This edition features:
Bart Busschots – The International Mac Podcast, www.bartb.ie (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc. linked from there)
Adam Christianson – Maccast, Twitter, App.net
Chuck Joiner – The MacVoices Group, Twitter, App.net
Topics covered by the panel include:
– Windows’ Boss Steven Sinofsky leaving Microsoft
– Experiences with Android, Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface
– Pixel Density Wars
– Linux on older Macs
– Macs recognizing 3 TB hard drives
– Apple’s changing culture – contribution matching, pet project time and more
– Black Friday shopping – tech and otherwise
– The challenges of multiple social media sites
Picks
– Bart: Check The Weather (iOS Universal app) – cleanest and most elegant weather app I’ve yet seen – (€1.79) ($1.99)
– Adam: Byword
– Chuck: dealmac, deal news, dealnews’ Black Friday newsletter, Black Friday App – dealnews.com, Inc.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Android and app scaling:
Android has several concepts that can help with sizing your apps on differently-sized screens. Android has several different layout styles, which basically make it possible for the OS to dynamically rearrange your UI elements and resize them on various screen sizes, or when screen size changes (I.e. you switch device orientation). There’s also an API mechanism called “fragments” that lets you bundle up certain parts of your UI into discrete “packages” that you can mix and match (so on larger sized screens, you can add more fragments in to maximize your use of available space). But these are kind of hairy to program and are also fairly new Android-wise. Also they were only introduced in Android 3.0, which means that if you want to maintain compatibility with older versions of Android (which most developers have tended to do), you can’t use them.
3 TB drives:
I too have had problems using some 3 TB drives with some drive docks and cases. In my case they mysteriously show up as 2.2 TB drives sometimes. Also I and others have seen really bad behavior where symbolic links seem to corrupt themselves on especially large (> 1.5 TB) volumes.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/18181940#18181940
Airfoil Speakers for Linux:
Rogue Amoeba does in fact make a Linux version of its Airfoil Speakers.
http://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2012/03/27/a-new-version-of-airfoil-speakers-for-linux/
However I’ve had trouble getting it to run; the dependencies in particular have been particularly problematic for me. There is an alternate package called ShairPort that I use, which I’ve never had any trouble with.
Blog post with more info Info: http://blog.mornati.net/2012/03/22/shairport-turn-your-linux-in-an-airplay-speaker/
Source Code repository: https://github.com/albertz/shairport
For Bonjour support, there’s avahi, which should be available in most Linux distributions’ package systems.
http://avahi.org
And for Apple file sharing, there’s Netatalk. Really old software, and can be a bit twitchy to get working right, but once it’s set up it works marvelously. Again, should be available in most Linux distros’ packaging systems.
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net
Comment by Donald Burr — November 14, 2012 @ 4:28 pm