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July 23rd, 2008
Yes, my son is now officially kicking his dad’s butt on the iPhone side of the business. Ben had NetSketch ready at the launch of the app store, and even as an impartial observer (as much as I can be, anyway), it’s an impressive piece of software.
NetSketch brings collaborative drawing to the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can draw on the iPhone’s screen in full color and share your work with others over WiFi – pretty cool! If you collaborate with your friends, everyone’s changes are shown in the drawing in real-time. And NetSketch is vector-based and offers infinite pan and zoom – so it’s easy to add detail to your work and you never run out of room.
Here are some drawings made with NetSketch:

I have to say it’s darn nice for $5.99, and the networking capabilities really set it apart. I can see this taking over in classrooms and meeting rooms this fall 🙂
Take a look at http://www.netsketchapp.com/
Posted in iPhone, Random Ramblings | No Comments »
July 22nd, 2008
Sorry for the silence – things have been very busy behind the scenes here and there’s a lot to catch up on!
Version 4.0.7 of Default Folder X was posted yesterday, cleaning up some problems that cropped up with Word 2008 after Microsoft’s 12.1.1 update earlier this month. There are also corrections for a few features that weren’t working as they should, and some re-engineering under the hood to allow for expansion in the future.
The update is free for everyone that’s got a valid license for Default Folder X version 4 (including those who received a free upgrade because they purchased version 3 on or after June 1, 2007). Just download the installer and run it – it’ll update your copy to the latest version.
You can read more about this release and download copies from:
http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/release.html
Posted in Default Folder X, Development | No Comments »
June 16th, 2008
Adam Aaron asked if I could make DFX pop up its menu under the mouse when he pressed a certain key combination. You can actually do this now with a simple AppleScript and one of the numerous macro utilities out there (Adam used QuickSilver to make it work on his machine).
First, write a little AppleScript like so:
tell application "Default Folder X"
ShowMenu
end tell
Then have your macro utility of choice (QuickSilver, iKey, QuicKeys, or whatever) run the script when you hit your favorite key combination, and there you go 🙂
(Note: If you’re running Default Folder X with its “Show icons and menus in the Dock” setting turned off, the application target in the AppleScript should be “Default Folder X Helper” instead).
Posted in Code, Default Folder X | No Comments »
June 7th, 2008
I’ve posted a pre-release version of HistoryHound. It now runs very smoothly and searches VERY quickly on Leopard. It’s also got options to constrain searches by date so I can, for instance, search for only the web pages I’ve visited in the last 4 days that included the words “iphone sdk”. It helps immensely in tracking down stuff you’re looking for in your browser history.
There’s also a new contextual menu that you can use to remove search results from the index or create a filter to prevent HistoryHound from indexing any further URLs that are similar to the one in your search results. And of course, there are some bug fixes and minor improvements in various places, but the big deal is just how fast it actually searches now.
And yes, I do know that Safari now has its own search field when you view your history, but it’s clunky to get to and doesn’t allow me to constrain my searches by date. Nor does it see any of the pages that I’ve visited in FireFox like HistoryHound does.
Anyway, I’m happy to have HistoryHound running about ten times faster now. Grab a copy and give it a try yourself!
Tags: bookmark, browser, firefox, history, hound, omniweb, safari, shiira Posted in Development, HistoryHound | No Comments »
June 5th, 2008
I had MacJury duty Tuesday on Chuck Joiner’s MacJury show, contributing to a discussion on stolen Macs and the hilarious Back to My Mac recovery of a stolen laptop. We also talked about Starbucks’ new WiFi rollout and speculated on their possible plans as a “media hub cafe”. Check out our random ramblings 🙂
Posted in Random Ramblings | No Comments »
June 5th, 2008
I occasionally get reports of problems between Default Folder X and Adobe InDesign. One user has done some digging and found that InDesign has some pretty major, known problems with Leopard’s Navigation Services (NavServices is the part of OS X that provides the Open and Save As dialogs). You may get crashes in InDesign when running Leopard, regardless of whether you’re using Default Folder X or not, and unfortunately, they’re not things that I can fix in DFX. For more details, see:
There are a couple of workarounds described in the blog comments. Tim Cole at Adobe has written up one in his recent blog post. A better one has been posted by Craig Swanson at CreativeTechs.
Thanks to James Wondrack for tracking down this info.
Posted in Default Folder X, Leopard | No Comments »
June 5th, 2008
A new version of DFX is now finished and up on the web site (the Japanese installer should be coming later today). Version 4.0.6 contains a bunch of compatibility fixes for various applications that do things in slightly nonstandard ways that would confuse Default Folder X.
I’ve also added a little code to try and make column view more tolerable in Open and Save dialogs. Default Folder X will now set the default size for columns based on the size of the rightmost column in the last Open or Save dialog you used (not the preview column, but the rightmost column containing a list of files and folders). I know this is still a little “clunky” – it’d be great if I could save and restore the various widths you’ve set for all the columns, or auto-size them to fit the actual contents of the column – but there are limitations in Leopard’s Open and Save dialogs that make those impossible or impractical. So, this change makes it better than it was, but still not as I want it.
Posted in Default Folder X | No Comments »
May 17th, 2008
David over at http://www.macbeginners.net/ has posted a screencast showing off some of Default Folder X’s features. You can view the HD version directly at vimeo if you like, too, but give David’s site a look, especially if you’re new to the Mac.
Posted in Default Folder X | No Comments »
May 13th, 2008
If you want to include one of Default Folder X’s menus (Favorites, Recent Folders, etc) in a Finder contextual menu, it’s easy to do with Abracode’s free OnMyCommand contextual menu plugin.
To add a DFX Favorite menu, follow these steps:
- Download OnMyCommand.
- You’ll get a disk image that looks like this. Run the “Install OnMyCommandCM” script and let it relaunch the Finder after it installs the CM plugin.

