I’ve noticed a resurgence on the web of people talking about OmniFocus and how they use the app to manage their task lists. Despite being a user for nearly three years — since the first public beta — for some reason I’ve never gotten around to writing about why I find it so useful and how it fits into my…
For an upcoming project, I needed a quick PHP function that would generate strong passwords. It’s an easy problem on the surface, but it has some quirky nuances that appear if you spend any length of time thinking about it. For example, it’s not enough to merely pick characters at random — you have to include at least one character…
Four years ago, on another blog, I wrote about my file backup strategy — everything I use to keep my data safe. A lot has changed since then. CD’s and DVD’s have fallen by the wayside, raw hard disk space has gotten insanely cheap, and online storage has finally taken off in a big way. At the prompting of a…
On this lazy Sunday afternoon I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention a few open source projects I’ve recently updated. GitHub makes sharing code so ridiculously easy, it’s a shame not to call attention to it occasionally in case other people might find something useful. Sosumi 2.0 First up is Sosumi 2.0. Last year, when Apple launched the Find…
A year and a half ago I wrote about OpenFeedback, an open source Cocoa framework for gathering feedback from your users. Initially, it was a sister project to Appcaster, my indie dashboard web app. Since then, Appcaster has grown up and morphed into Shine, but OpenFeedback remained unchanged. Tonight, though, I took a few hours off from Highwire and rewrote…
I’ve been wanting to switch my online store away from PayPal for quite a while now. Although there are a bunch of PayPal horror stories floating around the web (here’s a recent one), my main reason is to make my life simpler. As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to offer quantity discounts, coupon codes,…
Two years ago, shortly after I released VirtualHostX 1.0, I wrote about Appcaster – a web dashboard for Mac developers I built that manages my application updates, payment processing, etc. With the release of VHX 2.0 and Incoming!, I decided it was time to rewrite Appcaster as the original code was hurried and hastily patched over the last few years….
Sosumi is a PHP script that scrapes MobileMe and exposes Apple’s Find My iPhone functionality to the command line or your own web application. This lets you pull your phone’s current location and push messages and alarms to the device. Like my previous blog post that dealt with AT&T’s Family Map service, my goal was to connect my iPhone with…
Location Based Services are hot. They add an extra layer of usefulness on top of the web sites and products we’re already using. The trick is keeping your location updated in the cloud as frequently, comfortably, and securely as possible. Fire Eagle fulfills the security requirement — brokering your whereabouts only to parties you’ve authorized. And iPhone applications like Sparrow…
Last year I posted a PHP script that lets you dial phone numbers using Grand Central. I updated it this morning to support Google Voice as well. The syntax is the same You can grab the code from my google-voice-dialer project on GitHub.