Like most phone cameras, the iPhone's lens is focused for the most general possible use, i.e. nearly at infinity. TUAW reader Daniel Forsythe modded his iPhone to focus a bit closer up so he could use it to read bar codes that he shoots from magazines and equipment labels.
The mod involves breaking the glue that holds in the camera module and rotating the lens to bring the focus closer to the camera. With this hack, he can snap photos of close-in subjects. Check out his Flickr photo set for samples and discussion.
He writes that he plans to make a full mod guide should readers express interest in it. The photo seen here is focused to 0.25".
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.
Going back to school isn't all about the students; the educators are often just as excited or stressed out as the kids about the beginning of a new school year. What can make life easier on the poor teacher? Great Mac software! Read on for information on a grab bag of Mac and web apps to help out your favorite educator.
Searchlight 2.0 was officially released last week. Searchlight offers remote Spotlight functionality, allowing you to search your computer's files via a web browser, and it includes an iPhone-optimized interface. I talked with Searchlight's authors, Gravity Applications, during WWDC and got a good look at the pre-release version which left me pretty impressed. I've personally been using the beta for a while now to access the Mac Mini at my house which serves as my central file repository. Read on for a Searchlight overview ... and an exclusive TUAW giveaway!
Smashing Magazine does a good old-fashioned "why OS X is so much better" piece -- ok, well they're not that blatant (it's actually focused on the "top ten usability highs"), but with all of the iPhone/App Store news going around, it's kind of refreshing to see some nice, traditional Mac praise.
So why is OS X better than other (*cough*Windows*cough) operating systems? Metaphors play a huge part -- when you use a Mac, you're not just browsing through files or using plugins, you're flipping through what look like album covers, or pulling up a "Dashboard." And everything is extremely intuitive -- it's clear upon first look at the screen what does what or where to find certain features of the operating system.
Every system has problems, and OS X is no exception. But using it day to day, OS X definitely gives out all kinds of "wait, it was that easy?" and "just works" moments. And that's why we're such big fans of it in the first place.
You know if the App Store has been out for a month and we're posting about a web app, it has to be a good one. Google announced late last week that they've brought the terrific Google Translate service over to the iPhone. Of course, whenever you travel internationally, roaming charges (sometimes huge ones) can come into play, but if you find yourself tooling around Spain and need more phrases than ¿Dónde está el baño? or Tú eres mi chica, Google's web app will do the trick fast and easy.
And there's some nice coding in there, too -- the phrases translated get stored on the client side of the phone, so if you've already translated something, you don't have to reload the page to see it again. To use the service, just point your MobileSafari to translate.google.com. Folks in other countries probably still won't care too much what you have to say, but at least they'll know what you're saying.
This weekend, the iPhone Dev Team delivered an iPhone 2.0 jailbreak. Today, TUAW invites you to chat about the jailbreak, about the new Cydia installer, and about the future of iPhone jailbreak development and use. Follow the jump to join in our discussion.
I'm a heavy user of the IconFactory's xScope, a great universal tool for designers which we've covered severaltimes. For those of us with a need for it, it's worth every cent. I happened upon a freeware application today, though, which provides a subset of xScope's very useful features: omnidea Rulers.
This free app does a great job of providing on-screen guides, allowing the insertion of horizontal, vertical and intersection rules. It also gives you Photoshop-style rulers at the top and side of your screen for positioning. A HUD provides mouse coordinates and a magnifying glass, with two minimal views and one that shows all of the data at once.
Rulers provides screenshot capabilities. More useful than that, though, it also has an auto-measure tool similar to xScope's "Dimensions" mode. This is infinitely useful for quickly determining the pixel size of any on-screen area of which it can discern the edges. When Rulers is in the foreground, pressing Command-A will instantly show cross-hairs and a measurement for the area surrounding the mouse cursor.
Rulers is pretty darn useful, especially for web designers, and it's free. Pick up a copy from omnidea and enjoy.
When we talked to TheCodingMonkeysat WWDC, they made a cryptic reference to an iPhone application they had in the works. They've finally revealed what they've been diligently preparing: Circulator, an iPhone application to help you track everything you lend and borrow.
TheCodingMonkeys are the brains behind SubEthaEdit and the open source utility, Port Map (TUAW coverage here). Most recently, they've been working with Boinx Software on the upcoming BoinxTV. They've found the time, somehow, to create what looks like a very useful addition to the growing collection of iPhone productivity applications.
Circulator lets you track the things you lend and borrow to and from your friends. It's not specific to any type of item; you can track everything from dollars and cents to DVDs and power tools. You can add images with the iPhone's camera or from your photo library and keep a history of transactions for repeat use. The portability of the application is what will make it the most useful; you'll be able to record that $20 you handed to your buddy right there in front of him, mercilessly crushing any hopes he had that you'd forget in a week.
What good would such an application be without the ability to automate the act of reminding your friends of such debts? Circulator can send an "overdue" SMS or email to debtors, with templates available for the tone of the reminder: nice, neutral or angry. Nothing says "I want my orbital sander back" like frequent, angry, software-generated emails. Of course, this kind of record keeping could also help friends stay friends by avoiding misunderstandings and unfounded accusations.
Circulator will cost $5.99 at the App Store. If you've lost track of more than six dollars worth of loaned items in your life, you might want to check it out. For more information and a video overview, visit the Circulator page at TheCodingMonkeys' website.
So for quite a while now I've been using nothing more complicated than TextEdit to keep a list of what I've got on my plate any given day -- I stuck an "Untitled" text file in the top corner of my screen, and just kept it open all the time. But I wasn't quite satisfied with that -- at the end of the day, I still had this text file open, I never remembered to save what was in there, and it just wasn't as elegant a solution as I wanted. Wasn't there anything I could keep open as a memopad, that was smart enough to save itself and slide out of the way when I didn't need it?
A friend recommended Sidenote, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for -- like the Quicksilver Shelf (which I'm using religiously nowadays) it sits in drawer on the side of your desktop, can be pulled open momentarily (either with the mouse or a hotkey) and then slides right back out of view when you're done. Just like TextEdit, it allows for a nice variety of text formatting, and unlike TextEdit, it saves in a repository rather than a file. I only use one note so far, but there's functionality for multiple notes in there as well.
We last mentioned Sidenote way back in 2005, and since then it's been upgraded to 1.7.3, and streamlined a few already streamlined features. Very nice and easy app -- for the purpose, it was exactly what I needed. It's available as donationware from developer Pierre Chatel.
PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.
PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple's Character Palette tool, but it's slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.
PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a "cubic meters" symbol in Helvetica. Typing in "cub" produces no results, but you can click a new "All" button to search across all Unicode fonts.
Bothered with pesky PHP bugs? Grab a can of MacGDBp and exterminate those bugs FAST!
18 year-old Beantown open source whiz Robert Sesek has announced that he'll be releasing his MacGDBp project bright and early on Tuesday, June 17 at his Blue Static website.
MacGDBp builds on the open source Xdebug application to provide a native Cocoa Leopard-only app for remote debugging of PHP scripts. Connect to your running PHP script and you can do instruction stepping to see how your script is working. You can set breakpoints, view the current function call stack, and look at all local variable values.
Robert noted that MacGDBp is designed to be very familiar to anyone who has spent time using the Xcode debugger. He's releasing the app under the GNU GPL version 2, which (duh) means it is available at no cost.
If you do any work with PHP (hey, I'm constantly customizing WordPress myself), MacGDBp may be your new best friend. Be sure to set an iCal alarm for Tuesday morning and get your copy of MacGDBp.
Most of us know that we should perform regular maintenance on our Macs, usually simple things such as doing backups and shaking pizza crumbs out of the keyboard. But did you know that there are a number of UNIX System Tasks that are available for keeping your Mac running at peak performance?
A lot of Mac users don't want to pull up Terminal and type arcane text into the command line, so MacDentro has a GUI front end that you can use to run those commands and keep your Mac cruisin'. IceClean, now at version 3.0.6 has menus for OS X Maintenance, Cleanup, Security and Network, and Utilities, all of which are packed with menu choices or keyboard shortcut equivalents that make mundane maintenance chores simple to perform.
There are other apps available -- Maintenance and MacJanitor come to mind -- that perform similar tasks, but neither of those programs comes close to the depth of capability of IceClean.
The price is right, too - it's free, although you might want to send the MacDentro folks a donation if you find yourself using IceClean regularly. Download IceClean here.
Tip of the hat to our very own Victor Agreda for this find!
Linkinus is the preferred IRC client for a lot of our readers, I know (personally I tend towards Colloquy, but only because I'm a cheapskate and it's donationware), and they kindly dropped us a note to let us know they'd updated to version 1.3. The new build includes the ability to split chat windows (as seen above), in addition to a revamped UI, "major" performance upgrades, plaintext and Spotlight support for logging, and a whole slew of fun things to play around with, including, we're told, a "Whisper" style that will actually embed images, audio files, and YouTube and Google videos right into your chat windows (a la Campfire). Apparently IRC isn't just text anymore.
In fact, at $20 for all these features, Linkinus really is a steal for anyone who spends any amount of time in an IRC channel. Colloquy still does everything I need it to when I jump into IRC periodically, but if you want to chat like a pro in there, Linkinus is a great choice.
Macros can save you a lot of time performing repetitive functions on your Mac. While Automator and AppleScript provide a lot of power, some Mac users want an easier way to capture their keystrokes, mouse clicks and other actions. That's where Keyboard Maestro comes in.
This $36 gem from Stairways Software has just been updated to version 3.1, and adds a profusion of new features. While there's not enough space here to list them all, some of the highlights include:
A clipboard history switcher
An action to save a clipboard to a Named Clipboard
Clipboard Filters
Centering windows on the current screen
Fractional second (i.e., .75) pauses
Can add BBEdit Text Factories to the current clipboard
Stairways also fixed some known glitches from the 3.0 release. A 30-day free trial is available for download and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or better.
Developers and other WWDC attendees looking for a simple printout of the sessions and labs at the conference may be disappointed with the results when printing out Apple's (very slick) Ajax calendars. You could save the pages to PDFs and have a calendar format, but for the purposes of a nice, list-format printout, I can't find a printable version. It's entirely possible I'm not looking hard enough, but at least one other person had the same problem ... and was resourceful enough to come up with a solution. Johannes Fahrenkrug is making available a Ruby script that will make a PDF with a nicely formatted table of all the sessions and labs offered at WWDC.
You can grab the script at his blog and running it is a simple matter of unzipping and executing the wwdcpdf.rb file from Terminal (or wherever you like to do such things). The output is a simple table format with some classic Helvetica action. Those familiar with FPDF may be able to get more artistic with it, or simply build off of the existing code to output in other print or screen-friendly ways. Given that it's based off of an XML file, you can even do some sorting and filtering with a little bit of Ruby magic. Johannes states that he'd be happy to see the script enhanced!
TUAW's going 
Smashing Magazine does a good old-fashioned 
You know if the App Store has been out for a month and we're posting about a web app, it has to be a good one. 
I'm a heavy user of the IconFactory's 
When we talked to 
What good would such an application be without the ability to automate the act of reminding your friends of such debts? Circulator can send an "overdue" SMS or email to debtors, with templates available for the tone of the reminder: nice, neutral or angry. Nothing says "I want my orbital sander back" like frequent, angry, software-generated emails. Of course, this kind of record keeping could also help friends stay friends by avoiding misunderstandings and unfounded accusations.
So for quite a while now I've been using nothing more complicated than 
Bothered with pesky PHP bugs? Grab a can of MacGDBp and exterminate those bugs FAST!
Most of us know that we should perform regular maintenance on our Macs, usually simple things such as doing backups and shaking pizza crumbs out of the keyboard. But did you know that there are a number of UNIX System Tasks that are available for keeping your Mac running at peak performance?
Macros can save you a lot of time performing repetitive functions on your Mac. While 
Developers and other WWDC attendees looking for a simple printout of the sessions and labs at the conference may be disappointed with the results when printing out Apple's (very slick) 
