This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
Skeuomorphism gone mad. I kind of love it. (Also, double plus points for the name)
Fab thoughtful piece by Robin Sloan, delivered in an innovative form.
Jason Shiga’s outstanding “interactive” time-warping comic, reimagined as an iPad app. Highly recommended.
Congrats to my lovely chums at Massive Health on the launch of their first experiment. As beautiful and playful as you’d expect. Curious to see how helpful it is.
OS X screensaver that shows your friends’ Instagram shots. Lovely!
Rdio have launched their (mostly-)native Mac client, and it’s grand. Not as nice as Spotify (playlist building is still clunky), but it does 99% of everything you want. I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and it was the sole reason I resubscribed.
<3. Like a Quicksilver or LaunchBar for your phone contacts. Previous versions were good, new version has replaced the Phone app in my iPhone launcher dock.
I am digging the heck out of this. A lovingly-designed calendar app replacement for the iPhone which interacts with your existing calendars, so all the lovely syncing goodness of iOS keeps on working.
Beautiful social news gathering tool for iPad. Feeds are “curated” using Twitter lists, giving buttloads of flexibility. (Sadly the social part is buggered at the moment, as they didn’t account for all the iPad users out there)
Unrelated: New goal in life: Create a product that is cool, then get Adam Lisagor to make the promo video.
Super-simple typeface designer for iPad. Touch interface to sketch your font, then it uploads it to a website for sharing.
Outstandingly enjoyable iPhone game — like Geometry Wars if it had been designed from the outset for the iPhone. Challenging, smart, funny, and rewarding.
Fab site-specific Chrome extension to improve Flickr. Lightbox view is super nice. (Bonus points for removing the “by Yahoo!” from the Flickr logo!)
Beautifully designed and implemented board game for iPhone. I’m still getting to grips with the strategy, but it’s rather fine.
Looking forward to this. Reeder on iPhone is the reason I switched back to using Google Reader for my RSS collation needs.
New diff viewer for OS X. Finally, a diff tool that can deal gracefully with changesets across multiple files!
The free game is not a lie! To encourage download of Steam, Valve is giving Portal away for free for the next two weeks. If you haven’t already played it, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO.
The fabulous Pomplamoose have compiled their outstanding cover versions into a new album. Many examples of cover versions being better than the originals, particularly their gorgeous take on “Single Ladies”.
Robin’s novella is now available as a CC-licensed PDF file. I’m about halfway through reading my copy, and proud to have been part of the Kickstarter project that funded it.
Perfect for copying onto your Kindle before you board a flight this festive season!
I love my new Magic Mouse, but was missing my middle click. This app adds it back. Hooray!
Free car routing app for iPhone, which is using game mechanics (points & leaderboards) to crowd-source maps and traffic info. Initial prodding suggests it’s not ready for prime-time — you’re better off waiting for protonerds to fill up their data banks — but it might be worth watching in the future.
OS X Safari users: Install this! Blocks Flash until you click on the object in Safari (and other WebKit-based applications). A way to mitigate the risk of the Flash exploit without completely nuking Flash Player from your machine.
/me steps on log cabin
Tweetie has been my iPhone Twitter app of choice for some time. The new OS X version seems equally lovely. Not going to tear away folks with seven-column Tweetdeck setups, but it seems to be a good step-up from Twitterrific.
Things has completely changed my life. My moleskine has laid dormant for months, no longer the recipient of a gajillion TODO lists. And, as Shaun Blanc points out, the interface is a near total delight. Dragging a TODO into the project section to split it up into subtasks is the kind of intuitive action that makes it ace. If only it had MobileMe syncing, instead of custom-over-wifi and Dropboxery.
One of my favourite music-geek-thrills is hearing a support act at a concert, being wicked impressed, and buying their CD from the merch table afterwards. Vermillion Lies supported Amanda Palmer last night, and were ace in a quirky discordant silly folkpop kind of way. You can download their latest album for free here. Give ‘em a listen, whydontcha?
Fantastic, highly-addictive and free tower-defense game for iPhone. After three (almost half-hour each) games, having trouble beating Level 30 on Easy.
Update your OS X Address Book with photos and birthdays from your friends’ Facebook pages (sadly, Facebook bars it from doing anything useful, like updating email addresses and phone numbers)
Stonking little indie game, finally officially released. Filled with bizarreness and imagination, I’ve been having a blast with it.
I will confess to having fallen somewhat head-over-heels in love with Things as a TODO list manager over the last couple of days. Requires some light symlinking-to-an-iDisk to “sync” across machines, but offers the right levels of “This is a task for today/soon/sometime” to help keep me organized. Next step: Play with the iPhone app.
Pretty damned nifty usability-testing app for OS X. With an *awesome* icon. Similar to (and considerably cheaper than) the Windows app Morae.
In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You’d unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would freeze up for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader started. But since PDF is baked so closely into the OS X system, this Firefox plugin is wicked fast, and thoroughly helpful.
Testing tool for iPhone development — Replace your mouse cursor with a lifesize finger. Needs a dirty-fingernail easter egg, if you ask me.
Command line tool for interrogating and diffing Time Machine backups.
Graphically lovely, and drop-dead simple, audio recording app.
Another NIN album released for free download under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It should be noted that Ghosts I-IV was the first NIN album I’ve ever bought, after enjoying its free release earlier this year.
Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-Surf ran OK for me, with some minor resolution-based oddness. Not sure it’s worth $40, though, when I can just reboot to Boot Camp.
Trent Reznor releases a new NIN album as online download with “premium” collectors offerings. Notable differences to the Radiohead “In Rainbows’ download include a) It’s CC BY-NC-SA licensed, so you can remix it however you like and b) The first part has been “officially” seeded to BitTorrent in a shareware stylee.
I bought a new laptop drive for my MacBookPro last week, and with SuperDuper, was able to copy my OS X partition and boot off it within hours. The Boot Camp Windows partition, however, stumped me. No amount of disk copying or dd’ing worked.
This tool did. It does all the magick required to successfully copy a Windows partition and tweak the partition table to make Windows boot again. Hurrah!
Got this as part of MacHeist recently, and dismissed it as “pointless eyecandy”. I couldn’t be more wrong — While it is graphically-lovely, it allows for keyboard control of iTunes (including tasks like rating tracks) and is a lower-memory last.fm client than the official last.fm client. Added to my Login Items!
An outstandingly fun Windows game: Drive a car over coloured blocks on a track generated by an MP3 of your choosing. Pick something mellow, and you get a relaxing low-scoring game. But if you want a challenge, throw some pumping techno its way. Works very well with Chemical Brothers and Pixies, I find. Best use of Digital Signal Processing ever!
Really rather sweet Mac screencasting software. The post-capture editing tools look handy.
The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.
Cool prototype application by Tom Insam which monitors your foreground application in OS X, and tries to provide you some context by matching it to someone in your Address Book. It’s early days yet, but decidedly cool (and written in Python)
Freeware CD burner app for Windows. If this means I can nuke bloody Nero off my work PC, I’ll be a happy, happy man.
Free development environment for Python code under .NET. Will definitely be having an in-depth play with this soon.
The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.
Cool looking little screencast app from TechSmith — An easy way to grab images or video from your desktop, and share them quickly. Works in OS X and Windows.
The excellent Mac remote control software adds an AJAX web-server designed for the iPhone. It works a treat for the old Mac Mini I keep under my TV.
Lovely little email floater for Apple Mail.
OS X screensaver which grabs your friends’ photos from Facebook. Playing with this, I was reminded that a) I have some incredibly hot friends and b) I have some incredibly strange friends.
“Versions is the first Mac OS X Subversion client that won’t make you long for the command line interface anymore.”
If you don’t already own Parallels Desktop, the new VMWare beta is great — I far prefer “Unity” to “Coherence” for mixing Windows apps on the OS X desktop. Only $40 if you buy before the official release at the end of August.
Dashboard widget for the JQuery docs.
Plugin for Apple Mail which allows you to quickly tag/file/act-on your emails with a couple of keystrokes. I’d been looking for something like this for a while.
Simple easy-to-get-started programming tutorial, based upon Ruby and Mozilla. Written by “Why the Lucky Stiff”. The “Hackety Manifesto” is worth reading.
Panic’s newest app is aimed squarely at web-devs, attempting to roll “all” the stuff you need to build a website into one app. Looks interesting — I’m definitely guilty of needing about 7 windows open to do web development (a couple of TextMates, Firefox, Safari, a terminal or two). It’ll be interesting to see if this can bring it all together for me.
From the “about bloody time” file, a plugin from Microsoft for Firefox which allows WMV files to stream in your browser. This has been broken (and required lots of DLL copying) for years.
Firebug-a-like for IE. If this works as advertised, it could be indispensable for cross-browser Javascriptery.
Up-to-date list of the software I use on my Mac.
Tool to enable use of the Apple Remote in more apps than just Front Row on OS X. I hooked my old PowerPC Mac Mini up to a USB IR receiver, and can now control VLC with the Apple Remote that came with my MacBookPro. Hoorah! Well worth €10.
Nicely-done OSX app to help you keep track of your hours and invoicing when doing freelance work.
Impressive looking network backup software. Straightforward to set-up, you can either pay CrashPlan to backup to their servers, or use local or friends’ hard drives for free. Lots of nice touches, like using Bonjour to discover local backup destinations automatically. Once the Linux client is ready, I’ll be in heaven.
Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.
GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.
MS’s anti-spyware app is out of beta. Go install it on your relatives’ PCs post-haste.
Really frickin’ good Photomosaic-making software. I’ve been having lots of fun with this, using around 15,000 album covers as the “tiles”, and it does an bang-up job, without “cheating” by tinting or repeating images (like some other software does).
Player for Pandora which supports the multimedia keys on keyboards, minimizes to your system tray, and uploads your track info to last.fm.
New version of WinAmp (Remember them? It’s like an iPod, except you can’t carry it around with you. Ask your parents) includes “remote listening” — Stream music from your home PC to wherevers. Since Apple kept disabling hacks that did this with iTunes, I’m curious how AOL think they’re going to be able to keep this “legit”
Shareware Windows multitrack audio editor from Justin Frankel and co.
” Writing songs about corporate malfeasance so you don’t have to!”. Free net-neutrality MP3 from Jill Sobule, Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis.
The Grauniad’s constantly-updated downloadable PDF, designed to be printed out before you leave the office in the evening to read on the train home. Nice way to attack the evening newspapers’ sales without having to distribute deadtree yourself.
Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.
Microsoft make good on their promise — This download allows users of Office 2003 to save and open the new zipped-XML file formats.
The first major public release of the next version of Office. Get your grubby hands on the shiny new UI for the first time, and try to imagine how you’re going to explain it to your parents over the phone.
Win32 remote controller for Slimserver. I now have toast popping up on track changes, which makes me happy.
Auntie releases a Radio 4 comedy show for MP3 download & podcast. Hurrah! If they do this with the next series of Just a Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, I’m going to be a happy camper indeed.
Simplified home-network manager for Windows. A common interface for all the things you want to manage — routers, software firewalls, file/printer sharing, etc.
jwz’s awesome screensaver collection is now available for OSX. Windows users are still SOL. “There is no Windows version of xscreensaver, and there never will be. Please stop asking. Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge.”
Distributed P2Pish secure backups. You give up 10Gb of your hard drive, for the rights to distribute 1Gb of your files across hundreds of peers. Sadly Windows-only, and there’s no way to tweak how much *bandwidth* you’re willing to give up, but could come in handy.
Bootdisk that fits on a 1.44Mb floppy which securely nukes every scrap of data off of hard drives. Handy to have if you’re about to sell an old computer.
Interesting attempt to add more social context (eg. trust, recommendations) to BitTorrent donwnloads.
The now-traditional “What’s new in the next version of Gnome” post. As per usual, nothing that makes you fall off your chair screaming OMFGAWESOME, but it’s all welcome tweakage (especially the speeding up, since my Pentium3 laptop is pretty clunky these days)
To be investigated… Intriguing source-control browser (and searcher). I’ll have to give this a go at work tomorrow.
Fantastic news: VMWare are making their server product free(beer). I’m almost certainly going to use this for a dev server at work — Backup the virtual machine image every night, and if hardware crashes, just startup your backed-up image on a new machine. Also gets around the “You can’t create an image” limitation of the free VMWare Player app.
Microsoft have released a public beta of IE7. The homepage is a staggeringly fucking awful flash animation, promising “Everything you need, nothing you don’t, and a few things you have yet to imagine”, before displaying a list of Firefox’s features.
Small Windows app that tells you what an installer is planning on doing after the seemingly-compulsory reboot.
App to apply ReplayGain volume normalization to MP3s by tweaking the audio data, so the normalized files can be played back on any player (such as yer iPod), not just those that understand the tagging format.
To be tried-out: Cross-platform app that creates VPNs between computers — even if they’re behind firewalls. Downside: Requires connecting to a centrally-run server to initiate connection, which will soon be charging $$$.
Open-source whole-disk encryption package for Windows. Perfect for keeping your USB keychain drive safe from prying eyes.
The Beeb’s made a commentary track for the new Doctor Who christmas episode available as an MP3 download. What a great idea!
Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!
Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.
Microsoft have release the various versions of Visual Studio Express for free. Very smart move on their part — It reduces the cost of Windows programming to essentially zero for those who aren’t willing to pay, and MS can make up the money with their “professional” Team solutions and MSDN subscriptions.
Flickr screensaver for Windows. Rather nicely, it displays different photos on each monitor if you’ve got multiple screens.
This has great potential. VMWare have a free “player” allowing anyone to run pre-built virtual machines.
My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.