The Kids
The Kids, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.
The day after my son arrived from the states we got ourselves set up to take some Christmas pictures. With my trusty black backdrop, tripod, lights and timer, we spent the better part of the morning trying to capture everyone just right.
Pile on Mom!
Pile on Mom!, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.
In case it’s not immediately apparent, the girls get their red hair from mom.
A little cherub
A little cherub, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.
The sister of a college friend of mine recently had this precious little bundle of joy. I was fortunate enough to get to take some pictures of the little treasure. What a sweetheart!
The Secret Revealed
For the last few years my wife and I have searched in vain for a TV show I watched as a child. I only had the vaguest of memories about; a boy, a train, a black cat, an old man… We googled with all out mite and never got the answer we were looking for. Perhaps it was our lack of Google prowess on such matters. But every six months, without fail, some cartoon the kids would watch or some piece of music or random sound effect would trigger some distant memory of this old show and off I would go again, in search of the faintest glimmer of an answer to what had become my greatest mystery.
Tonight was just such a night where a certain phrase in a show the kids were watching set my mind adrift, back to the days of that boy, the old man, the cat, the train… So I went to search once again, hoping that this time I would have some luck. And wouldn’t you know it, within minutes I was presented with another blogger who was on a similar mission who had found his answer just a few months ago; The Secret Railroad!!!
Now that I have a name I stand a chance of getting my hands on some archive copies to that I can show my kids what I watched when I was their age. Wish me luck!
Realmac Software release LittleSnapper/QuickSnapper one-two punch!
Realmac Software has just made LittleSnapper official, bringing this very powerful screen and web snapping app out of beta and into the general public. I’ve been fortunate to be playing with this app for a week or so, putting it and it’s integrated web service, QuickSnapper through their paces. This isn’t just you normal screen snapping app. It’s a lot more than Skitch (which has never left it’s apparent state of perpetual beta) and has many advantages over it (with one or two slight disadvantages). And the web service, not unlike ScrnShots is a robust and attractive place to be and get inspiration.
LittleSnapper allows you to treat a collection of screen and web snaps more like a library, and iPhoto Library if you will, allowing you to tag them, rate them, make notes and annotations, view the source code for web snaps. This gives you not just a library of images, but a tool box of thumbnails complete with source code for studying, origins, ways to note what you liked about it, etc… There really isn’t many things to compare it to. It is one of those trend setting apps that has more or less made it’s own niche. Certainly a web designers must-have app.
And then there is QuickSnapper… While at first glance, it’s not all together different from what other similar scree/web shot sites are doing and on it’s own it wouldn’t be particularly exciting (except that it looks damn sexy). What set’s it apart though is that it was built to support the LittleSnapper app, and not built the other way around. That’s where these other screen/web snap sharing site have gone wrong in my books. They’ve built the site and now in order for you to get your stuff up there, they’ve made a half baked “utility” that will, if you are lucky, let you upload something… sometimes.
QuickSnapper, on the other hand was built with LittleSnapper integration in mind… exclusively. With the click of a button, LittleSnapper loads up a snap to your account. In turn, with the click of a button on QuickSnapper, you can pull down a shared snap into your own LittleSnapper library… click… that’s it! A complete, happy snapping, bio circle of screen and web snapping goodness. Does it get any better than this? Me thinks not!
Oh, and BTW, the screen grab of LittleSnapper? Yeah that was taken with LittleSnapper and is hosted on QuickSnapper…
SaaS… Free… Cloud computing… Dead
It probably sounds a bit funny to lament the death of web apps on a Mac productivity blog when web apps neither scream Mac or productive. The truth of the matter is though, I was am a heavy user of many web apps, more so than most of the native apps on my machine.
Let’s see, I use a remote time tracker, Google mail/calendar/reader, todo, flickr, Twitter… See where I am going with this? Most of these apps replaced local versions of the same service, and somewhat poorly, I might add. But the all have one really big advantage in that they can be accessed from anywhere and shared with anyone so easily that a monkey could do it.
But their biggest drawback to date is causing me to rethink the value of mobile access… since they only exist in the etherweb, if a developer decides to pull the plug on a service, you’re screwed! This already happened in a pretty big way this week with the loss of iWantSandy, Stickit, and pownce.
While I was only really effected by the loss of Stickit, I was still left scrambling for a desktop alternative that could do everyhing that I required of Stickit, and it such a way that felt familar. That’s how I came to use TaskPaper from HogBay Software. Now that working remotely is not as critical to me it was in my commuting and contracting days, this desktop solution seems to be the way I ought to move with all my other cloud solutions.
To be honest, Mail.app has come a long way since I dropped in the OS X 10.2 days, I already have BusySync syncing my Google calendar to iCal.app, rss feeds are a dime a dozen and would take me long to move back to NewsFire, and there are time tracking apps that actually keep acutate record of what a am really doing and not what a SAY I am doing.
Is your computing in the cloud? Do you feel secure with your choices in software as a service providers? Do you have a backup plan if/when they pull the plug? What do you think is the perfect balance?