Articles

Apr 27 2009

5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

The iPod touch is a beautiful little machine. Thanks to powerful
hardware and the creativity of developers it is capable of all kinds
of things – even controlling your home automation setup. Here’s a
short list of some of the more powerful things you should be doing on
your iPod touch:

Present on your Mac

Fresh off the Keynote demo, the new href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/">iWork 09 will allow you to
control Keynote presentations from your Mac. Not keen on waiting for
09 to ship? Try Mocha
VNC or VNC Lite from the app store. VNC will give you complete GUI
control of your Mac. And let’s not forget Apple’s own href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?mt=8&id=284417350">Remote,
that allows you to take over iTunes to play songs, movies or podcasts.

Capture ideas on your iPod

evernote 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

Ideas don’t always conveniently strike while you are at your keyboard.
Fortunately, there are some on-the-go solutions for jotting things
down for use later. The first is href="http://evernote.com/about/download/iphone/">Evernote. This
free (with paid option) service comes with an iPhone app that lets you
jot notes for upload to Evernote. It works offline and, when you
upgrade to the iPhone, it will capture pictures as well. In turn,
Evernote’s online service lets you sync, organize and even scan
pictures for text.

If you don’t care for a hosted service, href="http://carbonfin.com/">Outliner Lite (also comes in paid
version) allows you to quickly outline thoughts and email them as an
OPML file for later analysis.

Take Knowledge Offline

Sure its great, all the things you can find on the ‘net on your touch,
but what about those times when you’re offline? Shouldn’t you set
aside some of that space for some info you might need on the bus,
train plane or school?

wikiamo 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

Wikiamo thinks
so. This app will let you browse Wikipedia and stash pages for
off-line reading. But why stop there? You can take your own Google
docs offline with apps like href="http://iphone.iusethis.com/app/mightydocs">MiGhtyDocs and href="http://www.savysoda.com/Documents/">Documents.

Listen to Music that isn’t Yours

While you have that network connection, put it to good use. Streaming
music from the Internet is nothing new. But the way href="http://www.pandora.com/on-the-iphone">Pandora goes about it
is. On Pandora (iPhone, web or Mac app) you create a ‘station’ by
giving Pandora a song you like. Pandora, though some fancy magical
algorithm streams you hours of related music. Not only is it a great
way to listen to music you will probably like, it is also a great way
to find new music.

pandora 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

If you don’t care for Pandora’s client, you might try href="http://www.last.fm/group/Last.fm+for+iPhone+and+iPod+Touch">Last.fm
- who also has a client for you iPod touch.

Swap files with your Mac

One of the few lacks of the iPhone OS that separate it from grown-up
operating systems is file management. Wether or not the iPhone needs
file management is a debate for another time. For those of you that do
want to store and swap files from your iPod touch there are solutions.

The most Mac-ish app is href="http://www.heymacsoftware.com/">Briefcase (and its little
brother Briefcase Lite) which allows you to browse Macs and send files
back and forth. Like the other app I’ll mention, it allows access to
the files on the device itself.

If you’re looking for flexibility, the free href="http://iphone.iusethis.com/app/discover">Discover allows you
to browse the iPod from any platform on the network via web-browser.
Rather than give you access to the computer via iPod, Discover works
the opposite as Briefcase – accessing the iPod from your Mac, Windows
or Linux machine.

discover 5 Things to do with your new iPod touch

With the App store quickly filling with fart apps, it is nice to know
you can get some serious things done on your iPod.

Brian

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Jan 15 2002

Perl on your Mac part 1

By Jon Gales

Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a predominately Unix driven program. There are interpreters for all the major (and minor) OS’s but to run them locally you have to have Unix, Linux, or Mac OS X. If you want to get the interpreter for Classic it is available for free at http://www.macperl.com.

You can still follow what we will be doing, just ignore all the X mumbo jumbo.

Our first program:

  • Open up the command line (apps>utilities>terminal) and type pico
  • Type the following in exactly as is:
  • #!/usr/bin/perl
    #Our first application
    print “What is your name?
    “;
    $name = <STDIN>;
    print “Hi $name, nice to meet you!”;
  • Now type Control-O and enter test.pl for the file name, press enter
  • Press Control-X
  • Type chmod 755 /Users/YOURUSERNAME/test.pl


You are done just enter the path to the file to run it (/Users/YOURUSERNAME/test.pl) If you are in Classic just enter that same code into MacPerl and press Command-Shift-R.


Recap:
The first line (and it has to be the first line) of this script tells the computer that this code is Perl, and where to find Perl. This code gets compiled at run time (unlike C, C++, and an array of other languages) so the computer needs to know where to compile it at every time it is run. You can always find where Perl is by typing where perl. OS X defaults it to /usr/bin/perl (most common place for all systems). What this program does is it prints (to the screen not an actual printer) a string of text. In this case What is your name and then a new line (/n). All strings have to be quoted and end in a semicolon. In fact almost every line in Perl ends in a semicolon and if they don’t need one they will still work with them so when in out add one in. The input gets put into a scalar variable (always marked with a dollar sign before the name) called name. <STDIN> stands for Standard Input. Again we end with a semicolon. The next line prints another string but this time adds in the variable we just created. The chmod changes the permissions of the file. In Unix every file has permissions. You can read more about chmod and permissions here.


In my next article I’ll explain all the ins an outs of scalar variables and arrays. Stay tuned and have fun! We’ll get to some useful stuff soon (at least for all you X’ers).


If you are having trouble or would like to ask me a question please send me mail: jonknee@macmerc.com If not, continue on with Part 2!

By admin • Articles, Coding • 0

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