"HyperCard effectively disappeared a decade a go, making way for supposedly bigger and better things. But in my mind, the end of HyperCard left a huge gap that desperately needs to be filled – a space for an easy to use, intuitive tool that will once again let average computer users make their own tools. Such a project would have huge benefits for all of us, wether we are artists, educators, entrepreneurs, or enthusiasts." Lovely piece by Jer Thorp on Hypercard. I've mentioned Hypercard is quite formative for me, right?

"Brogue is a Roguelike game for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux by Brian Walker." It's REALLY good: stripped-down and straightforward, as Rogue was, but with nice mouse implementation and a lovely auto-explore mode. Really rather nice.

"ClickToPlugin is a lightweight and highly customizable extension that prevents Safari from launching plug-ins automatically, resulting in faster browsing, reduced fan usage, and increased battery life. It replaces every plug-in object by an unobtrusive placeholder that can be clicked to load the embedded content. Further, it can replace many plug-in-based media players by Safari’s native HTML5 media player." Installed.

"This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up as a terminal for my Mac Pro (circa 2010), a nerdy dream I’ve had for a long time that I finally made a reality yesterday." Beautiful. Just look at it!

"The Simplest Screen Recording App For Your Mac. Ever." Looks it. I'm fed up of wrangling things like iShowU, so I might investigate this.

This is working well for me: rapid calendar input, not too big on the menu bar, and yet nice support for multiple calendars and the like. Pretty much meets my calendar-input requirements, and leaves iCal to do the heavy lifting.

"Command line work isn't a separate task that should live on its own—it's an integrated part of your natural workflow. DTerm provides a context-sensitive command line that makes it fast and easy to run commands on the files you're working with and then use the results of those commands." This looks great. Will report back on it.

"...if the Mac App Store is only populated by a subset of today’s Mac software, a few key points (such as “Inexpensive”) still won’t be true. This is why I believe that the Mac App Store will be dominated by (and become known for) apps that don’t exist on the Mac today." This is really good. It might even be right; regardless, it's thoughtful and well-argued.

"Our original inclination was to put game content under "~/Library/Application Support/Steam", along with the other support files Steam uses. The problem is that uninstalling an application is meant to be as simple as dragging it from the Applications folder into the Trash. However, uninstalling Steam this way will leave all of your game content on the drive, which could easily be quite a few gigabytes of wasted space. Our solution was to put the content in a very visible and often used location so users could easily find and delete the game data if they didn't want it anymore. That's right, we chose the Documents folder specifically because it was visible and often used -- the very reasons users don't want it there." Well done, Valve, for explaining this in the short term, and providing a solution in the long term. (And: their thinking wasn't so woolly, really).

"There are a lot of ways to approach burning discs. Burn keeps it simple, but still offers a lot of advanced options." I hate burning CDs in the Finder, and this looks great.

MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for Wordpress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5... but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.

"ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations. ImageOptim combines various optimisation tools: AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT. It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller." Ooh, looks excellent.

"Grackle68k is a twitter client for early Macintoshes running System 6 through OS9."

"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."

"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.

"Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks." A lovely little video. I remember this well from the Mac Pluses at school, and even at seven or eight, it drove me nuts.

"On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop. You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket."

A good list of tips - lots of compiled stuff needs to be recompiled to x64, and this will be confusing. I am not upgrading quite yet.

"It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle."

"Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. It’s based on the robust DOSBox emulator, with a lot of magic sprinkled on top. Run DOS programs from Finder. Wrap your games into tidy packages that launch like Mac apps. Painlessly install games from CD—then bundle the CD with your game so you don't even need it in the drive."

"Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy." Looks like an interesting alternative to iMovie for most of the uses I make of video.

Nice post about using Scrivener for novel-writing, and a reminder as to how Targets work within it (which is handy for journalism).

"Xbox Live Friends is a tool for keeping a vigilant eye on what all of your friends are doing." It's much improved from previous versions, too. Enjoying this quite a lot.

Almost Atari 2600-era platforming, but with a couple of (big) twists. Compulsive, and cross-platform, it's almost definitely worth an hour of your day.

"F.lux fixes this: it makes your computer's lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better." Perhaps not right for things that need to be color-managed... but might be good for everything else. And healthier.

"MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock." Quite pretty, and makes a nice companion for FuzzyClock.

Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.

"We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.

"An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.

"Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."

"After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.

"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.

"OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks."

"QTAmateur is a small, simple QuickTime video player. It can play any format that QuickTime can understand, handle fullscreen video playback, and export files to any format that QuickTime can write." Cheaper than QTPro for converting Flip video files.

"Plainview is a full-screen web browser." Simple, Webkit, and effective. Useful if you need a kiosk-mode Safari in a hurry.

"Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence." Gorgeous.

