Posts Tagged: applications

note — Comments Off
27
Mar 11

Moving Billings to DropBox

I don’t know why application developers continue to make it hard for their users to put their data where they, the user, want to put it and not some semi-arbitrary place of the developer’s choosing. In the Mac world, it’s particularly annoying when developers do not allow you to make that decision and place the data in their application’s directory within the Application Support directory.

Why is this important or urgent? I use DropBox and I have recently decided to start doing a better job of tracking my time and both the front contenders for the job, Igg Software’s iBiz and MarketCircle’s Billings, assume that they know better than I do where my data goes. Bad app, bad!

There is a workaround, however, and it involves, sigh, symbolic links. This is one standard move in unix that I have just never gotten comfortable with. Some part of me thinks that something should be where it says it is. (This is weird, no?)

  1. Make sure the app isn’t running and that you have a backup of your data! I usually duplicate the folder in Application Support and call it “Billings Copy” just to be extra safe.
  2. Move your Billings folder from /Application Support/ into your Dropbox folder.
  3. Open Terminal.app and type: cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/ (If you aren’t familiar with Terminal commands, this will navigate you to the Application Support folder.)
  4. At the next Terminal prompt, type: ln -s ~/Dropbox/Billings/ ./Billings
work — Comments Off
13
Jan 11

What is an app?

The American Dialect Society, which earlier this week named the term ‘app’ word of the year, has the following definition:

The shortened slang term for a computer or smart phone application.

But Ian Bogost thinks it’s worth thinking a bit more about, and it is more than simply smaller functional units, a la the unix philosophy, with each one performing a specific task and that complex tasks require piping data through an array of applications:

The app is a mixed blessing for computer aesthetics, just like music sampling is for music. On the one hand, we get many variations of the same thing that can surprise us when refashioned in different permutations. But on the other hand, we get fewer coherent, complete takes on things. And there’s a risk that deep meaning slowly seeps out of every unit as each does less and less. Apps and web services like Foursquare and Facebook give us a preview of this potential future agony, one in which the most basic chunk of meaning is the conveyance of a piece of data from a database to a screen and back again.

note — Comments Off
15
Dec 10

Recover Mail Option in iPhoto 2011

Link to Apple Discussion thread.

work — Comments Off
11
Mar 10

An HTML5 Drawing Application

It’s done all in Javascript, using the canvas element. Simply amazing. And you can save your drawings as PNGs!

work — Comments Off
5
Mar 10

iPad Application Design

This is the first of what may very well be quite a few notes, as re-blogs, about iPad application design. I think humanist and content creators of all stripes need to be paying close attention to this.

In this case, Matt Gemmell has some initial thoughts that are worth a quick read.

work — Comments Off
14
Mar 08

Edit in Textmate

Remove old version:

rm ~/Library/InputManagers/Edit\ in\ TextMate

Create InputManagers folder:

sudo mkdir /Library/InputManagers

Copy the input manager to /Library:

sudo cp -pR /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/Edit\ in\ TextMate/
Library/InputManagers

Ensure everything is owned by root:

sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers