Bridger Maxwell has been blogging his progress on creating a homebrew multi-touch platform in OS X. Prior to this, there's been a lot of activity around building multi-touch systems on Windows using the Touchlib library, but this is the first time I've seen a concerted effort on OS X.

The basic hardware is the same for both environments: LEDs surround a sheet of acrylic, causing a backscatter of IR when fingers are pressed to the screen. On the software side, though, the multi-touch interface is provided through Pawel Solyga's OpenTouch library. From the sounds of things, though, it's not super simple getting the interface messages from OpenTouch to your multi-touch enabled Cocoa apps:

Both OpenTouch and TouchLib send the touch data to other applications by sending Tangible User Interface Object (TUIO) network messages. TUIO is a protocol that is designed for transmitting the state of multi-touch systems. TUIO is built upon another protocol, Open Sound Control (OSC). While libraries for receiving TUIO messages are available in a few languages such as C++ or Java, there was not a solution for Cocoa applications. My first step was to build a library for receiving TUIO messages in Cocoa.

Because TUIO is built upon OSC, I looked for a library that could parse OSC messages. Unfortunately, I could not find one that would fill all my needs. WSOSC was a library that came close though. There were a few issues to work around (use NSData instead of NSString), but eventually I was able to use WSOSC to parse the OSC packets. When finished, my framework had the ability to parse TUIO messages and had a method to delegate the TUIOCursor objects it created to another application.

From the blog comments, it sounds like Bridger is planning on releasing this middle layer when it gets a little further along. At the moment, though, he's released a demo comic viewing application that uses his multi-touch project framework. If you're interested in developing multi-touch apps for OS X, some of the discussions on Bridger's blog would be a good place to start.

Bridger's Multi-Touch Blog
OpenTouch Library

See also:
Make your own multitouch displays and software apps

My friend Barrett sent along a link today to an Illustrator scripting plugin called Scriptographer. I'm sort of a slouch at Illustrator, so I had him give me the quick 411 and I must say, this is pretty cool.

If you're familiar with Javascript, Scriptographer will enable you to crank out little scripts that can generate illustrations procedurally. As an example, the bubbelbubbling script, show above, tuns your pen tool into a fountain of random bubbles that follow your drawing path. There are certain styles of artwork that could really lend themselves to a procedural drawing tool: fractals, patterns, random "particle" effects. These things would take forever to generate manually, but by defining the effect programatically, you can quickly experiment with your work in a more dynamic fashion, tweaking variables and fine-tuning your work as you go.

The project website also has a growing library of user-contributed scripts that are worth checking out. It's a good place to start for your own creations, or you may just find exactly what you're looking for, already crafted for you by another designer-coder.

Scriptographer

If you have an irrepressible urge to turn these LEDs on or off through software, here is a program that shows you how. (Note that the program only manipulates the LEDs -- it will not actually cause caps lock or num lock to be engaged.) The program also serves as an example of how to do user-space Human Interface Device (HID) programming through the I/O Kit.

I'm not sure what you could use this for, but that's for you to sort out, right?

Manipulating keyboard LEDs through software
Reading and manipulating the keyboard backlight on the MacBook Pro
Hacking the sudden motion sensor

The trick is setting up a number of CSS rules that use "*=" substring selection on an element's properties. For instance, matching an IFRAME tag with the SRC parameter containing doubleclick would look like IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] and matching an anchor tag with an HREF containing a url with "ads." in it would look like A:link[HREF*="ads."]. Giving the style "display: none ! important" to all of the possible combinations and adding the stylesheet to your browser's chrome effectively turns off the ad-serving web. The site below has a comprehensive CSS file that's been tailored to assassinate ads from most networks.

To be honest, I didn't realize that you could do this type of parameter matching and subselection in CSS, so it's worth looking at the CSS source for that alone. If you don't use it for this purpose, perhaps the technique will come in handy for something else you are working on.

Better Ad Blocking for Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, and Safari
Ad Blocking userContent.css

It seems like I end up updating my laptop every couple of years, but as cool as new hardware is, sometimes the challenge of finding a new use for the old machine is more interesting. The iNoteBook mod is a classic example, transforming a broken, screenless iBook into a stealth desktop machine.

What's your favorite laptop reuse project? If you've got one, please share in in the comments.

The iNoteBook

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

This is one of my favorite Firefox features, so I'm pretty happy to see it available in Safari, even if it's under a hidden setting.

How to enable single window mode in Safari

Racketboy has a great article showing off some of the capabilities of the modern N64 emulator. If your machine is fast enough, most of the available emulators will really give you a noticeable resolution boost and better looking anti-aliased models. Using the Rice Video plugin with the Project64 emulator, you can even swap out the textures for some games with user-created texture packs.

