International Mac Podcast

As many of you know, I, in my spare time, develop applications for Mac under the banner of Blue Pyjama. I tend to have bursts of energy where I just feel like I need to write applications, followed by periods of several months where nothing new is made and things are just let to rot.

I’ve always wanted Blue Pyjama to one day become a money-making company, whether it be via the iTunes Store or through the sale of a desktop app. So far the day hasn’t come yet. This weekend was one of those super productive weekends. I wrote 2 applications that will be appearing on the Blue Pyjama website soon. One of them is a simple app for checking if your Internet is down, while the other is a web browser called Wildfire. Wildfire is actually reasonably OK. You wouldn’t want to use it as your main browser, but possible as a secondary one.

This got me thinking about sales. There are tons of apps that sell very cheaply ($10-$15) that are very simple and plain. How come browsers are free? With a web browser, you can do so much. Not that I want to pick on any apps in particular, but take Blitz for example; Blitz is a small utility that forces your computer to focus all of the CPU on one app. Blitz is $17.

How did this come to be? A web browser that gives you endless possibilities is free while a menubar app that makes other apps shut up costs $17! I’d have thought that the market should be the other way around, with a web browser selling for $17 and an application shutter-upper going for free. Once Wildfire is complete, I doubt that I’d be able to sell it – at most it would be donationware.

I guess that this shows how bizarre this world is. I’ll be interested to see what the comments are on this.

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.

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.

There are many screenshot tools for Mac; Grab, Skitch and many more. I’ve settled on a great tool from Realmac Software (Developers of RapidWeaver). LittleSnapper was part of the MacHeist bundle, a collection of apps that has been beaten to death by numerus podcasts and blogs.

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I admit it: I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I love web design. Put that together, and you’ve got many dozens of websites being produced for almost the same purpose – with each new revision replacing the last. This is the never ending cycle that is Blue Pyjama’s website. The latest tool that I’ve been trying is RapidWeaver from RealMacSoftware.

Screenshot of RapidWeaver

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Disney always tells you to “Wish upon a star” to make your dreams come true. While I Love Stars from The Potion Factory won’t make dreams come true, It definitely solved a problem that I had.

I Love Stars is a Menubar app that displays clearly your rating of the current iTunes song. By simply clicking on a star you can change the rating of a song. If you hate to have unrated songs in your library (like yours truly) you can have it flash and play a sound when an unrated song is played.

A great feature of I Love Stars is the fact that it is so discrete. When you aren’t playing a song it hides and you can also make it disappear when unrateable things (podcasts, streams etc.) are playing. To operate it you can either click on the stars or use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Cmd-star rating).

I Love Stars is a great little app that does one thing but does it well. You can get it for free today from The Potion Factory