and easy project that only involved managing the game assets. If we did touch the source code, there wasn't much too it.

Then there was The Sims Pet Stories. With this laptop friendly game, I was the programming lead on porting it to the Mac.

Just recently I finished working on The Sims Castaway Stories.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is the most recent game that I have been working on. Development on it has gone on for a long time with several complicating factors preventing it from being released earlier. The good thing is that things are winding down and the end is near for this project. Hopefully the customers can get their hands on it before too long. (Actually, I wrote most of this post a few weeks ago and am just now posting it. NWN2 began shipping today.)

Guitar Hero III was by far the most fun and exciting game I've gotten to work on. In fact, it was just named one of the Best of Show winners at the recent Macworld Expo. Most of the people playing games around the office wear headphones, but with the special guitar controllers for this one, it became quite a challenge to ignore the repetitive clicks from the fret buttons and strums. It probably took a good month or so before it no longer bothered me.

Bye Bye Braces

2008-01-11T10:23:00.000-06:00

After a long two and a half years, I got my braces taken off yesterday. What a relief! Now I have a retainer to wear to keep my teeth in the correct positions, but it's removable and won't cut my tongue or irritate my gums and inner cheeks like the braces did. Brushing my teeth even feels funny to me now that I don't have to maneuver around a bunch of metal.

Keith Murray of Global Geek Podcast reviews Sharpshooter

2008-01-05T22:08:00.000-06:00

Today, while looking at some of the referrals to my website, I came across The Global Geek Podcast. I was intrigued that such a named podcast was linking to my site so I visited it to see what it was all about. It just so happens that in episode number 72, there is a short review Sharpshooter.

During the Mac Lab Rat section, Keith Murray calls Sharpshooter his "killer app pick of the week." I was ecstatic to hear him say that. Listen for yourself by grabbing the audio. He talks about Sharpshooter at the 46 minute mark.

Ornament plunderer

2007-12-18T20:05:00.000-06:00

Carrie has two wonderful cocker spaniel dogs; however, sometimes they get into a little mischief. If we leave a loaf of bread close to the edge of the counter, it's almost guaranteed that it will be gone when we come home from work. On normal days, the boys are happy to greet us by the door. Duke, the black English cocker, has a peculiar mannerism where once he sees us open the door, he sprints back into the living room to find a bogey (that's what we call their toys) and then proudly shows it off to us. We always know something is amiss if Duke is cowering off to the side when the door opens.

After putting up the Christmas tree this year, we have come home to find a few chewed up ornaments on the floor. We've found about ten of them pulled off the tree and lying around the living room. I always wondered if Duke was the only responsible party because of his admitted guilt or if Buddy was somehow involved too. Well yesterday our tree had toppled over so it was time to get to the bottom of our problem. This morning, I set up my iSight camera to capture the scene every five seconds. Within thirty minutes of me leaving the house, the dogs started sniffing around...

The video shows that Duke pulled off a low hanging ornament and chewed on it for a few minutes before sticking his head back into the tree and causing it to lean over a bit. Then he pulled off one more from the other side. While Buddy was walking around next to Duke, it looks like he was smart enough to keep his paws to himself. I'm not sure how we're going to stop Duke from messing with the tree, but I am tempted to set up more video surveillance traps because it's a lot of fun reviewing the footage to see who has been nice and who has been naughty.

Sharpshooter 0.6.1 released

2007-12-16T15:50:00.000-06:00

I just released a a new version of Sharpshooter, the small utility which aids the management of screenshots, with bug fixes for non-English speaking users. One user from France had changed his default screenshot name to include an é (lowercase e-acute) character and my Unicode string comparison method was mishandling that case.

I also updated the foreign user interface elements to have all of the latest changes as the English version. When I released 0.6, I forgot to propagate the changes from the English nib files. I wrote a couple of scripts to help automate this process in the future. There should be no excuse for me to make this same mistake in the future.

And finally I translated Sharpshooter to a few more languages: German, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. I am certain that many of the translations are erroneous, so I invite native speakers of those and other languages to contribute with localization help.

