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Graph Paper Press release their first photoblogging theme

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

Last week WordPress theme builders Graph Paper Press released their first dedicated photoblogging theme, Retouch. It addresses a lot of the needs of photobloggers, especially those coming from the fading photoblogging platform PixelPost, such as correctly placed navigation; drop-down info, exif and comments; an organised Archive page; logo and menu on the same line to reduce vertical space wastage.

It also adds an HTML5-based gallery slider so that you can upload a few photos in a set instead of just one image; being HTML5, the slider works on modern touchscreen devices. Personally I think photoblogs benefit from just one image a day so it’s unlikely I’ll use this feature but it’s certainly nice to have if you’re less bound by such self-imposed ‘rules’.

Unfortunately for me, however, the graphical design of the theme seems to aimed at the less professional, less stylistically discerning photoblogger…

The graphical design of Retouch is garish

While the majority of GPP’s themes are elegantly styled and highly customisable, this one feels peculiarly like the lovechild of Fisher Price and whoever it was at Apple that turned iCal and Address Book into the skeuomorphic eyesores they are in OS X Lion, fake leather-and-stitching included.

I also discovered it has very little of GPP’s usual customisation functionality, so you’re kind of stuck with it.

Despair not!

The good news is that this is just the free ‘beginner’ version (the first hit is always free…); in their forums they revealed that a more fully featured ‘pro’ version is in the wings being completed, which will come with minimal black or white designs, the ability to turn off those footer widgets, and hopefully the usual Custom CSS feature.

Garish art design aside, Retouch has all the essential photoblogging functionality I need so all that stands in the way of me switching from PixelPost to WordPress with the minimum of fuss is the release of their pro version. Not long now…

Feb 04, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

how to customise your iCade stick and buttons

Monday, January 30th, 2012

A couple of days ago I wrote about my new iCade and how much fun it is, but that I don’t like the stiff, clicky buttons or the way the stick can slip into the diagonal directions too easily. The parts I ordered to improve the experience have arrived so in case you fancy trying the same thing, here’s a guide on how to fit them; click on any photo to enlarge it.

The new parts

Clockwise from top left I have:

  • Sanwa Ball Top Joystick JLF-TP-8Y – I went with Pac Man yellow for my ball top, but the original red iCade ball will fit too. Make sure when ordering that you don’t get the widely-available 8YT version as that comes with a metal plate attached which is apparently a pain to remove. If you’re interested in what the letters and numbers in the name mean, there’s a good explanation in this Shoryuken forum post.
  • 8 x Sanwa Snap In Pushbuttons OBSF-30 – these need a 30mm hole in the control panel to fit them whereas the iCade stock buttons are 28mm so you’ll need to widen those holes a little with sandpaper or a sanding tool. They have a slightly convex top and are far quieter with a much lighter tap required to trigger them. The lip around the buttons is pretty much the same size as the stock buttons so they should all fit okay. I went with red, yellow, white and black to match the iCade’s panel designs (didn’t fancy blue).
  • 5 Pin Joystick Cable JLF-H – one end plugs neatly into the new joystick. The other ends will need to be attached to the wires that currently run from the circuit board to the stock joystick, either by soldering or using a screw terminal. I went with the latter because I’ve never soldered anything in my life.
  • Sanwa Octagonal Restrictor Plate GT-Y – this is the ‘gate’ that restricts how the joystick moves. The joystick actually comes with a square gate that can be rotated 45 degrees (see my iCade review) but I’ve read that octagonal is the way to go for total control.

Total delivered from Gremlin Solutions: £50.36. Birthday, remember?

You’ll also need a few tools:

  • the hex allen key that came with the iCade (or similar)
  • Phillips screwdriver
  • small flathead screwdriver (if you’re using a screw terminal)
  • possibly a Security Torx screwdriver – my iCade control panel had two Security Torx screws but I read that other modders had no such screws in theirs. I guess Ion changed the design at some point. Security Torx heads are like regular Torx heads but with a pin in the centre that requires your screwdriver to have a hollow tip.
  • soldering kit or 5-way screw terminal
  • sandpaper or a Dremel sanding tool
  • a cable tie

Let’s get cracking

First we need to open the control panel. Remove the sides of the iCade and turn the control panel upside down to reveal the screws you need to remove.

There’s 16 in total, including those pesky Torx screws (if you don’t have them it’s just 16 Phillips head screws). Keep them in a dish!

Then rest the iCade on it’s back and lift off the panel carefully.

You need to remove the wires from the switches but before you do so draw a diagram of the underside of the board and note which coloured wire is attached to each button; they all have one black ground wire as well, you don’t need to note that.

