Putting aside the question about whether Apple purchased Placebase, it’s more interesting and worthwhile to consider why Apple is interested in pulling in and working with technologists like Jaron that obviously demonstrate the ability to pull together components and build a compelling, unique mapping stack.

Apple technology has increasingly added location capabilities. Address Book, Mail, and iCal all detect addresses and provide links to maps. iPhoto and Aperture understand coordinate tags and can provide maps as well. CoreLocation on the iPhone, and now in Snow Leopard, allow any developer to get the location of the device via a cascading order of geolocation: GPS, Wifi, IP, etc. Apple themselves developed the “Google Maps” iPhone application – just utilizing the Google API for tiles, location and routing.

More recently, Apple has provided for “lost iPhone” tracking via MobileMe. Enterprising uses and developers have used this for friend and family tracking services.

Looking forward, it’s clear that Apple sees the important potential of location to support and augment almost all of their applications and platforms. Like any good business, the less dependent a company can be on third-party’s for core functionality, the better. Therefore, it makes sense that Apple would investigate ways to own and control this key component.

And beyond pure business and strategy, there is a lot to gain by Apple controlling it’s own location and mapping stack. Apple obviously focuses on providing exquisitely crafted experiences. This should permeate through their maps as well. Look at the maps to your local Apple store for an example of how the cartography can fit into the look and feel of the Apple.com store interface. This same customization can exist throughout their product line. Maps applications and API can provide customized interfaces and styling.

And consider that Apple can also build out a MobileMe friend finding and family tracking service. There is now an inherent trust in Apple tools: easy to use, virus free, great for kids. These translate over to trust in sharing my location through my phone to my private family sharing portal.

So in the end, what this signals is a major shift to provide broad, consumer facing compelling geospatial technologies in a well executed interface. Apple is already responsible for enabling location-based services to cross the chasm, and is inducing the broad emergence of augmented reality. It makes perfect sense for them to ensure they control and can craft the entire experience. I’m personally glad they have someone as expert as Jaron on the team.

I’ve been playing around with the very complete examples over the last couple of days and am really impressed with how easy it is to build Cocoa apps in just a few lines of Ruby code and using the new InterfaceBuilder. You get full-fledged support of all OS X’s goodness without having to worry about Objective-C.

However, I hadn’t fully considered some of the implications of this until I was stumbled across the open-source OmniFocus-UI. It is a Rails app written as an iPhone interface to the Productivity application (GTD) OmniFocus. It essentially provides a very lightweight web interface to the application by way of the AppleScript interface. rb-appscript and RubyOSA are two Ruby AppleScript bridges that make AppleScript actually really nice to work with.

The fact that it’s a Rails app is almost silly. There is no database connection to speak of. All storage and primary functionality is handled by the app itself. OmniFocus-UI could probably be rewritten as a Camping or Merb application very easily with a much smaller footprint.

The way the Rails app works is that the controllers just route commands via rb-appscript. So when you want a list of contexts (organization of todos), the Rails app just needs to do the following in Ruby:

require 'appscript'
doc = Appscript.app("OmniFocus").default_document
doc.contexts.get.length

Or to see how many Inbox items you have:

doc.inbox_tasks.count

If instead you want to use RubyOSA, it’s really just the Class name that changes (and some more underlying bits):

require 'rbosa'
doc = OSA.app("OmniFocus").default_document

What this means is, it’s very easy to build web interfaces on top of any AppleScript-able Mac application. The one difficulty, however, is configuring your Mac to make it easily externally accessible from anywhere on the Web. If you’re handy on IT, you can always setup port-forwarding on your router.

However, if you just want setup & forget, you should check out Prism (http://goprism.com) – which creates secure, private web accessible connections to your home computer.

Tags: apple, macosx, leopard, rails, ruby, rubyosa, scripting, bridge, prism

GPS metadata is preserved when image versions are exported.

And there was much rejoicing… Yay!

