Apple have just released iTunes 10, and with the addition of Ping – it’s given them the chance to dip their toes into social media. I’ve only had a short amount of time to play with Ping and from what I can see it’s seems like a very closed network – restricting itself to just iTunes, there was supposed to be an option to connect and find your Facebook friends – but this was removed on launch. Now the only way to find friends is to search by name – which is a little hit and miss. Also, there’s no short vanity style URL that you can point your friends towards, although there is a work around;

• From the Ping menu in the iTunes store, use the drop down and click on ‘My Profile’.
• Right Click (Option + Click) on your name at the top of the page, you’ll access a small menu – click on ‘Copy Link’.
• You now have a direct URL link to your profile that when clicked on will open iTunes and view your profile page, allowing people to easily find and follow you. The URL looks something like this;
  http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=114837797
• As the link isn’t exactly very short or easy to remember, I logged into my bit.ly account and created a custom short URL; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas – much better.

At the moment the network seems very geared towards the masses, initial recommendations are the same for everyone – so along with everyone else I was directed to follow artists such as Lady Gaga, U2 and Jack Johnson. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t give me a more tailored set of artists to follow – they know enough about my music purchasing and listening habits to understand that I wouldn’t want to follow any of these people.

There were also some teething problems with uploading a photo, after multiple attempts my photo wotuld not upload. I searched Twitter to see if anyone else had the same problem (many did), and some had a solution – using a 250 x 250 pixel image, this seemed to work and my image is now awaiting approval online!

At the moment and for me, Ping isn’t going to replace LastFM as a recommendation engine as it’s tricky to find people who are into the same music as I am, but I think it could still work out very well for Apple. If Ping encourages people to review and ‘like’ releases on the iTunes store – it could lead to more purchases. There was a case study (in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point I believe) where by a certain number of reviews on an Amazon product page was able to influence people in to making a purchase, I’m sure 27 was the magic number, they didn’t all have to be positive reviews either. Once a product has 27 or more reviews the purchase rate starts to substantially increase.

I’m definitely tempted to review a couple of recent purchases, just to get some content into my own Ping stream, and if this creates a cycle where I get more followers then I could stick with Ping.

So if Ping is your thing, you can follow me here; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas

Homescreen.me is a new website, currently in beta at the moment, so invite only (my invite came through within a couple of weeks). All you do is upload a capture of a screen from either your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and include a description – this provides a nice way to display your current set of favourite or most used applications.

Here’s mine; http://homescreen.me/martinlucas

I’m not sure how far this website can go, it’s pretty static at the moment as there’s no way to share your screens (via Twitter, Facebook etc), no RSS feed for a user, or the ability to follow other Homescreen.me users – which would be a nice way of finding new apps. I’m sure additional features will get added to the site in the future. Also an app would be handy so you could upload your screen grabs straight from your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, instead I took the screen grab and emailed it to myself to upload.

I’ve been a fan of Grace Smith’s blog and especially her Dock Series where by she invites a web / design professional to show off their dock, it’s a great way of finding out what other designers are using, comparing their set up to your own – as well as finding new applications. A while ago she ‘opened the floor and invited people to take part’, I only just stumbled across the post – not sure why / how I missed it first time around, but all the same I screen grabbed my dock and here is a brief explanation on each of the applications that reside on my dock.

• Finder – My OCD means everything is very neatly filed away inside here.
• Dashboard – I do actually have a couple of apps in here that I use, apart from the pre-installed Calculater and Conversion tool – I use a Loren Ipsom generator by Tobias Ahlin, which is rather nice.
• Photoshop – I’ve been using PhotoShop for over 10 years now, I do all my designing in it – when possibly Illustrator and Fireworks could sometimes be better suited – but I’m so comfortable with PS I can’t let it go.
• Dreamweaver – Using this less and less now as I’m working with Wordpress more and more, I even looked into switching to Coda – but I couldn’t as there are too many DreamWeaver specific features I’d miss; especially the server behaviours which I rely on for my PHP / MySQL work.
• Adobe Illustrator – I wasn’t using Illustrator as much as I should, or at least when it was the best tool for the job – so last year I started designing T-Shirts and forced myself to do all the design work in Illustrator. It has definitely helped me learn the application, and work out how I can use it more in the future.
• CyberDuck – My FTP client of choice, I know a lot of people swear by Transmit – but this free app has never let me down; it has a great dock icon too!
• MAMP – I’ll either develop a website on the live hosting / domain, or I’ll work offline on my laptop with this Apache / MySQL and PHP setup.
• Text Editor – Editing and viewing simple documents, I also use Google Docs.
• Stickies – I used to organise all my work on these things, now I use them as a basic list of my current projects – so I can quickly see what I have going on, as well as what I have coming up the future. I also use them to make short notes while I’m on the phone.
• CurdBee – This is my invoicing app of choice, I’ve used the Fluid App to create an application from this superb web based invoicing service.
• Dictionary – My spelling can be pretty bad at times, so this gets me out of trouble on a regular basis.
• Contacts – Keeps all my addresses in order.
• iCal – I try to organise as much of my work / personal life in iCal as I can.
• Tweetie – Just switched from TweetDeck to this and I’m enjoying the cleaner interface, and the less is more approach.
• Skype – I’ve only just signed up, but I’m hoping it will become in handy with future clients who use it, especially those who are not based nearby.
• GMail – Another Fluid App, this time my Google Mail account. It even gives me an indication of how many unread emails I have in my inbox
• FireFox – My current browser of choice, and has been since my recent Mac Book Pro upgrade. FireFox struggled on my old 12″ G4 Powerbook.
• Safari – Now only used for testing.
• Opera – Surprised me how quick this browser is – but still only used for testing.
• Chrome – Another speedy alternative browser, and again only really used for testing.
• Camino – The least used of my browsers, and one for just us Mac users. I do occasionally use it when I feel the need for a stripped down, simple browser.
• Paparazzi – This takes screen grabs of individual web pages, handy for taking screen shots for portfolio pieces and uploading to CSS galleries.
• iTunes – Music all day long with this…
• LastFM – and this, I use LastFM’s radio stations based on similar artists and keywords (my username is djmartinlucas if you’d like to view my profile)…
• Spotify – … and finally this. I’ve only just started using Spotify, but I’m already building a collection of albums and playlists. And to my surprise – I don’t mind the adverts.
• Preview – I use it as my PDF reader, I find it a lot quicker to use than Adobe Acrobat.
• iPhoto Buddy – This is cool, it allows me to have 2 separate iPhoto albums (or more if you wanted), I have one for all my stock photos and a second for my personal photography.
• iPhoto – Store all my photos, both stock and personal ones. Really liking the recent upgrade with faces and better Flickr integration.
• Linotype Font Explorer – I use this to browse and organise all my fonts.
• App Cleaner – If I didn’t have this then I’d end up with a whole load of applications (and all their associated files) installed on my Mac, ones that I had tried out and then forgotten about. This makes it really easy to uninstall any unwanted application, and to make sure all the files have been removed.