I still use the real hardware (is the N64 considered "retro" now?), so before seeing this, I hadn't even considered emulation for this platform. That all changed when I saw the Mario64 mod shown above. The selection of available emulators is impressive, and there are open source emulators available for just about every platform. I'm currently playing a game under Mupen64 on my iMac and it's pretty flawless. My only wish is that all computers came, by default, with a nice joystick like they did back in the 80s.

Enhance N64 Graphics With Emulation Plugins & Texture Packs - Link
Project64 Emulator - Link
Rice Video Plugin - Link
Mupen64 Emulator (cross-platform, open source) - Link

With cURL installed, you can post to Twitter from the terminal window by using the following syntax:

curl -u yourusername:yourpassword -d status="Your Message Here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

You will receive a response containing the XML coding for your post which acts as a confirmation that your post was submitted.

Consider this: instant messaging is the new talk (phone for my VMS peeps) and Twitter is the new finger. It's nice to see at least one of these handy communication tools make its way back to the command line.

Posting to Twitter from the Terminal Window - Link
cURL downloads - Link

This project came into being after reading this post at lifehacker (original post and solution here). It listed a method to retrieve mails on your home/office PC by sending a "magic email" to it, but it was only for mac's. Seeing that people wanted it for windows as well, I thought of making something up during lunch time at office.

If you think about it, this is kind of a clever way to get around a corporate firewall. It'd be funny to add some directory listing functionality to it and formalize an email file transfer protocol.

Remote File Access Through E-Mail -Link

TrueCrypt 5.0 was released yesterday and OS X has been added to the list of supported operating systems, making it the only open source volume encryption utility that works in Linux, Mac and Windows. It's a really slick utility for creating an AES-256 or Serpent encrypted volume that you can drop sensitive files inside.

You can use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted volume image inside a file, or you can encrypt a whole disk image or partition. The OS X version uses MacFUSE to provide user-mode mounting of the encrypted disk. The main application window, pictured above, gives you a simple interface for creating and mounting encrypted images.

Once an image is mounted, you can use it like a normal hard disk. Unmount the disk and you're left with a file full of random gibberish. FAT is the only filesystem that's available through the interface, but once the disk is mounted, you can reformat it with Disk Utility to use XFS.

There are a couple of things worth noting. In the Windows and Linux versions a special bootloader is available that lets you encrypt your entire system drive. It doesn't look like that option is available in the OS X version. Also, when I tested the latest OS X binary this evening, the "hidden volume" plausible deniability feature wasn't working. Hopefully that will be added in a future release. Until then, TrueCrypt is better suited for storing tax documents and things you wouldn't want visible to a laptop thief, rather than the details of where you've hidden the bodies.

TrueCrypt - [via] Link

Becky Stern forwarded us Jonathan Berger's simple and useful hack that adds dividers to the Finder sidebar.

I use the Finder's Sidebar pretty heavily, but it was getting to be a mess that could really use some dividers. Solution? Make an empty folder called " ..................." and stick it in there.

You'll need a leading space with periods. Dashes also work and patterns like " - - - - - -" are satisfying too. Periods work particularly well, because you can make the filename long and when it's abbreviated in a skinny sidebar it'll still look correct with "..." added at the end.

To add more than one separator, you need a unique folder for each one. To do this, you can either make folders with different numbers of periods, or, for a consistent length, just place all the folder copies inside each other like Russian dolls.

The final trick is to give the separator folders a blank icon to disguise the fact that they are just folders sitting in your sidebar. I was too lazy to do this part and I'm still happy with the effect, though it doesn't look quite as hot as Jonathan's screen grab above.

Hacking Separators Into the Leopard Finder Sidebar - Link

We've posted about installing Ubuntu and Vista on the little Asus Eee PC, so to round things off, here's a guide for installing Leopard. Using a few tools of the hackintosh trade, Dan from Uneasy Silence was able to get OS X running on the little lappy.

So, ever since I got the eeePC I've loved how easy it is to tinker with. Since I'm not a Linux guy, I dumped the Xandros preload and opted for Windows XP so I could you my EVDO USB datacard and blogging software easier, but I wondered could I install OSX on it? And, after trial and error - you can!

One thing that Dan mentions is that Leopard is a bit pokey on the Eee. He opted to run OS X 10.4.8 instead, and it sounds like it performs quite a bit better.

Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC - Link
Vista on the Eee PC - Link
HOWTO - Install Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC - Link

One of my favorite old computers is making the news again--C|Net News.com reports that the Sharp Actius MM10 is most likely the thinnest notebook out there (seems pretty much a tie):

Back in the first years of the decade, Sharp released the Muramasas. Measuring 0.54 inch thick, the Actius MM10 Muramasa notebook, which hit shelves in 2003, came with a 1GHz Crusoe processor from Transmeta, 256MB of memory, a 15GB hard drive and a built-in Wi-Fi module. It ran 2.5 hours on a regular battery, and cost $1,499. Sharp also had a Mebius notebook in the Muramasa family that measured 0.65 inch thick.

