Friday, November 9, 2007

The Apple Blog (5 сообщений)

 rss2email.ruНа что подписаться?   |   Управление подпиской 

  RSS  The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
другие подписчики этой ленты также читают >>

  • Quartz Composer in Leopard

    If you’ve previously installed the Developer Tools from the OS X installation discs, (be-it, Tiger, or now Leopard) you’ve had available to you a pretty powerful tool by the name of Quartz Composer. It’s all too possible you’ve seen the application, but have no real idea what it does. Well basically it’s an environment that lets you patch different visual elements together and apply different animations and effects to them. The screensavers you see on OS X are generated (at least most of them, if not all) using QC, as are some of the iTunes ads, and even the funky new Photo Booth/iChat effects in Leopard are Quartz based.

    So Quartz Composer can do some pretty wild stuff, and it’s not even that difficult to figure out. I’ve had an item on my list for a while to do a post - possibly even a series - on using Quartz Composer. Clearly that hasn’t happened yet. But we’re all in luck, because over at CreateDigitalMotion.com, they’ve put up a fantastic run-down by Keith (of Plasq fame) of Quartz Composer and all the cool newness that results from the Leopard upgrade. Keith is the one responsible for that fantastic Skitch screencast, and you can see some very nice Quartz effects used within the screencast itself!

    Keith’s write-up is worth a read - it’ll take a few minutes, but if you’re interested in understanding Quartz Composer a bit more, this is probably worth your time, and will give you a good idea of where to get started.

    Some other resources I’ve found to be useful are as follows:

    • Apple’s Quartz Programming Guide - What better place to get the down and dirty?
    • Quartz Composer Community Forums - Some very cool discussions on using QC and examples of it in action from other users.
    • Sam Kass - Sam’s done some really neat things with Quartz Composer, and Leopard’s new features have re-lit his fire. He’s also mentioned in Keith’s post (linked above)
    • ZUGAKOUSAKU - This was on Digg earlier this year, and I’m just blown-away by some of the things this guy has done with the application. Definitely check out this work for inspiration!

    Hopefully this piques your interest in a very cool (and free - with the OS disc) application that can do some very powerful things. If you’ve got other resources for Quartz Composer, or great examples of what it can produce, please post them in the comments and I’ll update the thread accordingly.

    Thanks to Cris for the tip!





  • Fix for Wireless Networks Not Recognized in Leopard

    Since I installed Leopard, I've been noticing some strange behavior with my wireless networks. When my Macbook Pro wakes from sleep, I get a window warning that none of my preferred wireless networks can be found, and offering me a choice of the various ones it can see.

    wireless.png

    One of these, oddly, is my house network. I have a WPA2 encrypted network, so I enter the key, check 'remember this network' and click join. So far so good - except that this happens every time my laptop wakes up. (This all wouldn't be nearly so annoying if my WPA key weren't twenty or so mostly-random characters long, but I digress.) I have rebuilt and repaired my keychain, deleted and recreated the key for my wireless network, and deleted all the associated preference files, all to no avail. Every time it wakes up, there’s the window again.

    Frustrated, the other day I chose 'cancel' instead. The window vanished and, on a lark, I tried connecting to my network from the normal airport menu. Surprisingly, that worked without a blink.  Evidently, the key is being remembered somewhere, it just hasn’t reached whatever process is responsible for this little box.

    The support.apple.com forums lead me to believe that I am not alone in this strange forgetfulness; that’s where I got the above fixes, in fact. While this little workaround doesn’t fix anything permanently, others may find it useful.  And who knows - perhaps 10.5.1, supposedly rolling later this week, will fix this.





  • How To: Import RSS Subscriptions into Apple Mail

    I never quite understood Apple’s decision to include RSS support in Safari, but not in Apple Mail. Other mail clients such as Thunderbird have offered this support for years, but I just couldn’t bring myself to use them. They had never offered the power Mail did, with built-in smart folders and the way it had always played so nicely with iCal.

    When I first heard that Mail would be offering RSS support in Leopard my first thought was, “finally”. After installing Leopard I immediately opened up NetNewsWire and exported my subscriptions as an OPML file, only to find out that Mail wouldn’t accept it. Mail isn’t alone in missing this very important feature, Safari doesn’t offer OPML importing either.

    If you have been using Safari as your application of choice for reading RSS feeds you will be fine, it’s a simple mouse click away to bring them into Mail. But Safari for the most part is nowhere near powerful or feature rich enough for most of us.

    So what do I do now? Am I stuck with individually re-subscribing to all of my several hundred feeds all over again? At first this seems to be the case, but the long answer is: no. It involves a little jimmy-rigging and taking the long route but it is possible.
    (more…)





  • Google Search for iPhone

    One annoyance I have with my iPhone is the Google Search feature. I think the Google search results are by far the best results as far as relevancy goes. Unfortunately, however, when I set my iPhone to default to Google’s search engine, I am taken to the normal results pages. The Yahoo search option defaults to iPhone optimized search results.

    Google has a mobile-optimized (and iPhone optimized) search page at www.google.com/m, so why should iPhone take me to the normal (and extremely scaled) search results?

    Hopefully Google or Apple will make this an option soon. For right now, instead of using the built-in search I’m actually going to a bookmarked www.google.com/m and searching from there.





  • Apple's Trojan Horse: Webkit

    Back in the early days of TAB, one of our fellow writers was one, Chris Holland. Chris is a pretty smart guy, knows a little too much about too many super geeky things, many of which revolve around Apple technology. He’s since moved on from TAB, but continues to rant about technology on his own time, and from time to time we’ll exchange some IM’s to discuss these things. (If you’ve ever had the extreme pleasure of chatting with Chris, you’re already fully aware of the toddler-like energy levels and spastic excitement he displays for this stuff!)

    Well Chris is at it again, and recently wrote up his own take on a topic that I took a stab at a few months back. While my guess at Xcode dropping on the Windows platform was received with both favorable and not-so-favorable comments (Chris pu-pu’s my idea toward the end of his article…why am I even linking to him?), Chris offers up his own thoughts on the subject, fingering some of the underlying technology behind iTunes and Safari as the real key to the future of Apple software on the Windows platform.

    Webkit is an open source browser engine that powers Safari, and several other applications found in Apple’s stable of program offerings. Seeing as how it helps run Safari, and iTunes (see comments 1 and 3 below) which is now available to the Windows users of the world, Chris surmises that it wouldn’t take much more to offer up a way for Windows developers to test the waters of the OS X development world without having to make a full jump to the new platform first.

    Admittedly this is a teaser into that world at best. But it could be a nice foot in the door for Apple to bewitch current Windows developers with the great features and power available to them on the Cocoa side of the house. Coupled with the available frameworks within OS X and the accessibility of Apple’s hardware features, a whole new wave of developers could result from a move such as Chris suggests. And of course more third party developer support for a platform can only be a good thing.

    So take a few minutes to read what Chris has to say about “Apple’s Decoy into Microsoft’s World” and see what you think. Does the idea hold water? Or is it as out of left field as my guess of Xcode on Windows was?







rss2email.ru       отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=6893&u=24004&r=311667163
управлять всей подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp