Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow: “Q. What technology do you need to build the next Flickr? A. Trick question. What you need to build the next Flickr is people. George Oates, a key member of the core team that shaped the Flickr community, shares lessons that can help you grow yours.

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Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

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(Via A List Apart.)

PC World: $199 iPhone is cool, but possibly imaginary

PC World: $199 iPhone is cool, but possibly imaginary: “PC World’s Harry McCracken weighs in on Fortune’s report of a $199 iPhone.

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(Via Macworld.)

Apple Releases New iMacs with Faster (1066Mhz) Front-Side Bus

Apple Releases New iMacs with Faster (1066Mhz) Front-Side Bus: “As predicted, Apple released new iMacs today. The new iMacs include faster processors bringing the low end up to 2.4GHz and with the top end reaching 3.06GHz. The high end 24′ 3.06GHz iMac also introduces the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS (512MB) video ca…”

(Via MacRumors : Mac News and Rumors.)

FrankenMac in the Lab

FrankenMac in the Lab: “Brian Chen is joined by Lab director James Galbraith, who acts as our tour guide into the inner workings of the Rob Griffiths’ home-built Mac OS machine. They talk briefly about its performance and some of its peculiarities.

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(Via Macworld.)

Quick Look Plug-ins: Save More Time

Quick Look Plug-ins: Save More Time: ”

With the release of Leopard came over 300 new features. Some of these new features includes Time Machine, Screen Sharing, and Quick Look. I find Quick Look to be the most useful addition to Mac OS X. Upon installing Leopard, Mac users had one gripe — they complained that Quick Look could not handle all of the file extensions that they used in their daily lives. To solve this problem, developers created plug-ins for Quick Look in order to make it more compatible with different file extensions.

My favorite three plug-ins save me much time in addition to the time that I already save with Quick Look alone. Suspicious Package, BetterZipQL, and Folder View can all be installed easily to help you use your time more effectively. All one needs to do in order to install a plug-in is to drag the qlgenerator plug-in folder to /Library/QuickLook/ or ~/Library/QuickLook/. Upon a computer reboot, one can use these plug-ins to their advantage.

Suspicious Package can be very useful when dealing with .pkg installer packages. Before clicking any buttons in the window one can see a basic overview of what will occur upon installing the package. For example, you see the size of the package, if it needs administrator privileges, if it needs a restart upon installation, and even the amount of installer scripts the package contains. If one wants to get into more detail, they can press the Show Contents button, and the window will then expand and display all the files the package will install and where. This can be useful if one installs a package and then later wishes to delete it off the computer. When Quick Look is equipped with Suspicious Package, it can be used to detect Trojan installation packages.

Folder View is a plug-in that puts a neat idea into action quite well. This addition to QuickLook does exactly what one might guess: it allows the user to see the contents of a folder when activating QuickLook instead of just the folder’s icon. This can be handy when one would like to know what documents are in his Documents folder, their file kind, creation date, size, and even the folder’s creation date! Folder View is a great addition to QuickLook because it adds to QuickLook’s main purpose, allowing the user to view files quicker more effectively.

Macitbetter, the creators if the Mac program BetterZip, have outdone themselves by creating a free Quick Look plug-in called BetterZipQL with abilities similar to BetterZip.app. This add-on works with many different archiving formats including ZIP, TAR, RAR, and SIT. Upon activation, Quick Look will show the contents of the compressed file, and then one can see the archived file’s properties, kind, size, and date created. There is only one problem with my favorite free Quick Look plug-in — it displays hidden files. This clutters the window making it less efficient as it would be without this flaw. While I do have this small problem with BetterZipQL, it is still my favorite addition to Quick Look.

QuickLook’s entry into the Mac OS X system has been great in terms of saving time. These three free plug-ins, Suspicious Package, BetterZipQL, and Folder View, make a great addition to any Mac, and I truly suggest installing them today. If you know of any other great, time saving plug-ins, please comment on this review

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(Via MacApper.)

This, that, and the iTunes Store

This, that, and the iTunes Store: “Apple has been quietly tweaking the iTunes Store. Here are some changes you might not have noticed.

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(Via Macworld.)

Nova offers USB HSUPA wireless modem

Nova offers USB HSUPA wireless modem: “The GlobeSurfer Icon HSUPA wireless modem will let your Mac surf cell phone data networks worldwide.

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(Via Macworld.)