The latest version of Sharpshooter can be downloaded from the product webpage.

Sharpshooter 0.6

2007-12-06T23:49:00.000-06:00

Rename your screenshots with pinpoint accuracy!

I came up with that slogan for Sharpshooter while working on the help documents and I think it really fits with why I created the application. My main reason for writing Sharpshooter was that I would take a few screenshots in quick succession and afterwards I would have to open up each Picture X.png file in Preview.app, then switch back to the Finder and give them a descriptive name. Sharpshooter lets me rename each screenshot just after I take it, while the subject is fresh on my mind.

Tonight I have released version 0.6 which can be downloaded here (1.4 MB). Along with my usual MacUpdate and VersionTracker listings, I also submitted this to Apple Downloads for the first time. From what I have heard, I should start getting many more multiples of referrals through Apple.

Here are the changes with Sharpshooter 0.6:

Fixed Leopard compatibility issue with emptying the Trash.
Fixed a preview pane bug where PDF screenshots were not shown.
Fixed a bug when separating multiple screenshot files.
Now recognizes non-default screenshot name settings.
New Send Feedback mechanism.
Now includes a Help book.
Improved the French localization.
Localizations for screenshot name recognition in da, de, es, fi, fr, hu, it, ja, ko, nb, nl, pl, pt, ro, ru, sv, uk, zh-Hans, zh-Hant.

Localization Note: The file names of Mac OS X screenshots differ between each language. Sharpshooter will only work if it knows what the file name is for the current language. I have added support for some of the more common languages but please let me know if you want to help localize it for yours.

I'm now starting work on the two most requested features: being able to save in a different format and to a different location. I have been reluctant to add those features just because I had always envisioned Sharpshooter as having a simple user interface. After thinking up several different designs, I finally have one that I really like and should feel natural Mac OS X users. Once I add these two features, Sharpshooter will turn 1.0.

Now using Google Apps

2007-10-31T10:16:00.000-05:00

Up until now I have been accessing my iwankerl.com e-mail through the POP protocol. At work, from Gmail, and on my iPhone, I fetched the messages and read them but still keep a copy on the server. At home, I fetched them and deleted them from the server. Essentially this setup made my home computer the master database of my e-mails. However there were several things I didn't like about this. First, on heavy e-mail days, I would read through fifty or so messages from friends at work and then when I got home, I would download those same messages which showed up as unread. Then I would quickly go through them either deleting or saving as needed. The second pain was reading my e-mails on the iPhone. There is no spam filter on the iPhone and I was relying on Microsoft Entourage's client side Junk Mail filter when at home and work. So every time I checked e-mail on the iPhone, I ended up deleting 80% of the messages which were spam. Third, this meant that if I received an e-mail at home and later needed to access it from the road, I was out of luck. I thought about using IMAP with my e-mail account, but I really wanted to be able to use Gmail for web based access and Google didn't provide IMAP support... until last week.

When I started reading about Google and IMAP, I noticed that also offer a service called Google Apps. If you have your own domain name, then you can setup your e-mail to be hosted on Google's servers for free. With Google's very extensive documentation and help, it was almost painless to switch iwankerl.com over to this setup. Now I can check my e-mail using IMAP from my iPhone, work, home, or use Google's web based client and everything stays in sync with the added bonus of very reliable spam filtering.

MacWorld review in print

2007-10-30T11:09:00.000-05:00

My wish did come true. The December 2007 edition of MacWorld has Sharpshooter as the first reviewed item in Dan Frakes' Mac Gems column. Look on page 56 next time you pick up a copy. I didn't find out about this until responding to a user reporting a bug with my app on Leopard. When he said that he read about it in the magazine I ran down the hall to the break room so I could look and see if it was true. There are a few bugs on my plate so I need to hurry up and get the fixes out to all of my new users.

Sharpshooter 0.5

2007-10-21T16:16:00.001-05:00

I just released version 0.5 of Sharpshooter, the screenshot renaming helper application for Mac OS X. This version adds a feature which I think is really neat. If you use multiple monitors, taking a full screenshot will result in multiple image files, one for each monitor. Sharpshooter can now recognize this and allow you to work with these related images together in one window. This allows you to give the images related names or even combine them into one large image.