Update: Thinnest notebook crown belongs to Sharp - Link

Here are some pictures of the MM10, including a few disassembly shots (go here if the slideshow doesn't load):

If you hold down 'T' while booting a Mac, the screen will go black and display a large Firewire logo. In this state, called Target Disk Mode, your fancy laptop is magically transformed into a plain ol' external hard disk. Connect it to another machine via a firewire cable and your Mac's hard drive will appear on the other machine's desktop, just as if you had connected an external firewire drive. Just unmount and reboot to return your trusty Mac to its normal self.

While turning your laptop into a $2000 firewire drive may seem a little bit of a downgrade, it can come in quite handy for transferring large files. Think about it: if you were to transfer a huge amount of data over sneakernet, you'd need to copy it over to a firewire disk, reconnect the disk to the another machine, and then transfer the data again over the firewire connection. With Target Disk Mode, you only make the firewire transfer once, so a large file transfer takes half the time. Like sneakernet, you still need to hike one of the Macs over to the other machine to make the connection, but since you are transferring half the data, you are only required to wear one sneaker.

GrabFS is a clever MacFUSE-based file system created by Amit Singh that creates a live screenshot file system for all of your running applications.

When you run GrabFS, a new drive volume will appear. Inside, you'll find a folder for each running application, and inside each application directory, you'll find a tiff file for each of the application's windows. When you drag, copy or open one of these files, you get a snapshot of the application window at that point in time.

GrabFS requires Leopard and the Leopard build of MacFUSE. I think it's time for me to upgrade.

GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - Link
MacFUSE - Link

The RAM you can buy and upgrade. Nothing new there, but the CPU? Dylan McDermond from Low End Mac posted a hack today which shows us how to fake the CPU's clock speed. The gist is that with a few commands you can make Open Firmware report whatever clock speed you please.

Before running the install CD, you can enter the Open Firmware prompt by typing Cmd-Opt-O-F while booting (with the installer CD in). When you get the Open Firmware prompt, you can enter the following to have the firmware falsely report your CPU speed as 867Mhz and continue booting the installer CD:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,//:tbxi

When you reboot after completing the install, your CPU speed will be reported as normal again. Check out the link below for the full details, as well as how to adjust the reported speed for a dual-CPU system.

One thing this reminds me of is that Final Cut always refused to real-time render video transitions on iMacs and iBooks, even on models that were faster or had more memory than their Powerbook and Powermac counterparts. Makes me wonder if there is a similar Open Firmware hack to get around other software imposed limitations such as this.

Faking Out the Leopard Installer with Open Firmware - Link

Just open a Terminal window and run the following:

# defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
# KillAll Finder

One thing you might notice after enabling the hidden file option, aside from all those insidious .DS_Store files, is that all of the file icons will take on a hazy, 50% alpha look. I've gotten used to it, but it's a little annoying. To switch things back, just set the AppleShowAllFiles parameter back to false:

# defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
# KillAll Finder

Like I said... perfectly appropriate to edit stuff with vi from the terminal window.

Chris Seibold is hard at work on our second Big Hacks book, the Big Book of Apple Hacks, and he's looking for contributors to help out with the book. Contributors to hacks books receive a copy of the book, credit within the book, and a small honorarium. Your contributions are done under a non-exclusive arrangement, so you can use the material elsewhere (such as on your blog).

Here's a list of the hacks that Chris is looking for:

• Running Mac OS 9 on Intel/Leopard Macs using Sheepshaver
  
• Cool tips, tricks, and hacks for Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku (also Moodblast)
  
• iPod Touch hacks
  
• Creating podcasts and screencasts
  
• Parallels, Boot Camp, and Fusion
  
• Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office, Photoshop etc.
  
• Any other cool hacks you think we might dig
  

James Duncan Davidson has a post titled Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, where he explains his font choices for working at the Mac OS X Terminal. That post has triggered some suggestions from other folks, so if you've been itching for something other than 10pt Monaco, check it out - Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

Over at the Craftzine blog, Becky Stern posted a link to an excellent Instructable for rearranging the keys on a MacBook:

Jonathan made a great instructable on how to reorder your keyboard keys on a MacBook if you prefer a Dvorak layout (an alternative to the standard QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard requires less finger motion as you type). He also points out that it's helpful if you just want to give your keyboard a good cleaning. He'll show you the proper delicate technique for removing and replacing your keyboard keys without damaging them; the MacBook keyboard is quite unique. - Link.

