Beckism.com

Veerle recently ran a “What is Graphic Design” contest, and got some beautiful entries. She just announced the winners, and they’re a lot of fun. #15 is my favorite, I think. I love the way the message isn’t complete without the words and images both; I’m not sure why it ranked the lowest of the winners.

Makes me wish I was a graphic designer or had any sort of talent in that area.

I’ve shared my exploration into the world of tablet-friendly software, and there I recommended Sapiens, an application launcher that uses a mouse gesture to pop up a circular menu that provides you with quick-click access to the programs that you most often need in that context (Sapiens watches your habits and learns what programs you need/want the most over time). It’s a clever piece of software that’s beautifully designed.

But I’ve got a little secret for you: Sapiens actually totally sucks when you use it with a tablet. I don’t know about you, but when I’m drawing I tend to use a lot of circular motions. Sometimes I use motions that aren’t actually circles, but that are close enough for Sapiens. After about the third time I see Sapiens’ expanding dotted lines, I’m usually swearing like a sailor.

Sapiens does provide a list of excluded applications, so I could, for instance, disable it in my various drawing apps where I use circles the most. However, this totally defeats the point of using it for me since I’m mostly needed it when I’m using my tablet, and I’m mostly using my tablet when engaged in an artistic endeavor.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: xGestures. xGestures has the happy benefit of requiring you to hold down a button while you make the gesture (right mouse button by default, which translates into the bottom button on a Wacom pen), so unlike Sapiens it rarely activates accidentally unless you make a habit of holding down the right mouse button while you move your mouse around.

To rid Sapiens of its annoying mouse gesture, circle your mouse for the last time, click the preferences icon and set things up in the “Activation” tab as shown (just follow the orange arrows):

You can set the hotkey to anything you like (just make is obscure so that it won’t be likely to conflict with another application). Then in xGestures, set up the gesture. I used a circle (after all, why not?). If you do use a circle and are using a tablet, I recommend drawing circles with xGestures a few times before you actually define the gesture. I found that my typical circle can register in a number of different ways, but by drawing it a few times I found the one that I use the most often, and then stuck with that.

And now that Sapiens is actually on-demand instead of constantly interfering, life is much, much better.

I’ve been having a hankering to write some short fiction and throw it up here on Beckism.com, but for some reason every time I start a story its pacing and plot jump into a novel-length plot.

That damn senior thesis ruined me for short fiction. I never really appreciated before how difficult it can be to write something cohesive in a thousand words or so. Guess I’ll just have to finally finish Season 1 of Dirt Man. (It’s only been what, three years in the making?)

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a great game for the Nintendo DS that’s appropriate for any age. The art is engaging, the puzzles range from laughably easy to head scratchers, and the music and occasional voice acting are both extremely classy. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys logic puzzles.

I’d forgotten how many hours of my childhood were poured into puzzling out logic problems until I picked up Professor Layton and the Curious Village and had nostalgia slap me in the face. It was a very pleasant surprise.

Recently my boss started asking for more graphics editing and it was the perfect excuse to buy a Wacom graphics tablet, which is something I’ve wanted since college but haven’t thought I’d have a use for. I’m not really the artistic type. The drawing below (which I drew yesterday after work and probably speaks loads about the state of my unconscious) pretty much epitomizes my abilities:

I opted for the 6×11 Wacom special edition, which is a sleek black color instead of their standard gun-metal gray and is huge (and a widescreen ratio!) without completely depriving me of desk space. The actual tablet is gorgeous, and over the past week and a half I’ve fallen completely in love with it. I had thought that tablets were only useful for drawing (hence my years-long hesitance over buying one; see above), but it also stands in as a great alternative to mousing (or, in my case, trackballing — which, incidentally, sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is). And, to be honest, although I’m no da Vinci, I find drawing the occasional diabolic clown a lot of fun.

But the real reason my introduction to tablets has been so great is because it’s opened up a whole new realm of software that I never before had a reason to explore.

Scribbles was the first thing I downloaded, of course. The program has some issues (no eyedropper, inability to move single layers around, etc.) but it’s still one of the most brilliant interface designs I’ve ever seen, and it makes drawing a quick after-work diabolic clown far easier than it should be.

ArtRage, on the other hand, was a program that I’d never heard of until I went looking for cheap, easy-to-use drawing programs, but it’s fantastically cool. I haven’t really found a use for it yet, but who doesn’t want to be able to use paints and canvas on their computer? Just swooping the paint brush around makes me feel so classy.

Then there’s Sapiens. I took a look at Sapiens when it was originally released and had absolutely no use for it. While I love the concept of circular contextual menus, I’m a hardcore LaunchBar fan who likes to keep his hands on the keyboard. When I’m using the tablet, though, LaunchBar becomes pointless because it’s a long trip back to the keyboard (and I have to put the pen down). When I realized that, Sapiens was the obvious choice for a mouse launcher.

And of course xGestures, which I’ve used for years, functions great with the tablet. (The key: large, steady strokes.)