Mine were tough little buggers to remove and nervous sweaty hands didn’t help, so I used my Leatherman pliers to grasp the necks of the metal clasps and tug firmly.

The black switches need to be removed next. Pull gently on the tall strut holding each in place and you can wiggle them out easily.

Finally unscrew the nuts and slide the buttons out; some of those blighters are tight but rest assured that none are glued on even though it bloody well felt like it.

Before you remove the joystick, take a look at the iCade’s circuit board; where the joystick wires are attached there should be the directions printed in tiny lettering on the actual board. If so, great. If not (highly unlikely) then before removing the stick take a note of which of the coloured wires is attached to each directional switch on the stick.

Now pop the ball and dust protector off, remove the four screws and keep hold of them for later; then slide the stick out and cut the wires as close to the switch connector as you can so you have some spare when soldering/connecting.

The new buttons need a wider hole, by a couple of millimetres. I have no sanding tools so I got some sandpaper and did it by hand which was easy enough but took me about an hour, and boy did my wrist hurt the next day.

You’ll also need to sand the hole for the stick by a millimetre or so, to fit the lip at the base into it.

The buttons clip in easily; make the re-wiring easy on yourself by aligning the buttons so the switches beneath line up the same way. Then, looking at the buttons so SANWA is printed the right way up, clip the appropriate coloured wire onto the left contact and the daisy chain of black wires onto the right contact.

The joystick is a little trickier. Technically it doesn’t matter which orientation you mount it so long as you connect up the wires appropriately, but our hand is forced because we need enough room to clip on the 5-wire bundle safely. The best position is to have the stick connector (or PCB) facing the iPad, towards the back of the case.

However, if we just rotate the entire stick to achieve this, the iCade’s screw connector gets in the way of the stick’s plastic moulding; you can see them sticking out either side in the first image below. Therefore, we have to mount the base with the protruding mouldings top and bottom. That would place the PCB on the left or right side, so we have to rotate that as well, to take account of the stick mount rotation.

Don’t worry, it’s easy :)


Unclip the existing square gate from the stick (again, note that this gate can be rotated forty-five degrees into a 4-way stick if you prefer). The PCB and four switches are all one piece and can be lifted off together, rotated ninety degrees and replaced. Then attach the octagonal gate (or your original if you’re happy with that) and you’re done.

Position the stick so the PCB faces up towards the back of the case, making sure the mounting ring sits properly in the widened hole, then attach it with the four screws that held the original stick.

Nearly there! All that’s left is to connect the directional wires to the 5-wire bundle. It’s best not to clip it on just yet, so that you don’t risk pulling on wires while making the joins.

Because we rotated the connector and the switches, we need to re-map the directions and as luck would have it there’s a brilliant guide to doing just that available here, which for ease of reading I’ve reproduced below with full credit to the original creator, rtdzign.

The guide shows the view of the stick from beneath. With our PCB in the top position we want the bottom left picture. I have a Sanwa stick so on the 5-wire bundle I need to connect yellow to the UP wire, green to DOWN, red to LEFT, orange to RIGHT and black to ground.

You’ll have noticed there’s 4 black ground wires coming from the circuit board. As the stick uses a common ground you only need to use one of those four, doesn’t matter which; you should tape up the ends of the others so there’s no chance of metal contact in the future. I’ve read of people merging all four into one and connecting that, but I preferred the simpler way.

I used a screw terminal but if you fancy a spot of soldering then you might like this soldering guide on the Touch Arcade forums.

So, got your wires all connected up? Time to clip them onto the PCB and then fire it all up and make sure it works.

And assuming it does, you’re done! I got it right first time, thankyouverymuch :)

Grab a cable tie and tidy up that bundle of joystick wires, then tuck everything in neatly, make sure nothing’s trapped and start screwing the case back up, casually tossing into the bin any Torx Security screws you may have encountered along the way…

I have to tell you, the difference is huge. It was well worth the effort. Games like Pac Man, Silverfish HD, Hard Lines and Forget-Me-Not are so much more pleasurable due to the improved accuracy of the U/D/L/R directions with the octagonal gate; your high scores will improve, guaranteed.

The buttons are a different world. A feather-light press is all that’s needed and when hammered they make nothing like the cacophany the stock buttons do, plus you don’t feel like you’ve been for a workout. In something like Super Crate Box where reaction speed is key (thanks to the crazy big collision box around your character), the hair-like trigger on them is superb.

