Shouting Grounds

I am LOVING this app!

“When Apple introduced the MacBook Air, they detailed a new feature called “Remote Disc” which makes up for the lack of a standard optical drive in the MacBook Air. Remote Disc allows the MacBook Air to wirelessly use a PC or Mac optical drive as if it were its own. Included with this functionality is the ability for the MacBook Air to wirelessly boot off of a Remote Disc shared drive. This means that if your MacBook Air requires an emergency boot or fresh reinstall, it can be done without the $99 external SuperDrive.

This added functionality required changes in the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and is not presently available on other Macs.

…

Update: We’ve been told that Mac OS X 10.5.2 will bring wireless booting to all Macs. “

Now wireless booting via shared disk, I can use. I wonder what the limitations of the remote disc software will be regarding the amount of clients that can boot. Of course you take a slow medium like an optical disc, then add the lag of a networking framework, probably wouldn’t make sense. Hopefully the rumors about 10.5.2 enabling this feature on the rest of the macs are true, but I won’t be truly excited until they allow boot via a mounted hard drive. The old G5 needs a firewire drive to boot externally and it’d be nice to have some flexibility there, in case I hose the ports with another bunk Lacie disk.

This may not look like much (it is my face, after all), but it proves a very useful tool when converting hand drawn logos, or other artwork to a printable medium without having to manually trace. It exports EPS, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PDF, Microsoft BMP, Photoshop, PNG, TGA, and SGI. It supports layers and CoreImage effects, and has iPhoto, Flickr, and iSight integration.

*Nitpicker Alert*
I’m not as crazy about the sketch (pen) tool, compared to Intaglio, since you can’t stop inputting points and readjust curves since the points are hidden after they are placed to avoid obscuring the path. It’s a minimal effect, but I’d prefer to have the flexibility of control over a little polish.

Still, I’m looking forward to using this little baby without the trial logos on the output. Seems like an effective and well thought out utility geared toward fast vector composition. Definitely more user friendly than Intaglio, and certainly less expensive (though not as feature rich) as Adobe Illustrator.

I advise you check it out, should you own a Mac.

I’ve been playing around with the choice application CSSEdit from macrabbit recently, and I have to say that I’m smitten. From a person that is only now getting into CSS and site design, I’ve learned so much from using this app in just a couple of days. I don’t know what I’d do without it to tell you the truth. I also don’t know what this site would look like without this program…oh yeah, like ass and chives.

Having the ability to peer into the template from which this site has been created is the best method of understanding how a site is constructed. It’s helped immensely when dealing with little visual issues and new features. I now have a much better grasp on how this template is arranged and the CSS objects within.

Just a couple of key features that I’d like to highlight, if I may:

X-Ray Mode
Yowsa!! You mean to tell me that I can load any page on the net and view it’s CSS object structure visually and interactively….yes.

Live Preview
Awesome!! So I can just fuck around with the CSS arguments and bang…I’ll see the result on a cached page?

Codesense
Nothing new, but very welcome when coding to avoid the cronic finger fuckitus.

Clean Layout
This is a more important feature than people usually give it credit for, but it makes using the program an absolute joy. Searching for objects, easy, previewing of an object in the sidepanel, easy, maintaining proper syntax while coding, easy.

Now I know that I’ve left a lot of features out, but that’s just because I’ve only started using CSSEdit, but I have to recommend this inexpensive and powerful app to all Mac users looking to bend their ugly ass website to their will. It will certainly help.

Follow this link to see a demo of this program. Crazy. I can’t help but evangelize this application and its uses, because as I watched the video I was awestruck with how quickly and easily you are able to connect all of the visual, aural, and spacial aspects of your digital life in one goddamn program. I feel this powerful urge to be the custodian of my family’s history now. Unbelievable is all I can say. As the video progresses, more and more features are detailed and it seriously seems like they thought of everything. A group of photos now can be linked to people (multiple even), places, things, and time. Details about people in your database can have a photo associated with every part of their life (depending on the photos imported). The last minute of the video is a kicker. Just when you think that they would be running out of features, they cover the web export options.

You can create a fully interactive website housing all of your database content complete with map links, attachment access, links to people within the photos, and a fully interactive flash slideshow of the whole collection. Bra-va *golf clap*

If you have any imagination at all you should clearly see the uses of this software, for both yourself and your family.

And for you PC users they have a PC version available now!

MemoryMiner

If you’re a Mac user, check out mupromo.com because you have eight days left to cash the fuck in on 10 applications (including MemoryMiner) for 50 bucks. 50 goddamn dollars! That’s like 600 bucks worth of software! The same software packages that were used to make the news broadcast video (PulpMotion) and this website (RapidWeaver) are included. If you own a Mac, you’re a turd eating fuckball if you pass this up.