dsandler.org

Chris has written up an excellent summary of our TapeDeck development experience, from the first sparks of an idea in September through our April betas and finally to the release in May.

At some point I’ll scan my early sketches and add them to the historical record. For now, I’ll leave you with an early about box for TapeDeck (and since I love about-box easter eggs, you can find this in the shipping app, along with some others).

Chris Liscio and I just unveiled our top-secret Mac application project of the last few months: TapeDeck. While Chris is on the ball with his own blog post commemorating the release, here I am with a lot to say and no time to say it. I’ll write up something more “official†over at the toastycode blog over the weekend.

For now, I’ll just collect press and links over the course of the next few days here at dsandler.org.

Update 5/10: TapeDeck is the top featured Staff Pick on Apple’s Mac OS X Downloads site:

When this happened to Cuckoo a couple of years ago, it meant a huge jump in users and lots of great feedback. Very exciting.

—John Gruber, Daring Fireball: TapeDeck 1.0

—Jeff Smykil, Ars Technica: Quick Look: Tape Deck, simple audio recording on the Mac.

—Scott McNulty, The Unofficial Apple Weblog: TapeDeck 1.0

—Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired Listening Post: Even Luddites Will Enjoy Recording with TapeDeck

—MacNN: TapeDeck 1.0 quickly, simply records audio

—Peter Cohen, Macworld.com: TapeDeck audio recorder debuts

—Hendrik Auf’mkolk, MACNOTES.DE: TapeDeck: Schnelle Audio-Aufnahmen

—Florian Innocente, MacGeneration: TapeDeck 1.0 : le bon bruit du lecteur de K7

[Note: Apparently K7 is French shorthand for “cassette.†I get it now, but I had to look it up.]

Mac software bloggers sharing the love: Daniel “Punkass†Jalkut; Brent Simmons; Gus Mueller.

Searches: Twitter posts containing “tapedeckâ€; Technorati search for “tapedeckâ€

Update 6/3/08:

—Matthew Glidden, Inside This Particular Macintosh: TapeDeck 1.0

I got an email this morning asking for help with ds-sleight.js. I subsequently discovered that Google didn’t know anything about it except what other people have written. So here’s some quasi-official documentation:

ds-sleight is a small blob of JavaScript I’ve been using since the year 200X to force Internet Explorer to render the 8-bit alpha channel in 32-bit PNG images. (You might recall me whining about IE’s miserable support for PNG transparency back in 2002.)

There’s a little by way of instruction in the JavaScript source; here’s a slightly more verbose version of the installation procedure:

It even (mostly) works on PNGs used as CSS background-images. Enjoy (if you haven’t already)!

Hi. Just bumped Cuckoo up to 1.1.1 to fix a bug that seems only to affect some 10.5 users. See the blog for details, or just go straight to the download page.

Update 7/26: I’ve also posted the command-line tool for manipulating login items that I wrote while developing the latest release. You might find it handy.

I put a new version of Pyrothèque out yesterday, just in time for the 4th. Lots of fun new features (including snazzy new splash screens—see above). Read all about it over on the toastyblog.