Five Star Wall – Week 2 – July 2011

Posted on Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Something cool for your desktop this week. To celebrate the latest minimalist wallpaper round-up on the site, we’ve found a very funky blissed-out split-tone aqua wall for your desktop. Airena is available in widescreen friendly 1920×1200, though given the design of the image you could crop it to any resolution. You can get it, right here.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Posted on Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Here’s a stunning looking app that’s so cool you might even go and buy an iPad just to enjoy it. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an interactive book of a scope and quality that hasn’t been reached before. It was created by a former Pixar animator and incorporates all sorts of innovative features. Trailer is below and the book’s available in the App Store now.

The Minimalist Collection July – 12 Stylish New Wallpapers

Posted on Monday, July 11, 2011

Here’s a piping hot and brand new batch of minimalist wallpapers to adorn the coolest desktops around. We’ve curated this collection from DeviantArt, which is no mean process as many ‘Deviants’ seem to have a pretty fucked perception of what constitutes minimalism. If you like this article, plus consider ‘Liking’ or ‘+1′ing it below. Anyway – on with the show:

Read on for the links …

Don’t work harder, work smarter with Vitamin-R time-slicer for Mac

Posted on Monday, July 11, 2011

Vitamin-R – $19.95 or App Store – PublicSpace.Net

There are of course, myriad GTD (getting things done) applications out there. In fact, over the last couple of years it’s fair to say that the market for such motivational programs has exploded. The majority of these applications are designed to help you organise your tasks and as such are usually little more than glorified to-do list programs. Vitamin-R however is a different sort of an application as it’s designed to help you focus on one single task at a time.

Vitamin-R is a time-slicer application and it works like this. Let’s say you’ve set yourself a task to complete, such as writing a chapter of your novel. Vitamin-R enables you to break that task down into a series of achievable time-slices of a length that you specify. Once you’ve

Blotter – Embed a Stylish Calendar on Your Mac Desktop

Posted on Sunday, July 10, 2011

Blotter – Wireload – $9.99 (App Store)

iCal has been a staple of the Mac operating system for nearly ten years now. It was introduced in 2002 as part of a secret side project – a team of French coders were hired by Steve Jobs to create a cool Mac application that supported multiple calendars and task management. It hasn’t changed that much over the years, indeed the rather cheesy wooden makeover it has received in OSX Lion is one of its first major ‘refreshes’.

Blotter is a utility for iCal that embeds a week’s calendar right on your desktop. It’s a small install that can be set to run automatically on log-in and takes up very few processor threads while serving up your forthcoming events, appointments and tasks. It is embedded at a desktop level, but cannot be interacted with directly – to change any of the tasks or events you need to fire up iCal.

The on-screen calendar can be displayed in one of three sizes – a slimline narrow version, a half-screen medium sized version and a full-screen mode. In addition the calendar can be positioned in one of nine locations around the desktop according to your own preferences. To move you simply drag the calendar to your preferred location from within the application’s preferences window.

The calendar itself is transparent and thus looks very different according to the desktop wallpaper you’ve chosen to use. In all modes it displays a large date display on the desktop and your upcoming tasks. Forthcoming events on the calendar are colour-coded as per the colour you set within iCal, making it easy to work out which events in your diary relate to which part of your life.

It’s all very well getting organised, but you need to have ready and immediate access to information in order to make the best use of it. My problem is that I often put stuff in iCal and then fail to open iCal to see what’s coming up. Blotter neatly solves this issue, by keeping all your event data front and centre, right there on the desktop. It’s a cool and well designed application that deserves a spot on any iCal user’s desktop.

Paper Planes Wallpaper

Posted on Friday, July 8, 2011

Inspired by this Reddit thread, I’ve made a wallpaper based on the paper aeroplanes in the original image. Resolution is 1920×1080 and you can get the full size version here. Hope you like it.

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Skype 5.2 for Mac Released – Group Screen Sharing Added for Premium Users

Posted on Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Skype on the Mac has always lagged some way behind the PC version and now that Microsoft own the application, we can’t imagine that situation’s likely to improve any time soon. That said, the interface on Skype for Mac is certainly considerably easier to find your way around than the convoluted mess that is the PC version. And at least Mac users haven’t been totally abandoned the way that Linux users have.

So 5.2 for Mac has just been released and the main feature of interest is a paid-for premium service called Group Screen Sharing. This service, which is quite clearly aimed at business users, enables you to start a group video conference and then display your screen for all the attendees to view. It’s the sort of service that lends itself well to presentations of various kinds, but it requires a fairly hefty internet connection to cope with the video transmission and the screen sharing bandwidth at the time same time. If you do go premium you also get standard group video calling, live chat customer support and 25% off a HD webcam – so not a terrific incentive then.

If you don’t fancy the $9.99 monthly cost a premium subscription then you can still enjoy the new always-on-top video window. This enables you to minimise the fat-arse Skype window and still see the person you’re talking to while you use your computer. All in all it’s not a massive update, but still a no-brainer update for all Skype-using Mac owners.

Five Star Wall – Week 1 – July 2011

Posted on Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Here at Geekosity, we’re currently in the throes of winter, but we understand that most of you guys live in that other hemisphere, upstairs. And with that in mind and with nothern hemisphere schools and colleges all breaking up for the long summer break, we thought we’d tap into that cool road-trip summer vibe with this rather funky wallpaper of a VW Combi Van. You can get it, right here.

App Store Freebie of the Week – Text Wrangler

Posted on Monday, July 4, 2011

Sometimes you’ll find the most capable of apps are also the cheapest and Text Wrangler from Bare Bones Software is a case in point. It’s a feature-packed application that can access, modify and save pretty much every text-based format there is. However none of this should come as a surprise because it’s made by the same people that make the illustrious BBEdit – the one text editor to rule them all.

Text Wrangler is a general purpose text editor, a programmer’s or system admin’s text editor and a text manipulator. It includes some incredibly powerful tools, such as grep search/replace, difference & merge and text clean-up. Given how powerful it is, you may be wondering why Bare Bones choose to give this app away when its only real competition is their own paid-for application BBEdit. The answer is that many people don’t need the sort of horsepower BBEdit has all the time. Plus BBEdit includes some other advanced functionality that you don’t get in TextWrangler, such as full blown HTML editing tools, the clippings system and a special font specifically designed to assist coders.

There are numerous instances where an app like TextWrangler can save you hours of painstaking editing. There’s some pretty good case studies on the Bare Bones site that give a good insight into functions such as grep. If you ever need to tweak a text file, alter it in some highly specific way or changes its format – TextWrangler should be your first port of call.

SideWriter – the onscreen/offscreen note app

Posted on Sunday, July 3, 2011

Code529 – Free (Beta) – Download

We’ve all had that situation where you’re copy and pasting something and you need to store it somewhere temporarily. You might be copying sections of text somewhere and you need to build up all the different quotes before pasting the whole. Or you might just be on the phone and you quickly need somewhere to note down a phone number. Or you might have a great idea that you need to get down quickly before you forget it. Now if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably resort to a quick TextEdit window or a Post-It note in the dashboard or, as I often do, when there’s no time to open an app – entering it into the Google search window in Firefox.

SideWriter aims to address this issue by providing you with a bit of text storage space that’s always available, but doesn’t get in the way of your other applications. This neat little utility docks to the left or right of your screen and only comes into sight when you require it. To view it, just move the mouse pointer to the left or right of the screen and it pops out. SideWriter doesn’t just store your notes internally – it automatically saves all notes to the Documents folder as you type, using the header title as the filename.

The app’s flexible, while staying true to its core functionality – namely temporary text storage space. You can make several notes on top of each other and copy as much information into it as you wish. You can give notes subject headings and flick between them as required, although this note-switching feature is less-than-intuitive and could do with some work. It’s also possible to resize the window to any dimensions you require, such as a large full-length window or a smaller Post-it size window by just dragging the window out and, should you wish, lock it in position. SideWriter’s still in beta and available for download free from the MacUpdate site.

Lion Golden Master Hits the Torrent Sites

Posted on Saturday, July 2, 2011

No sooner has Apple announced that the golden master (basically the final developer release before it goes live in the App Store) than it appears on the download sites. Mac OS X Lion GM and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion GM 11A511 Bootable are both out there and being seeded.

All the downloads are weighing in at the 3.5Gb mark, which suggests the final release will place a bit of a strain on the App Store when it hits in about a week’s time. All things considered, you do have to wonder why a Mac owner would risk a pirated version of OSX, particularly given that it will cost just $30. We’d wonder how cheap Apple would have to make their software before people stopped copying it – but given the vitriol you see being spewed at free and $0.99c apps in the app store, we already know the answer.

App Store Daily Freebie – SoundSource

Posted on Friday, July 1, 2011

Short and sweet one for you today. SoundSource from Audio HiJack and Radioshift developer Rogue Amoeba, is a little menubar utility that enables you to switch your audio input and output sources with a single click or to adjust the volume settings associated with those input and output sources.

SoundSource takes up very little memory space and is absolutely perfect for anyone who needs to switch sound sources reguarly, such as when listening via headphones or outputting to an external sound device. Direct download link from the developer’s website, below.

Next Generation Music Making and DJing with TouchOSC

Posted on Friday, July 1, 2011

Electronic music has always been a butt-clenchingly contrived process. Ever since the dawn on the synthesizer, electronic music makers have had to contend with the most specialised vocabulary outside the world of penguin dentistry. The science of sound is such that endless parameters go into shaping each parameter. Electronic music making software is therefore pretty damned complicated too.

So it’s great to see the possibilities of the touch environment being brought to bear on the music software interface. TouchOSC is a modular OSC (open sound control) and MIDI control surface for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad. It enables you to harness the power of your favourite music-making package, such as Logic Pro or Ableton. The touch interface is, it must be said, far more conducive to creative music making than twiddly on-screen knobs with the mouse and keyboard.

Currently running to version 1.63 and available in the app store, TouchOSC can utilise faders, rotary controls and the like, but it can also use your iDevice’s accelerometer for a truly creative twist. The interface editor software is available in Mac, Windows and Linux flavours on the developer’s website. If you’re a music-making, iPad-owning tech-head, check it out here.

App Store Daily Freebie – Opus Domini Lite

Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2011

With so many note-taking apps in the app store, you need to do something to stand out. And that’s precisely what the developers of Opus Domini (it loosely translates to Work Master) have done with this cute and free app, which sports a really cool interface.

On the right left of the application’s window are five tabs, which give access to the app’s main functions – daily tasks, master tasks, ‘compass’, goals and mission. The general thrust of these sections is that this app’s more than about planning the week ahead, it’s about setting longterm goals for yourself and seeing them through.

In effect all of the different sections make this a great longterm planning application. You can set repeating tasks, assign goals over a period of weeks or months and track how you’re doing by referring back to those old entries. On the technical side of things, the app has a full search facility and can be password protected should you wish.

Get it

Thunderbird 5 Released

Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Mozilla have released the latest version of the popular email client, Thunderbird. If you fancy making the switch to Thunderbird, you’ll be pleased to hear that it has a migration agent to ease the process, along with a mail account setup wizard that can handle IMAP, SMTP and SSL/TLS settings without much input from you, beyond the usual username and password.

Thunderbird 5 has a one-click address book which enables you to add a new contact by simply clicking on the star icon next to their name. There’s also a quick filter toolbar, fully indexed search, built-in archiving and junk mail tools and phishing protection.

As always, it’s a totally free open source download, available in the usual Windows, Linux and Mac flavours for download right now from the Mozilla website. Changes from the previous version are:

• More responsive and faster to start up and use
• Thunderbird is based on the new Mozilla Gecko 5 engine
• New Add-ons Manager
• Revised account creation wizard to improve email setup
• New Troubleshooting Information page
• Tabs can now be reordered and dragged to different windows
• Attachment sizes now displayed along with attachments
• Plugins can now be loaded in RSS feeds by default
• There are several theme fixes for Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Support for Mac 32/64 bit Universal builds (Thunderbird no longer supports PowerPC on Mac)
• Over 390 platform fixes that improve speed, performance, stability and security