And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
through those old woods a path was made.
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2010 January 19
A whole bunch of Mac developers have joined together in the Indie+Relief event,
where all proceeds on January 20th (tomorrow!) will go to support Haitian relief.
Calf Trail will be donating all proceeds from Geotagalog sales this week to
Haiti Busiess Recovery through Partners Worldwide.
Partners is an organization that wants more from companies than money: they connect business owners across borders and cultures
so they can learn from each other as partners.
They've been in Haiti and many other developing nations long before this earthquake, but now there's a lot of rebuilding to be done.
Please check out all the companies, sofware and charities involved in Indie+Relief.
There's a lot of good stuff there, and it's all for good causes on January 20, 2010.
2010 January 18
Today we released Sesamouse,
a free utility for Magic Mouse users.
It extends the mouse's gesture support to include pinch and rotate,
and also sends finger positions for advanced multitouch applications to use.
Story time!
Since seeing Jef Han's demo,
it's been obvious that multitouch is a great way to do more stuff with less fuss on the computer. Then Apple started
mass producing multitouch gadgets — phones first, then laptops. But then all desktops got was the Magic Mouse, which
traded the Mighty Mouse's two spare buttons for..left and right swipe?
At Calf Trail, Nate needed a way to test out some multitouch gestures without having to buy a whole new MacBook.
As it turns out, the Magic Mouse has full multitouch hardware
that's able to track up to five fingers at once.
It's only its software drivers that don't pass this gesture and touch information along to desktop applications.
There's code floating around the internet that reads more detailed touch information from trackpads and the Magic Mouse.
The problem is that it needs a private Apple framework, which would make any program that uses it directly likely to break
with operating system updates. At Calf Trail, we try our best to make reliable software.
Directly relying on unsupported features didn't seem like a good solution at all.
But long story short, Nate spent some time in November reverse engineering the way gestures and touches are sent to legitimate applications.
(Big thanks to Kris Markel and Nate's sister Alissa for
taking the time to record and send sample data from their laptops.
It was invaluable for figuring out how multitouch works on the new MacBook trackpads.)
Once his Magic Mouse arrived, it was just a few more days work to build a solution to the multitouch dilemma.
That solution is Sesamouse, and it's a free download!
It still uses some unsupported system features, so it might break eventually, but its design should reduce potential issues.
We hope that Sesamouse makes using your computer more enjoyable, and encourages more developers to add support for multitouch gestures.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot:
The Sesamouse application requires Snow Leopard (10.6), but the underlying gesture trick does work on Leopard too.
Chime in in the comments if a Leopard version would be helpful to you.
2009 December 14
Geotagalog is today's MacZOT!
In many parts of the world, the weather's not ideal for hikes and travels with a camera,
but this is a great chance to prepare for spring and keep your winter vacations organized.
You might already have a license if you're subscribed to this blog,
but be sure to tell your friends about this opportunity!
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