- Open the “OMCEdit” folder and launch OMCEdit. You’ll get a message that it needs to create a new preference file. Tell it to do so.
- From the “Command” menu, choose “New”.
- Fill in the command fields like this:

- Once you save the command, it should appear in your contextual menus like so. Clicking on it will bring up the full Default Folder X hierarchical Favorites menu.

You can do this same thing for other DFX menus by substituting a different name for “Favorite” in the AppleScript command you use in OMCEdit. Valid options are “Disk”, “Favorite”, “Recent”, and “Finder”. Leaving off the ‘named “Favorite”‘ entirely will pop up the entire DFX menu hierarchy as it appears in the menubar.
Posted in Code, Default Folder X | No Comments »
May 5th, 2008

Congrats to Michael Mistretta, who’s going to be getting a brand new iPod Touch for his winning entry in the iPhone Application Idea contest! I apologize for taking so long to judge the entries – as I said in an earlier comment, I got sidetracked a lot as I explored the feasibility of some of the entries and discovered details about the workings of the iPhone OS.
While I’m not going to talk up Michael’s idea until its development is a bit further along, I’ll share some of the other entries we liked:
- Location logging that can be used to tag photos after you upload them to iPhoto
- Consultant’s client billing / project timer / mileage / expense tracker
- Podcast downloader that updates over WiFi so you don’t need iTunes
- Enable the iPhone as a touch sensitive input device to replace or augment the mouse
- A visual bookmark viewer that uses CoverFlow
- A diet / health blogging app to feed something like Body Lapse
There were a ton of other great entries, many of which I’d love to implement if it weren’t for technical or distribution issues. There are a couple in particular that deserve special mention:
- A Mojo client
- A “spaces” capability where apps are activated by turning the iPhone to particular orientations (how sweet would that be?)
- Download song lyrics for the currently playing song (obvious, but still not there)
Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas! Oh, and if you submitted one that didn’t win but we end up using it later on to build a successful product, you’ll definitely get a “thank you” iPod or some other present 🙂
Posted in Development, iPhone | 2 Comments »
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