bioneural.net » software

Air Sharing between iPhone and Mac

Bruce — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:14:38 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Air Sharing is a fab app for iPhone that lets you mount a file store on the device to the desktop as a wireless share. You can browse your files using any decent web browser, and even upload files to the phone—albeit one file at a time. This limitation can be overcome by mounting the iPhone as a network drive (on Mac from the Finder Go > Connect to Server... and enter the server address). Rather than have to visit this menu each time, wouldn't it be nice if there were a one-click way to mount iPhone? There's a app for that. Yep, there's an app for that if you're willing to make one. Fear not, this is very simple using Automator which brings AppleScripting to the Rest of Us. The iPhone supports Apple's Bonjour networking protocol, and can be recognised by either the assigned device name or IP address. If like me you use your iPhone on more than one WiFi network, it might be assigned a different IP address via DHCP. Because of this it makes sense to use the iPhone's Bonjour name rather than IP address, which you can identify from within Air Sharing by taping on the WiFi icon: My Air Sharing app is built with three Automator actions: Get Specified Servers, Connect to Servers, and Show Growl Notification (Growl is an essential OS X add-on). In Automator drag these actions to the right side of the window in the order shown: In the Get Specified Servers action click Add ...

PhotoLinker evolves geotagging on Mac

Bruce — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:32:35 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

PhotoLinker 2.0 ($US50, 30 day trial) is described by its developer as a 'pro geotagging and annotation tool'. Geotaggers who were familiar with GPSPhotoLinker will recognize the family resemblance, but will also appreciate the magnitude of changes this new app brings. It's no longer dependent upon use of a GPS track logger for a start, as integrated mapping now supports a manual geotagging mode (hence the dropping of 'GPS' from the name). There are improvements to workflow, a map viewer, a facility for track and waypoint management, and the pièce de résistance—EXIF metadata annotation. And yet it retains the incredible flexibility and the same precise control over automatic geotagging parameters that I appreciated in my review of GPSPhotoLonker. This post takes you on a visual walkthrough of the many new and refined features. Disclosure: A single user license for PhotoLinker was provided by Early Innovations for the purposes of this evaluation (v2.0.1). I have a personal interest in the success of the Geotag Icon. Offset When you first click on the Geotagging Console button a HUD prompts you for the time zone your camera was using when the photographs to be geotagged were taken. As a general rule this is easier if your camera is always set to UTC (GMT) which is what your track logger will also be recording. The HUD helpfully prompts you to use a date and time-shifting tool if the images and tracks you load don't appear to match. Adding tracks and photos You can add GPX tracks, single or multiple, ...

Swine flu apps pervert free informatics

Bruce — Sun, 24 May 2009 07:17:42 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Information wants to be exploited—and that's generally a good thing. Exploitation has downsides too and these seem to be manifest when you look at the growing epidemic of iPhone apps pertaining to swine (novel, Mexican, or H1N1) influenza that you can pay to download from Apple's iTunes for use on your iPhone. As of today I count nineteen paid apps (in the UK store) and thirteen provided free-of-charge (although these may include paid advertisements). Do we need so much choice? Do we need flu updates on mobile devices at all? What are the risks associated with this expeditious development? 'Greedy pigs' priced from 0.59p to £2.99. Some of the apps, such as Swine Flu Tracker Map (free), appear to be fairly well implemented, often merely aggregating content from online information sources but sometimes paraphrasing static material such as FAQs: Other apps are very clearly rush-jobs, some even turning what is a serious global threat into a game. None of these applications are produced by authoritative official information sources such as WHO or the CDC, and most have the audacity to charge for information they had no hand in producing but have extracted verbatim from freely available sources. Information that is constantly changing. Can these authors maintain the motivation to constantly update the static advice within their applications? Can Apple's App Store approval process, with it's virtually non-existant quality assurance standards, possibly keep up? Some apps—specifically those incorporating Google Maps—are in violation of the data provider's terms of use (others are using OpenStreetMap, presumably ...