Baseline: There’s Nothing Baseline About This App

Baseline: There’s Nothing Baseline About This App: “s you all the scans that you have saved for a hard drive. You name the scans, so if you name them by date you can easily find which scan you are looking for. It would be nice if you could double-click on one of those managed scans and compare to it, though. You can do this easily, though, by just selecting a scan in the popup box in the upper-left hand corner. Another thing that would be very useful would be, when you open Baseline, to load the last scan made so you can see what it looked like.

Another amazing feature of Baseline is the ability to archive and compress files with the click of a button. Just press ‘Archive’ in the toolbar (when you have already scanned), and it will take that file and compress it in .gzip, and put the original file in the trash. If you choose to archive the file, it will compress it with .tgz and trash the original. It would be nice if they asked you whether you wanted to have the original trashed.

Baseline is well worth the ~$5 more you pay than for OmniDiskSweeper or WhatSize because of all the features listed above. Not all of them are perfect, but no one expects them to be. The final most important thing that makes it even more worth the money is the interface. Its interface is so much more Mac-like than all the rest. I absolutely love the interface, and think that it is so much easier to use than those of the others. It just looks better, which in my opinion is worth the $5 alone.”

(Via MacApper.)

GrabUp: Screen Sharing at the Next Level

GrabUp: Screen Sharing at the Next Level: ”

Recently I published an article describing all of the cool things one can do with Apple’s built-in ‘Grab’ application. The article included the majority of the modifier keys available while taking a screenshot, and I also described what uses there are for taking screenshots. The one explanation I did not go into enough detail about is the fact that screenshots can be used to teach someone far away how to complete a task on their Mac. GrabUp makes screenshots one hundred fold easier to share.

GrabUp is a small menubar program that waits in one’s menubar anticipating activation from its shortcut. By pressing ‘Command’+’Shift’+’3/4″ more than just a screenshot is taken. Your image is uploaded to the Internet, and the link is copied to your clipboard automatically. This program takes out all the struggle of emailing a screenshot to a relative who desperately wants to make a slide show of his children for the first time. In addition, the program keeps track of all the recent uploads for later use. The keyboard shortcut that once snapped a simple screenshot is now capable of sharing your screen across the Internet via a personalized, private link like this.

GrabUp is an amazing program but it does have a flaw or two that are worth writing about. This application’s function is very simple and, occasionally, that leads to a few problems. Sometimes, when taking a screenshot, I have personal information on my desktop that I would like to edit out of the photo. GrabUp’s functionality does not allow for me to do this because it uploads the images straight to the Internet. Furthermore, I may forget that I have to edit screenshots before sending the link, and the person I am trying to help will receive my personal data. Additionally, there is certainly no way to prevent it from uploading to the Internet and overwriting one’s clipboard once you have captured your screenshot (unless you turn the whole program off).

GrabUp has changed the way many Mac users, including me, look at screenshots. Now, when one of my friends goes out of state, I can still help him or her with their computer endeavors. Also, this program is completely free, so there is no hassle when attempting to download and try GrabUp to save the day for your friends and family. I suggest downloading GrabUp if you do not mind the small annoyances that I pointed out.

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(Via MacApper.)

Check Your WordPress Security

Check Your WordPress Security: ”

Matt Mullenweg from the WordPress team has posted a message about the security of WordPress, which MarsEdit users who run WordPress should take a look at. It’s particularly timely because there are a number of attacks going around that impact older WordPress blogs that haven’t been updated to to the most recent version.

In my customer support for MarsEdit, I have been seeing these security problems pop up quite a bit lately. The so-called ‘spam injection’ attacks often inject spam links at the oblivious expense of how these links might mess up the XMLRPC interface which blog clients such as MarsEdit use to interact with your blog. It’s gotten to the point where error messages from the blog such as ‘Parse error. Not well formed.’ are almost certain to be symptoms of such a spam injection attack. Updating to the latest WordPress almost always fixes the problem immediately.

Matt’s advice is pretty basic: update to the latest WordPress, and check your posts for signs of tampering. But it’s nice to have advice ‘from the top,’ so to speak. I will be glad to see this wave of blog-attacks pass us by as more and more users get updated to the latest release of WordPress.

I commented on the post, suggesting that what WordPress would really benefit from is some kind of automated updater, so that users can easily update without having to worry about whether they’re doing it right or whether they’ll mess up their blog. The great news is Matt replied saying that they are in fact working on such a feature for 2.6.

Looking forward to a built-in automatic updater for WordPress! But in the mean time, be sure to stay current so you avoid the nasty attacks that are going around.

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(Via Red Sweater Blog.)