If you’re on the fence about trying this but fear of cracking the iCade open is holding you back, rest assured if I can do it, you can*.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

* By the way please don’t hold me to that. It really is simple but if you’re disasterously bad at stuff like this and you go ahead and try it and screw it up by doing something stupid like cutting all the wires at the wrong ends or something, all bets are off and I will deny any legal responsibility to my claim that “if I can do it, you can”.

But seriously, you probably can.

Jan 30, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion, Tech & Geek | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

My quick review of the iCade for iPad

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

It was my birthday last weekend (36 if you must know) and I treated myself to an iCade for my iPad; normally I think they’re a bit overpriced at £79 ($99) but it was in a sale and I got some Quidco cashback, plus it was my birthday so that’s okay.

It requires a bit of assembly screwing the sides, back and pre-formed control panel to each other but once complete the design and high quality finish instantly conjures up memories of mis-spent youths in arcades, even if you never actually mis-spent your youth in arcades (the only games I was allowed as a kid were ZX Spectrum and BBC Master games, and I’ve been remedying that ever since).

The verdict is that we love it – my wife is no gamer but got thoroughly stuck in to a couple of classics and modern remakes on the iCade, laughing, cursing and throwing the stick around mercilessly. She’s even downloaded some to her own iPad for when I’m out with mine, it’s that good.

Yes, it’s expensive but it’s the extra level of control it brings to iPad arcade gaming that justifies the purchase – most people instinctively know how to use a stick, even if you’ve never set foot in an arcade. The improvement is profound in some cases; for example, the delightfully insane Forget-Me-Not does alright with swipe-to-turn input but played on an iCade you immediately forget about the controls and focus on the frantic, epileptic-fit-inducing gameplay; arcade gaming feels so right on this thing.

But it’s not perfect

We’ve mostly been playing Pac Man for iPad and a brilliant Galaga clone called Warblade HD, both of which I highly recommend. They’re the epitome of arcade gaming and well worth the price, even Pac Man’s relatively pricey (for retro) £2.99 – just think how many goes that would buy you in an arcade these days. However, these games are so good that they highlight a couple of issues I have with the controls.

First, both the stick and the buttons, while sturdy and good quality, are very clicky and the buttons require a fairly firm push. Shooting games like Warblade are bloody noisy to play as a result, and it can get pretty tiring hammering away at the stiff fire buttons. Sure, I could work on my arcade physique a little more but it really does feel like hard work after a while.

Second, the stick’s movement is restricted by a square ‘gate’ inside the control panel. The square is set so that the stick locks into the corners on the diagonals as opposed to the Up, Down, Left and Right directions which are on the flat sides of the square gate.

In Pac Man in particular you want to hit those prime directions reliably and often with some force (especially when Hollie is playing it). The way the iCade stick is set up it’s far too easy to hit the flat edge of the square gate and slide into one of the corners; it only takes a small slip like this to trigger a diagonal, turning Pac Man round a corner you didn’t intend to turn or occasionally flipping him 180 degrees, straight into the ectoplasmic jaws of Blinky, Pinky, Inky or Clyde.

The clickiness was a bother that I could live with but the stick gate was such a frustration in an otherwise excellent package I Googled it to see if anything could be done. I learned that some square gates can actually be removed from the plastic frame they sit in and can be rotated 45 degrees to place the corners on the prime directions.

Alternatively they can be replaced with octagonal or round gates. Unfortunately the square gate on the iCade’s stick is all one piece and can’t be rotated. For that I’d need to buy a new gate, and so I was introduced to Gremlin Solutions and everything you might need to build your very own arcade machine.

And then I got to thinking about how if I was going to pop the iCade open I might as well see about fixing the clickiness too, so I started learning about switches, button weights, PCB versus non-PCB sticks, the naming conventions of Sanwa joysticks, and how to fit all the above into an iCade. Before I knew it I’d bought a set of eight buttons, a new stick, wiring, and an octagonal gate; £50.36 delivered from Gremlin Solutions, almost as much as I spent on the iCade to begin with.

Hey, it’s my birthday, remember?

Next post – fitting the new kit.

Jan 26, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

on David Cameron’s advice to the British film industry

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Today the papers report the latest BS to spill forth from our Prime Minister, David Cameron, this time about the film industry (Guardian; Telegraph). Now, David clearly doesn’t know the first thing about the film industry. That’s not to say that I know everything, I absolutely don’t, but there’s some things I do know that make the crap Cameron spewed forth sounds utterly ridiculous.

Here’s how the afore-linked Guardian reports it:

During a visit to Pinewood studios in west London, the prime minister will meet small and medium businesses in the £4.2bn UK film industry, and suggest he supports the expected findings of a review that aims to rebalance the industry’s national lottery funding in favour of supporting independent pictures that have mainstream potential. Successful film companies would receive greater support, rather than government funding going to unproven film-makers.

What he’s basically saying is that only films that are going to do well at the box office should be getting funding, because that will solve everything.

Except it won’t solve anything at all. In fact, it’s literally impossible to achieve in the first place. What David Cameron clearly has no idea about (amongst many, many things) is that in the movie industry…

“Nobody Knows Anything”

William Goldman, movie screenwriter extraordinaire, famously stated this in the opening chapters of his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. It refers simply to the fact that you can write a movie, cast a movie, make a movie and promote a movie, but until it gets released to the public, nobody knows anything whatsoever about how successful it will be.

Now there are executives around the world who think that actually they do know. Of course they think that, or else nobody would be funding any movies at all. Executives with the purse strings make assessments on the likely success of a movie and weigh that against how much money they’re going to put in and make a judgement on the risk involved.

The problem is that no matter how experienced they are, and how many successes they’ve had in the past, they still don’t actually know. Movies that were expected to soar actually bomb all the time. And movies that came from nowhere can go on to capture the zeitgeist and the public’s attention in ways nobody ever predicted.

So what Cameron has done is weigh in on a problem he knows absolutely nothing about, by making out like he actually has the solution. And the solution is:

(and I’m paraphrasing)

“Only fund movies that are going to make money.”

Brilliant, Dave. Just one question: how are we going to know what those movies are, exactly?

Actually, two questions. Second question: doesn’t this clever idea lead us gayly into the gaping maw of Blockbusterland, where only the loudest, flashiest, most anodyne films ever get made because they most closely match the depressing monotony of Hollywood’s annual summer release schedule?

And once we’re there, how is that going to make it ultimately easier for Britain to support the creation of the sorts of thoughtful, intelligent movies that the medium, and Britain in particular, can do so well? This decision of Cameron’s (I keep saying it’s his decision but in fact he’s actually just supporting some other investigation that has come to this conclusion, and will no doubt have been advised to do so because it might make him look more like he’s down in the trenches sticking up for the Brits he’s supposed to be governing) just bolsters the notion that only blockbusters can be counted on, which in turn drives more creative films even further into the styx (that’s if they can even get funding any more), which means they make even less money, and so on.

I have no easy answers. But the one thing I do know is that nobody knows anything, and that Cameron’s idea that we should only fund films that will make money is in fact an empty series of words designed to make him look like he’s got a plan; this isn’t it.

Jan 11, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

I’m turning off comments, and here’s why

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

It’s because I hate you all.

Just kidding.

I started considering it because there’s been a lot of chatter on lots of far more popular blogs than mine about whether leaving comments on or off is the best policy to adopt for your site. It really all kicked off with Matt Gemmell when he posted this article about comments on blogs; he has now followed up with this post. They’re good reads, you should go have a look.

Some people say leave them off because it cuts down on trolling, the hassle of approving comments, general negativity and noise, and can improve the appearance and load time of a site. They also suggest it provokes potential commenters to either write something thoughtful in response on their own site, or to seek you out on social networks to make a comment directly to you instead.

Other people say leave them on, and within this perfectly valid mindset there are some particularly negative voices accusing the ‘Off’ supporters of all sorts of things from preciousness to an inability to deal with being wrong and only liking the sound of their own voice.

The less aggressive of those who prefer comments on suggest that comments breed intelligent discussion, allow the discussion to remain up to date, instill a degree of openness and community and can lead to the original author discovering new things about whatever he or she is writing about. One person, a food blogger (and Matt’s wife), claimed she’s never had a single negative comment on her site and has never needed to police that, so clearly the nature of your community of choice has a role to play.

Most of the comments on this site are on the handful of articles that get the most traffic from Google searches – a few about streaming to a jailbroken AppleTV 2, and my pieces about Instagram 2.0, Hipstamatic and Hipstamatic Disposable. These are popular and helpful to people but I’ve moved on; I still stand by them and have opinions on them, and I did engage with a couple of review commenters who had contrary opinions to mine. It’s just that I use the site to scratch the itch I have to write about stuff and share it, and I want the site to be just… me. There, I said it, you got me.

That’s not to say I can’t handle criticism; I appreciate constructive criticism, can admit when I’m wrong and am open to having my mind changed by good counter arguments, but I find that most critique and discussion in comments sections comes with internet snark.

