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- It's All Greek To Me: 15 Lorem Ipsum Resources
Web designers, font purveyors, professional paginators and even application developers need sample data to test their layouts, creations and algorithms. “Lorem ipsum” has been the de-facto standard when placing non-distracting text into test areas and has been shown to exhibit characteristics of standard lettter, word and space distribution. While one could just keep a copy of a few paragraphs of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum text around, there are many tools for your Mac (and on the Net) that make this task even easier.
Ipsum Everywhere!
If Rosborough Technology’s lipServiceX (1.2) didn’t exist, someone would have built it. As an OS X Services menu item, it gives you quick and (almost) ubiquitous access to “lorem ipsum” no matter what application your using. A key combination makes this the quickest way to get some ipsum into your project.
Dashboard Widgets
While there isn’t exactly a plethora of widgets, the following ones cover all the ipsum bases:
- Dolor Sit Amet (small & quick)
- Cicero (gets the job done)
- Lorem Ipsum Widget (fancy)
- Corporate Ipsum - a humorous alternative to “lorem ipsum” (though it generates readable text, so it may distract proofers).
Editor-support
- TextMate has a built-in generator invoked via tab completion of the magic word.
Browser-based
- Dummy Lipsum - Firefox add-on
- A very nice “ipsum” bookmarklet generator
Online “lorem ipsum” generators
While not exactly a comprehensive list, these sites get the job done:
- lorem-ipsum.info - My favourite; multi-lingual (enables character set anomaly testing)
- lipsum.com - (the original?)
For the “do it yourself” folks
- Lorem Scriptsum - AppleScript script (with source and many options)
- The classic Perl module
- GTK+ GUI and Python module
- Ruby ipsum
Finally, this Joel on Software forum discussion is a great primer on the efficacy of even using standard “lorem ipsum” with some creative suggestions on alternatives. I’d be very interested in what tips and tools other TAB readers use to “get their ipsum on”, so drop a note in the comments!
Tags: Commentary, dashboard widget, lorem ipsum, service, services, Tips
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/14/its-all-greek-to-me/#comments - Apple TV 'Take 2′ - Post Upgrade Melancholy
For the past 24+ hours RSS readers around the globe have been awash with OS X 10.5.2 update news and notes on the ancillary side updates. The Cupertino software barrage continued today, including the Apple TV “Take 2″, which added access to iTunes rentals, Flickr/.Mac photos/movies and HD trailers.
I started the download before my evening run and it was ready to install when I finally had time to complete the upgrade. What followed was a series of very un-Apple events. From the point I told it to start the process to being greeted with the new main menu I received practically no useful feedback apart from the pretty silver-grey Apple logo and a progress bar. I experienced waiting through at least three reboots, had “static” appear (briefly) and was finally placed into a completely foreign menu system. Apple provided no verbiage on what was going on nor whether each step was truly successful, and there were no “go to apple.com/… to learn more about the update” prompts to help me prepare for the feature changes & additions. While I didn’t need those prompts, I suspect there were more than a few Apple TV users who would have really appreciated them since navigation is – in some places – radically different.
As far as the new features are concerned, Flickr & .Mac integration work very well (for as long as we have Flickr…sigh) and are easy to configure. I haven’t had the opportunity to try purchasing or renting anything from the integrated storefront (perhaps if they had managed to get Martian Child in on the Tuesday store update I would have had more reason to), but I suspect they made extra effort to get that right given how it sets up a nice, direct revenue stream for them. HD trailers, however, are just horrible. Wall•E (our two year old loves the trailer) stalled five times despite the Apple TV being hooked up via Ethernet and my Comcast link being very solid/speedy (contrast the trailer hiccups with the 180MB 10.5.2 update retrieval which downloaded in just under 2 minutes, though I realize it’s not a completely fair comparison).
So, overall, I was left a bit disappointed after the update, but look forward to being able to use the new features as Apple expands their video library and improves retrieval of HD content.
What’s your Apple TV ‘Take 2′ story and what are your thoughts on the update? If you’ve tried purchasing or renting directly from the Apple TV, how easy/seamless was it? Any hiccups with trailers, .Mac or Flickr? Share your experiences over at the Community or drop a note in the comments.
Tags: .mac, apple-tv, Commentary, flickr, Hardware, movie rentals, Software, software-update, take-2
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/12/apple-tv-take-2-post-upgrade-melancholy/#comments - While You're Waiting For The iPhone SDK…
As a previous post indicated, Apple has yet to publicly release the iPhone/iTouch non-web SDK and it is still unclear if casual developers will be able to get their applications onto these new devices. As we all wait like expectant parents, there are some great resources out there for the current, Apple-preferred method of iPhone development.
Wrox Press recently released Professional iPhone and iPod touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari by Richard Wagner. So far (not quite finished with it yet), the book is an great reference for iPhone web development and focuses on the most effective use of Joe Hewitt’s iUI framework. The CSS-heavy framework provides an excellent base for your iPhone/iTouch applications and enables you to focus on application design rather than device quirks.
