Category Archives: OSX

OSX: Renaming Fonts (For Free!)

I just got a huge problem. I’m working on an iOS app, and it turns out that we need to maintain compatibility with iOS 4. So… the problem is that we use custom fonts. A lot of them. That shouldn’t be an issue. BUT… i got to notice that iOS 4 supports up to two different fonts per family.

Long short story, if you’ve got a font family with… 5 different fonts, iOS 4 will load just two of  them. So how do we solve it?.

Simple!. We rename some of the extra fonts. Thing is, there are lots of tools to do that. But they’re paid. And… dude, it’s just renaming a font!. That’s where TTX comes in.

TTX is an opensource tool that basically converts a font into a readable XML. So… you just need to parse your OTF file, change the font name… and run TTX again, to pack it up into an OTF file, back again.

So far so good. But i was getting an error while trying to run TTX on OSX 10.7.3. The problem is that TTX works fine only in 32 bits mode.

So…. if you’re also having problems, just run this command, and you’re good to go:

defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

Back to BitTorrent

Well… after MegaUpload was shut down, it’s been a hell of a nightmare to find a working filesharing service. Everyone is sooo afraid of the MPAA and RIAA, that they’re just closing the door. So… it’s time to get back to our roots.

YEAH!. I’m talking about P2P networks. I used to be a huge fan of BitTorrent, in the good old days where MegaUpload wasn’t even technically possible. It is in fact thanks to BitTorrent protocol that The Pirate Bay is still operative. Magnet links are, as far as i know, legal. Nobody can punish you for posting magnet links. In the end, it’s a GUID, right?.

So… i had to get back to BitTorrent. That was the easiest way to stop searching files that are just not there. The big question is… what is the best OSX Client for BitTorrent?.

Well, i’d like to recommend this one:

It’s called Transmission. Just click on the link, and get it for free. There are few tools that help you automate the download of torrents. I’ll post some of them in the next couple of days. Stay in sync!

 

OSX iStats

Apple did a pretty good job with OSX. You buy a new mac… and you get almost everything you need, ‘for free’. Any mac comes with iPhoto preinstalled, Mail, Calendar, Safari and even Garage Band. Basically it covers everything an average user needs to do.

There are really really few weak spots to OSX. I dare to say that… one of the few things OSX lacks is a nice widget to check out things such as the download speed… cpu load and temperature and even uptime. Good news is that there is a nice company called iSlayer, that has a reaaaaally cool Dashboard widget named ‘iStat‘ , which does exactly that.

It’s free… so you definitely don’t have an excuse not to download it. It has two modes: horizontal and vertical. You can tweak which indicators you want (and which ones you don’t want). Plus.. there is an iOS version, too. Go check it out!

Automating file download…!

I really don’t know if we’ll have file sharing services in… say… 5 years from now. Since megaupload has been taken down, and it’s CEO imprisoned, several other file sharing services have begun shutting down their services.

But many of them are still alive and kicking. So… whenever you need to download a huge amount of different files, manually entering the captchas (plus opening the links, one my one) turns into a tedious task.

That’s where jDownloader comes in. It’s a java based, multi platform app, which helps you download files form multiple sources. It has lots of plugins, and gets updated periodically. So chances are… it supports whatever filehosting service you’re using.

It has automatic captcha recognition (at least for several hostings). And if the hosting you’re using doesn’t have ‘auto-captcha-recog’, you’ll simply get a popup with the image itself.

It’s REALLY useful!

Useful Firefox Plugins

Google Chrome is definitely my favorite web browser. It has OSX Lion fullscreen support… it’s fast and lightweight, and Google itself is in charge of pushing it forward. But sometimes it just falls short… you just can’t find a suitable plugin for whatever you need to do. That’s the only reason i have firefox installed in my mac. Even the latest version of FF, release 11, doesn’t support OSX fullscreen feature.

So… let’s stop pointing out weak spots of this browser… and let’s go to the point!. The following plugins make my life easier. Really… so… i suggest you check them out.

  1. Firebug
    Yes… it’s also available for Chrome. But this version has far more functionality than the google counterpart. It’s really useful when you’re developing websites…!
  2. Video DownloadHelper
    Suppose you wanna download FLV files from whatever site you’re visiting. This is your friend!… it allows you to capture videos from a huge list of different websites.

I hope you find this helpful!