This is actually a really common problem with most photo-editing programs. You’re lucky if they retain much, if any, of the EXIF metadata for an image. All that time spent putting in Copyright, Headline, Caption, Location, Subject, etc. is usually probably lost the minute you export to JPG or upload to Flickr. It’s nice to see applications, especially professional-grade ones, supporting the additional metadata.

The Update addresses another issue I ran into the other day:

Addresses an issue in which incorrect encoding could be used for the files created by the “New Text File” Automator action on Intel-based Macs.

I was trying to setup Automator actions for my Pertelian X2040 LCD in an upcoming MacTech Magazine article. Now I can add lines for upcoming iCal events, Mail messages, and perhaps even pipe these out to my NabazTag!

Of course, there are about a dozen other very cool technologies for developers in Leopard that should really make application development, faster, better, and more fun. I’ve gotten a chance to play some with Leopard previews, and the actual User-facing improvements are minimal. But what users will eventually get will be lots of better third-party applications. (via Theocacoa and Michael McCracken)

It’s great to see how much effort is going into not just creating slicker UI’s, but better supporting the people that really make or break an operating environment – developers. Microsoft has had a lot of developer support for quite awhile, and I constantly hear about various .NET meetings/presentations/technologies etc. Apple really kicked it off by releasing XCode for free (no ‘professional versions’ need apply) and then having terrific Developer Documentation and examples.

The Leopard developer page makes some odd claims:

Mac users love to exchange quick messages, have video conferences, and collaborate on each other’s desktops across the network.

um… right, ok. I just love collaborating on your desktop. Anyways, I can’t wait to dive in and start developing on Leopard.

Tags: macosx, apple, leopard, ruby, python, cocoa, bindings, objective-c, programming, microsoft, .net, theocacoa, michaelmccracken

Overall it has a very nice layout, though I think there could be a little more line-spacing. The Short story sections that look like Safari windows is cute though the double-url’s is redundant.

One thing about Mac magazines, there are quite a few out there now, and to be honest, the community just isn’t that big to warrant 4 or 5 monthly magazines. Especially when there are so many blogs. Really, you end up getting multiple reviews on the same new products, like an external hard drive. And which magazine is going to give a bad review of a new piece of Apple hardware.

Mac Talk also has non-mac specific articles, like Depth of Field for photography, and better movie recording techniques. There is even a Programming section, which is very welcome, but perhaps a little bit out of the mainstream.

Personally, I like the idea of various levels of Mac Magazines. You have your general audience magazine, like MacAddict or MacWorld. There is the sole surviving technical magazine, MacTech, and various photography and media Mac magazines.

I’m curious as to the readership trends of print magazines to online resources, and how magazines can better blend the two. Wired, for example, published their print magazine (of which I am a subscriber) with all of their articles, and excellent layout. However, they also push their articles out online, staged, after the print magazine. Sometimes the online article comes out before I’ve gotten a chance to read the print version. This is a case of the magazine still providing the easy to use, and pretty print magazine, but gaining a wider readership and use to the community by also publishing online.

Personally, I get a large amount of traffic through my articles that have been published online through Linux Journal, whereas I don’t know the amount of MacTech-inspired readers I get.

I hope more (all) magazines follow the trend of publishing their articles online.

Tags: mactalk, mac, magazine, theocacao, macaddict, macworld, mactech,

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
def speak (str)
  str.gsub! (/"/, '\"')
  src = %(say "#{str}")
  NSAppleScript.alloc.initWithSource(src).executeAndReturnError(nil)
end
speak "Hello World!"
speak "Kon nich Wah. Ogan key desu ka?"

Ben Bleything submitted a talk to RubyConf, titled “Harmonize: Exploiting RubyCocoa and Sync Services for Fun and Profit” where he discusses making a wrapper around the SyncAPI in Ruby. (blog post introducing Harmonize)

RubyCocoa looks like it may have stagnated a little as the last release was November 2005, but perhaps with such a renewed interest in Ruby, and Mac OS X gaining popularity, perhaps new life with be breathed into it. Projects such as SyncBridge and Harmonize also obviously help.