I was hoping that this newest version would be a full featured 1.0 release, but there are still a few more items I would like to add before then. First, I need to include some documentation as a help book. Then there are some feature requests that users have sent in but I'm not certain if I want to add them or not. Some of the requests, even though they pertain to screenshots, aren't really befitting to the purpose of this application. I am still thinking of how I might be able to include them without bloating Sharpshooter with too many features just because I can.

On a related note, MacWorld did not end up publishing the Sharpshooter review in their print edition. You can read the online review but I was really hoping for something I could hang up on the wall. Oh well. I still suspect that it might have been printed and gotten a higher rating if the app was complete.

New phone equals new distraction

2007-09-10T23:25:00.000-05:00

Tonight I have been procrastinating cleaning up the house because my new phone arrived today. When Apple dropped the price, Carrie was nice enough to buy me the 4 GB iPhone model. I've only made one call with it to Carrie and she said that I was cutting in and out, but the voice quality was much clearer than with my old phone. One feature that I do love is that I will be able to take this to my local sports bar and get updates on my fantasy football team's progress.

I'm having the inside and outside of my house painted before I sell it and move in with Carrie. The painters start tomorrow and I have asked them to do the outside first (I haven't really prepped the inside), but with rain in the forecast that might not be an option. I'll have to stay up late and clean up a bit.

The other thing that has gotten pushed back is working on Sharpshooter. I have added new features since the 0.4.1 release, but they still need some polish. Once those are done and tested, I will probably call it 1.0 and put it on the back burner except for bug fixes. Ideally it will be finished before the October MacWorld edition comes out because I think there will be a review of Sharpshooter in it. There is another application I have been working on sporadically that I would like to release but it isn't close to being finished. Initially its purpose was to improve on the event reminders of Google Calendar, but now that I have an iPhone, I am also looking to add in synchronization functionality between the phone and the online calendar.

Sharpshooter 0.4

2007-08-08T02:07:00.000-05:00

Sharpshooter 0.4 is now available.

I have gotten some positive feedback from last week's widespread release of Sharpshooter. There were 836 combined downloads from MacUpdate and VersionTracker. Unfortunately with version 0.3, several users couldn't get Sharpshooter to work properly on their systems. With this latest version, I re-implemented the screenshot detection mechanism to be more robust and laid the foundation for upcoming features. I was even informed by a few people that there is a way to change the default location and image type of Mac OS X screenshots, so basic support has been added for that. If you have any problems with Sharpshooter, don't hesitate to shoot me an e-mail.

Sharpshooter 0.3

2007-08-01T01:04:00.000-05:00

A new version (0.3) of Sharpshooter is available. Now there is a handy menu status icon to help give the app an always available user interface. Even though my programmer artwork is embarrassing, I am still tempted to distribute this to a wider audience (Version Tracker and Mac Update) as I'm curious to know if others find Sharpshooter helpful.

Announcing Sharpshooter

2007-07-22T20:57:00.000-05:00

I am pleased to announce that Sharpshooter version 0.2 is available for downloading. It is a freeware Cocoa application I developed to help with screenshots on Mac OS X. I use the Command-Shift-4 key combo to capture parts of the screen a lot, but grew frustrated when I had to switch to the Finder to rename the "Picture 1.png" file to something more apropos. Sharpshooter runs in the background and out of sight, until you take a screenshot. It will then present a window where you can review the picture and choose what to do with it. You can either rename it from its default name to something more descriptive, move the screenshot to the Trash, or cancel the operation keeping the screenshot as it is.

Hopefully you find Sharpshooter as useful as I do and I would love to hear any feedback you might have for me. Here is a link to the Readme.

Caveats:

Sharpshooter requires Mac OS X 10.4 or greater.

Sharpshooter will work with multiple monitors, but I hope to add better support for this in the future. Currently if you take a screenshot spanning two monitors, you will end up with two separate windows to rename "Picture 1.png" and "Picture 1(2).png".

I need a different icon.