Intro to iOS: Thursday Dec. 6

Tom and I are doing another Intro class this Thursday, Dec. 6th, at 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Main Library Branch.

The class is free but registration is required.

Join us for an introduction iOS, the operating system that runs iPhones and iPads, with Dave and Tom, founders of the Bytown Mac User Group. ByMUG has been helping Ottawans using Mac and iOS devices since 2006. Bring your device and follow along. No device? No problem! This informative workshop will cover the basics and much more! 

If you are attending and have questions.. please send them in in advance so we can be prepared.

All about games..

There are a few places to get Mac games, other than the App Store.

A few of the larger ones:

Steam lists 2500 games for Mac.
GOG or Good Old Games has 1297 games for Mac.
macgamestore.com, has hundreds in each category.

There are quite a few others, and reviews of them are available online if you want to know which is better or worse than another, and why.

gamersgate.com
gamesrocket.com
amazon.com/mac-game-downloads
gameagent.com
aspyr.com
ubisoft.com
ea.com

The reason we’re here is for games.. and knowing what’s good *before spending money* is important, go read reviews. There are many review sites, and they all have “best of” lists.

http://www.macgamerhq.com/top-games-for-mac/

What do I play?
More like what do I still play? aka what still works on El Capitan.

Osmos
Enigmo

Quinn, a Tetris game, which you can still download from macintoshgarden.org

The Tiny Bang Story, a kids puzzle game.

Cave Story “Doukutsu Monogatari” is a great side scroller ported to the Mac. A bit of fiddling required to get it to work, but worth it! Start here: http://www.cavestory.org/download/cave-story.php

Bungie. What else do I need to say? Yep. Halo. Myth, and many more. Halo 5 just came out.. for Xbox. Although Microsoft did port 2 games to iOS (instead of Windows Phone, what a surprise!) : Halo Spartan Assault and Halo Spartan Strike.

Yes, You can still play Halo, from 2004, using http://halomd.net
You can stil play Myth as well, using Project Magma.

But we’re not limited to just Mac games.. we can run emulators as well. One that I have used on occasion is Boxer, which lets you run DOS games.

Shout out to Ambrosia Software and one of my all time favorites: Avara! Apparently I can run it under emulation. Still making games after 20 years!

I’m sure i’ve missed many, what are your favorites?

Desktop Pictures & Automator!

Some people call them wallpapers, I prefer desktop pictures… and I have a big collection of them. hmm. 336 of them in the current rotation, as of this article. I’ve been collecting them for at least a decade, according to the earliest modified date.

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So what do I do with them, and where do I find them? Well, currently I have them all in a folder in my Pictures folder, aptly named Wallpapers. Yeah, I wanted a short name! They come from various sources, but the main one is http://www.desktoppr.co/ What’s so good about that site? Well, it’s linked directly into my Dropbox folder, so syncing an image is as simple as clicking the little cloud icon under the image. Very nice feature. They all end up in ~/Dropbox/apps/Desktoppr/ which, as you may have noted, is not where I keep my collection.

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Why not, you ask? Because there are many images that are in my collection that are personal photos, and I do not want to make them part of my Desktoppr library. You guessed it, anything I add to the Desktoppr folder goes back up to the site. You can see my collection online, once you login, at https://www.desktoppr.co/theconsultant

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For a while I would sync new images to Dropbox, then manually copy them across to the Wallpapers folder. This got tedious fast, so I worked for a while on cobbling a bit of a folder action script together. After messing around in Applescript for a day and not quite getting what I wanted, I headed over to Automator.

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I created a new folder action and added the “Copy Finder Items” and chose my Wallpapers folder. Umm, that’s it. Too easy. Saved it, and then right click the Desktoppr folder and, in Services, go into Folder Actions, and add the workflow.

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Next time an image dropped into the Desktoppr folder it automagically got copied across. No more manual syncing.

Now I can spend all that extra time looking for the next great desktop picture!

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