QuickPost and Tr.im update

Recently Tr.im, the URL shortener service built into QuickPost, announced that they will be not continuing operation. This is an incredible shame as it's a premiere service so it's exciting to see that this morning they announced that the tr.im will become open source in the public domain. 

The last few bugs submitted for QuickPost were in relation to what service we will choose to support, the answer to this will evolve over time but we have decided to go with continued use of Tr.Im. We are looking into the cost and effectiveness of using the source code to derive our own shortener service for QuickPost.

A little update for QuickPost: Its been a fair while since Beta 2 came out and I apologize. Work and intense education commitments take a majority of my time, as well as a new hardware project that I will announce later. Beta 3 is nearly finished and will be released within the next few weeks, good things come to those who wait. 

QuickPost Beta 3 Sneak

It's been a substantial amount of time since the release of beta 2 but unfortunately education commitments have taken the important center stage. Beta 3 was meant to be released today but this is not the case and to further annoy the anxious users, the next 3 to 4 weeks will be spent mainly on work and school. It will be a while before Beta 3 will be released, but it will be worth it, as you will see in the demo below it has a whole bunch of slick refinements and exciting new features. 

The demo is what we have built so far, introducing support for Wordpress and further refining the current services as well as making the app simpler and easier to use. Something which I'm proud about with this demo is that every submitted bug from Beta 2 has been fixed and refined. Each request and tester report has been taken very seriously, as you will see there are some massive changes to how the app looks and behaves. Please enjoy the demo and remember that an enormous amount of time has been spent on this project, so I ask for your patience during this busy time of the year. Thankyou!. 

QuickPost Beta 3 Preview from Alex Mills on Vimeo.

WWDC 09 Predictions

It's now time for my regular pre-event predictions and this time it's the much awaited Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2009, held at the Moscone center in San Francisco. I'm extremely excited as previously the only real announcements from this event were mac hardware and software, while this year we have Mac OS X iPhone (What Apple officially calls it), and Mac OS X Snow Leopard plus a whole bunch of other hardware to go with them. Let's get into it.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

From a consumers point of view this release doesn't appear to be too much but if you are a business person or developer, it's time to get excited. Previous releases, Leopard in particular, were a whole bunch of new features whereas Snow Leopard will be a bunch of new features for developers. New technology to handle multiple core intel processors called Grand Central, the ability to tap into the vast amounts of wasted power in graphics cards and a complete cleanup and streamline of the operating system. This gives developers like myself new tools, technologies and visual features in our own applications, and in true Apple fashion, with little effort.

A couple things I would like to see in particular from an interface designers point of view is the actual tool that was patented to create resolution independent buttons and elements. At the moment to do this in leopard involves subclassing components of buttons etc which is pretty messy. Plus improved toolbars, token fields and easier Core Data migration. It will be interesting to see though if Apple does come through with the new marble interface or something similar, personally if it's going to look anything like the glass in iTunes and iPhoto it will be horrible. They finally got consistent interfaces with Leopard, lets not do a Tiger have 4 please. It would be really sweet if Snow Leopard goes on sale right away.

iPhone V3/Video/Video 3G or whatever it's going to be called

Unfortunately with all the amazing work that's gone into Snow Leopard, any sort of announcement about the iPhone will take center stage. We have already seen the new spotlight and cut/copy/paste in Mac OS iPhone 3.0 so I would believe that it will be mainly about new hardware if the recent rumors have anything to do with it. My requests for a new iPhone would be:

• Better camera... please a better camera
• Improved scratch resistance
• Better bluetooth (Demoed in iPhone 3.0)
• Improved battery life
• Better screen!!!!!!
• More screen colours
• Cheaper
• Optus allowing to upgrade at no cost :)

Best of luck to everyone at WWDC this year, my best wishes to Steve Jobs and I hope to see you all next year when QuickPost will make it's conference debut!

Introducing QuickPost Beta 2

Exactly 5 months in the making, I'd like to introduce the second beta of QuickPost for Mac. Beta 2 is one incredible update due to the fact that almost none of the code from the first beta is present in this one, thats right it was built from the ground up. Finished 2 days ago, it's been in private testing while I finish the new website which I'm extremely proud about so go check it out to get the full details on this new release.