An OS X player for More FM Wellington

Bruce — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:29:13 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Good radio stations can be hard to come by. My personal preference is for a mix of older and contemporary tracks, with a healthy dose of variety but nothing too far outside mainstream. One such radio station is Wellington's More FM, to which you can listen live using your web browser. I'm not keen on Internet radio delivered via a browser window because I usually end up closing the tab/ window by mistake! This Saturday morning project produced an OS X app to keep in the Dock for when the urge to listen to More FM strikes; it opens a network stream and commences automatic playback, using either of the VLC or QuickTime players. Tested under Mac OS X 10.5.6 using VLC 0.9.9 (Intel) and QT 7.6. A browser-based player Windows Media Player 10 content as streamed by More FM won't playback via your Mac within Safari unless you have downloaded and installed both Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X and Windows Media® Components for QuickTime from Microsoft: A VLC-based player This Automator application for OS X uses the Play Movie from URL automator action by Jason Prell, available from Apple here. You'll need to have installed this action and of course the veritable VLC to use it: If Play Movie from URL is not pre-installed you'll see an error: A QuickTime-based player QuickTime is installed with Mac OS X by default. This app uses the default Run AppleScript action included with Automator, but QuickTime needs the help of Flip4Mac WMV to handle the WMA2 audio ...

Desktop refits with GeekTool and friends

Bruce — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:53:12 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Further to my previous post on how to get BBC weather feeds on your desktop, this article collects together other scripts for GeekTool I've come across and customized (hat tip to the original sources, which I neglected to record). Who says the command line doesn't have equal status alongside the Mac OS X eye candy? Suggestions for optimization/ improvement or additional useful scripts most welcome. Creating headings Create headings using an echo shell command, just as when using PHP. For example: echo " //UPTIME:" Within GeekTool you can specify a custom font face, colour and opacity, text alignment, accompanying icon, refresh time, and whether the output should be "on top" of other windows—as for any of the following shell commands: Reporting system uptime The following shell command will report system uptime: uptime | awk '{sub(":", "h ", $3); sub(",", "min", $3); print "Time since last system boot: " $3}' Monitoring memory usage Does you Photoshop work or toying in Parallels merit investment in additional RAM? The following shell command will allow you to monitor memory usage, showing the total RAM in use and top running processes (the window is sized so that the top 10 are visible): uptime | top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "RAM in use: " $8 " \n"}'; top -ocpu -FR -l2 -n20 | grep '^....[1234567890] ' | grep -v ' 0.0% ..:' | cut -c 1-24,33-42,64-77 Identifying CPU hogs Why is that non-essential utility app you just installed consuming 97% of your CPU cycles? The following shell command will allow you to monitor how much of ...

Live BBC weather using GeekTool

Bruce — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:33:00 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

GeekTool is great fun and seems an ideal means of occupying the mind while avoiding something else you should be doing. This Preference Pane for OS X basically lets you create a "live" desktop, auto-updating with data extracted using shell scripts (which can themselves call AppleScripts), image overlays, or log and other text files. I found many inspiring examples around the web to appropriate for my own desktop (see here; apologies for failing to note sources)—but one thing I had to work out by trial-and-error was bringing BBC Weather into the mix. Assuming you already have GeekTool installed (free), go download and install Lynx, a command-line web browser available for OS X here (free). Now enter your town, city, country or UK post code on the BBC Weather website. Look for the "latest observations feed" link. For example, for Chesterfield the feed link is: http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/obs/id/3282.xml In GeekTool create a new shell script with the following command: lynx -dump http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/obs/id/3282.xml This will show you the text file that we will be working with, created from the RSS feed. Alternatively you might open the same URL in Lynx itself from the Terminal: In a TextEdit window (for editing convenience) we now write AWK commands to search for and pull out the bits we want. I found these articles served as a useful AWK primer. You can also search-and-replace text as in the following code to remove redundant commas: {gsub(/,/,"")}; Find a unique word on each line from which you want to extract text. For example, to refer to the line containing ...

