slimApps

Hi All! I wanted to take a post and let you know that development on Heatmap Studio .5 has is in process! Three main features are in the works:

1. Enabling large scale decay and dot sizes for large drawn heatmaps (although it will take a ton of time to do these maps, but I’ve gotten some feedback for this so it’s going in! )

2. Option to draw a legend on the map with the range

3. And finally Thanks for doner and feedback giver Amanda for this great idea! An option to export Google Maps heatmaps as KML files for Google earth These files will be used overlayed on the globe in Google Earth, looks like this could work REALLY well! THanks again Amanda!

-o2Slim

o2 Slim Projects, heatmap studio

You can visit it here:

http://www.slimapps.com/forums/

This forum can be used for general discussions and feedback/help with all SlipApps!

Enjoy!

o2 Slim Bead Helper, Projects, Site, heatmap studio

Wow, can’t believe it’s been 6 days since a post. Time goes by quite quickly esspecially when you’re freaking super busy!

Some updates:

- I’m still working on the new version of bead helper
- Not really working on heatmap studio all that much right now as it really hasn’t been used that much
- THings are still going okay with the new mac but I gotta tell ya, I still find myself using windows a lot more often, but I’ll bitch about that in another post!

o2 Slim Site, activities, random

Boy have I been busy! I’ve been up and down the east coast and busy busy busy with work. Sorry for the lack of updates (for anyone actually reading my time wasting ramblings! ).  I’ll get back into the swing of writing about myt mac experience, which by the way I’m starting to realize is beginning to fall right in line with standard windows annoyances (lock ups, slow downs, crashes ,etc).

o2 Slim Site, random

It was mid-evening, the wind was gently blowing a soft tune again the trees outside the living room window. The glow of a television cast an warm illumination to the rooms otherwise darkened state. Reclined on the couch I peered up every now and then to check the flashing screens of gibberish. Looking down I realize….I’m on my Dell laptop again?!

Yeah, turns out I was plugging away on my dell last night instead of my new mac. I told myself it was only to purge it and clean it up before I sold it off but I found myself doing my normal routine well past the cleanup process. Surfing the web, checking my eve training, checking the wow world, etc. I was actually questioning why I was sitting here doing this when the brand new $1600 piece of mac equipment was sitting in my lap bag next to me.

I wasn’t sure why, but one thing I was getting more sure of was the dependency on a multi-touch trackpad with gesture capability . As I used what now feels like an archaic form of trackpad interface I found myself struggiling. At risk of rambiling on about this I’ll just stop here and say I really enjoy multi-touch!

Either way, I was still on my pc and not my mac, so what gives? Yesterday as I sat at worked I began to realize I don’t have the slightest bit of knowledge of cool mac utilities or gadets etc. It seemded the only place I had searched for them was at apple.com’s osx software page. It became aparent it was one of those situations like at a fast food drivethru window. THe question why do people prefer going to places like burgar kind and mcdonalds over other places like Arbys? Well my thought is because I don’t know what the hell to order when I get up to the window, so I’ll stick with what I know. Same applies here. I find myself knowing where to look for pc software, gadgets, etc and not where to look for the mac equivelents. I suppose that will just take some time

On a brighter not, iMovie has proved to be an amazing little product for something that’s included with the purchase of the notebook. For $3.50 I was able to run to RiteAid and pick up a few project style poster boards, tape them together, and in 5 minutes has a amatuer greenscreen setup. It turned out that it’s not too shabby either! I was actually creating greenscreen effects with my iSight camera and 3 dolars worth of drugstore cardboard! Nice.

o2 Slim osx, reviews, tech

Well I released HEatmap studio about a month ago now, and I still haven’t heard much from it out in the wild. I’m curious to know if people are actually getting good use out of it and if its even worth my time to put out the next version

o2 Slim heatmap studio

I’ve been very busy with work and life things, etc, so I haven’t had a ton of time to drop by and post. Of course I’m unfortunately still very busy so this post will be short and to the point as well (sorta)

So one of the things I’m noticing about using Macs is the metric ass ton of documentation, which is good….and bad. My problem is that although detailed and thorough the documentation is also lacking in an executive summary / quick ref sections. What I mean is that it seems everytime I go looking for an answer to a quick question, for what seems like a small problem, I’m faced with a 300 page help doc. Usually I can pinpoint a quick paragraph and find the answer but it turns out with a lot of the mac stuff I’m finding the answer spread out across 3-5 paragraphs and pages, etc. That can make me a bit sad.

Another problem I ran into with the documentation (and a bit of a setup problem) was with the iPhone SDK. I have a 1st gen iPod touch that I needed to get up and running with the SDK.  I figured this wouldn’t be a problem but 45 minutes into it I realized I was quite wrong. After nuking the ipod 3-4 times and having it once in what I thought was an unrecoverable state I finally got it working with the new OS version. THe next step was to get it working with the security certificates that are required when developing with the SDK. All in all this was a long drawn out process which I can tell Apple has tried to make simple and painless but in the end it turned out to be a HUGE time sink to do something that dare I say… would have been much easier in a windows dev enviornement.

o2 Slim osx, tech

I’m kind of busy (lazy) this weekend so I rolled both days into one, and it turns out there’s not much to write about! I haven’t had the chance to have further interaction with OSX specific applications. Ive been working on some other things here and there. 