I hope there’s a couple of applications in there that you might find useful. I might follow this up with a ‘Showing Off My Menu Bar’ post as there’s one or two neat little applications in there too.

I was ripping a few mix cd’s for my ipod yesterday and i put a disc in the drive and it didn’t show up in itunes, or in finder – very strange…

so i restarted and nothing changed, i held down the eject key on the keyboard and still nothing happened. this was when i panicked a little and hit the Apple Discussions forum to find out if this had happened to anyone else.

there were a few similar scenarios but nothing exactly the same, but the solution was found. basically you have to restart and hold down the touch pad button until the cd ejects – and it did.

here’s the support page with all the info: docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88068

i’ve been a mac os x’er for about a year and a half now and have gathered a fair few little applications in my dock. here’s some of the essentials;

cyberduck
my ftp client of choice, it’s a really great ftp client that does everything that is needed and it does so in a nice, clean and simple manor. get it here, cyberduck.ch.

cocoa mysql
a great little open source database management tool for os x, i’m not the most technically minded so i like small applications that make things simple for the not too technical and this is one of them. get it here, cocoamysql.sourceforge.net.

paparazzi!
paparazzi is a little application that takes screen grabs of websites, it’s one of these apps that does one thing really very well. you can export the final screen grab one of 4 different file types in either full size or as a reduced thumbnail. get it here, www.derailer.org/paparazzi.

adium
if you wanna chat on your mac, then you’re gonna need adium. you can login with your msn, aol, icq, yahoo messenger, google talk, .mac and many more. adium is also expandable and customisable – you can change the icons, add emoticons, messenger styles and more. get it here, adiumx.com.

snap ‘n’ drag
the screen grab function on os x is pretty good, but this app goes that little bit further. giving you options to grab the whole screen, a selection or an individual window. snap ‘n’ drag will also allow you to grab video clips from media players and the dvd player – which is the reason that i found it. get it here, www.yellowmug.com/snapndrag.

senuti
not being able to take tracks off your ipod – the only downside of connecting your ipod with itunes? maybe! but solve the issue with this smart little program. get it here, www.fadingred.org/senuti.

mac janitor
one that i can’t decide whether it’s needed or not, basically os x needs to be on during the night to run certain scripts that do a series of ‘house-keeping’ on your mac. i’m not sure what this house-keeping involves but it sounds helpful and for those of us who don’t leave their macs on 24/7 this program will run all the scripts for you. it did actually free up a load of hard drive space when i first ran it. try it for yourself here.

mac saber
now for something fun – if you have a mac laptop and one with a motion sensor you can run this application and throw your mac around and it will make light saber noises – just be careful with your mac, don’t let it slip out of your grip! get it here from macupdate.

photoshop has been the number one choice for image editing with designers and photographers for a number of years but it may have to look over it’s shoulder if Pixelmator lives up to it’s expectations.

the user interface looks lovely, it’s built on open source technology and it has all the filters, effects and tools that you’d find in adobe’s industry leader. check out the website for more details, it’s not out yet so like me you’ll have to sign up for their which will send you an email to notify you of Pixelmator’s release.

www.pixelmator.com

the original adverts featured 2 american chaps discussing the pro’s of owning and using a mac and the con’s of owning a pc including virus’s and having to read all those manuals. well now we’ve got versions featuring british comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Channel 4’s Peep Show.

you can view all the new uk versions here.

i would safely guess that every technology blog and news site on the world wide web is currently reporting on apple’s announcement of the long awaited iphone. it looks like an amazing device that i’m already adding to my wish list, and not only is it a phone, but a widescreen ipod (4gb & 8gb) with full screen video and a pretty nice internet communicator with email and web browsing with safari. possibly most impressively is that it runs apple’s own opperating system – os x, for ‘desktop class’ applications.

there’s a whole load of information at apple.com/iphone where you can also watch steve job’s keynote speech.

i know this sounds ridiculous and believe me, my girlfriend called me something along those lines when i started swinging my powerbook around the room like a sword, but it’s now possible with this little application called macsaber.

you need a SMS (Sudden Motion Sensor) enabled mac for this to work, the application picks up the motions and movement of your mac and turns them into really realistic light saber type noises. oh, and if you’ve got a mac laptop with a backlit screen it will create brighter flashes with the more violent movements!