Max Williams

Here’s a lizard for you to look at (linked to my newly-created, still pretty empty deviantART page):

Modelled, of course, using Blender. I was playing with the subsurf tool, and it made it surprisingly easy. It was the first time I’d used it, and if you haven’t played with it I suggest you do. Here’s the mesh that resulted in the final thing:

Oh, and here: have some tiling wallpapers based on the same guy.

Download

I’ve made a Dashboard widget. It’s a version 0.5 beta, so right now it’s really more of a tech demo. You can download it, but it’s going to be totally rewritten for version 1.0.

It’s purpose is to store searches while you’re offline, so that next time you connect to the internet you can open them one at a time, or all at once in separate tabs or windows.

Its coolest feature is that it supports “space triggers”, inspired by tab triggers in TextMate. So you can type g and press space, and it’ll display Google’s favicon to show you that the search terms you enter will be passed to Google. It has a number of others; Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google images, Flickr, imdb, Amazon, Youtube etc.

I plan to extend this a lot before v1.0, to allow you to add arguments and more complex searches and so on. Kinda similar to YubNub, but easier to use and with the emphasis on caching searches to visit later.

Here’s a quick “how-to use”:

1. Expand it and double-click it to install it in the Dashboard
2. Hover over the widget and click the info button to reveal a list of triggers
3. Switch back to the front, type a trigger into the search field and press space
4. If it recognised the trigger, the search field should now contain an icon representing the search URL
5. Now enter your search query and press return. The search will be added to the list above.
6. Click the link to open it in your browser. Notice it goes dim to show that you’ve visited it.
7. To open all unvisited links at once, click the arrow button in the corner of the widget.
8. To clear the search cache (remove all links), press the button in the corner marked with a cross.
9. To remove individual links, click the button marked with a cross next to the link in question.
10. To resize the widget, use the resize handle on the back (press the info button)

Adding customised and localised search protocols is definitely planned for version 1.0, but for now the only way to do that is to edit the sites.js file inside the widget’s bundle.

There are a few bugs in this release (for starters, it should scroll to the bottom of the list when you add a search and it doesn’t), but it’s so poorly written at the moment that I can’t ever see myself fixing them. Version 1.0 will be the one that gets big fixes and so on. This is just a toy, really.

Feel free to make feature requests in the comments, but have a look at the planned changes for version 1.0 first.

Download (140KB)

The iTunes update to version 7.1 brings a few cool things; mainly support for the Apple TV and fullscreen Cover Flow.

But the coolest things aren’t made obvious. The first is hidden in the preferences window, under the “Parental” tab. There’s an addition of a “Ratings for” menu which includes a list of countries, one of which is United Kingdom. This makes me very hopeful that iTunes TV and movie content will be coming over here very soon. I wonder what it’ll be like… I’ve always wished that the BBC would put its collection on iTunes, but I doubt that will happen. They’ve always preferred to work with Real and Microsoft for their online content, which seems crazy to me. There was a brief moment when Real video had better compression than QuickTime, and I think that that was about the time when the BBC were just starting to get into the internet. If they could just make the switch to iTunes, dump a load of content on there, start making money from it and help Apple to establish a video presence in the UK… it would be fantastic for everyone, and it would go some way towards untying them (and us) from the TV licence in an elegant way.

The other cool thing is hidden away even further, in the strings inside the application bundle (quotes messed up by WordPress. Well, mainly by me, but WordPress helped.).

• “4309.161″ = “Are you sure you want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV “^1â€? will be replaced with games from this iTunes library.”;
• “4309.162″ = “Are you sure you do not want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV “^1â€? will be removed.”;
• “4309.163″ = “Syncing games on “^1â€?…”;
• “4309.164″ = “Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because they cannot be played on this Apple TV.”;
• “4309.165″ = “Some of the games in your iTunes library, including the game “^0â€?, were not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because they cannot be played on this Apple TV.”;
• “4309.166″ = “The game “^0â€? was not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because it cannot be played on this Apple TV.”;
• “4309.167″ = “Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.”;
• “4309.168″ = “Some of the games in your iTunes library, including the game “^0â€?, were not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.”;
• “4309.169″ = “The game “^0â€? was not copied to the Apple TV “^1â€? because you are not authorized to play it on this computer.”;
• “4309.170″ = “iTunes could not sync the game “^1â€? to the Apple TV “^2â€? because there is not enough free space on the Apple TV.”;
• “4309.171″ = “iTunes could not sync the game “^1â€? to the Apple TV “^2â€? because the game is corrupt and could not be read.”;
• “4309.172″ = “iTunes could not sync the game “^1â€? to the Apple TV “^2â€? because the game could not be found.”;
• “4309.173″ = “iTunes could not sync the game “^1â€? to the Apple TV “^2â€? because an error occurred (^3).”;
• “4309.174″ = “iTunes could not sync the game “^1â€? to the Apple TV “^2â€? because an error occurred. “;

So basically what I’m trying to say is, “I was right all along! Haha!”

You can read more about these discoveries on the relevant MacRumors post.