Leopard Geekgasm

So Apple’s scheduled to release its highly anticipated OS X update tomorrow right? Well guess what–I’ve been straddling the hype and reading pre-release reviews and previews so much over the last couple of weeks that I have splotches of semen all over my work station thanks to intense, multiple geekgasms.

Apparently the new OS X Leopard doesn’t scrimp on new features and its impressive feature set stretches farther than its semi-transparent menu bar and reflective dock as it boasts of over 300 new features(And seriously, is anyone even surprised? I mean if they released Leopard as a mere cosmetic update then they should’ve called it “Vista.” See what I did there?).

Because it’s all over the Internet and A-list bloggers can’t shut up about it, I’m pretty sure that you have an idea of what Leopard’s marquee features are; I mean I’m sure, vague as it may be, that you have an idea of what Time Machine, Stacks and Leopard’s integrated Bootcamp features can do.

But what do all these bells and whistles translate to for the normal, only-slightly-geek people like us? I mean sure the new Applescript, Dashcode and XCode 3 features may prove useful for those programmer types but for average macheads like myself, what is there to be excited about?

For me, there are three reasons.

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Uninstalling Adobe AIR-based Applications from Mac OSX

I’ve been playing around with Adobe AIR based apps onOSX for almost 3 months now and I must say that I see nothing but tons of potential for the new runtime environment.

The cross-OS platform uses HTML, Flash and AJAX among others to make highly-functional Rich Internet Applications and deploy them as desktop clients.

Currently, my favorite AIR apps include  Snitter, an AIR-based Twitter client for Mac OSX; Airpress, a Wordpress compatible blogging client; and of course, Pownce’s desktop client.

However, AIR being a relatively new runtime environment, applications tend to be buggy and I find myself installing and trying to uninstall apps a lot.

Usually, to make sure that I delete all files associated with the app I am trying to uninstall, I use either App Zapper or App Delete.

The process is pretty straightforward. I go to my applications folder and drag the program I wish to uninstall to App Delete or App Zapper and that’s that.

I’ve been trying out a lot of Adobe AIR-based apps in the last couple of months and until lately, I haven’t found a way to uninstall them as they do not appear in the applications folder.

What I found out was the AIR installer and apps are, by default, installed in your Home/Applications folder rather than your root Applications folder. So for a user named TedGrubb, AIR-based apps are installed in /TedGrubb/Applications rather than in /Applications.

Hat tip to Satisfaction’s Ted Grubb for the info.

Update: Looks like you can embed video recorded using Jing Afterall

Dave McCollom from TechSmith emailed me regarding yesterday’s post about Jing. According to Dave, you can embed screen shots and videos recorded via Jing on your website after all. All you need to do is login to ScreenCast, another TechSmith service Jing automatically signs you up for to store your captures:

Hi Mike - I work for TechSmith (makers of Jing) and would like to thank you for
your nice post about Jing. I also wanted to let you know that you can embed
video. Check out the following screencast to see how and let me know if you
have any other questions or feedback.

As a proof of concept, I recorded a video you could watch that should show you how to go about doing exactly that.

Thanks for the info Dave.

Capture and share everything that goes on in your desktop with Jing

If you spend enough time on the internet, chances are you are no stranger to the sometimes elaborately complex task of taking screen captures, cropping/enhancing them using your photo editing software, and uploading them to a photo hosting service before you can finally share them.

Now, I know a lot of you have your own ways to shorten this process. Personally, I use a combination of OSX’s grab, Adobe Photoshop and this handy ImageShack Image Upload Dashboard widget for the Mac.

I’ve been pretty much happy with the aforementioned combination until I found something that does the job in a more convenient, more streamlined fashion. Techsmith, a company specializing in screen capture and recording software has a service that does exactly that. And more.

The concept behind The Jing project is an always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere. Aside from providing a simple yet functional desktop interface which allows you to take screen shots, Jing also also allows users to make simple annotations to screen captures before storing and allowing users to share them using Techsmith’s ScreenCast service.

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A little something for everyone who got a new iPhone this iDay!

With every other A-lister raving about the iPhone, I can’t help but feel happy for everyone who got themselves a unit. I mean come on, these people deserve some credit as they went through hell, with some even camping out Apple stores days before launch, just to be one of the first to own Apple’s newest, much anticipated product.

So here’s a little something for all of you lucky, proud new owners of an iPhone:

Seriously.

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