intention

Jun 14 2010

MacMerc.com is Back!

MacMerc.com is back… but why did it go?

I’m happy to announce the return of MacMerc.com and my intention to resume production on MacMerc.TV. It must have seemed strange after so much attention and effort was made to launch an ambitious podcast that was so well received (thank you all for that) to then not only stop producing that show but to take down the site that hosted it.

Believe me, it wasn’t part of the plan.

Let me take you back a year or so and I’ll try to explain.

Shortly after I launched the podcast, I started up a friendship over Twitter with Greg Grunberg ( @greggrunberg ) from NBC’s HEROES. He is an amazing guy with all kinds of projects on the go. At the time he told me about an idea he had for an iPhone app that would bring up coupons based on where the user was in proximity to the stores. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who could develop it. I did, of course. I connected him with my friend from my days on The Wizards of Technology, August Trometer ( @august ).

That was the start of the whirlwind of activity that became Yowza!! Mobile Coupons ( @yowza ). In the early months it took over a lot of my time and even distracted me from my day job a fair bit. I had no time to write blog posts, much less scripts. There was definitely no time for shooting and editing.

In the midst of all that, a hacker came a-hackin’ (it’s what they do). Somebody was repeatedly compromising MacMerc.com’s security and posting all kinds of filth and horror. With all the other stuff happening in my life, I couldn’t handle this as well. The only person that knew the site well enough to defend it was also the guy I recommended when Greg asked if I knew any coders, and he was busier than me.

I was sunk.

My only defense was retreat.

Through my friendship (and internship) with Cali Lewis at GeekBrief ( @calilewis ), I had met some amazingly wonderful people and made some great friends. One of them, Daynah ( @daynah ) came to my rescue and put up a “be back soon page” and went to work converting the data from my antiquated pre-Typepad content management system over to WordPress. She did a great job and I am so thankful for her help.

My participation with Yowza!! is much less than it was and I, once again, have time for blogging, script writing and podcasting.

Let’s dig in!

By admin • announcement, Featured, News • 7 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Two Mac Apps that give your Blog pics more Oomph!

(from Episode #40 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)

Do you have a blog? It seems most people do these days. What about a Flickr account? Or maybe you frequent an online forum or two. If you’re involved in any of these popular online activities, you have probably needed to post an image at one time or another. (I can’t imagine why anyone would have a Flickr account if they had no intention of posting images!) I’m going to show you two Mac applications that simplify the process of creating images for blogs and one that will even help you upload and post the images after they’re created.

PICTURESQUE
First, we’ll start with Picturesque from Aqualia (ah-KWAH-lee-ah). The program’s chief function is resizing and beautifying images for your website. You can add borders, fades, shadows, glows, rounded corners and reflections and adjust each effect to your liking. The interface is very clean and straight forward and it takes all the fiddling out of making your blog graphics consistent. You might even be able to develop a combination of effects that can become your blog’s “look.�

Speaking of a consistent look, Picturesque allows you to batch process a group of images so that they all have the same effects and scaling applied. You can drag multiple images to the Picturesque window and apply the same scaling and beautifications to them all before saving them all out to the desired image format.

SKITCH
Skitch has some of the same features as Picturesque, but not many. Skitch resizes, but not in the same way that you resize in Picturesque. Here all you do is grab the corner of the Skitch window and drag. It looks like you might merely be zooming in, but you are actually scaling. This method makes it difficult to work with images larger than your screen resolution, but if you’re using Skitch for its intended purpose you really wouldn’t be using images that big.

To crop an image, you just drag from the edge of the image inward until you find the cropping you like. Skitch crops in on the image and resizes the Skitch window to accommodate you.

Skitch’s left edge is populated with drawing tools so that you can mark up your images with shapes, lines arrows and text. Embellishments made using Skitch’s drawing tools are movable as individual objects after you draw them and are vector-based so that if you decide to scale the image up after making notations, your drawings will not lose detail or crispness. Skitch even works with WACOM tablets and allows you smooth pressure sensitive drawing.

When you’re done with your image, you can just drag it out to your desktop, to your email client or you can configure Skitch to upload to your web space, Flickr account or Plasq’s own MySkitch service. When you enter in this account information into Skitch’s preferences, you can also ask the program to automatically put the URL, HTML or forum code into your clipboard so that you can immediately go about posting your new image to your blog or that forum you lurk in.

Skitch is integrated with iPhoto, so you can Skitch your latest pictures of your dog. And it even keeps a record of all the images you’ve made, posted, emailed or archived so that you can continue to manage them if you need to.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Skitch: http://plasq.com/skitch
Picturesque: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Skitch (Price unknown, public beta available now or very soon)
Picturesque (USD$19.50, free watermarked demo)

By admin • Articles, The Lab with Leo Laporte Segments • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 5 2005

Remember that keynote address Job was giving in Paris? Forget it.

Yeah, that’s right, another “about face” from Apple. Today’s news is that the keynote address that Steve Jobs was going to be presenting at the Apple Expo in Paris will not be happening. No Jobs. No keynote. Nothing. So hopefully none of you booked flights to Paris just to see the Insanely Great One, because now you’re going to be forced to find your own entertainment in Paris…might I suggest the Louvre? Here’s a travel guide for you people who made plans to go to Paris with no intention of actually seeing it.

Note:

By admin • apple, General News, News • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,