I admit to posting plenty of my own snark on the internet, but I decided I don’t want to invite that in. I know that’s hypocritical but there’s plenty of forums to take the fight to; taking criticism and discussion out of the forum-style arena of comments and into private emails can cultivate a more mature and less showy discussion – not always, but often. It’s not like the site is a hotbed of trolls and fanbois, but I feel better about the place this way, spiritually.

Also it’s all about me, remember.

Typical me melodrama aside, mostly I get positive comments and thanks and of course I’m very appreciative of that, especially when someone can add to the discussion or solve an issue. However, those extra nuggets are just as easily Tweeted to me, where in fact they can reach even more people much quicker; and the compliments, while welcomed most warmly, really only feed the side of my brain that gorges on the approval of others and that’s a side I’d rather starve.

In fact I just remembered I already turned comments off on my photoblog about a year ago for that very reason, that occasionally I would knowingly post images I thought would appeal to people rather than whatever I felt like. Turning comments off felt cleaner, more like a gallery of work than a blog.

I also think the page looks better without the whole comments bit so any easy way to make the place look tidier and more elegant is fine by me. Me me me.

Bottom line, all the existing comments will stay because there’s some good stuff in there, but you can’t post any more and future posts will be completely comment free.

If you have a comment you’d like to make, please do! You can find me on @myglasseye on Twitter. Say hello!

Jan 10, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off

why you should install Alfred for Mac right now

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

Today I want to write about an app I recently got for my Macs that has completely changed how I use them for the better. It’s called Alfred and it’s a ‘launcher’ app that allows you to do almost anything on your Mac via the keyboard.

Such apps are not new but until now I’d had no interest; Alfred caught my eye with a bold, friendly design and a lot of recommendations. It’s available in a basic free version here with an optional ‘Powerpack’ for £15 that massively expands what it can do.

To really get the most from Alfred you need the Powerpack but you should definitely grab the free version and give it a whirl; I upgraded within five minutes of seeing what it could do and haven’t looked back so this review is based on features it provides – but not all of them, there’s just too many.

(All the Alan Partridge fans reading: insert your own “I wonder who got the powerpack?” gag here –>   )

Typing alt-Space brings up the Alfred box into which you type your command or keywords. Typing an application name launches it, like Spotlight; typing a URL or part of a bookmark opens your browser and takes you there; if you want to search the web Alfred offers a selection of search engines then performs the search; it can control iTunes, send emails, perform calculations, manage your clipboard history, search for and perform actions upon most any file on your computer – and that’s just ‘out of the box’.

By installing 3rd-party extensions in the form of Shell Scripts, AppleScripts or Automator Workflows, Alfred can integrate with many popular applications including Wunderlist, Fantastical, Things, Evernote, Spotify, and Omnifocus. You can even tweet from it. The Alfred user community has come up with all sorts of other cool computer stuff you can do with extensions, many of which are collected on the Alfred site here; have a browse and see if anything that you do often has an Alfred shortcut. If it doesn’t, just create your own.

If all of this still sounds a bit “so what?” then you’re thinking what I was thinking when I first read about launchers. I mean, what’s wrong with the Dock, right?

Alfred is quicker, less distracting & more comfortable

For a long time my Dock had been loaded with around twenty apps and four folders. I would have liked a less full Dock but I found that it was more annoying to have to go looking for them when I wanted them than it was to have the Dock looking a little busy.

Then I got a Magic Trackpad for my iMac. I like it in principle but it’s definitely suited more to gestures than it is precision; It’s probably no coincidence that around this time I started investigating apps like Launchbar and QuickSilver that I’d heard a lot about; I wanted a better way to get to apps than through precise mouse movements.

In the end I didn’t see the point installing and learning to use something new that I could approximate for free by using Spotlight to launch apps that weren’t in the Dock. Spotlight’s cmd-Space shortcut is easy to remember and type, and entering a few characters of an app’s name is far quicker and easier than invoking a new Finder window and navigating to the app and double clicking.

Having got used to launching apps via Spotlight like this, trying Alfred was like opening the floodgates as it grants the same easy access to almost everything you do regularly on your computer, and considerably more elegantly.

How could Alfred help you?

Here’s a few examples of how I use it day to day:

I rarely type URLs into browsers now, or search via the Google box in my browser (although I still don’t remember every time). I can connect to my other Mac via Screen Sharing with just two keystrokes (‘ss’) instead taking a good ten seconds of focus to do it manually. When working on my site I often use the same selection of apps so I’ve set an Alfred keyword that opens them all at once.

