Any product designers fond of the Mac OS X platform will appreciate how monumental this is. In their Manufacturing 2010 Products Webinar [you can access the full webinar here], Autodesk has announced that they will be bringing the AliasStudio line of surface modeling tools to the Mac platform. Core77 transcribes the announcement as follows:
According to product line manager Thomas Heermann, they’ve been building a Mac version for about a year and a half “when [Apple] started shipping really good hardware”, and expect to ship it along with the new Windows version in early April.
Now that Apple is running Mac hardware on the X86 architecture we’re seeing more developers port their previously unavailable software packages to the Mac platform. McNeel has been beta testing a Mac version of Rhino (my personal surface modeler of choice at the moment) for a while now, but it’s not ready for a full release yet. It will be interesting to see if the Mac version of AliasStudio really matches up to the concurrently released Windows version. There are a number of other 3D modeling packages available on the Mac platform already, and Core77 gives a decent summary of options on their site. As a product designer that prefers an OS X work flow, I’m excited to see so many industry standard software packages making their way to the platform.
Via: Core 77 + Autodesk
The [utterly awesome] web comic XKCD has finally exposed the Kindle for what it truely is…
From: XKCD – Kindle
A year and a half ago I wrote a blog post about using AFPd on my hacked iPhone to get access to my phone’s file system through Finder using Apple’s AFP system. When firmware 2.0 came out I went legit with my phone and lost touch with jailbreak app updates. I recently re-jailbroke my iPhone and now I’m having to relearn how to accomplish the things I used to have set up. A lot has changed in a year and a half!
AFPd apparently broke with firmware 2.0, and Netatalk was developed to take its place. You’ll find Netatalk in Cydia. If it’s not showing up under default repositories, do a web search to find out where it’s living. Once installed, you’ll see your device as a shared computer in the left sidebar of Finder. When you select the device, you’ll need to hit “Connect As…” and log in as either root or mobile. If you haven’t changed the password for these accounts, it will be alpine, but you really should change this password. Until you do, anyone who knows anything about Mobile OSX defaults will be able to access your file system.
That point about security brings up another issue… anyone on a Mac on the same WiFi network as your device will see your name in their finder sidebar. It’s not a huge deal, I’m a pretty public person, but I’d still like better control over my name being thrown around in places like coffee shops and other public connections. This is where RupertGee’s Boss Prefs toggle comes in. With it installed, you can turn AFP on and off instantly, letting you control the broadcasting of your name as you roam around networks.
I really think having manual control over this service is a must-have. Instructions on installing the Boss Prefs toggle for AFP are located at RupertGee’s blog here: http://redwolfberry.com/rupertgee/iBlog/2008/11/08/netatalk-toggle-v100/
I don’t do a whole ton of photo uploads from my iPhone to my Flickr account, so I haven’t messed with many dedicated uploader applications. Instead, I use the “secret” e-mail address you get for your account, and I send the photos through Mail.app. However, after checking out the beautiful Flickit application I think I’m going to convert over to a dedicated app!
Check out the video demonstration at the Flickit Website. The application is quick, extremely polished, and feature rich. You can even geotag a photo with your current location with the press of a button. Setting privacy is a must-have, and is very easy to set in this app.
You an grab Flickit for free from the iTunes App Store [link]
(Amazon Link) on my 
in my spare time. I’m not going to try to give a full review here since I’m only about half way through the book, but I did want to write a quick post here recommending it. The author, 
, which covers how our mind developed and uses language internally and externally. It was very interesting and I’m looking forward to getting to read the whole book.