On The Road…

I’m on my way to Phoenix, for a week. I had hoped to post a few stories before I left, but I just couldn’t get to it. You know how it is.

I’ll have my laptop with me and may get to some posts while I’m away, but if not, I’ll be back on the March 8th.

Darth Vader and the Flying Circus

To continue the Star Wars theme from the last post, here’s a great remix of a classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The creator of this threw in some great little details. Vader’s light saber continues to glow after he drops it, and is beginning to start a small fire. And, in one scene you see a storm trooper on a speeder whiz by.

YouTube Link | via Miss Cellania

MarsEdit Changes Hands

MarsEdit

The big news around the Mac blogosphere this morning is that MarsEdit has changed hands. It’s now owned by Red Sweater Software.

For those unfamiliar with MarsEdit, it’s a desktop blogging application capable of posting to many popular blogging systems, like WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Moveable-Type, and more. It happens to be my personal blogging app of choice.

MarsEdit was originally developed by by Brent Simmons, of Ranchero Software, who also developed the awesome RSS reader, NetNewsWire (another favorite of mine). Both products moved over to NewsGator when they acquired Ranchero.

Ever since the acquisition of Ranchero, the future of MarsEdit has been a little uncertain. Now that MarsEdit has changed hands again, it would be real easy to get discouraged about the future of this awesome app. But, in this case, I feel really good about the move.

Red Sweater Software is the brain-child of independent Mac developer, Daniel Jalkut. I had the good fortune to briefly work with Daniel on a freelance project a couple of years back. He’s a really nice guy, with great development skills, who understands the Mac user-experience. I have every confidence that he’ll push MarsEdit in a positive direction. I can’t wait to see what he does with it.

The current version of MarsEdit is 1.1.2. Daniel has stated that upgrades through the 1.x product line will be free to registered users. If you don’t already use MarsEdit, you can pick up a copy for $24.95 (well worth it). There’s also a 30 day demo available for download, so you can give it a try first.

Related links:

Finally, a Rubik’s Cube even I can solve

Spy's White Rubik's Cube

This Rubik’s Cube “for the lazy person” is by Madrid based street artist, SpY. His site says it’s been made in 6 different colors, but I don’t see any mention of how to actually get your hands on them. SpY has several other cool pieces as well.

I like this blurb from SpY’s site…

“SpY’s pieces want to be a break in the automat-like inertia of the urban dweller. Bits of thought that hide in a corner for whoever wants to let himself be surprised. Full of both irony and a positive sense of humor, they appear to inspire a smile, a thought, to help a conscience a little bit more lucid.”

via NotCot

Sample any color on your screen with Pipette

Pippette

Sometimes it can be a little inconvenient to fire up Photoshop, or dig through the source code of a webpage, just to get a color value. That’s where Pipette comes in really handy.

Pipette is a nifty little eyedropper app capable of sampling color values of any pixel on your screen. Once you sample the color, just hit copy (cmd + c), and the hex value is copied to your clipboard. Pipette is a relatively light-weight app, so you can just leave it running in the background, that way it’s always available.

Best of all, Pipette is FREE, although donations are welcome.

UPDATE: It looks like Apple gives us this functionality right out of the box in the form of a little app called Digital Color Meter. It’s in your Utilities folder. I had no idea. Digital Color Meter has the added benefit of giving you a couple of options for the color code it uses, however, Pipette has a simpler key command for copying the color and it auto-hides itself when it’s not the active app. Both work well, it just depends on your workflow as to which one is better for you. Thanks to Paul (and iChris) for this tip.

via Cool OSX Apps