A very useful shortcut that I’m using daily is for Wunderlist. Things I need to remember occur to me all the time; sometimes I try and record them with Siri and then get frustrated with Siri when I have to correct everything it got wrong; sometimes I remember to launch Wunderlist and create a new reminder; and most of the time I do neither because they’re both too much effort and then I forget.

With Alfred I type ‘wl remember to do that thing’ and go back to whatever I was doing while Alfred sends that off to Wunderlist in the background, displaying a Growl to confirm receipt. My fingers don’t leave the keyboard, I remain in the same app environment and I stay focussed on whatever I was doing. All I have to do is remember to check Wunderlist…

Another example: I’ve been playing a lot of Skyrim recently (like, hundreds of hours of it) and occasionally need to look something up online. I’ve saved the two best Skyrim wiki sites as custom searches in Alfred and given them both the keyword ‘sky’. Now when I need the low-down on that Chillrend blade I looted I type ‘sky Chillrend’ and Alfred offers both wiki sites as possible actions. Rather than search one at a time I’ve set a keyboard shortcut to ‘action all results’ with ctrl-Return and both open in the background.

And then there’s the customisation and options; most of the keyboard shortcuts can be altered (although you should try the defaults first because they’ve been chosen deliberately); you can change the fallback search sites Alfred will offer to search with if it doesn’t recognise any keywords in your query; Dropbox syncing to sync extensions and settings across multiple Macs running Alfred; you can even style the Alfred box how you like it or download themes other users have created (my own attempt is available here – what I said earlier about Alfred being elegant obviously goes out the window if you go with a Sex Pistols colour scheme).

Alfred also learns quickly; the more you use it, the less characters you need to type before Alfred knows what you want. Using this I’ve trained it so that when I start typing ‘ph’ it offers Photo Mechanic first because that’s what I’ve picked the most when I’ve typed in just those two letters in the past, whereas if I continue to ‘pho’ it offers Photoshop first.

The finishing touches to an already wonderful app are the friendliness of the small team behind it and the support of an enthusiastic community providing extra functionality in spades. Every question I’ve tweeted at @alfredapp has received a prompt and helpful response and there are both official and unofficial Alfred tips sites to pore over.

Grab now, buy later

A full review of Alfred would take ages and I’ve really only touched on a very small set of the functionality; suffice to say it is extensive. The wealth of possibilities may seem overwhelming or you may be reluctant to give up the mouse. Don’t worry – it scales beautifully to users of all proficiencies and your mouse hand will definitely thank you. In fact, at first it took me by surprise how liberating it was to remove so many constant mouse interactions; even small movements down to the Dock are hassle compared to Alfred once you get into the habit.

If you use a Mac regularly I think you’ll love Alfred. Grab the free version now and see how long it takes you to resist the Powerpack and open up it’s trove of possibilities. It really does change the way you use your computer.

(Okay that last line sounds so much like a radio sponsorship blurb but I assure you this is from the heart, not the wallet; I love using Alfred so much I want you to as well – no kickbacks here.)

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Jan 04, 2012 | Categories: News & opinion, Tech & Geek | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

I like going to an Apple Store

Friday, December 30th, 2011

I went to the Apple Store in Westfield today to have a Genius look at the faulty Sleep button on my iPhone. When I got to the Store twenty minutes early I nodded and smiled to the waiting groups of assistants near the door, none of whom tried to get in my way beyond saying hello as I passed. I made my way to the MacBook Airs to have a play, and launched the Apple Store app on my iPhone. The app noticed I’d arrived for my appointment and offered to check me in. Yep, thanks.

Back to those Airs. So thin, so light; they are so choice. If I had the means I very probably would pick one up. Although, perhaps a 15″ would be better for me. There’s no hurry. And, to be fair, I have no need whatsoever so I’ll just wait and see what comes out next year and then find another reason to put it off again.

However, before I can start poking through About This Mac there’s a buzz in my pocket and a notification lets me know they’re ready for me at the Genius Bar where Jonathan will be helping me. And fifteen minutes early too; that’s a first, although the whole of Westfield seems a little quiet today.

As I head over to the Bar to seek out Jonathan I’m easy to spot but nonetheless a red-shirted Genius hanging out at the end of the bar catches my eye and calls out my name, waving me over.

“The system works!” he jokes, catching my smile.

Jonathan has a look at the phone, verifies the issue, ticks some boxes on his iPad and heads off to get me a shiny new handset.

What impressed me about this trip was not the resolution to the issue itself, but how Apple keep you involved in the appointment process and create a bond directly between you and the Genius before you even see each other. Personal touches like this are why I enjoy going to Apple Stores, even when it’s just to get a repair done on a faulty bit of kit. Are there many other companies whose retail experience leaves you feeling this way?