"Syncopation from Sonzea provides a hands-free solution to keep your iTunes® music collection synchronized across multiple computers running Mac OS X." And this is what might make a Squeezebox practical chez nous.

"BusySync lets you share iCal calendars on a LAN and sync iCal with Google Calendar." Well, if it does that, that's pretty nifty. Worth checking out.

"UFO: Alien Invasion", an open-source clone of the X-Com/UFO games, now has an OSX port available. That requires trying out, then.

Looks like a great diff-ing application; shame it's Leopard only, as I'd be on it like a flash. Beyond Compare is still the one Windows app I kind-of miss.

"ScreenSteps brings simplicity to the labor intensive process of software documentation." Focusing on the screengrab, rather than video, as instruction tool. Could be a nice approach, especially if export is any good.

Drivers for 360 joypads under OSX. Works well with my wired example, haven't tried with a wireless, and doesn't work (yet) with my Hori EX2 stick. I'm hoping we can fix the latter...

"Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail." Leopard only, notably. It also has a good Office Space joke in its screengrabs.

"Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity." A nice way to build site-specific browsers; shame it's Leopard-only...

"Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files." Apparently now does FLAC transcoding, too, which is useful.

It's a tracker. A tracker for Windows/OSX with VST instruments and effects support, a built-in sampler, and more. Certainly worth a play!

Interesting looking cheap drawing package for the Mac.

"Integrity will follow all of your internal links to find your pages, checking the server response code for all internal and external links found". Handy broken-link checker for OSX.

Currently very-much-enjoying Pukka: brings decent bookmarking not only to Safari but to lots of applications, handles multiple delicious accounts well, and is generally very smooth to use. Will almost certainly register it when the time comes...

A few handy GeekTool snippets I keep forgetting...

"Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly know better by now, I am here to tell you about backups. It's very simple."

Like Pyro for Basecamp: a product-specific client as a browser.

"CCMenu displays the project status of CruiseControl continuous integration servers as an item in the Mac OS X menu bar." And it integrates with Growl.

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X

"Quartonian Mixer is a free creative commons licensed VJ mixer created entirely in Quartz Composer."

Awesome, awesome OSX puzzle game.

"The rest is just implementation detail." Great story from Will Lee about how, despite not doing any of the things you're "supposed" to do, he became a programmer. The answer? He always was one.

Stupid U3 software. Storage media should not be autoloading software or using stealth-partitions, and it shouldn't want Windows to uninstall it. Naughty.

"For Mac users who want a simpler way to create lists. TaskPaper is a simple to-do list application that helps you stay organized. Unlike competing applications, TaskPaper is based on plain text files which offer you paper-like simplicity and ease of use.

In a nutshell: it's Tetrinet for OSX. Get in.

Some nice, insightful commentary on the relevance of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines in 2007. Good stuff, for anyone interested in interface design.

"Just as the mini-player in iTunes does for music; MiniMail puts information about your inbox at your fingertips. You can easily see messages as they arrive, and quickly action them." Want!

On The Job is an unobtrusive, easy to use time tracker. It's not bloated with features you'll never use, yet it's powerful enough to handle all of your time tracking needs. On The Job is perfect for anyone billing by the hour.

NNW hits 3.0. Time to upgrade.

Cha-Ching is a fun and easy to use money manager, with a slick interface that uses advanced functionality built into OS X.

PdfCompress is a Mac OS X utility for reducing the size of PDF files.

MacFLAC is a graphical frontend for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), developed using Applescript Studio.

Flac to MP3 with a single bash script. Just what the doctor ordered...

Often you don't need the exact time in hours, minutes and seconds. A more human readable style like "five past ten" makes more sense. For that, you can now use FuzzyClock.

CHM files - compiled HTML - are basically Windows Help files. You need something like this to view them on a Mac.

Homebrew Galactica Viper/Raptor fighter-combat sim, based on the excellent (and now free) Freespace 2 engine. As a huge BG _and_ FS2 fan, I'll be checking this out.

Nice overview of procedures for making a decent screencast on a Mac - and various useful tools to do so.

Note-taking application, designed as a big bucket to throw content at. Could be interesting.

Some nice tips on using sips with applescript

ADC reference on shell scripting - looks comprehensive, nicely-organised, and well-written.

Highly useful: analyses when an Apple model was last replaced, and tells you if it's a good time to buy one. Fortunately for what I'm looking for, it's "still good value"...

Not quite ready for release, but anyway: MacLive is a nice Cocoa front end to XBox Live, with Growl integration (hurrah). Hoping it'll be ready soon!

Lovely Photoshop job on the Mitchell & Webb Apple ad.

By all accounts, very good; 89 pages on Quicksilver can't be bad, certainly - better than none.

Beautiful Twitter client from the Iconfactory.