Brad Arsenault (dot com)
The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged
Ninite Application Installer
Oct 25th
This week has been an interesting week: it’s been Windows 7 week! I chose not to write about Windows 7 this week because for most people it’s not big news –I’ve had it for months from MSDN, a lot of those who care have tried the betas, and most “regular” people don’t upgrade their operating systems until they get a new computer. However it’s worth mentioning that there is a great service out there that will be useful for those reinstalling their OSes (recommended as opposed to an in-place upgrade for Windows 7), reinstalling your Vista or XP install, or just got a new computer and need to get all of your applications on your computer. Ninite has a solution for you.
Ninite, a new service that allows you to check-off what software you’d like to batch-install, creates an executable that takes care of downloading and installing the applications you chose from the list that they provide. However there are free and open source programs on this service, you can also get paid software such as Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, which just downloads a trial of it, allowing you to activate it using your purchased product key.
As I said before, this site creates a batch installer mini-program that takes care of downloading and installing your applications. I should clarify that the application you download from this site is small, less than a megabyte (165KB in my case). When this program is executed it does the downloading, meaning that this will not install applications offline such as downloading this on a computer with an internet connection and trying to install applications on a PC without an internet connection won’t work and trying to use this to install applications on a PC with a slow internet connection won’t be beneficial.
Here is how the interface works:
And this is what the installer app looks like in Windows 7:
I give this service top marks for it’s usefulness, uniqueness, ease-of-use, and wide selection of applications. However I’m interested to see if they will offer a way to do offline installs of applications (a lot more useful if performing a lot of installs on a lot of machines).
Tweetie 2 – Preview Images Surface
Sep 28th
My favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie, seems to be about to go 2.0 with the latest 3.0-only update of it’s top-10 selling social networking app. Since the dawn of Tweetie just 10 months ago I’ve loved every second I’ve spent with it, and even more loved seeing other iPhone users using and reviewing it. In these reviews you almost always see two basic phrases:
- “…done the Apple way…”
- “…has sex appeal…”
That is very high praise, especially coming from a market that is highly dominated in mind-share by Apple’s multimillion dollar industrial design. The more important detail is that there is finally a platform with developers dedicated to user experience…. remember Windows Mobile? Palm (before WebOS)? Blackberry(before the Curve)?
PocketPC Desktop crica 2000 - from Wikipedia
It wasn’t that long ago that the best applications that we any home-brew or even small corportate IT/IS department could do were stylus-driven, 256-color, and lacked so many refinements we’ve seen in Mac OS (just to list a few; button alignment, button size, button text, button format, screen layout, application flow, location of controls, speed and stability of custom elements, visual effects, and annoying tapping/clicking sounds).
As I’ve diverted from the promised content, I’ll note that based on this Tweet from Lauren (Tweetie programmer-extraordinaire), Tweetie 2 is definitely coming. Today TechCrunch, Mashable, and TwinCities have all posted preview screenshots. This looks good!
Links:
- atebits.com – BigBird Redux (Blog Post from Tweetie dev)
- TechCrunch – Preview Tweetie 2…
- Mashable – PREVIEW: Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone [Pics]
YouTube – I Fell In Love at The Apple Store
Sep 28th
This is the best YouTube video I’ve seen all day.
iTunes 9 Cocoa?
Sep 9th
If you haven’t clued into Apple’s hidden shame, iTunes and Finder (up until Snow Leopard) are Carbon apps. That just means that the applications haven’t been rewritten for Mac OS X and are still carrying the legacy of the Classic environment. That doesn’t mean much for the user except for an app’s ability to address large (4GB+) memory and run in the 64-bit-ness that users seem to like the sound of.
I’m not sure exactly what these screenshots (that I took) reveal, but it is interesting….
iTunes 9 Resources folder and 'Get Info'
Note the
plist file is in both 8.2.1 and 9. So what exactly changed?
iTunes 9 Resources folder and 'Get Info'
I’m not 100% sure if this is a definite sign of Cocoa-ness, but I see a
plist file– a staple of Cocoa… but that’s in both.
iTunes 9 Resources folder and 'Get Info'
Note the
RSRC file. This is a “resource fork“, an invention and utility of the original MacOS (and Carbon apps). Is this a definite sign it’s not Cocoa?
iTunes in Activity Monitor = 32-bit
Also note that all of Apple’s apps run in 64-bit mode (as seen in Activity Monitor) except for iTunes. We know Carbon apps don’t do 64-bit, so is this an indicator… I mean, Apple would kick it up to 64-bit if it were Cocoa, right?
Not that which API iTunes uses is important for most users, it would be encouraging to think that iTunes has been moved off of it’s 10+ year old code-heritage. Any Apple devs out there that can speak on either direction of this?
Track My Snow Leopard Shipment!
Sep 1st
If you remember back earlier thi year I had a post about tracking a classic Mac keyboard and mouse from eBay… well I’ve since shipped a few items on Canada Post, Fedex, and Purolator and have come up with a few PHP pages to make these pages viewable on non-secure connections and to eliminate almost all scripting (at the very least make these viewable on cell phones). I will be releasing the source code to these pages for you to use, but in the meantime you can wait and watching with me as my copy of Snow Leopard ships across the country to me: [bradarsenault.com/track.php].