Dec 30, 2011 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off

a quick look at Cathode for Mac OS X

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

I’d like to share and recommend an app I very rarely have need to use; in fact I really only use it when I’m re-jailbreaking my AppleTV, which hopefully I’ll not need to do again for a good long while. However, I wish I had chance to use it much more often. It’s called Cathode (Secret Geometry, $10) and it’s a fun alternative to the Terminal utility that comes with OS X.

For those who don’t know Terminal (and nobody would blame you if you don’t) it’s used for accessing the command line of the computer. The command line is kind of one level of sophistication up from the system’s guts. When you do something in the graphical user interface of your app, the resulting commands come here to do their thing; you can make the computer do anything you want from here, including committing computer suicide, making it an intimidating place for the inexperienced.

(I know pretty much zero about working with the command line except what I copy and paste from reputable sites when I’m jailbreaking. I have gathered that ‘sudo’ is a powerful and oft-used command that makes something ‘do’ something, so I allowed myself the luxury of smiling knowingly at the recent Penny Arcade guest strip about that one, although I probably shouldn’t have.)

So whether you’re an occasional user or you pretty much live in the command line, you may appreciate Cathode for putting a friendlier face on it than the cold, blank stare of Apple’s Terminal.

clockwise from top left: three preset display types, plus one with custom tweaks to make it glitchy

You can tweak almost every option on the screen including font family, size and colour ; background and foreground colour; monitor curvature and reflection opacity; rate and opacity of the scan-line; character flicker; a whole bunch of retro sounds you can turn off completely if you like, including a beep every key press just like the movies; you can even put an iSight photo of yourself at the keyboard into the screen reflection.

It’s all completely cosmetic but it certainly makes digging into the command line on a Mac a much more enjoyable experience. At the moment I have a setup inspired by the Swan computer in Lost:

This is just a slightly tweaked 'Viti Green' preset

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Dec 29, 2011 | Categories: News & opinion, Tech & Geek | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Adventures in AppleTV streaming: switching from XBMC to Firecore’s ATV Flash

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

I’ve got an AppleTV 2. I like bouncing video from my iPad 1 to the telly via AirPlay but other than that it’s largely useless because I don’t buy video from iTunes and I don’t convert the video I do own to the format that iTunes and all dependant Apple devices recognise, because life’s too short. Instead, I jailbroke the box when I got it and installed XBMC. This worked really well until I upgraded to Lion which broke streaming due to Apple changing how Lion handled SMB sharing.

After much hair-pulling and XBMC-forum-surfing I found workarounds and posted about them (here and here). I stuck with using Playback to get my media available on the network, but I missed the lack of cover-art and metadata (which Playback doesn’t support). And then eventually my XBMC install became quite unusable after something, somewhere, stopped it from reliably connecting to anything at all. After all the jiggery pokery trying to get streaming working again I had no idea what I’d done and I gave up.

I switched back to streaming to my Xbox 360 via Playback even though: the 360 sounds like a jet engine taking off; it drinks electricity like water on a hot day; and it doesn’t show metadata or cover-art (whether you’re using Playback or not). It just streams the video, but that’s all I wanted at this point.

Enough!

Yesterday I had the house to myself and I decided to start over.

According to the AppleTV menus I was running OS 4.1.1, a comparatively archaic version. You may have noticed that for some reason Apple’s naming conventions for their iDevice versions of iOS and their ATV versions of iOS do not match, although for a brief time around iOS 4.3 they came in sync. I found a great post on Firecore’s forum that explained it. The current version of that post is reproduced below for ease of reference:

Firecore forum post explaining iOS naming conventions for ATV2 vs iDevices

It turns out that the ATV2 OS version 4.3 is the most recent version that supports untethered jail breaking, and that version also adds Airplay support for many 3rd party apps, not just Apple’s (try it with AirVideo from your iPad – just awesome). There is currently a tethered jailbreak for 4.4 (which is the equivalent of iOS 5.0.1 for iDevices) but trust me, you’d be better sticking to untethered if you value a quiet life.

UPDATE: When I performed the jailbreak only the 4.3 version supported untethered, but the latest Seas0npass includes an untethered jailbreak for 4.4. The major differences are AirPlay Mirroring from the iPad 2 but seeing as I only have an iPad 1 I am sticking with my 4.3 jailbreak for now.