The last thing that I’ve been finding myself using the tablet for has been taking notes (primarily useful during phone calls when I only have one hand available). Unfortunately, I have not yet found my perfect solution for this. SketchBox is a cool piece of software, but the stuff you sketch isn’t searchable. inkBook promises searching, but is less than stellar in actual use (just try using the erase tool and watch it casually destroy stuff you never touched; not fun). Circus Ponies Notebook 3 looks promising (and, considering past Notebook versions, will certainly be far more polished and feature-rich than inkBook), but it isn’t even available in beta yet.

I’ve tried using Apple’s Ink technology for note-taking, and while it’s mind-blowingly amazing that it can recognize my handwriting (which is legible to a select few people in this world), the technology’s implementation is a little too clumsy for quick text entry.

So the hunt continues, which, to be honest, is how I like it. I am admittedly a bit addicted to software demos. And I am, at least for the moment, hard-core addicted to tablets.

Changes, a beautiful application that allows you to easily compare directories and files, was released today. I got into the Changes beta late in the game, and I don’t know how I got anything done without it. It makes comparing text files ridiculously easy and, dare I say it, fun. The developer is extremely responsive, too, and has a great first name to boot.

Changes has a 15-day free trial, and is available for $39.95. Additionally, you can get $10 off the asking price if you act soon by using TUAW’s coupon. I strongly recommend that anyone who works with plain text files download Changes and give it a try. It’s a must-have utility.

I’ll make this short and sweet:

Although MarsEdit 2.1 added tagging, it didn’t include an easy way to migrate in your old tags (it only remembers tags that you’ve added to a post using MarsEdit). There are two workarounds for this:

1) Edit a MarsEdit plist (not too painful, but still not fun)
2) Open up your old posts and select the tags

Seriously, all you have to do to get MarsEdit to remember a tag is to select it. If you have a fairly short list of posts (or quick fingers), this is simple. Make sure that the tag field is turned on for your blog and that it’s the last field before the content in the post window. Then:

• Hit Enter (to open the selected post)
• Shift-Tab (to select the tag field, which incidentally selects all of the tags, adding them to MarsEdit’s memory)
• Command-W (to close the window)
• Arrow down, Enter (to open the next post)

Rinse and repeat. Repetitive, but if you don’t want to touch a plist it’s probably an acceptable substitute, and once you get the pattern down you can very quickly drill down through a number of posts (one hand for arrows/enter, one hand for shift-tab and command-W). If you’re not impatient, it looks like Daniel Jalkut will be implementing some sort of friendly tag management interface down the road.

Because I’m a drummer and possibly crazy, I put on some music and did it in rhythm. This is more fun than it sounds; kind of like a poor man’s Guitar Hero. Without a guitar. Or any heroics.

The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick is possibly the best adult fantasy that I’ve read in the recent past. I highly recommend it. The setting is an intriguing mixture of technology and fantasy, and although the book has some minor failings it is still well worth buying. Literary fantasy done right.

MarsEdit is a brilliant product, and one that I’ve been trying to use for my blogging ever since version 2.0 was released by Red Sweater Software (aka Daniel Jalkut). Initially, though, I didn’t have much luck and kept finding myself returning to the WordPress web interface. However, version 2.1 finally added decent tagging, which provided the impetus to at last move all of my blogging activities into MarsEdit.

For Beckism.com this was easy, but for Tagamac I had a big problem: MarsEdit didn’t give me access to the many images that I’ve uploaded using the WordPress web interface. This is a major issue for Tagamac, because I reuse images a lot (when writing about software updates).

Although Daniel Jalkut has stated that he’s going to implement some form of image migration, I got impatient this weekend and hacked my way through the MarsEdit uploaded files plist. It took me about an hour and a half to get the 40 images I wanted in, but after I hammered out a few details the process was pretty straight-forward. For anyone else who is frustrated by the lack of their old images in MarsEdit, read on for some tips and advice on how to hack your own plist and lead a happier, more fulfilling life.

Before you get started, a few disclaimers: this process is completely unsupported by the developer, and if you don’t know what a “plist” is, you should probably stop right now or else proceed very slowly and cautiously. Mucking around in preference files is an excellent way to screw up your app.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.

First off, go invest in PlistEdit Pro (or at least download the demo). You’re going to be doing a lot of copying and pasting, and trust me: you don’t want to edit plists in plain text form. PlistEdit Pro also lets you duplicate and drag and drop XML nodes, which makes it about a trillion times more useful than the default Property List Editor included with Mac OS X.

Assuming you’ve got PlistEdit Pro, open MarsEdit, make sure that you’ve uploaded at least one image using its Media Manager to the target blog, and then quit the program. It’s possible to do everything from scratch, but this will make your life a lot easier.

Navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/ (if you’re not familiar with that notation, “~” means your user account folder, which is the folder that contains the folders Documents, Desktop, Music, Pictures, etc.). Duplicate the file UploadedFiles.plist so that if you totally screw up you can get MarsEdit working again. Open UploadedFiles.plist in PlistEdit Pro.