New Stuff

• Offline Post Storage
• Multiple Blog and User accounts
• More powerful and stable visual editor
• Source code editing
• URL Shortening
• Tweeting new posts
• Search and add maps and videos to entries

Improved

• Higher control of web images
• Powerful hyperlink creator for websites and mail-to links
• Smoother posting
• Text formatting
• Interface

These are just to name a few, head to the website to check out the release notes and download the latest beta. It works with Mac OS X 10.5+ and Google Blogger. Support for wordpress and more coming soon, here's proof.

Please download, if you like, love or hate something about the app, use the built in feedback (In the QuickPost menu) to let me know :). Or just post a comment here. Just remember that this is a beta app so the features, interface, icons and finish are not final and will change over time.

Latest Chromium Screenshots

Chromium is the open source project behind the Google Chrome project. For a couple months now you have been able to download nightly builds of the native mac version which is awesome for fans of the windows app. While these are early builds of the browser they show great maturity and stability, even though most of the preference options don't actually work. Many of the main features work including tab dragging (including to new windows) and incognito mode. It's far from complete and suitable for real world use but it's definitely on the way so we should be seeing a Google Chrome beta for Mac soon. 

I love this browser, the fact that the dock icon doesn't even bounce is great indication of the performance during startup and that address bar, just brilliant! When using my current browser Camino, 90% of the time I open a new tab to search so with Chromium I don't have to tab to the search field, I just begin typing. The interface is just stunning, which is not easy on a mac. It's very hard for designers to create interfaces that use different kinds of controls and make it look like it belongs in leopard but  reckon they have succeeded with this one. This is something the ugliest browser on the planet could really spend time doing. Check out the screen shot of how the leopard chrome works with the browser interface. 

Something that could be interesting? Maybe the feature by the same name in Safari 4 is actually a webkit project?

So go check out the latest nightly builds and test, if you find an issue or the browser crashes, make sure you can repeat the steps and submit a bug report. Check out the screenshot of the full app below.

iTunes could be smarter.. even a little

Check out the screenshot above. Now let me explain. To save space on my MacBook Pro hard drive I keep all my movies (I own the DVD versions, don't stress) on an external drive that iTunes links to. What annoys me is that this dialog suits a situation where the user has changed the location of a file, but not one when an external device is missing. iTunes should detect that the file is located on a external device and then prompt the user to connect it if it isn't already. No one wants to see this dialog when they haven't touched their library for months, and while the new dialog works the same as the old, it tells them why the file cannot be played and how to fix it. I have made a mockup below of an example dialog that I believe would be more suited. It does look the same but the user knows how to fix it and that something hasn't gone wrong with their library.

End of an era

I'd like to take this time to talk about a period of my life that has now come to an end, Digilife. In early 2006 I walked into Perth's best Apple store ready for my first day of work experience as a year 10 student. Starting out in the admin, it quickly became clear to my supervisor that the workshop gained most of my attention and on the third day I became their first and only student to work on an Apple product. That Apple product was a 17 inch Powerbook G4, at the time it was their flagship notebook so you will understand that I was more than nervous. 

All through year 11 and 12 I worked as an Apple technician for Digilife through workplace learning and as a part time job, it was amazing. I can proudly say I have worked on every non-vintage mac produced, and my favourite being the 17 inch MacBook Pro due to ease of access with the case. Though the new unibody macbook's are beautiful inside and out, they are a little fiddly and the connectors are a nightmare. 

All through my time at Digilife I worked with another Alex, Jason and Christolph. Unfortunately both Jason and Christolph moved onto different things and I give my best wishes to them. 2009 was the first year of my teenage life where I didn't have to turn up for school, though Tafe is pretty close, and working at Digilife was now my part-time job. That was until a couple of weeks ago. Tough economic times had forced us to close our retail store in the Perth mall, leaving just the flagship store and service centre in osbourne park. Unfortunately the sales team was not able to sell enough products so on the 9th of April, Digilife closed it's doors for good. 

After spending over three years working with the same team that we call a family, it was incredibly difficult to face the fact that we would never return to work together again. Sure some of us may end up working in the same company but not as a team and thats a real shame. Some of the team were angry with the owners Chris and Anne for loosing heir jobs but I'm the complete opposite. Yeah it sucks that I lost my job but if it wasn't for Anne and Chris giving me a chance as a young boy to prove myself to becoming part of the technical team, I would not be the kind of person I am today. I'm so so very proud of what I built in the past four years, relationships, memories and skills. So while I miss everything we have done, I raise my glass to this family and wish them all the very best. Thankyou guys, for accepting me into your lives and hearts, it's been an absolute pleasure to work with you all. I hope the future is fruitful for you and that you make your dreams happen. Peace.