HoudahGeo take two best for geotaggers

Bruce — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:28:13 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

HoudahGeo was at version 1.4.2 when I last looked at it in a Mac geotagging software showdown. A license costs $US30 (50% less for students; also TrailPay option) although this is a free upgrade for those with a 1.x license. The following is a largely visual tour of HoudahGeo 2.1, illustrating its ability to perform both automatic and manual geotagging via an outstanding 3-step interface, and to share geotagged images with users of Google Earth, Flickr, and Locr—or any service/ software than can read EXIF metadata or CSV/ GPX files. Disclosure: A single user license for HoudahGeo was provided by Houdah Software for the purposes of this evaluation. You should be geotagging Geotagging—surely you've heard the term? The geotagging 'ABC' post here on bioneural.net is rather popular, and since the software showdown post was published geotagging in general, and on the Mac in particular, has seen a number of exciting developments. CDFinder has been updated with significant geotagging functionality (e.g. export of variable-size images to KMZ). GraphicConverter can edit geotags and create them using Google Earth. Geotag is a cross-platform tool seeing active development. An update to Nikon ViewNX brings free manual geotagging functionality. Even Apple have got in on the act with the release of iPhoto '09, which supports manual geotagging and sharing of geotagged images to Flickr Map (there are options for older iPhoto versions too). Of course the iPhone can geotag images taken with that device's camera, and track logging apps are available via the App Store. The range of Mac-compatible data ...

Dropbox and iPhone sitting in a tree

Bruce — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:40 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

It's amazing how easy it is to fill an 8GB iPhone. While apps like FileMagnet (using a proprietary protocol & desktop companion app) and Air Sharing (WebDAV via your desktop or web browser) provide "documents to go" functionality, this only works if your phone is on the same WiFi network as your desktop—and providing you've enough space left after syncing that episode of Battlestar Galactica! Since the iPhone does not offer expandable storage there are two alternatives. The first is to stream media content to the device (e.g. via BBC iPlayer, Internet radio, or DRM-free iTunes tracks). Alternatively, you could temporarily cache and view a limited range of file types via mobile Safari, or download and store various documents retrieved from your FTP server (e.g. via FTP On The Go, MobileStudio)—or make use of the cloud (e.g. via Dropbox or Box). Getting your files into the cloud Dropbox software is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. When installed it creates a local folder on your desktop machine that is automatically synced to an online filestore. You can connect multiple computers to your Dropbox account so that any edits made on one machine are automatically reflected in the local folder on all linked computers: In addition to using the client software, you can access the contents of your Dropbox from any computer or mobile device with a decent web browser. The web interface is very clean and supports uploading of any file type from your desktop: The web interface for uploaded files in a ...

Geotagging comes to Nikon ViewNX

Bruce — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:19:13 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Nikon ViewNX 1.2.0 is a free download (56.6MB .dmg) and doesn't require a Nikon (e.g. works with iPhone images). Manual geotagging is limited to placing a pin on a Google Map (you can't search the map). ViewNX recognizes automatically geotagged images (embedded at capture, added via a track logger, etc.) and handles geotagging of Nikon's raw (NEF) format as well as JPEG. To view location metadata (indicated by a globe icon), select an image and click it's pin to reveal an info window. Reverse geocoding is not performed and any existing IPTC headers are ignored.

Apple Mail To Do folder killed at last

Bruce — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:20:42 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Apple Mail in OS X 10.5 insists on adding 'Apple Mail To Do' folders to your IMAP accounts such as Gmail; delete them and they're back on the next sync. Finally someone has figured out a solution that works. Quit Mail and open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist in BBEdit or similar and search for LocalAccount (as AccountType). Copy the string under the uniqueId key. Now search for the NewNoteToDoAccount key and paste over the LocalAccountId string. You can now delete those pesky folders on the server so they won't show up again in Gmail (as Labels) or in Mail on your iPhone when you relaunch desktop Mail.