International Mac Podcast

This is the last part of my series on The Hit List. You can read the first, second, and third posts, or the full article as it was meant to be seen.

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Everyday millions of people express their emotions with Twitter. Not only do they tell their followers what they’re doing but what they love, hate, think, believe, wish and feel. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could collect those feelings. Presenting twistori.

Twistori is a website that annonomusly shows in real time, tweets that contain one of six emotions (love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish). When you load the website all you see is a left-aligned list of the emotions displayed in an eye pleasing range of colours against a funky dark background. At this point you can either click on an emotion to see its tweets or wait a few seconds and twistori will randomly choose an emotion. The list shrinks to the side and tweets containing the verb that you’ve chosen start to fly past.

So, how is this related to the Mac? twistori has come out with a screensaver for Mac OS X that I love. It’s essentially the same thing as the web-based version except in a screensaver. Also, there’s a product called twistori desktop which allows you to set your own parameters (eg; Tennis, Elbow, Foot) I tried the desktop version and although it worked it wasn’t very amazing.

twistori is a great little webapplet. There are so many possible places that you could use it – just imagine. The twistori website (and the screensaver) is free. TwistoriDesktop is $19.95.

Cocoa is my girlfriend. That is a phrase coined by the popular cocoa blog of the same name, and it rings sadly true for me, both as a developer of mac apps, and more importantly as an avid user of mac apps.

Somehow things like Adobe Air, X11, and even Apple’s own Carbon give me flashbacks to my time on Windows. Up until a few weeks ago I was using Twitterific as my main twitter client, unfortunately for it, it took its own concept of simplicity too far.

Also, it doesn’t look all that cocoa-ish, especially in Leopard, where HUD windows are supposed to have a glossy looking header. So then I was a rogue twitterer, on a hunt for some good Cocoa twitter clients. I found 5 contenders – here and now they will battle it out for my usership. *ding ding*

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This is a part of my ongoing series on The Hit List. You can read the first and second posts, or the full article as it was meant to be seen.

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One of the many things that I’ve enjoyed since my switch to Mac is the Mac OS X menubar. The way that you can run little applications and with a simple glance be informed of their status is brilliant. The way Apple has built-in Menu thingys is great for first time users too. I’m going to walk you through my Menubar.

My Menubar

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RealMac Software kindly donated a license for LittleSnapper, a revolutionary screen capture app for Mac. We asked our readers to tell us why they wanted a copy for a chance to win. We had loads of entries, but after much fighting inside my brain I’ve picked our winner.

I’m proud to announce that Luke Beaumont is our winner. Luke is a Digital Media Student and he says that one of the things that he will use LittleSnapper for is showing his tutors how he develops his projects. Luke has been sent his prize, a copy of LittleSnapper (value $39).

This wraps up this great competition. Thanks to RealMac Software for sponsoring this competition. If you would like to sponsor a competition (big or small), you can tell us over on the contact page.

This is a part of my ongoing series on The Hit List. To read the first post, click here, and to read them all at once as they were meant to be read, here.

There are two types of true containers in THL, and several other pseudo-containers. The difference is that items actually reside in containers, and are just shown in pseudo-containers. Think of containers like folders in the file system, and pseudo-containers like smart folders. Note that these terms aren’t actually used in THL to the best of my knowledge, I just made them up to allow you to better understand their uses. (more…)