Secret Weapon Labs

The Year In Review

Through ups and downs of the past year, it’s been a very fun and interesting ride. Here’s what’s piqued my interest the most:

News, Stories, Software, People, & Places

• Apple is taunting us with yet another WWDC and who knows what will turn up
• FileMaker is still fun to run and develop in. I purchased 8.5 and have not looked back to anything below 8.0. I haven’t upgraded my site to 8.5 but that’s another story entirely
• Photoshop is lurking in as CS3 and it looks schweet
• People made MacHeist more popular by talking about how they didn’t like to talk about it
• Gears Of War came out for the Xbox 360 and quickly redefined what is the new standard (for the most part) and quasi-realistic first-person shooters
• Vanilla 1.0 may really be the new Wordpress. Go check it out.
• Flickr continues to exemplify the kind of cool new site that redefines the seemingly age-old thing (photos in general, but photo-booths as well). I’ve been to the NYC version of this San Francisco bar and it certainly leads to fun.
• John Mayer’s new album (Continuum) kicks ass. Go get it if you like things … like music.
• I’ve been trying to get into HDR (high-dynamic range) photography. It’s unfortunately quite difficult with Photoshop CS2. At least until I learned about is the freeware CinePaint (available at cinepaint.org) In addition, there is Pixel (http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12)
• CSSEdit has become one of my new favorite and de facto Dock-icon-apps. It’s simple, inexpensive, elegant, and damn powerful. If you’ve moved your design away from Dreamweaver exclusively and closer to a BBEdit->Dreamweaver->CSS tweaking kind of workflow or if you are skipping Dreamweaver entirely, this little app is worth every penny and more. Definitely check it out.
• If you ever loved building stuff with Legos, well now you can do it on your Mac with Lego’s official Digital Designer software or the open-source Bricksmith. Both seem to be ridiculously fun if you’re into building stuff.
• Paparazzi has been one of my favorite apps for a number of years and yet few Mac users know about it. It effectively takes full webpage images for you to archive or do whatever with, with the greatest of ease. In otherwords, if you wanted a PNG image of a long web page, you can fire up the app, provide it with the address of the page, and it stitches together and generates the full-size and full-length image for you.
• Pixen is a great little app if you love drawing pixel art. It features an interface hybrid of the age-old ResEdit and Photoshop. It’s bitmap graphics in style and is not to be missed! Seriously…
• Lastly and most importantly, on a personal and professional note, I’m close to releasing a major piece of software built entirely in FileMaker. It’s a great achievement. I’m completely proud of it. And you’ll be hearing all about it, very soon.
• Happy 2007! Live it up!