Wildwobby

For some reason I got sick of iTunes, and decided to make a simplified music player that can list all my songs, and play them too.

So, I opened XCode and got to work.

Here is the result.

It’s simple, but functional. I programmed it to find all the audio files in the User’s Music folder, and list them. All you have to do is click one, and click the play button. You can even move the slider to repeat a portion of the song.

Important things to note, audio file in the Music folder only will work. If it is in something like /Music/iTunes/music, it won’t work. In later versions, if this app gets any attention at all, I plan to:

• Make a proper icon for it.
• Make a preferences window where you can customize things such as the target music folder.
• Add pause capabilities.
• Etc…

I have integrated Sparkle, so the app will tell you when I have released an update, and it will automatically install it.

Download PlayerLite here: http://wildwobby.com/downloads/PlayerLite.dmg

Get yourself a real steal for your mac by purchasing the MacHeist bundle. Get your self 12 top grade applications for only $49. The bundle includes all types of programs. Manage your personal finances with Cha-Ching. Easily listen to your iTunes from the desktop with CoverSutra or play a 3D game like Nanosaur 2 for example. All 12 applications are top-notch and very useful. Check it out for more info.

In order to create a website, there are several options and things you need to do. I have compiled an image of how I make websites, and how everyone should.

By default, OS X does not have the ability to fully interact with NTFS formatted hard disk or partition. NTFS is a disk format used very widely with windows ever since Windows NT, hence NT File System. There are many reasons you would want to transfer files to/from OS X and Windows. Sure, parallels or VMWare can do it, but those cost money, and not to mention are meant to run the operating system itself, not just be able to interact with the NTFS.

All you need to do to be able to access your NTFS partition, is install the 3rd party drivers. First off, download NTFS-3G. Install it, then restart. Done. When you boot up again, the windows partition will mount in OS X, and you can transfer files between the two as if it were native. There are other software that do the same thing, such as Paragon NTFS, but that costs $40.00! If you need to access files on your windows, bootcamp partition, NTFS-3G is the way to go.

Wordpress 2.5 has been released. It includes tons of new features including a highly updated admin panel and dashboard. The post editor is now more Safari friendly. There is a new gallery feature for uploading multiple images in the same post which I will use extensively. The whole template for the admin panel is different! If you are running a site with wordpress, I highly recommend you upgraded!

http://www.wordpress.com/

There are a lot of tutorial websites out on the web these days. A lot of databases containing links to tutorials for every piece of software you can think of. However, the best tutorials tend to come from sites targeted to one piece of software alone. It takes a lot of discovering to find such sites. But below, I will show you my picks of the most helpful, informative sites.

PSDTuts

–Photoshop– PSDTuts has gained a lot of popularity over the past year. The tutorials are free for the most part, but sample .PSD files are available for download for a few bucks to help keep the site going. New tutorials are posted around 3 times per week, but the website already has a bunch of tutorials from the countless previous weeks. Every month PSDTuts also published a web roundup featuring a few of the best photoshop tutorials on the web from other sites. You can submit your own tutorials to the site if you want, and if accepted, the owner, Collis, will give you $125.00 for it.

Emanuele Feronato

–Flash Programming– The tutorials on Emanuele’s site are top notch. With a new article posted almost everyday, techniques are shown how how some flash game hits are made. Bloons, Tower Defense, etc…– Emanuele starts from scratch in multipart tutorials showing and explaining the code to replicate it. He also shows many tips on how to bring in revenue from your game. How to create a game and get it sponsored, or put in-game ads in it is a snap if you read this blog.

A List Apart

–Web Design– This online magazine is great if you want to learn how to improve a website. A List Apart is published around twice a month, containing 2 articles per publication. The List Apart has been around for a very long time though. At present it is at issue #255. The good, the bad, and the evil about web design is discussed including some tips and other very useful information.Am I missing something? Comment! I am interested to hear in other high class sites for specific tutorials like these. 

Did you know Photoshop can take a video and make an animated image out of it? Yes, it can! Photoshop has the ability to import a video file and convert each frame into a layer and automatically animate it, heres how:

1. Find the video file you would like to use. If you only want to use a portion of it, don’t worry, photoshop will let you select that later.
2. In Photoshop CS3, go to file->Import->Video Frames to Layers…
3. Choose the video file you would like to use. (I’m going to use part of the MacBook Air commercial)
4. When you select which part of the video to use, you hole down the shift key and drag the playback marker thingy from where to start and where to finish. Keep the video short. Most video is 30FPS. We are only going to use every other frame. Limit yourself to around 10 second, which would be around 150 layers in photoshop, but more keep it as short as possible to keep the size of the file small.
5. You should resize the image (Image->Image Size) to whichever size you want the video to play. Remember, the smaller the better again. (I used 120 for the height, and let it automatically find the corresponding width by having constrain proportions checked).
6. Now that you have the video resized, you need extend the canvas for the rest of the signature. Go to Image>Canvas size and change it to the size you want your final image to be. (I used 500×130)
7. Now, select all of the layers. (Tip: Click layer 1, then shift-click the last layer), and select all of the frames (same tip), and move the video where you would like it placed. If you don’t select them first, the animation will get messed up.
8. Make sure all of the animation frames are selected when you move everything around. If you don’t, you will manually have to nudge it back!
9. Make a new layer under Layer one, and make you background on it.
10. Make a new layer on the top of the stacks, and make the image of your signature on it.
11. Add text on the top.
12. Make the last frame longer so it doesn’t seem like an infinite loop.
13. When you are done, File->Save for web & devices.
14. A window pops up. Save as .gif. Change the settings to get the lowest file size possible for an acceptable quality.

 Now, clearly, I didn’t put too much time making this look good. I just placed video and text. However, the point of this tutorial wasn’t to make as good a signature as I could, but to show how to incorporate video.It is hard though. I only had 60 video frames, and it came out to 200 and some odd kb. I hope this was informative and you learned how to add video to a photosohp document!

There are some applications that are so amazing, every mac user should have. Although some are payware, the are limited and are definitely worth it. A lot of good applications are included with Macs in iLife, however there are still some that are necessary for the happiest mac-ing!

• Productivity $- iWork ‘08
• Online Chat - Adium
• E-Mail - Apple Mail
• RSS - NetNewsWire
• Text/Code editing $- TextMate
• Media Playing - Perian
• FTP $- Transmit
• Torrenting - Transmission
• Design $- Adobe Photoshop CS3
• System Monitoring - iStatPro

These applications pretty much cover it for me. iWork is awesome for me, but some business users would prefer something with more Microsoft compatibility should opt to the new Microsoft Office 2008. Adium is a great, muli-protocal instant messaging client thats more light weight than iChat. Perian allows for playing of many different types of media files from within quicktime.  Photoshop, although expensive, is the greatest image editing program available.