Libin Pan

Couple of things need to remember about Facebook groups:

1. You have to choose a network which your group belongs to
2. After you click “Finish and View”, you couldn’t change network anymore
3. Only the people are in the same network can join your group

So, here’s one things make sure you do it right at the very beginning:

1. Set Global as the network of your group.

But, if I already created a group and want to change its network, what can I do?

The answer from Facebook is very simple: recreate it.

Today we created a new group for ToRCHI:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7729954398

And the next monthly meeting will be the “Tour of IBM’s Innovation Centre“, make sure add it to your events.

English, Facebook, Toronto Event, Facebook, ToRCHI

I was thinking about my blogging plan today. At the end I decided to start from talking more Mac things at the beginning as it is easier for me now. So, here is a rough list:

• Menu Items
• System Preferences
• Dashboard Widgets
• Login Items
• QS Plugins
• QuickLook Plugins
• Color Pickers

Then I found an interesting post about Color Pickers was just coming from TUAW.com today. So I “grab” it to here.

A color toolbox

Title is a little confuse. But the content is very valuable and make sure check what people said in comments.

Anyway, I’m not a graphic designer, I couldn’t give any professional opinions. So I just list some of them which I’ve tried and kept.

• Mondrianum
  

  Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the Adobe® kuler community

• Paint’s Picker
  

  Painter’s Picker puts an interactive color wheel in almost every Mac OS X application. It adds the ability to choose related colors, such as complementary colors, analogous colors, etc. directly within the color picker. It also adds more precise controls for choosing saturation, hue angle, and brightness. Painter’s Picker is the simplest way to perform complex color selection in almost any Mac OS X application.

• Shades
  

  The Shades Color Picker adds an additional pane to the standard Apple Color Picker. It is designed to help you choose colors by showing you grids of related colors. Shades uses Hue - Saturation - Brightness (HSB) color coordinates which many people find more intuitive than Red - Green - Blue (RGB) color coordinates. To use Shades, you choose a center color, a step size and a color coordinate (one of H, S or B) to hold constant. Shades then draws a grid of related colors.

• RCWebColorPicker
  

  RCWebColorPicker is a simple color picker for Mac OS X 10.0 or higher that displays the red, green, and blue values in HTML-friendly hexadecimal values. It also allows a user to restrict the sliders to only allow the 216 web-safe colors.

• Color Picker Pro, this is a stand alone application, it’s not a color picker.
  

  Color Picker Pro is a small drag and drop savvy application that aids in capturing hex, RGB and HSL color values for use in CSS and HTML production. Pull colors out of application windows, icons, your desktop or anything else that you happen to see on your display. Copy or drag and drop color values to your favorite text based CSS or HTML editing application. Store your frequently used colors, undo and redo color changes or make your colors web-safe at the press of a button. Tailor the format of your hex, RGB or HSL color values to your personal specifications.

• Tangerine, it is a color management tool.
  

  Tangerine color management software provides graphic designers and creative professionals with a unique color workflow experience. Now you can have the color you want, when you want it, how you want it. Tangerine offers new and enhanced color support to OS X.

• Color Schemer Studio
  

  ColorSchemer Studio is a professional color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to advanced professionals.

  Work with a dynamic visual color wheel, instantly explore harmony relationships and even let ColorSchemer Studio intelligently suggest color schemes for you!

• Find more by searching MacUpdate

English, Mac, OS X, Software Color, Mac, OS X

MarsEdit is the one which I use to create my blog posts. Yes, I am writing this post in MarsEdit right now. I’ve tested some other offline and online blog editors already, and MarsEdit is the best one as far as I can tell.

So, what’s new from 2.0 to 2.1?

1. Search Your Drafts and Entries

Now you can quickly filter your posts and drafts by keywords. Just type a word or phrase into the toolbar search field, and MarsEdit will restrict the post listing to only items that contain the text you’ve typed.

2. Native Tags Support

For supported systems, including Movable Type and WordPress, MarsEdit now offers a field for capsule-style tagging of your posts. It even remembers the tags you’ve typed before, so you’ll be able to reuse them in a jiffy on future posts.

3. Improved Web Preview

MarsEdit’s built-in preview sports a sleek new default appearance, massively enhanced performance, and fine-tuned usability. Now previews update quickly and without flickering or jumping around as you edit your post.

4. Save Drafts To Server

A new Post Status popup in the options pane lets you choose between Published and Draft status. Server support for this feature is somewhat hit-or-miss, so be sure to test with something not too embarrassing!

Links:

Homepage of MarsEdit

Download from official website

More on what’s new

MarsEdit on MacUpdate

English, Mac, OS X, Software Mac, OS X, Software

I just came back from TorCHI monthly meeting, it was a great event again. Really appreciate the great efforts came from the managers of TorCHI and Leonardo Ruppenthal who is the awesome speaker tonight. Too bad I forgot bring my camera. I will catch up next time for sure.

Leonardo Ruppenthal is a senior user experience consultant at Bell Web Solution. He talked about what they are doing in Bell to help users easily access videos. And he inspired a great discussion on the status and predictions of user generated contents and old school TV channels.

About TorCHI:

Toronto Region’s special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (ToRCHI) is a local chapter of the ACM’s special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). This chapter has members in Toronto, Guelph, Waterloo, Peterborough, and other nearby locations in Ontario. We are psychologists, designers, human factors engineers, computer scientists and computer users who meet to discuss and exchange ideas about human computer interaction and user interface design. We meet at 7:00pm in the second or third week of every month at various locations. The format of our meetings usually consists of refreshment time, presentations by invited guest speakers or discussion groups, followed by question periods, and open discussions.

Anyone who is in Toronto and interested in UX and CHI could/should join this. Next meeting is February 27. It is a tour at IBM’s Global Services lab. Should be cool!

And the ToRCHI Facebook is on: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2323294704

English, Toronto Event, ToRCHI, UX

MacBreak Weekly is one of the best podcast which focuses on Apple, Mac and OS X. If you didn’t subscribe it, I strongly recommend you to do so. You can easily find the way on their homepage: http://www.twit.tv/mbw.

The hosts of this episode are same as usual: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay. Two of them are little sick.

The guests are Philip Ryu form MacHeist and Andrew Welch from Ambrosia. It is really interesting to hear talking from these people, who are great developers or people who are behind some big things in Mac World.

Why “MacHeist Replies”? The short story is:

1. MacHeist recently had a great success on selling $500 software bundle for just $49. The final number is: 43,815 bundles sold and $488,003 raised for charity.
2. In the last episode, MacBreak Weekly 74, the guest Rich Siegel (from Bare Bones Software, the creater of BBEdit) “dismisses the arguements” related to MacHeist bundle.
3. In this episode, Philip Ryu and Andrew Welch talked back.

It is amazing to see such a podcast could feature exactly like a old school serious TV shows!

Anyway, subscribe it and you will like it too.

Apple, English Apple, Mac, OS X

OK. Here we go, finally!

This will be my personal weblog site, and I will talk about a lot of things, serious things:

• Things

Things what I did, what I am doing and what I want to do.

• Technology

Java, Ruby, Database…

• Apple and Mac

I love my MacBook, so much.

• Tools

I have tried 1000+ programs on windows, 2000+ apps on OS X and lots of vary plugins.

• China

Where I was coming from and where my family are.

• Toronto

The beautiful city I am living and loving.

• Startup

Tried and failed, tried again and failed again, still keep trying.

• More…

How we start? Well, one post at a time.

Why today? Can’t wait until February.

Thanks and see you soon!

English