Update: Check out the very good examples and information at RubyCocoa.com, including how to use your Apple Remote from RubyCocoa .

Tags: ruby, cocoa, rubycocoa, programming, macosx

It’s a little expensive, at $100, plus about $50 for each set of maps you want to buy for it. It seems like for $100, you should at least get 1 set of maps for free to start. This kind of pricing isn’t really aimed towards a hobbyist or someone who just wants to ‘play around’ with maps.

There are numerous other mapping solutions for the Mac, none with as smooth an interface, but run much cheaper with similar functionality. Here is a quick list as well as their own blurb and pricing.

USGS Topo!

View any point on the topographic map in 3D or draw a route and see a 3D fly thru of your route. $60

GPSUtility

GPSUtility displays GPS data including speed, bearing, position and satellite information. Free

GPSy

connects your Macintosh to a broad range of Global Positioning System (GPS) navigational units and has advanced mapping, logging, and data transfer features. $50

TrueNav GPS and Go

Expand your digital hub by connecting global positioning system (GPS) devices. Experience the wealth of information that GPS devices are able to provide to your Macintosh. Include location information with your data. $50

MacEnc (by GPSNavX)

charting and navigation application that allows the use of the free NOAA S-57 ENC marine charts on your Mac. $99.95

GPSRouteX

auto-sequencing GPS route navigation application for Mac OS X. Full support for GPSd, import/export Google Earth KML files, import/export GPX files, create your own routes and waypoints, even use your laptop with Google Earth driving directions to give you spoken, “turn-by-turn” driving directions! For a more complete description, check out the feature list.$29

GPSNavX

for the boater that wants to take the Macintosh aboard for real-time display of position on full color marine Softcharts and BSB raster charts.$60

Mac GPSPro

transferring Waypoints, Routes, Tracklogs, and GPS satellite Almanacs. MacGPS Pro works with almost all brands of GPS receivers for a real-time display of GPS information on a moving map on the Macintosh screen. It allows import of maps from a wide variety of sources. These maps can be viewed with no GPS receiver connected, or used in real-time as a moving-map display of your current position and velocity. $50

TopoDraw

allows you to draw new waypoints and tracks directly onto a 2D map simply by pointing and clicking. You can also use TopoDraw to present navigation data gathered with your Garmin GPS unit on a 2D map.$12.95

Route66

contains more than 6,500,000 streets in the US & Canada, ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 contains no less than 4,000,000 Points of Interest in over 60 categories like hotels, restaurants and petrol stations, most of which together with their addresses and telephone numbers. What is more, ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 also provides support for GPS, enabling you to establish your exact location using satellite navigation and ensuring that you will never lose your way again.$40

TerraBrowser

Terrabrowser is an internet browser for satellite photos and topographical maps which are obtained from the Microsoft Terra Server. $15

RoadNav

Roadnav is an in-car navigation system that can run on a variety of operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Roadnav can obtain a car’s present location from a GPS unit, plot street maps of the area, and provide verbal turn by turn directions to any location in the USA. Roadnav uses the free TIGER/Line files from the US Census Bureau to build the maps, along with the GNIS state and topical gazetteer data from the USGS to identify locations. Free

Trail Runner X

TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more, with geographic display of your workout area. Exports to cellphone or iPod Nano. Free

There are also some nice frameworks and utilities for working with GPS:

MacGPSBabel

utility for converting between GPS formats

FourCoordinates

Cocoa Framework for interfacing with GPS devices

GPSd

daemon that allows multiple connections to a GPS unit, GPSdX is a Mac-specific version

NoSweat

interface to the Garmin Forerunner

gps2gpe

GPS to GoogleEarth converter

LoadMyTracks

LoadMyTracks downloads Tracks, Routes, and Waypoints from GPS receivers (including those from Garmin, Magellan, and Timex) to your Macintosh. From these, it can create GPX files (for use in software that understands GPS output) or KML files (for use with Google Earth and Google Maps).