One of the things I’m continuously longing for is more in-depth detail and configurations options.  Although I know about the terminal and console I need to dig deeper into figuring out the commands etc as I’m sure there’s equivalents for most of the things I want to do. 

One of the things I note about some of the OSX apps is the startup time. I’m not sure why but it seems that sometimes they don’t start up so quick at all. THey run smooth but start slow, not sure what that’s all bout but whatever it’s not too horrible. 

o2 Slim osx, reviews, tech

A little late but better late then never I suppose for the day 2 thoughts. 

I’m still really enjoying the OSX experience. But of course being the tech nerd and programmer that I am I’m finding some drawbacks here and there. Lets start with the good though. Installs and DMG files. 

I’m loving the install process for most of the packages that I’m finding for the operating system. I installed some games, some apps, and some SDKs. It seems everything is quite automatic and painless. However, that  does leave a bad feeling sometimes as I don’t have much control over options outside of which location to install in. But in the end when I look at windows apps I guess you don’t get much more than that, it just feels that way. 

DMG files are turning out to be an outstanding file type. These files are disc images that seems to be able to be created out of anything including folders, cds, entire drives, etc. Whats especially nice about them is that they can be mounted and resemble another drive on the machine allowing for quick no losing your place access. 

Bootcamp is also up ad running. THis is the Mac standard for dual booting the mac directly into a Windows operating system. The setup and process of “bootcamping” the mac is quite seemless and impressive s its built into the operating system and fully supported! Once I installed the RC1 of Windows 7 I was able to pop in my Leopard cd and install the windows drivers for the mac! One problem I do have with this though is that apple does NOT (or that I’ve found) provide a download location for these drivers, not sure why, but if you don’t have your leopard cd handy you won’t be running with all the hardware features you could be.  

Of course being the tinkerer I am one of the problems I’m really having a hard time getting used to is the inability to tweak certain settings. For example, I installed World of Warcraft to give it a run. Once playing I really wasn’t enjoying have no anti-aliasing so I retreated to the OSX prefs menu in search for an nVidia control panel…… damn no luck. Turns out there isn’t one!! So that leaves me with a sadness feeling, I can’t even control my 3d settings (easily that is, maybe theres a way to do it via command line). This seems to actually be a common theme across the OS, if you really want to edit in-depth details forget about it. It seems the way the OS is setup is to specifically protect you from yourself. Windows is incorporating some of this but you’re still given the opportunity to change what you want easily.

o2 Slim osx, reviews, tech

It was a rough first day for my introduction to Macs, but I made it through. What’s the story behind this? Well…my brand new Macbook had a hardware failure , specifically the control board for power and batter management. In simple terms the system didn’t recognize the battery. 

Beginning the first day at work with the mac was quite smooth sailing, I setup the system and registered it normally which is a smooth and painless process from what it seemed. I’ll get more into how cool this process can actually be in a bit. Once setup the the machine was off and running smoothly. THe first point of interest for me was the Spaces system, which divides your desktop into multiple virtual desktops. These virtual desktops allow you to move your running programs or windows seamlessly through each desktop and quickly switch between them. I started with 2, but quickly moved to a quad setup. THinking it was more of a novelty at first I was quite happy to find myself actively using the desktops and surprisingly increasing my productivity slightly.

The next major feature that I noticed right off the bat is the multitouch trackpad. This trackpad allows for various “gestures” including switching between applications, and “fanning” out running applications to get a quick view of what’s going on where. You’ll be sure to get use out of this trust me!

The Time Machine! AN excellent, and I bet underused feature of OSX. This application allows you to hook up and USB harddrive and use it as an automatic backup device. To my amazement running the incremental backups did not seriously takeaway from performance.   This system keeps your system and all settings fully backed up at all times (when the drive is connected). I did this for more of a testing / novelty sake, but as I found out it turned out to be outstanding. 

This leads me back to the hardware problem I mentioned earlier. So after contacting Apple support I was instructed I would have to take the machine to an apple store and have the run diagnostics. One of the odd things was that I had to actually schedule and appointment with the support desk at the store, not exactly awesome but whatever. Once in the store I find out they’re “running behind”. After waiting around 15 minutes after my “appointment” time I was called up. THe tech actually stumbled a good bit around trying to determine what he would do next. This didn’t instill a ton of confidence but whatever. After 35 minutes (no kidding) he finally got somewhere with one of his diagnostics apps and determined the board was bad on the laptop and not the battery. He put the macbok back together and told me he’d be right back to “discuss the options”. Heh, options? No see this is where a piece of hardware less than 24hours old isn’t undergoing “options” but being replaced. THank god he returned to let me know they would replace it with a brand new one on the spot. 

When I got home the coolness factor of time machine really shined through. I turned the new macbook on and began the registration process all over selecting English as the language and then … wait what ohh “Restore settings from a time machine disk” No way it couldn’t be that easy? Well it turned out it was! I plugged in the drive selected it and bam! It began restoring my macbook from the morning settings. Once complete everything was there and setup just as it was before my trip to the apple store, AWESOME!

o2 Slim osx, reviews, tech