Singleton Strategies

15 November 2005 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ development

Often, when you are developing some application you wish it to run one instance at a time. If you are writing a native application, there’s no problem because the platform you are aiming on most probably already has everything for this kind of magic. When it comes to cross-platform approach it’s vitally important to choose something neutral. This post is about my experience in this area.

BlogBridge gets forum and public bug tracker

11 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.

Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!

Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.

Mac Week Is Over

11 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ history mac

The first exciting week of living with Mac is over and, I guess, it’s time to share my impressions. Although, I wasn’t using it too much (you might remember that it’s Kate’s personal workbench), I had several nice moments during this week when I was granted the permission to spend several hours wandering through the system and trying various applications. Overall, I’m very positive about Mac. All the way I was using it, I had a smile on my face. It was the smile of pleasure as I was thinking how intuitive and highly integrated things could be if they are done right.

Kate’s Mac Is Here

8 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ history mac

At last, Kate’s Mac has arrived and we are celebrating! We had some Sambuka cocktails in the evening and other exciting stuff.

Pixen 2 - Pushing Pixels To The Limit

6 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ review

Those of us who are into graphics design sometimes complain about the complexity of graphics packages they use. While giants, like Adobe Photoshop and Corel PhotoPaint provide enormous selection of tools and features, for some applications they are definite overkill. And that’s exactly why some of my friends look for alternatives. Here’s one of them for your consideration and, I guess, it is good one for those who think on a pixel level. :) Take a quick look…

Singing F1 Engines

4 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

I’ve just stumbled across an interesting article by Stuart Waterman on Renault’s RS25 V10 engine, used in Formula One racing cars, has been taught to sing “We are the Champions” by Freddy Mercury.

It’s amazing how precisely this rendition sounds! At a glance I was slightly confused by this fact. What should be happening to the engine internals, switching RPM’s that fast? But the next moment I realized that it could be another wonderful and very artistic way of testing engine reliability and robustness. They could think of some application which takes popular or famous tunes in MIDI file format and use them to make a sound test for engines they produce. The whole factory could sing one song today and choose the other tune for tomorrow. Of course, it sounds weird and this is how it is. But it’s just fun to think about and even more riverting to imagine. :)

Anyway, the MP3 sounds totally amazing and worth listening even if you aren’t fond of Freddy Mercury’s songs. Watch it!

Weird Photoshop Math

4 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

Today I was put into a deep shock with how Photoshop calculates final color of the dot which has several semi-transparent objects on its way. Assume for a second that you have a black background and two 50% white squares on top of each other and the background. What do you think, will the resulting picture show grey square or will it be entirely white?

That Amazing Spotlight Feature of Mac OS X

31 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

It’s not a secret to anyone that Mac OS X has a wonderful feature — Spotlight — which greatly helps to simplify your daily life by providing surprisingly fast search facility. It helps to find almost anything in your Mac without diving deeply into the folders hierarchy. Yeah, everyone knows about it, but what was really exciting for me to discover is a way you can tell it what kind of stuff you are looking for.

Migration To Mac

28 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

Yes, we finally did it with Kate. We decided to replace Kate’s desktop PC with an iBook from a new updated line (14″/1.44GHz/1GB/60GB/SuperDrive/AE/BT). So why have we decided to make this step? Here’s the list of our most important points: Mobility. Kate is a designer and it’s essential for her to be mobile in order to talk with her clients effectively, showing the demos et cetera. Furthermore, we always keep in our minds a potentially-soon migration to Australia and her desktop PC could be an anchor. We both got tired from Windows platform. These endless problems with registry which becomes overflown once a year requiring whole system to be reinstalled can make mad anyone. Also, what makes me sick is that such a big company as Microsoft is unable to show something really revolutionary. Instead, it always repaints Start button in different colors and sells that again and again, while the whole other world is evolving.

Columba: E-Mail Client

22 October 2005 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ review

The other day I made a test-drive of another E-mail client written in Java — Columba 1.0. At a glance, it appeared very friendly and well-though out, but soon… Here come my (unpleasant) notes, so if you a fan, you can skip the rest of the post as it won’t add any confidence and make you proud of the product.