{"id":1464,"date":"2007-08-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/?e=1464"},"modified":"2007-08-26T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","slug":"mac-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/mac-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday I was at the Apple Store Glasgow<\/a> opening. Fun was had by a lot of smiling people. As I mentioned I was interviewed by Mark<\/a>‘s ex -piecast team The MacCast<\/a>. I would guess I’ll end up on the cutting-room floor as I mumbled and probably blushed, but the questions made me think a bit. They asked about my favourite apple applications, this got me started, my favourite applications are not apple ones. Of course I use the iLife tools and would not be without them, I’ve just started using pages and keynote and like them. But some of the ones I like most come from elsewhere. Here is a wee bit about 3 of them, why I like them and what they do. A sort of 3 favourite applications after I’ve skipped past iLife, iWork, email, browsing and Web 2.0 etc.<\/p>\n

\"SC<\/p>\n

SuperCard<\/a> is cousin of the old mac essential HyperCard<\/a> a simple but powerful tool for building applications and scripting on a mac. SuperCard has a simple english type scripting language and can tap into the power of appleScript and unix shell calls. I use it everyday. In the past I have created fairly useful teacher and teaching tools but now I mostly use if for avoiding repetitious task. Eg. most of the gallerys on Sandaig Classes<\/a> such as this one<\/a> are run up with a SC project. I blog about Supercard at Bad Poet<\/a> and have some resources for teachers and others on the site.<\/p>\n

\"\" Comic Life<\/a> is not an application that I use everyday, but it is a great tool for children and epitomises a type of good mac application. The way it fits in with the iLife suite, making creating comics a simple task, drag and drop. By tapping into core mac ‘stuff’ the graphics, gradients and shadows are beautiful. I believe there is a windows version in the works, I’ll be interested to see if it is as slick as the mac one.
 <\/p>\n

\"\" TextMate<\/a> is an amazing text editor for macs. I probably only use a tiny fraction of textmate’s facilities. Aimed mostly at programmers TextMate is still useful to folk like me who write a bit of html, css and occasional snippet of php, it has a ton of keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of thing. for example if you are writing on a html document and select a bit of text and hit command-control-shift-L textmate looks up the selection on google and creates a link in your document. textMate is extensible via bundles, there are bundles for all sorts of things, different programming languages etc. I am blogging this with the blogging bundle, I can preview and post this to the blog without leaving textmate. I drag an image onto the Textmate document and it is uploaded to my blog and the html snippet inserted. you can define your own snippets, I type seb<\/strong> and hit tab and a link to ScotEduBlogs<\/a> is created (like that). Drag a swf onto the document and the code for inserting the flash file is created. It would take months to explain everything textMate can do.<\/p>\n

I’ve just realised there is another wee application that I am beginning to depend on almost everyday ImageWell<\/a> which is wonderful for quickly doing what you want with images, annotating, dropping a shadow, resizing and uploading. I just used it to create and upload all of the images in this post, in no time: command-shift-4 in the finder to get a screenshot (hold the) <\/p>\n

So those are my 3-4 left field must have applications I would be interested in yours?<\/p>\n

blogging<\/a> mac<\/a> supercard<\/a> textmate<\/a> comiclife<\/a> imagewell<\/a>

\"Blogged<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was at the Apple Store Glasgow opening. Fun was had by a lot of smiling people. As I mentioned I was interviewed by Mark‘s ex -piecast team The MacCast. I would guess I’ll end up on the cutting-room floor as I mumbled and probably blushed, but the questions made me think a bit. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,169,375,236,349,218],"post_format":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-wwwd","7":"tag-blogging","8":"tag-comiclife","9":"tag-imagewell","10":"tag-mac","11":"tag-supercard","12":"tag-textmate","13":"kind-","14":"h-entry","15":"hentry"},"better_featured_image":null,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p57zFQ-nC","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1464"},{"taxonomy":"post_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_format?post=1464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}