Alvin Lai

Finally its here!

Remember playing quake or counterstrike and having to pull out the cool console/terminal ingame to type in some commands to change a game level or something?

Something like this.

Now there's Visor that brings that to the Mac desktop! Check out my screenshot!

Sweet!

You can bind a shortcut key to call it up with a nice transition effect with customizable delay.

The nice thing is Visor automatically hides when u click on another application, so it doesn't get in your way.

And of course it retains the session/remembers what you typed even after it hides so you can resume work after recalling it.

Get rocking with Visor here!

What's with Safari these days? It's been pissing me off with the ever frequent beachball (Mac OSX's equivalent of the busy hour glass).

The last straw came when I had to forcefully terminate whilst working on some AJAX scripts.

I turned to Camino, a mac specific browser based on the same Gecko rendering engine that made Firefox famous for its accuracy in rendering webpages.

Specially created for the Mac, Camino is tightly integrated using native Cocoa.

The only thing that you might miss from Safari is probably Sogudi, a plugin that allows you to do instant wikipedia searches like "wikip manhattan project" or google searches with "g steve yang".

A quick google search provided the answer.

Here's it:

Just open Show All Bookmarks, add a new Bookmark, for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

and assign a keyword. Like "wp". Then, type wp Camino in the location bar, et voila!

Enjoy!

I'm not sure if it's the case for most of you, but I've found it increasingly difficult to get to know new music.

Maybe I've grown out of techno. I need a breather from classical.

Maybe a friend has sent you a single song that you really like but don't know where of that came from.

Sure you could check out the other songs from the same artist. But what if you could get to know new songs that feel similiar?

In comes Last.FM

The sky got a little clearer when I finally stumbled back on Last.fm. A webservice that introduces music based on similar artists you specifiy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could only listen to a limited number of 30 second samples from the website when you search for an artist.

And you even have to sign up to preview the 30second tracks. Oh well, I signed up grudgingly and guess what I stumbled on?

A Last.FM Player application download!

It recommended me the Mac OSX version, but there are also Windows (maybe Linux) versions for download too.

And what does it do?

Search for an artist and it plays FULL length tracks of similiar music!

Such a godsend. :D

Searched for Stevie Ray Vaughan and what did it get me? Led Zepplin Stairway to heaven, another of my favourites.

Found another nice band!

The Allman Brothers Band - In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.

Anyone has the CD? :D

Enjoy!

Always seen those magnificient screencasts (read: digital recording/video of a computer screen output) of people teaching you how to use certain software or even teach you a new programming language?

I've always seen those Ruby on Rails screencasts and Subversion screencast and always wondered if it was easy to come up one with myself.

Screencasts really help you to follow step by step, much like an online lecture that's directly captured from someone's computer screen so it's really easy to follow! If only IVLE webcasts can be done this way :/

Today, I'm proud to introduce you a FREE mac software that allows you to do that easily, called IShowU, which is only available on the mac of course :)