Category: software

Buy Mac Software, Support Child’s Play

ironcoder » Child’s Play Day:

Child’s Play is a Seattle-based charity started in 2003 by the guys at Penny Arcade that helps make the holidays a little nicer for sick kids staying in children’s hospitals by providing toys and games for them to enjoy. Since its inception over a million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash have been collected.

This year a group of independent Mac Developers are teaming up and donating all of the proceeds from sales of their various software titles on Thursday, December 7th to the Child’s Play charity. To participate simply purchase the products as you normally would through the various online stores. Your money will be collected and sent to the charity and you’ll get some great Mac software to enjoy.

Includes some of mph’s favorite software, WebNoteHappy and VoodooPad. (I own the latter and while I don’t do much with it these days it is good software from a great developer.) (Oh, funny — they’ve got the app mph blogged cryptically about just today…)

Looks like a lot of neat stuff. (Guitar Shed especially, not that I’m a guitarist… Oh, and I could pay for Billable if it helped me get around to actually invoicing somebody that I keep forgetting to…)

Aquamacs emacsedit

HollenbackNet – MuttOnMacOs provides a good solution (via this mailing list post) for anyone who wants to use Aquamacs as an editor for a command-line-based application. To wit: don’t use emacsclient directly; create a little script like this:

#!/bin/sh

# script to force Aquamacs to open in front of terminal
open -a Aquamacs\ Emacs
/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient "$@"
# Now make sure the focus goes back to the terminal when we are done
open -a Terminal

in a file called, say, emacsclienthack.sh, and reference that shell script instead of emacsclient itself. Makes things quite pleasant.

LMMS Review

So I’ve been checking out LMMS, and it pretty much delivers as promised: “easy music production for everyone.”

Imagine something with capabilities somewhere between a classic “soundtracker” application and something like GarageBand, but super easy to use, and preinstalled with a big pile of useful samples.

It’s quite awesome.

It took me a bit to figure out how to use it because there’s basically zero documentation, but the complexity is miles less than that of comparable programs designed for high end/professional type users.

I threw together a silly little beat demo song in no time. (Warning: it’s a tuneless little electrobeat thingy.)

It can’t do everything in the world but what it can do is easy and fun and accessible.

Kudos!

I would like to insert here an “I hate linux sound” rant — I wanted to use a LMMS beat and record a ukulele tune with it, with Audacity, say — but I couldn’t figure out how to record anything in Audacity on Linux without adding an ugly, nasty burbling effect, presumably because Audacity on Linux isn’t yet hip to ALSA, the advanced linux sound architecture, “advanced” in this context meaning “not horribly sucky and broken.”

Guess I’ll be doing all my recording on OS X.

LookLater

LookLater A commenter on my and Joe’s gaming blog pointed me at a neat service he created, “Looklater,” intended for quickly oookmarking things you want to go back and read later. Kind of a private del.icio.us but without tags and with some other spiffy features. Very interesting little ajax bookmarklet interface! Not Safari compatible though.

But then these days I’m even using Firefox on the mac.