ThinkMac SoftwareInstantGallery on macZOT
I’m excited to announce InstantGallery will be featured on macZOT tomorrow. If you’ve not heard of macZOT before, it’s a site that offers great shareware apps at low, low prices, but in a limited quantity and for a short period of time. The old ‘grab ’em while they’re hot’ adage applies π
I won’t tell you just how much you can save on InstantGallery’s regular price of $15, only that it’s substantial and if you want a slice of action keep an eye on macZOT tomorrow.
Now for a quick update on NewsLife – my timetable was thrown off a bit because I had to move apartments last month. But I’m on course to deliver a beta towards the end of September. I’m also going to reveal for the first time that once NewsLife is out the door I’m going to begin work on a new app that could be described as a big brother for InstantGallery. Watch this space ^_^
WWDC predictions
It seems everyone is doing WWDC prediction posts at the moment so I might as well take a shot at it.
Obvious stuff…
- OS X 10.5 Leopard previewed and Select and Premier ADC members get given a preview copy.
- Mac Pro announced.
- iPod update of some kind because it’s overdue, sales are slowing and Apple wants to one up Microsoft’s Zune.
- DashCode will be released. (IDE for creating Dashboard widgets, already leaked but never released.
Pure speculation, developer fantasy stuff
- Leopard will sport a refined Aqua UI, which will see the unified look spread to everything – well almost, there will be some niggling inconsistencies to piss off GUI freaks like me, just because they’re becoming something of an OS X tradition at this point. (Which means someone important at Apple doesn’t care about this issue and isn’t willing to commit the man hours to rectify it).
- Brushed metal will die and be replaced by something that looks similar to the darker unified look used by iTunes and iLife ’06, but it won’t be quite the same (see above point about consistency), the difference may be purely to prevent existing brushed metal apps from breaking too horribly. Also note that Apple likes to differentiate its products by using custom UI styles (e.g. Aperture).
- The black transparent info panel will become a standard AppKit widget.
- The Finder will only receive cosmetic tweaks and superficial new features and will continue to suck. However Spotlight will be revamped to the point where it makes the Finder almost obsolete. Again my justification for this is fixing the Finder at this point probably requires a ground up rewrite and I don’t think they’ve got the resources to do that, it’s more likely a small team has been charged with creating a killer Spotlight UI that will suitably distract from the Finder.
- More lovely Bindings and CoreData goodness will be squeezed into Xcode and InterfaceBuilder.
- Leopard will feature a version of Mail which doesn’t make your eyes bleed.
- Steve will announce a new version of iTunes with eBook support (yay) and downloadable crappy quality DRMed to hell and back movies (meh).
The it will never happen but I can dream bit:
- Widescreen, wireless iPod with mobile version of Safari and eBook reader.
- Apple opens the iPod so it can run 3rd party code – specifically specially tailored dashboard widgets. Think justification for developing an IDE purely to build something as pointless as news tickers and clocks.
- Apple stops using graphics for the buttons in all their apps and actually standardises a set of buttons to use across all its applications which are part of the standard AppKit set.
- The Finder is rewritten from scratch in Cocoa, has sane icon spacing and generally doesn’t suck.
- Apple stops gouging for QuickTime Pro and makes the standard player capable of doing those special features only pros use like full screen video π
- All Macs ship with 1GB standard from now on.
IG 1.5 is here!
Took a little while to get this one out the door – but here it is, InstantGallery 1.5. The big features are previously noted are gallery loading and saving and image rotation.
What’s next? Well I’ve already got one really cool new feature lined up for 1.6 and that’s live searching. That is Spotlight style live searching for your web gallery without you needing any kind of server-side scripting support. I also want to add some kind of HaloScan [obsolete link removed] integration for those wishing to use IG for photo blogging.
But before the next IG release expect to see a new lil app I’ve mentioned a few times in the past – NewsLife. RSS for the rest of us.
Updates are in order
Goodness it’s been a little while since I last updated the blog – my apologies! I’m working hard on the next release of InstantGallery, version 1.5, which will be out this week if all goes to plan. The big feature in 1.5 is the ability to save galleries so you can come back to them later. Everything about a gallery is saved, so watermarks, extra links, headers and so on are preserved. I’m hoping to have time to add an image rotation feature also, although no promises on that last one as I’m up against a deadline here.
In other news I’ve finally gotten my hands on an Intel Mac so I can make doubly sure those universal binaries work as they should. It’s a black MacBook and I’m absolutely loving it so far, I’ve had no problems with the glossiness of the screen (it makes it much more usable outdoors in bright sunlight) and the speed increase over my old 1GHz PowerBook is phenomenal. It does run a bit warm, but then so did my old PowerBook – the solution is to use a laptop cooler. I’ve got one of these – in black of course so it matches π
As for NewsLife, and indeed NewsMac Pro, there will be more news about these apps soon, once I’ve got InstantGallery 1.5 out I plan to re-devote some attention to them. Most of my time recently has been consumed doing web and icon projects for other people.
NewsLife Philosophy
Posted on May 10, 2006 by Rory Prior
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Another part of being unintrusive is not interrupting you when it’s not really necessary. For example when you add a new feed to NewsMac by clicking a feed link it throws up a dialog asking you to confirm the action, NewsLife will just do this transparently and only prompt you if it can’t read the feed.
As already mentioned the UI is going to be radically simplified, which is made possible by cutting things down to the core features an RSS reader needs. The aim is to come up with something so intuitive your grandmother could use it.
When can you get your hands on this thing then? Well the development timetable is slipping a bit, I’m still hopeful I’ll have something ready by the end of the month, but no promises there. In the mean time check out InstantGallery if you haven’t already – this app seems to be striking all the right notes with people at the moment.