Sometimes I need to output PDFs of a wireframe produced in OmniGraffle in two versions, one with annotations and one without. Luckily I habitually put all annotations on their own layer, so all that’s needed is a simple AppleScript to tell OmniGraffle to toggle the printable and visible nature of every layer named “Annotation”. A bit of googling turned up this forum post which does most of the work, I just needed to add in the printable property.
Dropzone
iTunes UIWTF
With every release the iTunes UI seems to get worse. This morning I attempted the seemingly simple task of copying a video from my Mac to my iPhone. Firstly, I need to drag the video to iTunes which then creates a duplicate copy of the video on my hard drive for no apparent reason. The video then shows up in iTunes, so I attempt to click and drag it to my iPhone.
Pixelmator 1.5 released
And it looks like the best update yet. Finally Pixelmator has all the tools you’ll need to use it for web work, including slicing, export for web and an info panel (of sorts). Bye bye Photoshop. I never have to look at your stupid clunky custom interface again.
Convert design evolution video
Really interesting video charting the design evolution of the iPhone app Convert by tap tap tap.
Lovely to see the iterations gone through and the design decisions being made along the way. Especially interesting is how much more usable this ends up than the pretty but woeful ConvertBot.
EyeTV and Turbo264
Two products from Elgato, EyeTV lets you use your Mac as a PVR and Turbo264 massively speeds up video encoding to h.264. You’d expect them to work together beautifully but this is what I see every time I ask EyeTV to export a recording through Turbo264.
The last operation could not be completed because an error of type -536870176 occurred. Such a shame that they can’t seem to make two of their own products work together.
Typinator vs TextExpander
Quick fight out between two applications that do essentially the same thing, which is expand text snippets to become something else:
Round 1 - Does it do what it’s supposed to do? I bought TextExpander to do one thing, correct my typos. I have a chronic habit of typing semicolons where there should be apostrophes. Words like “don;t” and “can;t”. I set this up in TextExpander, set off writing an email and it failed to catch a single one of my typos.
Tagging email revisited
I’ve been using InDev’s MailTags for a while now but sadly this isn’t the panacea that I’d hoped. It seems that it occasionally deletes messages without your consent and without telling you. Obviously this is not ideal, especially as it happened to me yesterday when I tagged an email with the words “flight”, “details”, “receipt” and “important”. And when I say it deletes messages, I don’t mean it moves them to the trash, I mean the message is gone.
Photo post
Worst. Logo. Ever. And still no support for OpenDocument, a ratified ISO standard since 2006, but proudly supporting Word's de facto .doc format and still using another new proprietary format? Shame on you Apple.