Acorn 1.2 is out, and the best way to get it is probably the auto-update if you're already running it, or you can download it from the website if you haven't already.

New features, it's faster, and bug fixes: release notes for Acorn 1.2

My friends Chris Liscio and Danial Sandler have just released TapeDeck 1.0.

'''TapeDeck is a new audio recorder exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5, designed with a quick-capture workflow in mind. You’re never more than a single mouse click (or keystroke) away from making a new recording, which are called, unsurprisingly, “tapes.” TapeDeck records directly to compressed MP4-AAC audio, making it equally useful for quick high-fidelity samples or hours and hours of lecture.'''

I've been testing TapeDeck for a couple of weeks, and it's pretty neat.

Congrats on shipping guys!

Gus Mueller on MacVoices. (Hey, that's me!)

Chuck Joiner interviewed me earlier this week about the various products that Flying Meat has. I rambled on about Acorn and VoodooPad and FlySketch, and even FlyGesture. It was a fun time, and I hope to be back on one of his shows again.

Thanks Chuck!

Acorn 1.2b1 is available for folks to test out. You can download it from the "latest builds" page.

Lots of bug fixes and improvements, and some new features as well. Here are some highlights:

New:
New "Last Filter" item under the Filter menu.
New Layer With Selection / New Layer With Selection via Cut.
Holding down the option key when choosing a core image filter from the Filter menu, now applies it right away without bringing up the filter panel.
Acorn can now open and save JPEG 2000 images.
New Overlay blend mode.
New "Offset" filter under Filter->Tile Effect.
Smarter trim command, now crops to the edge color and not just alpha pixels.
Fancy Crop (tm). The crop tool now tries to figure out a nice default if you just click on the canvas without dragging. (Ok, not really (tm)).
Holding down the option key when using Trim to Edges works just like Fancy Crop (tm!) does.

Fixes/Changes:
Tweaked the way selections work, so they more closely resemble "industry standards".
Much better looking cursor for the draw tool.
Plugged some memory leaks.
Various performance improvements when opening large files.
The canvas no longer accepts "first clicks" when it's not part of the main window.
QuickLook fixes, and more.

The full release notes are available as well.

Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout Poems are very cool. He creates poetry from newspaper clippings by blacking out all but the few words he needs.

(Found via kottke.)

One little (but amazing) feature on FFFFOUND that I have grown to love and depend on are the keyboard shortcuts for navigating to the next/previous image and page. You can see the shortcuts in the upper right corner of the page when you visit FFFFOUND.

In short, press 'j' to move to the next image, and when you reach the last image of the page 'j' moves you on to the next. It's awesome, and I've found myself repeatedly pressing 'j' when reading random blogs. And it doesn't work. And I become very sad.

It might be that FFFFOUND isn't the first website to do this, but it's the first time I've come across this particular shortcut. And everyone needs to adopt it, because it's so freaken' great.

It's been linked to by just about everyone now, but if you haven't seen / read it yet, Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" is a pretty good watch. You can also read the speech here.

When Flying Meat first started getting successful (ie, people really started noticing my work), I was asked a lot where I found the time to code. After all, I was working a full time day job and I played guitar and rock climbed as much as I could. The answer was easy and obvious- I didn't own a television.

I think people really underestimate the amount of tv they fill their lives with. Just turn it off, and unplug your cable. Really, you can do it. That Thursday show you "need" to watch? You'll get over it, trust me. And if you really really really need to watch it- buy it off the net and put it on your iPod to watch when you've got some downtime somewhere.

These days I do own a television, but it's not hooked up to anything but an xbox, a wii, and a mac "media server". So it is only ever used for playing games or watching the odd movie. There's so much more to do with my time than doing nothing.

If you live in the Seattle area and want a new job, RogueSheep is hiring another software dev.

They are a great bunch of guys that are fun to be around, and super hard workers.

(Just don't ever play any drinking games with Matt or Chris. You'll lose. I promise.)

Second Gear (headed up by Justin Williams (of Elisha Cuthbert fame)) has released it's first pay-for Mac app: Today, "iCal's Little Helper"

'''Today is a powerful, easy to use event and task management application for Mac OS X Leopard. Built on top of the same data engine as Apple's iCal and Mail programs, Today let's you quickly see what events and tasks are on today's agenda with the click of a button.'''

Justin also wrote PocketTweets and Porchlight.

I was at Mike's Chili Parlor for the first time last night with some friends (decent chili on the edge of Ballard, Seattle) and as I was walking out I saw directly across the street from me a plain concrete wall. For some reason I was overcome with the urge to spray paint some Banksy-esk graffiti to it. I obviously didn't, but if I did this was what I would have put up:



p.s. Wall and Piece by Banksy, is a great book.
p.p.s vectors made in Illustrator, then rasterized in Acorn of course!

Update: If you got this plugin yesterday or this morning, make sure to download a new version. There was a bug in the cleanup script that could delete files it didn't create, (which would obviously cause some headaches depending on where you export your doc...).

Georg Kaindl has written a web export plugin for VoodooPad, which encodes an entire document (including images) into a bookmarklet, which you can then view on your iPhone (freaken' crazy awesome!). This works today, no SDK required. It doesn't work for big documnts, but if you just have mostly text... this is for you.

Check it out on his VoodooPhone page.