I was just updating our home page to showcase our two Apple Design Awards and suddenly noticed that we only twittered about that and forgot to mention it here so far:
TheCodingMonkeys and Boinx won an Apple Design Award for their collaboration on BoinxTV.
It's a great honor to receive a second engraved aluminum cube after we won our first for SubEthaEdit in 2003. To me it's already a definite highlight of this year.
And as you can imagine Dominik is pretty happy about it as well:
Today on 37signals' "Signal vs. Noise", Matt Linderman shares the story how he used SubEthaEdit together with David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried to write books together:
How do you collaborate on a book when one author (DHH) is in San Francisco, one’s in Chicago (Jason), and one’s in NYC (me)? Last week, we did a joint writing session and pulled it off. Here’s how we did it:
We all log into iChat and start an audio chat. That way we can discuss what we’re doing.
Then we work on one essay from the book at a time and paste the current version into SubEthaEdit. While originally designed for coding together, its collaboration features work great for co-writing text too.
All you need to do is drag a person’s name from iChat into SubEthaEdit and then they’re collaborating on the document with you. Color coding lets you see who’s editing what. It works so well that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and it doesn’t get (too) confusing.
This week in coding monkey related news we'd like to point you to the guys at Boinx, who just released version 1.2.1 of their BoinxTV software, which we helped create.
BoinxTV is a full-fledged TV Studio in your Mac that let's you mix video and audio input from DV cameras, webcams and QuickTime movies, add lower thirds and all other effects imaginable with Quartz Composer and output a TV show, video podcast or event recording live-to-tape.
We are happy to report that we released a new version of the TCMPortMapper framework and Port Map, that avoids triggering a nasty bug in mDNSResponder leading to it logging lots and lots of messages to system.log.
We also added and fixed support for some Draytek router models. Get it here.
Some of you might remember the so-called "Broadcast Treaty" that the World Intellectual Property Organization discussed in 2007. To break it down to simple words, afaiu there where plans that the act of broadcasting something would give copy rights to the works used in this context to the broadcaster and therefore make things even more complicated and restrictive for internet users and creators.
Today, twitter user @eulenherr sent us a link to a talk featuring Cory Doctorow telling the story of how the treaty fell trough thanks to how the argument was framed by him, the EFF and other NGOs with near-realtime notes and blog posts. It fills us with joy to hear that he and his colleagues used SubEthaEdit to collaborate on the texts that averted change for the worse. We are proud to have played a (albeit tiny) part in this.
I have an 17 inch Intel iMac in my living room, next to a nice HD-TV to which it is connected via miniDVI to DVI, and then DVI to HDMI cable. This is more or less my home server, it runs all the time. Since it runs anyway I had the thought of putting a clock on it. So off I went and did a simple Quartz Composition just displaying the time in big Helvetica, in a 24ish yellow color, including seconds.
I quickly decided that this variant had two major flaws, and a minor:
when you display seconds on a digital clock, there is always the need of everyone that is visiting to constantly look at that clock
quartz composer is way to inefficient for this job, because it always displays at full framerate even when no changes are done if at least one time based patch is in the composition. I don’t know why it does it, but having 60 identical frames per second rendered isn’t something I accept here. When removing the seconds display, they become 3600 identical frames. Moreover if you use share screen, the vnc server will try to update as quickly.
just big fat yellow helvetica is not beautiful enough.
Thinking about how a nice clock might look like, it came to me: the iPhone unlock screen clock. Perfect. That is a clock I want to have in my living room. After some hours I got my result, a nice looking iPhone clock as a quartz composition. Feel free to use it anyway you like – I put it under a BSD license. I’d suggest you put it in ~/Library/ScreenSavers and use it as screen saver.
Two problems solved, one left to go: efficiency. Okay, so what I really want is a clock that is updated once every minute. And I want to have it on all the time, not only when the screensaver is active. This way I have a nice clock on the second screen when I use VLC or Quicktime to view Videos. And I want it as backdrop so I can use the second screen if I want to (my HD-TV is main screen so front row will present itself on it). So hereby I present iPhoneClock 1.0. It renders about one frame every minute and places an iPhone like clock on the Desktop Background of your display. If you have more than one display attached it will choose the display where the menu bar is not. Both the Composition and the App require 10.5.
The guys over at Adium have posted a neat story about how they compile their changelogs for releases. They use SubEthaEdit as you can see in the screenshot. Generally one wouldn't associate fun and "amusing parts of work" with compiling a list of changes, but it seems collaborative editing makes even that possible... ;)
Congratulations to our friends at Panic for winning the Apple Design Award for Best User Experience this year. Cabel has a pretty funny video of the ceremony for a nice peak behind the scenes of WWDC. Check it out.
We're excited to welcome an application today that can edit text together with SubEthaEdit.
We're even more excited that it's Coda, Panic's latest masterpiece. It's really great to see a long-standing collaboration between TheCodingMonkeys and Panic finally bearing fruits everyone can enjoy.
We think it's great to have a second application powered by what we call the Subetha Engine, broading the user base and making collaboration more common. We are proud that this kind of collaboration now crosses application borders to the benefit of all Coda and SubEthaEdit users.
So, in summary: Congrats to our friends at Panic, great work! And to all SubEthaEdit and Coda users: Let's party together, at least in a online simultaneous text editing kind of way.
Great news, everyone. We are happy to release SubEthaEdit 2.6 today. Besides the usual fixes and small improvements we have two major new features in this release: Tabbed windows (as previewed) and invitation windows that look about 300 percent more awesome.
This screenshot illustrates the changes pretty well, I think:
Version 2.6 is a free upgrade for all current licence holders and has a 30-day free trial for the rest of you. So what are you waiting for? Download it already. ;)
