Author Archives //

As a graphic design student I use my bamboo tablet from Wacom extensively. Wacom recently expanded the bamboo experience with Bamboo Dock, a collection of handy apps and widgets based on adobe air. Each of these apps are either based around productivity or just plain fun! Until earlier in the week these were PC only, although Wacom has now released the mac equivalent.

Opened with a simple drawing of a line with your tablet the dock expands to show all the apps that you have installed with the option of installing apps later on through community sources. Currently only a few apps are available such as Doodle which sorta says it all but it fun if you need to scribble down a few notes or sketch out some ideas…and  Landmarker, which is a fully functional map interface that you can also scribble on and leave notes… although a downside to this is that it uses yahoo maps instead of Google which I would have preferred. Finally you can also add shortcuts to any application installed, saving you from having programs on your dock or in a stack.

Overall a very nice piece of software with alot of potential for some great add-ons! For more information, check out the Wacom Bamboo Dock site.

29/09/2008

Mactropolis News

Long time readers may remember a post a while back about the BETA of a custom RSS reader of the website for Mobile Safari, I am pleased to announce that 2nd BETA of the service is starting again available soon at this address where you will be able to test out the new platform which features these enhancements……

  • Brand new graphics to accompany the new site design
  • Significant speed increase
  • Background images designed to accompany large posts
  • Brand new home screen icon

Overall this new design is much more efficient although I am still seeing some problems with image resizing so I’ll have to see if I can do any editing to fix that!

A couple of people did mention that they had no idea how to use the service so as a rough guide you do not need to use any of Mobile Safari’s navigation buttons, you just tap the story you want to read, scroll down as per usual with any website and then if you would like to go back to more articles then tap the back to more articles button. Or if you would like to read the current story on the Mactropolis website then tap read more! Very simple very concise and built from the ground up for iPhones!

01/04/2008

Fun Stuff, iPhone

Mactropolis RSS Reader BETA TestHi there! I’m Jacob, the latest blogger here at Mactropolis. You can expect at least two things from me here:

1. A Student’s Opinion On Mac and Software Available For Students.

2. A Journey Through Learning and Coding For the iPhone SDK.

Along with these I will also be posting any reviews that I deem useful to you. The reader.

But for now its down to business! In my first app here developed exclusively for the iPhone I give you the custom built Mactropolis iPhone RSS Reader. Built using the SDK components for Dashcode this is a very basic web app. Yes mobile safari has a built in RSS reader but it doesn’t allow for customization or any images to give it a personalized look, this is where Dashcode comes in, using its own built in JavaScript based code you can edit everything and customize the JavaScript a tiny bit to create something that fits towards your blog or websites theme.

As you can see its very simple to use considering you understand the key concepts. The Mayor and I have been working on this for the past three weeks and we have now got a version ready for release, be warned this may not function as we are expecting and we would love your feedback on the app. If you are using firmware 1.1.3 or higher then you can add this as a web clip with a custom icon developed but if you are using an older firmware then you can always just add it as a bookmark on your device. Just visit http://mactropolis.com/reader to view the page although don’t try to view it using a standard desktop browser as it WILL NOT work.

Any feedback that you have will be taken into account. Please send any feedback you have to mayor AT mactropolis.com. We are looking to improve it massively in comparison to where it is right now!

Thanks and watch out for improvements and other apps in the future!