I’ll try and do an overall review of the various applications later.

I’ve owned Virtual PC for 2 years now and ran it about 4 times when I first got it. It was too slow on my dual 1.8 G5. Go figure.

Snark my dual 1.8G5 decides that he wants to shutdown right now, and there’s no convincing him otherwise. Of course, he does tell me this in several languages, which is very considerate of him.

And when I finally force Snark come back to life, he greets me with useful bits of information

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x000A4754): attempt to interlock mutex (0x04AA9FD8) failed on mutex lock

Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
      Backtrace:
         0x00095718 0x00095C30 0x0002683C 0x000A4754
         0x0025F918 0x0025EF28 0x002689F4 0x00268090
         0x002AAF98 0x000ABF30 0x33000000
Proceeding back via exception chain:
   Exception state (sv=0x3B0BEC80)
      PC=0x90046060; MSR=0x0000F030; DAR=0xF058AEC4; DSISR=0x42000000;
      LR=0x90045E20; R1=0xF058ABE0; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.7.0: Fri May 26 15:20:53 PDT 2006; root:xnu-792.6.76.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

I’ll get right on that.

Another feature I’d really like to see in some grander build-tool is being able to link Cocoa projects to online bug tracking, like Trac, to link to the appropriate files/lines and changes.

By our best estimates, over 90% of the 550 people at RailsConf 2006 are using Apple laptops.

We decided to reward those willing to take a stand against the norm and compute different.

See the Flickr Stream

The instructions below are the quick, and bare-bones steps needed to get a rails app up for development on a Mac OS X machine.

Create your rails application

$ rails ~/Projects/myapp

Edit your apache config file

You need to setup your apache to know how to handle the /myapp URL request. Put the following at the bottom of your httpd.conf file.

/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

FastCgiServer /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/dispatch.fcgi
    -idle-timeout 120 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=development -processes 1
Alias /myapp/ "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"
Alias /myapp "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"

<directory /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/>
  Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride all
  Order allow, deny
  Allow from all
</directory>

Restart Apache

After you’ve edited the file, you need to restart apache:
$ sudo apachectl graceful

Set the rails base address

Now you need to let rails know what the base address is for the URL’s:
~/Projects/myapp/public/.htaccess

RewriteBase /myapp


Test that it works

Navigate your browser to http://localhost/myapp, and you should see the happy Welcome aboard

Go give it a download. There are still two major feature requests:

1. Secure screensaver – when ‘Ask for password on wake’ is turned on, it will hide the dashboard
2. Dual Screens – the semi-transparent, colored background under DashSaver won’t show up on the second monitor

You can also catch a great audio review of DashSaver over at the MacReview Cast (mp3, it’s at the beginning, the first reviewed freeware app)

Expect more features coming up soon.

Widgets themselves are nothing special. Having developed one and dug through, modified, and working on more, they are just a collection of HTML and Javascript that happens to show up very nicely in a big dynamic webpage called Dashboard

This will be nice since currently only KonfabulatorYahoo! Widgets are cross-platform.

But what really impressed me was their new Open Source projects. Their open-sourcing their plugin-in interface, their internal and powerful frameworks, and CocoaTechTerminal which allows developers to put a terminal within an NSView in their applications.

A company with solid code, releasing parts of their code-base in open-source is unadulterated awesome and much to be applauded. I’m downloading PathFinder 4 just because of their open-source coolness and will give it a try and may purchase it.

Since I’m on the topic of people making very developer friendly add-ons, I recently came across John R Change Contributed projects, which include a better NSStream, a case-insensitive NSDictionary, a category of NSString that adds support for matching regular expressions, and other Cocoa add-ons and classes.

