I’ve also removed the manual download. The only way to download Afae now is to use the update site (http://robrohan.com/projects/afae). If you’d used the update site before, you’ll have to uninstall the old plugins and re-setup the update site. You can read more about it on the project page.

Thank you to everyone who’s been using Afae, your feedback, and your generous donations. I really appreciate it.

(Photo curtsey of Choubistar via his flickr account)

… wait for it …

Ok, it’s probably not really true ^_^. The laptop was likely left over from a previous, non Microsoft, presenter. According to a few comments from people who said they were there, Ballmer’s slides were from an automatic slideshow which was probably not running from the Mac. But still, I find it pretty funny.

I woke up Saturday with an idea (which is actually a joke at our house now, “Guess what honey, I have an idea!”). I wanted to have a podcast of news bits that I could listen to while I did my morning routine - the catch being I wanted it daily, and I wanted to control the shows overall subjects at will.

That desire, along with my new found Automator curiosity, led me to throw together Rohan Times Radio News ( :-D ). It’s an automatic process that takes an RSS feed, reads it, and makes a podcast out of the stories. To get the content I want, I am using yahoo pipes to filter and sort the feeds, and then republish the feeds as the shows teleprompt.

Here is a basic overview of how it works (sorry for the oddities with the movie, youtube seems to be doing odd things on upload lately):

One of the coolest parts about this is it basically requires no code (I did, however, use a bit of code to have finer control).

I don’t think I can publish the podcast for the world, as I think it would be seen as a copyright violation, but if you are interested in this let me know.

They are made by a guy named Todd Ditchendorf who, apparently, used to work at Apple.

Some helpful gems that I use and recommend:

• A SOAP Service Tester.
• An XSLT plugin for textmate.
• An XML plugin for textmate that does XML document validation.
• An XML-RPC Service Tester.

His main project appears to be a project called Fluid which from the demo seems like AjaxLocal done correctly (think Adobe AIR without the local access / flash part).

(I should preface this with using game emulators and and game ROMS is, sadly, of questionable legality)

Short and sweet: it seems XBox controllers (non 360) use USB to do their magic, so modifying an XBox controller to use with your computer is very simple. Just cut the XBox controller and the USB cords then wire them together (leaving out the yellow wire). The inside wire colors will match up so it shouldn’t be hard, but here is a movie showing how it’s done (ignore the driver part unless you are on windows).

Once your controller is ready, download the Mac OS X XBox HID driver. After it’s installed you can find the settings in System Preferences.

Finally, fire up Snes9x, and go into Config > Configure Controllers. You should see the following:

In this screen click on a button (for example the purple up arrow) then press the corresponding button on the controller (the direction pad up button, or the joystick up). Once the controller is configured you’re all set to play - and you didn’t even have to ruin your original SNES controllers.

I downloaded the first SDK, but I found it to be less than useful since you had to build the UI by hand. It seemed to be kind of like AWT when it first came out - where you had to instantiate controls, and place them by hand in code. I just couldn’t find the time to try to mess with that - guessing Apple would do this update at some point.

Interface Builder is the standard UI building application on Mac, and it’s probably the best one I’ve used. I can’t wait to have some time to checkout this version of the SDK.

I want my iPhone to act like an old Nintendo controller that controls a game emulator running on my Mac either via the USB connector or bluetooth.

Now if you are not into retro Nintendo games, and don’t immediately see why this would be totally cool, hear me out - this would be my nirvana situation. (plus the whole "iPhone UI changing to a controller that does things to my Mac via bluetooth" has many other applications)

A lot of people in my generation like old Nintendo games. I still play them, and some of my friends do too. (I am not sure how prevalent the market is, but I would be willing to bet it’s somewhat large, and would be larger if something like this existed).

The whole backlog of the Nintendo catalog could be sold over iTunes, and you could play the games on Apple TV on your computer. Emulators already exist for Mac OS X, and the resources these emulators require is not huge.

Apple could get a sense of the casual gaming market, and Nintendo could make some money off items that are just sitting there. Heck, I mean if they charged $4 per game, it’s money they were not getting before. If it worked out, they could open it up a bit more…

This might even work with the WII titles. The iPhone has XYZ sensors - you could make some really neat games using that. Of course, iPod touches would work as well.

There could even be "lite" versions of the games that continued on the iPhone when you disconnected from the main platform (the laptop or Apple TV or whatever). Like you have to keep feeding your character or it’ll die - I don’t know things like that.

I would be fun if Nintendo released an SDK, or set of tools, to start new games on the old platform too. I’d like to play a new Legend of Zelda game. (I wish they would do that anyway.)

But in it’s simplest form, I’d like a controller application to play emulation games on my Mac. All the pieces are already there. The emulator, game roms (which are currently only legal if you own the physical game I think), and the ability to use USB to control the emulators.

I think if a non-company (aka hacker) is going to make this, they’ll have to use a jail broken iPhone as I think the Apple SDK doesn’t give you access to the USB (an bluetooth?). There is already a jail broken application that does all this already on the iPhone itself, but I almost always have my laptop and phone with me and I’d rather use a bigger screen.

Oh well, one can dream.

I stumbled on a Git hosting provider today called github. The prices are good, and they range from free (for hackers), to $12/month for small teams, to $100/month for large companies.

If your company does outsourcing to countries where the net connectivity is sometimes sketchy, you owe it to yourself to checkout Git. The distributed nature of the program allows for better collaboration in those types of environments.

Because each “clone” of the repository can still commit, even when the network is down people can still work, and re-sync when the network comes back up.

The other gem I spotted today was a Git Textmate bundle which makes using Git in Textmate as easy as using SVN. Here is a screens shot:

You can install the bundle by following the steps on Gitorious (You need to have the command line version of git installed first).

And lastly, I said before that “git doesn’t have a UI and you need to be comfortable with the shell”, but I was incorrect. If you run the command git gui from within a git directory there is a simple but effective UI. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like on Mac OS X but it works on Linux and Windows as well:

I find the Textmate bundle nicer for most day to day activities, but git gui frequently comes in handy.

You can add the gadget to your iGoogle home page (which I am starting to dig), and access it from any operating system from just about any where in the world:

Or if you use the Google side bar in windows, you can add it there too.

You can even embed the Gadget on your own web site.

A new word is shown almost every day (Monday through Friday), posted at 6:00 am PST.