I downloaded Seas0nPass from Firecore’s website, performed the jailbreak to 4.3 and all went well. I reinstalled XBMC Version 11 (Eden) which adds greater stability and also a new, easy-to-do streaming solution called AFP that supposedly works well with Lion. Well, it didn’t work out for me.

Although XBMC showed me an AFP connection to my networked computers, and although I’d turned AFP on and set up the folders I wanted to share, XBMC wasn’t seeing any shares. I appreciate it’s a work in progress and that maybe I missed something, but after trying all the other usual methods and coming up with a whole bunch of not-much just like last time (some folders shared, others didn’t, don’t know why, can’t be bothered to work it out any more), I decided that XBMC is still far too flakey to get stressed over and started looking at Firecore’s ATV Flash solution.

(For clarity – my Playback shares still worked but it doesn’t send any metadata like cover-art and that’s the main reason I like XBMC; ATV Flash does use metadata, so it won my favour.)

It’s a $30 bit of software that gets installed onto the ATV at the click of a button (unlike XBMC which requires installing either it or NitoTV via the Terminal, which can be a bit fiddly). The main difference between it and XBMC is that ATV Flash sets up shop in the AppleTV’s existing dashboard, maintaining the Apple-y feel; interactions all use the existing Apple UI. It’s pretty cool.

I’d had a look at ATV Flash before, when it was in beta, and had been suspicious of paying for software that does something that XBMC does with greater customisability for free. However, I was at the end of my tether with the implications of ‘free’ for now, and Firecore promised that setting up shared media would be as simple as making sure File Sharing was turned on in my Mac’s settings.

It worked seamlessly.

I appreciate there are people complaining in their forums that it doesn’t do this, doesn’t do that, glitches with streaming, etc, but the same is true throughout computing – some people’s setups will play nice and others won’t. My experience so far has been flawless, touch wood. We streamed a movie over wifi from my iMac to the ATV and it was smooth and uninterrupted (the movie itself, Insidious, was fun but kinda stoopid). It has a couple of areas I’d like to see improved, such as the ability to scrape for movie metadata based on a folder name rather than a media-file (because all my movies reside in their own named folder within a Movies folder) but apparently features like that are coming, and updates do seem to be quite regular.

So: it didn’t crash, it was ridiculously easy to add my computer’s shared folders, and it all feels like it’s part of the same Apple experience.

You do have to buy before you try, but they have a 15-day money back guarantee. I can’t tell you how well that works because I won’t be needing it. For $30, I’ve hopefully found my final ATV2 streaming solution.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Dec 27, 2011 | Categories: News & opinion, Tech & Geek | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Attention PixelPost users: Graph Paper Press to release photoblog themes for WordPress in 2012

Saturday, December 24th, 2011

Attention, PixelPost users looking to switch to WordPress – this is the news you’ve been waiting for!

My photoblog originally ran on the Blogger site and was called i-Shot. After a year or so I got the confidence to set up my own site using PixelPost software, which I branded my glass eye.

PixelPost was great software – created by and for photobloggers all you had to do was install the code, pick a theme, and get posting. Sadly in 2009 the developers had to officially cease supporting the project as they had real jobs and there just wasn’t the financial support to keep it going. The software still works but looking to the future I would prefer not to be reliant on code that is no longer supported.

The site you’re reading now and my portfolio site both run on WordPress using themes created by Graph Paper Press. I’ve seen a lot of premium theme developers in the WordPress community but GPP are by far my favourites, with over two dozen slick and highly customisable themes. Even their free themes are impressive.

But there’s no real photoblog theme. They have one called Uno which is aimed at photobloggers who also want to make text posts, but it’s not as simple as a PixelPost theme and although the guys in the superb Support Forum were tireless in helping me tweak all the code to bash the theme into the sort of shape I wanted it, the basic design wouldn’t satisfy the long-term PixelPost user, especially one who had no desire to leap into the guts of the code to tweak it.

I started a thread in the forum listing the sorts of things I felt a good photoblog theme should start with, there was a bit of back and forth with their guys, and this morning Thad Allender posted the following reply:

“… many thanks for all your feedback. We will build a theme (or two or three) that cater to your needs. There seems to be sufficient demand. Please feel free to spread the word in the PixelPost community if you want. We will have the theme ready by the middle of January.”

This is great news, especially as I’ve long since stopped posting to my photoblog while I tinkered with a potential switch to WordPress. Now that could be as soon as next month.

Thanks, Graph Paper Press, and also Merry Christmas everyone!

(or Happy Hanukkah, or Splendid Saturnalia, or whatever other festival you choose to honour in your family!)

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

Dec 24, 2011 | Categories: News & opinion | Tags: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »