Spikes Of Nothingness - osx category

James Strachan's favorite Mac applications

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:01:21 GMT

James has a nice list of Mac applications and I am using most of them. However, there is one missing: ChocoFlop, a CoreImage-based, realtime, non-destructive, high dynamic range Image and Photo Editing Application for Mac OS X.

Some of ChocoFlop's features:
- Very fast launch time (about 1 or 2 second on cheapest mac mini)
- Written from scratch for Mac OS X 10.4+
- No legacy or compatibility slow code
- Uses all hardware acceleration (CPU and GPU)
- Universal binary for PowerPC and Intel
- Uses CoreImage and custom OpenGL code.
- The download is about one megabyte (zipped) so far and will remain in that range (translation will probably increase this).

Yup, I am using it with no problems and BTW, ChocoFlop and Flop.ca are not related :)

SHIMO, an extremely well done CISCO compliant VPN Client for OSX

Sun, 27 May 2007 15:21:17 GMT

Since I moved to OSX, one ugly and unstable tool that I had to live with, was the Cisco VPN client. Being completely unhappy with this Cisco little app, I was always looking for an alternative and few days ago I found it: SHIMO.

Shimo has many reasons to be the best choice for OSX, and I'll just quote few:

... full Cisco compatibility
... saves passwords in your keychain
... automatic (re-)connect on wakeup, network-changes, etc
... global shortcuts for fast connect/disconnect
... stable and well integrated with the OSX. Better than the Cisco VPN client
... statistics screen

And the feature I also love: it can be easily integrate with growl for notifications.

If you already have a CiscoVPN connection defined, SHIMO will import your previous settings and use them right away.

I love it!

Goodbye Cisco :)

Display folder contents as a tree structure

Sun, 27 May 2007 14:57:28 GMT

A lot of times I had to do acrobatics to be able to display the contents of a UNIX folder as a tree. Well, no more!

Looking for using the ls command in various combinations I found this command gem:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

So for a folder where the standard: ls webapps/hello/ will display this:

WEB-INF   actions   content   pages     public    templates

The new command trick: ls -R webapps/hello/ | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/   /' -e 's/-/|/', will display:

   |---/WEB-INF
   |-----classes
   |---/actions
   |---/content
   |---/pages
   |---/public
   |-----styles
   |---/templates

Neat, eh?

There is also a nice script wrapper for the above command, follow this link for more.