Mac

This morning kicked off the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California. Thousands of developers and press waited in line for the highly anticipated keynote by Phil Schiller.

Twitter was being flooded by attendees giving minute by minute updates using the hash tag #WWDC. At 12pm CST today, there were 78 new tweets per second with the WWDC hash tag attached. There was a lot of momentum and energy surrounding this morning's event -- people were predicting what was going to be announced, a new iPhone or OS, and rumors started to spread that someone saw Steve Jobs in the building, spawning the prediction that Jobs would make an appearance. When it came down to it, everyone just wanted to hear it from the man himself.

I was somewhat to disappointed to go on SnagIt's download page and find out the application was not supported for Mac OS X. However, I didn't have to go far to find Jing, created by the same company that brought you SnagIt, Techsmith.

And even better, Jing is free.

Techsmith launched Jing as a project back in July 2007, and it's no secret they might come out with a premium version. Currently, Jing uses screencast.com to host files and provides the user with 2GB of storage and 2GB of transfer sound. After capturing an image or video, the user can:

1) add text, arrows, or highlighted selected areas
2) instantly grab html code and imbed the image or video to their site
3) upload the file to screencast.com, flickr, ftp, or the user hard drive

Jing doesn't offer the same user functionality as SnagIt, and they explain this reason in the QA section on their website:

"...the key difference is about workflow. Jing is designed to be fast-visual communication shared with others in a variety of locations. Capture. Annotate. Share."

It's not uncommon for me to download numerous tools over a period of time while I'm online. Today I had spent the last few hours reading blogs, checking twitter, downloading a few SEO tools, and so forth. All of a sudden I notice that all of my links are highlighted in red!

Annoyed, because it was happening on every page no matter where I went, I did a little research and found the answer: The SEO toolbar I downloaded defaulted the setting that had caused this highlighting occurrence. If this has happened to you, the fix is simple:

Go to Tools/SEO for Firefox/Options. The setting is 'nofollow links.' Click the box "enable/disable highlighting." Refresh your page, and the links should go back to normal.

Coda
Coda is an amazing multipurpose program created by Panic Softare for the Mac OS platform; it combines a text and CSS editor, FTP program (based on the already wildly succesful FTP tool for Mac, Transmit), terminal, web previews of your files, and even has a built in version of The Web Programmers Desk Reference. I absolutely LOVE this program because it eliminates the need for having multiple applications open and streamlines my web editing and uploading process. Unfortunately for PC users, Coda is only available for Mac.

On October 26th, Apple released it's new "baby".. the new operating system for Mac, OS 10.5 or as many people know it, Leopard. As any dedicated Apple fanatic would, I had this preorderd to ship to my door on the release date. This is the fifth major update to OS X and contains, by Apple's count, up to 300 new features... such as major changes in the OS's interface, updates to several of the OS's built in programs, and improved security. While I don't have the time to go over all 300, I'd like to touch on two of the key new features.

New UI:

I just released a new version of my png compression software for Mac OSX.

What's new? Not much. I changed the name from the incredibly lame PngOptimizer to PngThing and got a new icon courtesy FastIcon.com.

PngThing.dmg (1.78mb)

Recently I've started optimizing my PNG images. In most cases, I can get file sizes smaller than GIFs, and if I'm real lucky cut 24-bit PNGs in half.

There are a few optimizing programs out there, but none of them do what I really want. Previously I was using PNGpong, a dashboard widget, but I'm not a fan of Dashboard (I know, I know) and wanted a program that I could simply drag a folder onto and not have to worry about selecting fifteen different PNGs.