I love Bwana, mostly because I hate man pages.

OS X is pretty helpful if you feel the need to poke around in the terminal with various commands; every command line program comes with it's own attendant manual page. Thus, if you want to know the many uses of ls, you can type "man ls" at the prompt and get something that looks like this:



All well and good. If you want to scroll down a page, hit the space bar, or hit the down arrow. Likewise, you can hit the up arrow to scroll back up, line by line. Simply dragging the window slider back up doesn't cut the mustard - instead of giving you what you're looking for, you end up with blank space:




The only problem with doing things this way is that it's all, well, rather inconvenient and ugly. And that's where Bwana steps in.

It's a clever little plugin for Safari that accesses man pages in a rather more pleasant and approachable format. Just hit man://ls in the address bar, and you get something far more palatable, thus:

Labels: Cool Stuff, Terminal, Tip

Ringtonator lives!

Take that, gigantic corporate monolith from who I derive my sole source of income!

I'm so confused right now.

I love Finderpop. It's an amazingly useful little application that lets you turn this:




into this:



Please feel free to enjoy it at your leisure. And to take a moment to send the author a little beer money, as requested.

Labels: Cool Stuff

Recently, I had the unmitigated pleasure of talking with a client - and, dare I say it - friend on the phone.

Now, this is probably not news to anyone who's ever used Mr Alexander Graham Bell's extraordinary telephonic device, but as most of my work seems to be conducted hands-on, it's rare that I get to make that kind of claim.

Anyway, there came a juncture in our conversation where I really needed to know what process was hogging up so much of the CPU, so I asked her to open the Terminal and type "top" at the prompt. "Oh no", she laughed whimsically. "I'm not touching that thing." "Why not?" I asked, I reasonably. "Well," quoth she, "there's a reason they call it the Terminal with a capital T".

Indeed.

I run into this pretty often; people who are more than comfortable using the OS X interface, and who have quite often been expert with the classic OS before that - and in fact, are usually capable of making a lot of other applications do things that I am quite incapable of comprehending. But once presented with a blank window with an arcane looking prompt, the natural instinct seems to be to rock back on one's heels and say "Surely there must be another way. I'd better call Dave."

Now, don't get me wrong. Fixing other people's computer woes is how I earn my daily crust, and I'm more than happy to jump into the car and race around leaving a trail of fixed gear, smiles, and enormous bills in my wake. However, it's incumbent on me to show people that the Terminal is their friend, and so I'm going to try to post one or two tips on the Terminal, a few basic commands, and maybe a smidge of UNIX every week or so. Stay tuned...

Labels: Terminal, Tip

Remember a couple of post ago where I mentioned Apple's penchant for "fixing" things that people have worked so hard to break (in this case, the ability to make your own custom ringtones for the iPhone)? Well, they've done it again. iTunes 4.7.2 breaks ringtonator. Still, I imagine we'll have some other, equally ingenious hack in the next day or so.

Please note: This is a story about a friend of mine, and not in the "I'm-saying-it's-a-friend-but-it's-really-me" sense. Let's call this friend Greg, mostly because that's his actual name. Sorry, Greg.

If you do a healthy amount of design or production work, you often end up with unenviable task of having to sort through an enormous amount of graphical assets; fonts in assorted formats, image files of every size and option.

Good move: Invest in a good asset-tracking piece of software (I like Portfolio).

Bad move: Put all your files into sorted folders on a server, then write and run a script to affix a period to each folder (eg: ".GIF", ".JPG"), thus rendering everything you've worked on for the last couple of hours... invisible.

Ouch.

Labels: Tip, uh-oh

So, I'd written a rather good tutorial breaking down the exact method for editing the metadata in AAC-encoded audio files with an eye to informing the world at large about the dark art of converting songs into iPhone ringtones. Neat idea, I thought. And one that somebody else has done better.