One of the best features of the book is how Wagner drives home the need for applications to be both network-resilient and network-aware. The iPhone has the ever-tenuous EDGE connections to deal with and Wi-Fi is not always stable or speedy, even on the iTouch. This book and the iUI framework should help you quickly build robust and speedy web-based applications for either device and make you an overall better mobile-targeted web developer.
Web-based iApps will continue to have their place in the iWorld even after the on-device SDK is released and you can find additional resources over at iPhoneWebDev.
If you’re using the iUI framework, have read Richard Wagner’s book or have other suggestions for mobile web development, drop a note in the comments with your thoughts/experiences/suggestions.
Tags: Commentary, Development, iphone, itouch, sdk, web development
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/12/while-youre-waiting-for-the-iphone-sdk/#comments - Aperture 2 Released
Apple is on a software-release roll. Yesterday they released Leopard 10.5.2 and today they have released Aperture 2.
Aperture is Apple’s pro-level photograph editing and management software that has been picking up a lot of steam in the past couple of years.
There are over 100 new features in Aperture 2, some of which are:
- Updated user interface
- Quick preview mode
- Larger project management
- .Mac Web Gallery integration
- Tethered shooting support
- Duplicate detection
You can see the full list of updates here.
Also worth noting is the price as now dropped from $299 to just $199 for a full version and $99 to upgrade.
Tags: aperture, News, photography, release, Software, upgrade
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/12/aperture-2-released/#comments - iPhone Development Preview
Craig Hockenberry (of Icon Factory/Twitterific) give us a glimpse of what development will be like for the iPhone via his personal/development blog. What can we expect?
- Tossing most of your current UI code
- Being way more careful about object/memory use
- Relying on your Objective-C & Cocoa skills for visual element design since NIBs are non-esistent
- Learning a whole new way to get input from the user and info to the user
He goes into a decent amount of detail (as much as he probably can given the lack of a public API release) and leaves the reader with a good sense of what it will be like in the brave, new iWorld.
Tags: Commentary, Development, Development, iphone
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/11/iphone-development-preview/#comments - Apple releases 10.5.2
Apple has just released 10.5.2 via Software Update.
There are a slew of changes/fixes, some of which are:
- Improved Airport connection reliability and stability
- Improved Dashboard widget performance
- Updated Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view
- Ability to turn off transparency of menu bar
- Reduction in overall menu transparency
- Adds a menu bar option for accessing Time Machine features
The big one that most people will be excited about is the ability to turn off transparency in the menu bar.
Post in the comments if you have any issues with this upgrade.
Tags: leopard, News, Software, software-update, upgrade
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/11/apple-releases-1052/#comments - Speed Up Documentation & Lesson Creation With ScreenSteps
Image is everything when preparing application documentation for manuals or creating a lesson for a training class or a self-paced module. An annotated series of screen, window or dialog boxes is much easier to understand than a simple list of actions and OS X users have many tools to choose from, including ScreenSteps 2
(from Blue Mango Learning Systems). ScreenSteps takes a holistic approach to solving the problem of capturing, organizing, annotating and exporting/publishing complete lessons. After starting a “lesson”, screen captures are stored in sequential order. You can begin annotating at any time and add markup/highlights to each step of your lesson as your workflow warrants. The entire lesson project – including all files – is completely managed by ScreenSteps, so no need to gather up all the capture files on your own. Publishing/presenting is a snap with HTML and PDF output options. (Complete details on all application features in All About ScreenSteps 2.)ScreenSteps goes even further by creating a place to share your work with the community at ScreenSteps Live (something aking to “Flickr for Lessons”). A quick example is this brief lesson on how to create/update a Pages table of contents. Lessons can be tagged (gotta love this semantic web of ours) and can be made private (feature coming soon).
Despite the application being available for both Mac and Windows platforms, the developers did a great job making ScreenSteps 2 “fit in” on both, though they seem to have a definite affinity for OS X.
ScreenSteps 2 comes in Free, Standard ($39.95) and Pro ($59.95) options and ScreenSteps Live is completely free, with a paid/ad-free option coming in the near future.
If you have any experience with ScreenSteps 2 or ScreenSteps Live definitely drop a note in the comments.
[Via Sean Sperte’s Geek & Mild blog.]
Tags: Commentary, screenshots, screensteps, Software
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/11/speed-up-documentation-lesson-creation-with-screensteps/#comments - Community Activity: February 11, 2008
- 32GB iTouch, 16GB iPhone
- Microsoft Office 2008
- iCal Server
- Leopard Features Missing
- iCal and Being Productive
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/11/community-activity-february-11-2008/#comments - TrueCrypt 5.0 Brings Plausible Deniability To OS X Users
While I’m not trying to only focus on security topics, they just seem to pop up more often than not, including today’s serendipitous discovery that TrueCrypt is available for OS X. Security isn’t just about maintaining system integrity (loosely defined as keeping malicious code from getting onto/running on your system). A critical component is ensuring that your valuable data is protected according to your risk appetite (loosely defined as confidentiality). Macs already have FileVault and secure disk images to handle basic encryption needs, so you may be asking why we need yet another utility for protecting information our systems (a fair question).
