Viewing posts with the tag Technology

iStat Menus and iStat Pro

October 17, 2009 | Productivity | Technology

islayer

Two great apps that I’ve found recently are iSlayer’s iStat programs.

These little apps are basically a window into your Mac’s inner workings.

The iStat Pro is a dashboard widget that displays all sorts of good information about how your Mac is running.  Anything from RAM usage, to Drive stats, to temperature of components, to fan speed are all at your disposal.  The units are dragable to any most any order you’d like.  Also the skin has a few different colors so you can change to taste.

istat4

The iStat Menus contain the exact same information but in your OS X menubar.  The advantage over iStat Pro is the always available visual readouts.  (Yes, that one click to open the dashboard makes a difference!)  You can customize the individual icons to contain more or less visual info and you can (by the order in which you activate them) dictate their position in the menubar.  Also, the colors can be tweaked.

istat2They work well together too.  I use the menus for “critical” – or at least what I call critical – info.  RAM, drives, network usage, and CPU usage are all just a glance away.  I can then open up the widget for other info – like temps, fan speed, uptime, and power stats – that I don’t need in front of me.

In any case, these apps are small and fairly light, and can help troubleshoot if you need some quick info.  (Example: Why is my fan always running!  Oh!  It’s some malfunctioning program!  I’ll fix that!)  Hopefully, you can find good uses for these two programs!

Do you have any apps to recommend?

Notice for WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers

July 4, 2009 | Technology

themespluginsdbJust wanted to pass some info along to all of you budding theme developers.  Your themes need to be licensed under GPL.

Well, okay, part of them.  According to this article from WordPress the php and html in your themes are GPL because WordPress itself is under the GPL.  However, the css files and any images in your theme do not technically need to be licensed under the GPL.  Talk about a monkey wrench!

What that means is technically you could pull off a case where you can hold all the rights to your css and image files to control the php and html.  Now, I’m not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination (and the only area I know something about is music copyright law), but that seems to be really tricky.

As an aside, this is really only a problem for premium themes and plugins.  Because the php and html are derivative works of WordPress, you must follow the GPL.  That does not mean that you cannot charge for your time, effort, and distribution of the themes or plugins.  But you have to allow for the provisions of the GPL; namely, your code must be available, and anyone else can modify and/or distribute the code without permission.

Ah, the new world of copyright and license.  For me, I’ve spent a good amount of time coding, tweaking, and testing my WordPress Creations.  And while I do agree that open is better, I would like the option to get something back for my effort.

Do you all have any thoughts?  Any arguments for or against?

Edit: Well, it seems the crux of the argument is what constitues a derivative work of WordPress.  This article details the problem.  Thanks to Andrei from Softblog for the link.

Open or Closed: Experiencing (Social) Technology

June 23, 2009 | Marketing | Technology

open_closed_doorOpen.  Or Closed.

This has become a big question for web technology.  Opening up your source or API to the public can reap huge dividends.  Just look at Twitter and all the news and apps and traffic it has.  (It also has great content, but let’s have that as a given.)  Closing your source or API can have quality control benefits and keeps your tech where you want it.  Think Apple and their secrecy.  Great innovations.  Pros and cons on both sides.

For me, I’m more on the open side.  Here’s my take.

Using my Twitter example, its growth has shot up in recent months.  Personally, I think it is because of its openness.  You could use any number of apps to use Twitter.  You can control your experience.  If you like the web version, use that.  If you like an app, use that.  Switch as you feel led.

Now, I’m not sure being totally open all of the time is the way to go.  Apple obviously is doing okay, and they keep a tight lid on their advancements.  The iPhone, the iPod, iTunes, and (oh yeah) their great computers.  They do open their code up so people can create programs to use on their hardware (the App Store, Objective-C, Cocoa, etc).

So, what do you think?  Open or Closed?  Or Both?  Or some better way?

Wordpress Development Cheat Sheets

June 17, 2009 | Technology

wpcheatsheet

Found this via John Saddington today.  It’s good enough that I wanted to post this for any of my readers who design Wordpress themes.

This article contains some Wordpress cheat sheets for all of your theme development and design needs.  I’ve already downloaded most of them, and will be referencing them often.

So, click through and enjoy, and let us know if you found them useful.

Video Games Saved My Life

June 14, 2009 | Fun | Life | Technology

video_games

Going about my usual blog reading, I was reading this post (which linked to this Mashable post).  Great thoughts.  I’d like to add a few.

Video games are the movies of the next generation.  Games can suck you into their worlds so easily, it’s not even funny.  I remember playing Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic for days and days, totally immersed in the story.  I think that game might be one of the reasons I like writing stories so much.

But as much of a bad rap as these games get, they do teach us something.  They keep our minds active (and now with the Wii, the rest of us too!), they make you solve problems, they make you work with others.  These are all very important in the working world.  Use this to your advantage.

As an aside, I know there are games out there that are over the top.  All things in moderation.

What have games taught you?

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