There are many, many more libraries out there. Just watch CocoaDev, a developer Wiki that is active (if sometimes chaotic) documentation, discussion, and resources on Cocoa libraries.

But I digress.

Behold, there was scripting

… and it was good.

I had written an Applescript to set the latitude & longitude (and other location info) to selected photos in iPhoto. iPhoto was often beligerent and required a restart of the iPhoto (and possible database recreation) to read the location information (which was viewable in the “info” panel).

iView puts the location info as a user-editable set of fields in the EXIF data fields. Users can set city, region, country, etc. But for whatever reason, they are unable to change the latitude & longitude.

I paired down my iPhoto script to just handle latitude & longitude and handle getting the file name from iView. The tough part was how to get from the iView example selected_images to a useful POSIX path to feed to exiftool. This code does the trick.

set selectedID to selected_images(1)
if selectedID = {} then
	display dialog "No photos selected"
	return
end if

repeat with this_photo in selectedID
	set photo_path to path of this_photo
	set the image_file to the POSIX path of photo_path

Installing & Using the script

Download the script here and expand it in your ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts folder and then reload iView. You will also need exiftool, as it is the real magic behind the smoke & mirrors.

To use the script, select whatever photos you want to apply the same location information to. Then go to the “Scripts” icon in the menu bar, and choose the “Set Lat/Lon” script. Enter the latitude, longitude, and altitude in decimal format, pressing “OK” after each field. Wait a little while, and then a dialog will tell you how many photos were processed.

Back in iView, you should see the latitude & longitude information in the right side-bar. You can also turn on lat/lon view in the thumbnail view by pressing Command-J and selecting “Latitude” “Longitude” “Altitude”. You may need to press Command-B to rebuild the thumbnail to have the info show up the first time (or on updates).

When exporting images (say to flickr!), your geo-annotated data will stay intact and can then be mapped (or mapped).

Of course, they could get higher-resolution icons to display for each application.

Also check out their reference to NoThickManuals Wiki.

You can download the new version from the software page. There is also an included Readme that discusses setting up your widget over to work over the internet back to your house or office.

I hope you enjoy!

troglogdyte speak

For those interested, coding up preferences for a Dashboard widget are actually impressively straight-forward and easy.

The only two lines of code that are special are the following which get and set the preference for the widget:

    var IndigoServerIP  = widget.preferenceForKey("serverIP");
    if(IndigoServerIP  != '')
        getObj("serverIP").value = IndigoServerIP;  

    widget.setPreferenceForKey(getObj("serverIP").value, "serverIP");

Assumedly these are stored by the name of the widget (e.g. com.highearthorbit.widget.Indigo).

The actual event amounted to 3 hours of panel discussion by 10 leading independent Mac software developers (well, 2 were Apple developers) ranging from “how to become an independent developer” to “what to do when the big Fruit rolls on your turf”, and including stops in “why is DRM bad?”.

The discussion was very enlightening. For example, when someone with a lot more money then you rolls out a copy of your product on *every* machine, what do you do? Move on, diversify, cry over some spilled milk but then innovate. The one thing that was missing was more discussion. Many of the 200 audience members would have liked to have shared more of their ideas/questions, but the event was limited in time.

Like any conference with talking heads, it’s also enlightening to finally see and hear people you’ve read about a lot. Putting faces, and real personalities to online personas. The audience was, humoursly enough, filled with about 4 archetypes of male geek and 1 archetype of female geek. Yes, I did fall into a category myself. The panel was a little more diverse, perhaps indicative of why they are successful. Of course, perhaps it’s also because they choose to sleep less.

Afterwards we were off to Jak’s Tap, a small bar with a large beer selection where I devoured me some yummy Honker’s Ale while delving further into what our vision/thoughts were on the plusses/minuses of 10.4 and what should be included in 10.5.

If you can ever make it to a small developers conference, get-together or PUG meeting, I *highly* recommend it. I made it to ADHOC/MacHack and now this and have loved every minute of each meeting.