After eating dinner I took a nap; it was a long day. When I woke up I was famous. Well almost.

Apple World Wide Developer Conference Student Scholarship e-mail

It appears that several of MacWarriors–Chad, Matt, and myself are starring in the WWDC Student Scholarship application e-mail, going to ADC Student Members.

If you’re a student Mac developer, I highly recommend applying for the WWDC Student Scholarship (a US $1,595 value!). I had such an awesome time last year, learning so much in a few days, I sure hope I am accepted again this year. I’ve had a bit more time to focus on Mac programming since WWDC, and I think it will be even better this year. I can’t wait!

Now back to coding LaserLine, and drivers for the EasyLase USB. I have a suspicion there’ll be a release of something this weekend…

Project Canary is the project that I’ve been working on in my User Interface Design & Implementation class–CS465.

Basically the idea is to have a server that sits on a wireless network searching for open DAAP shares. The server plays back music for a room full of people, attempting to select the most acceptable music for the group. How you ask? That sharp looking Dashboard Widget above is running on each of the laptops around the room, letting each user enter their musical preferences and their choices be known. Volume is also controlled collaboratively.

I’m pretty proud of the functional prototype we’ve implemented here; it’s certainly not ready for prime time, but with a bit of work, I think there is real potential.

Feel free to download and setup the prototype from the Project Canary project page.

Today marks the release of a very tiny little app that we whipped up over at ACM, that might come in handy to the rest of the world. It is called MOVE, and it unfortunately is not an acronym, just really loud. Alas:

MOVE is a small AppleScript Studio app that enforces logout of unattended publicaly accessible machines. It prompts the user (even on top of a screen saver) with a familiar Log Out dialog and lets the user choose “Cancel” or “Log Out.” Should the user cancel, MOVE simply quits, should the user click “Log Out,” the app will perform a standard log out process, prompting the user to save any open documents.

The distinguishing feature of MOVE is in it’s action on the timer expiry. Should the timer reach zero, MOVE will send SIGTERM to loginwindow, forcing logout without prompting for saving. It is not possible to cancel this logout, preventing the possibilities that: 1) a machine is not left in an unusable state with the screen locked and user missing in action, and 2) a user chooses Log Out from the Apple menu with unsaved documents open and leaves without responding to the prompts, leaving their account vulnerable to passers by.

So essentially, MOVE is a tool to force logout of unattended OS X machines, but provides a nice familiar interface in case it pops up and the computer really wasn’t unattended.

Download MOVE v1.4 (Universal):

MOVE.dmg.

Enjoy!

For almost 3 years now I have dealt with a horrible buzzing noise emanating from the external speakers connected to my PowerBook when it was plugged in to things on my desk. At some point I discovered it was linked to having my 17″ Apple Studio Display plugged in, but leaving it disconnected kind of defeats the purpose, so I didn’t track the problem any further. So the magic is this; turn the brightness slider all the way up in the Displays control panel, and no more buzzing! It turns out that it is only the dimming of the backlight that introduces this noise over the ground plane. I couldn’t believe I didn’t figure this out earlier! Finally I may begin enjoying my Fostex PM 0.5’s again. Sweet.

In addition to David winning 2nd place for RingCycle in Undergrad Research at EOH, a number of other great things happened. I saw a hawk the morning before EOH as I stayed up all night a Siebel, and I happened to get my great new Magnets in the mail from Engineered Concepts. Proof:

I strongly recommend checking it out. Even if only for a little bit, its amazing. This year I would like to recommend everybody go visit David Kaplan’s RingCycle exhibit, as its really awesome–and I made the posters. I also must recommend all of the ACM exhibits in the Siebel Center, including MacWarriors’ exhibit, because I am a member of that group.

I look forward to checking out exhibits in Everett as well, because they have cool electronical things in there always. Soon I will be building and blogging about electronical things–I will take photographs when the parts come in; it’s going to be big.

Also, there will probably also be Balloons. Yay Balloons.

*Edit*
EOH == Engineering Open House

Just before closing out his speech, Jobs kept to tradition and announced that he had “One More Thing…”

He said the 15-inch PowerBook product line would be going away in favor of a new “Mac Book Pro.” The laptop features a 15.4-inch display and is a hair thinner than the 17″ PowerBook. Additionally, it’s about 4-5 times as fast as the previous PowerBooks, Jobs said.

Mac Book Pro includes a built-in iSight, IR sensor, Apple Remote, and new Power Adapter. It weighs 5.6lbs and will ship with Front Row software. A 1.67 Core Duo model will retail for $1999, while a high-end 1.83GHz model will sell for $2499.

Apple will begin taking orders for the Mac Book Pro today for shipments beginning next month.

Apple Rolls out new iMacs, Mac Book Pro, iLive ‘06[AppleInsider]

Ok. So we were expecting this. But “MacBook Pro”??? come on! PowerBook was so much a better name. I am excited about that new power connector though. Really excited. I guess the dual-cores will help performance too– but man, that power connector is going to be awesome when I accidentally pull on the cord and it doesn’t break solder joints on the motherboard.

One extra random feature of Mac OS X that I am afraid many people don’t know about is its pre-configured support for emacs key-bindings. These only work in Cocoa applications, but fortunately that means most applications today. Sorry Firefox. A few keyboard shortcuts for text navigation can really speed up usage. When I read today:

Secret shortcuts. Hidden helpers. Mysterious menus. You could spend months tracking down all the undocumented features tucked away in Mac OS X 10.4, Apple‘s newest operating system. But chances are, you’re too busy using Tiger for more-important tasks—such as doing your job. So Macworld sent in a team of specially trained spies to uncover Tiger’s deepest, darkest secrets.

Tiger Secrets Declassified [Macworld]

I thought “Woa, somebody beat me to posting about this at such a random time!” Then I read the article and unfortunately none of the tips that were important to me made it.

I will outline some of the shortcuts I recommend using:

• Ctrl-A : Jump to beginning of line
• Ctrl-E : Jump to end of line
• Ctrl-K : Cut from cursor to end of line (useful for delete)
• Ctrl-Y : Paste that test you just cut

Also, hold Option and select text in Tiger on multiple lines for this cool box-selection thing, where the cursor will turn in to a cross-hair and select just the contents of the box, not the whole line.

you can also type bindkey in a terminal for a complete list:

joey% bindkey
"^@" set-mark-command
"^A" beginning-of-line
"^B" backward-char
"^D" delete-char-or-list
"^E" end-of-line
"^F" forward-char
[continued....]

I realize there are many customizations possible, and more to this– but if you are interested you should check out Mac OS X Hints and do some searching. Now you know its possible.

(I know this post was egregiously unnecessary and somewhat offtopic. I just wanted to show off some new formatting stuff I hooked up in the CSS last night.)