Next, open the ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/UploadedFiles/ folder and go through its sub-folders until you find the image you uploaded using MarsEdit to the target blog. This is where you’ll be copying all your old images into.

The UploadedFiles.plist file is organized into a root level which contains a bunch of numbered entries (starting at 0). If the image you uploaded to your blog was the most recent image you uploaded, it should be the highest numbered row. Find it and toggle the row open using the little arrow. You should see something like this:

This is where you realize just how much work you’re in for and give up. If you’re lucky (like me) and all of the images you need to migrate into MarsEdit are the same size and type of image, you’ll be editing four of those entries for each image, copying the image into the folder you found above, and creating a thumbnail version of it for MarsEdit to display. If your images differ in size or type, then you’ll be editing all but three of the fields for each image.

You have to want this.

If you’ve decided that yes, you do want it that bad and absolutely can’t wait for Daniel Jalkut to implement some sort of migration assistant, here’s the process:

Select the row you toggled open (”3″ in the example above) and click the “Duplicate” button in the PlistEdit Pro toolbar. The duplicate will be inserted immediately below and everything will be automatically renumbered (so your duplicate entry would be “4″ in the example above). To make your life easier, drag the duplicate to the very bottom of the list. This will reduce confusion when you begin duplicating over and over.

The general workflow that I followed and recommend:

• Duplicate the last row (which I just described) so that you get all the weblogName, weblogUUID, and so forth for free.
• Used your blog’s admin interface to get the URL of the image (I had an empty post open so I could insert the images as I went).
• Because the image name and month were about all that ever changed in this path, I’d just switch back to PlistEdit Pro and change those in the url entry by hand. If yours differ a lot, you may want to use copy and paste.
• Edit the copyFilepath, imageThumbnailPath, and originalFilepath fields with the image’s name and appropriate path. For the first one I used PathFinder’s Copy Path→Unix command (available in the right-click contextual menu). All of my images were in the same directory, so after that I just edited the filename at the end. If yours are located in different places, you’ll need to edit the entire path for each image.
• If your image is a different width/height from what’s shown in the imageHeight and imageWidth fields, then you’ll need to edit these. Mine were all the same, making the whole process that much easier.
• Set originalFilename to the text that you wanted to be used as the image’s alt text (MarsEdit by default uses the actual image name, e.g. “example.jpg”, but as long as you have the chance to set some intelligent alt text, I say why not? As far as I know, this field isn’t used for anything else).
• If your image is a different type than the image you duplicated this row from, you’ll need to change the mimeType entry accordingly (some common mime types: “image/png” for PNGs, “image/jpeg” for JPEGs, “image/gif” for GIFs). Odds are, the world will not end if a few mimeType entries are incorrect; I don’t know if it’s actually used by MarsEdit after the image has been uploaded.
• In the Finder, copy your image into the appropriate folder (you located it inside the ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/UploadedFiles/ folder already). If you don’t have the image backed up on your local machine, download it from your server.
• Duplicate the image for the thumbnail. If either height or width of the image exceed 128 pixels, you need to resize the thumbnail (in whatever editor you prefer; I recommend Acorn) so that both dimensions are 128 or less.
• Edit the name of the thumbnail version so that it’s the same as the image with “.com.red-sweater.thumbnail” appended to the end (e.g. “example.jpg.com.red-sweater.thumbnail”).

And that’s it! The image should be added to MarsEdit now, and accessible from the Media Manager catalog tab. After you add the first one, you should probably save the plist and open MarsEdit to make sure that it shows up the way you expect. If it does, then feel free to add as many other images as you need using the same basic process. As long as you take it slow and make sure that you get all the names right, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Some notes:

The type of image of the thumbnail doesn’t appear to matter. Theoretically, the name of it shouldn’t matter, either, as long as you have the correct name in the plist file. The naming convention described above is the way MarsEdit does it automatically, though, so it’s probably a good idea to stick with it.

The copyFilepath and originalFilepath entries may well be optional. In fact, you might well be able to get away with only copying a thumbnail version of the image into MarsEdit’s Application Support area since when it comes to viewing the image in the Media Manager and adding it to your blog posts, the only things that matter are the thumbnail and the URL. I didn’t experiment with this, but if you do let me know in the comments if it works or not!

Overall, this is a major pain (it took me a good hour and a half to two hours to migrate the 40 images that I need into MarsEdit), but if you use your images a lot like I do, it can really help you move into MarsEdit and out of the web interface once and for all. Particularly compared to WordPress’s terrible image manager, MarsEdit’s Media Manager is a breath of fresh air for me. Good luck!

Looks like there might be a new definitive answer to screencasts:

ScreenFlow, from Vara Software

A bit expensive compared to iShowU or even Snapz Pro X, but given that it’s an all-in-one package that has some majorly cool features like after-the-fact mouse and keystroke highlighting (!!!), it could well be worth the investment for anyone making screencasts much. I’m definitely going to download and try it out, that’s for sure. Leopard only, unfortunately for those running 10.4.