If you need/desire cross-platform compatibility, then TrueCrypt is a perfect choice. You can encrypt a virtual disk image onto a USB drive and take it from Windows to Linux to OS X and gain access to your all your secret data, something that is not possible with OS X secure disk images.
The other big “selling point” (difficult to use that term with a free & open source product) is the concept of plausible deniability. Until you go through the process of decrypting/mounting a volume, TrueCrypt file or disk volumes appear to consist of nothing more than random data (i.e. there is no “signature”). It is impossible to prove that a file, a partition or a device is a TrueCrypt volume or that it has been encrypted. This is an important point since we’re going down a very slippery slope (at least in the United States) where folks are now being forced to give up their secrets with full legal backing. You can rename a TrueCrypt file to “Family Vacation.mov” and be able to claim that it’s just a corrupted transfer from your video camera with no way for the authorities to prove otherwise. Similarly, non-boot volumes (which is not an option for OS X yet) have no identifiable tags, making it look like an unformatted partition with random data.
Sadly, one of the coolest features – creating a hidden volume within an encrypted volume – is also not available on OS X yet. This option would allow you to give up your keys/passphrase to an outer-encrypted volume, but have another hidden, encrypted volume within it that uses a separate set of keys/passphrase. This lets you give up some of your secrets but not all of them.
My attempts at downloading and installing TrueCrypt were woefully unsuccessful with Safari under Leopard (the download file was corrupted). It worked fine in Firefox and is available for 10.4 and 10.5, Intel or PPC. I’ll be putting the software through some tests over the next few days, so drop a note in the comments or forums if you have any questions or want to share your experiences with the product.
Tags: Commentary, encryption, security, Software, Software, TrueCrypt
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/06/truecrypt-50-brings-plausible-deniability-to-os-x-users/#comments - Crazy EDGE Outage
As many folks have reported, AT&T’s EDGE network is struggling in the midwest. Outages have been patchy but seem to have affected entire cities, or at least large areas. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been any accounts of service dropping within inches…until now.
Here I sit, in downtown Cincinnati, and of the three iPhones in my office, two of them have absolutely no cell service. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Any attempted call immediately fails. They are the equivalent of an iPod Touch, plus a camera. Fortunately for me, mine works perfectly fine and I get to just listen to the frustrations of my coworkers and not experience any of my own. But the rants really fired up when we decided to sit all three iPhones, each with the exact same hardware (purchased within two months of each other), side by side. Here’s what we saw:
Pretty weird. I’ve experienced similar things with people that have other phones on the same network, but never with the exact same hardware. So who’s to blame here? AT&T or Apple? Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the outage, and I can say (from experience) that there are some really grumpy AT&T customers out there.
So what about you, loyal TAB readers? Can anyone reproduce this?
Tags: att, Commentary, iphone, News, Reader Feedback
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/01/crazy-edge-outage/#comments - MarsEdit Update Kicks Your Blogging Up A Notch
I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.
One of my major complaints about the previous version has been the horrendous preview feature. While you could connect MarsEdit up to your site CSS style sheets fairly easily, rendering of your entries was always slow and buggy. The new preview feature is fast, responsive and (so far) bug/crash-free. This makes creating entries more fluid and enables you to trust what you see locally rather than having to preview posts on your site before publishing.
One other great, new feature is the ability to search your posts locally. If you contribute to a number of blogs (public or private) or just post quite a bit, this can be a great way to go back and see if you’ve already hit upon a topic before. It can also be a great way to gather support materials for a new post. Since you can use MarsEdit as a note-taking system (you don’t have to post drafts to a server), this can also be a fantastic way to organize small bits of info you keep promising to find a place for.
Finally – for Movable Type and WordPress users – authors have the ability to do free-tagging instead of picking from a list of defined keywords. I’m a huge Drupal fan, and Drupal does have free-tagging support, so perhaps Dan will read this humble post and work on interfacing with the Drupal API’s.
MarsEdit is not free, but it’s a bargain at $30. Dan is very responsive in the ME forums and both he and the app have a presence on Twitter (when Twitter is actually up, that is).
If you have any good/bad experiences with MarsEdit please drop a note in the comments and if you have alternative blogging client/post organization suggestions let us know as well (always good to hear from those three ecto users out there).
Tags: blogging, mardedit, News, Software, software-update
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http://theappleblog.com/2008/01/31/marsedit-update-kicks-your-blogging-up-a-notch/#comments
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