If you want new folders instead of untitled ones, or if you prefer to have a copy of a file instead of a file copy, it's pretty simple to tweak some of the localization text that Finder.app uses.

Just view the package contents of /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder, and then open Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings in TextEdit. Inside, you'll find the contents of various messages and default names used throughout the OS X Finder interface.

You can tweak a lot of things in there, but two of the most useful are the default new folder name (normally "untitled folder") and the name given to files that are created using the "Duplicate" menu item.

So, you can change:

"N4" = "^0 copy";
to
"N4" = "another ^0";

or maybe change:

"N2" = "untitled folder";
to
"N2" = "name me";

Aside from a goofy hack to mess with a coworker, one thing that could be useful would be to prefix new or duplicate files with an underscore or a couple of zeroes. This makes them sort to the top, easier to find in a large directory. Just make sure to make a backup of the Localizable.strings file in case you later decide you like things better the way Jobs intended it.

Change the Finder's default name for duplicated files - Link

Sometimes it's nice to have a secure and familiar OS that you can use from any machine. Puppy Linux is just that: a really lightweight, CD-based Linux distribution, designed for maximum portability. If you're using a PC, you simply boot and run Puppy Linux from a CD, storing your settings and changes to a file on your hard disk or flash drive. What's awesome is that it's so compact, you can fit an emulator, the CD ISO, and the save state files all on a flash disk or SD Card, making it one tiny little OS package that you can carry in your pocket.

Using Q, the OS X port of the QEMU virtual machine, you can create a small footprint, virtual Puppy Linux box that will run under OS X and fit on a flash drive. In addition to its portability, this is one of the easiest ways to get Linux running on your mac.

You could have a little portable Linux box running on your Mac in a half hour. So let's get started.

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

When you're on an untrusted or unencrypted network, everything from what you browse to the email and IM messages you send can potentially be snooped by a third party. Sure, some sites use https and you can use ssh to connect to a remote server, but what if you want to jack in and enjoy the relative comfort of knowing _all_ of your applications are communicating over a secure channel?

For that, you need a secure proxy. By setting up a SOCKS proxy, you can have your applications route all of their network communications through a secure connection to a network you trust. Gina at Lifehacker put together a quick guide for setting this up, and once configured in OS X's System Preferences, most of the default apps like Safari will just start using your proxy and you're good to go.

A lot of your favorite applications--ie. Firefox and Adium--need to be manually configured to use the proxy, however, as they don't pull this information automatically from the system preferences. This is straightforward to do, but it means that every time you cruise over to the local coffee shop, you need to set up your proxy configuration in multiple places.

Albert Lee came up with a nice solution to this problem. An application profile manager called rooSwitch and some quick Actionscript is all you need to make a couple of command line scripts that will set up or tear down your proxy, as well as switching all of your application preferences.

If you save this script with a .command extension, then you can run it by double-clicking on the icon in the Finder like a regular application. When it runs, it will change the location, switch your profile, and start up the SSH tunnel. Enter your password and off you go!

I should mention that his script also introduced me to a useful mac command line utiliy called scselect. By typing scselect [locationname], you can switch your Mac's location straight from the command line.

Safer Surfing on Untrusted Networks (Mac Edition) - Link
How to configure an SSH SOCKS proxy @Lifehacker - Link
rooSwitch - Link

Packet Garden is a network visualization tool that maps your network traffic into a 3D representation, sprouting little plants on a globe whenever a connection is made.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

Packet Garden is GNU licenced and written in Python, so you can give it a try on supported Linux, Windows, and Mac machines. It doesn't run on Intel macs, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, Soya3D (the 3D library it uses) is the culprit and has not been compiled under this architecture. Anyone want to take a stab at porting this? I'm not familiar with the package, but it might be as simple as installing all Soya's required libraries and running a python make script.

Packet Garden. Grow a world from network traffic - Link
Soya3D - Link

Well, now there's something you don't see every day.

Mark Hoekstra from GeekTechnique subjected his iBook's motherboard to successive rounds of burnination and managed to correct the infamous iBook video display defect. Had this not succeeded, I think I'd still have to give him 10 points for style.

In addition to other quality control problems like frayed wires in the display hinge, a huge amount of early model iBooks suffered from a defect where the display would just completely crap out, both on the internal LCD and the external monitor output. Apple used to take these in and service them for free, but their warranty lifetime is long expired.

The problem is that the array of solder points that connect the graphics processor to the motherboard tend to fail over time. I assume this happens with the repeated expansion and contraction of components during normal use. By heating up the graphics processor with a heat gun--or, more appropriately, with a big ol' flaming can of moonshine--you can get the solder to melt and reflow over the broken connections.

If your old laptop is currently serving out its final years as a paperweight, you may want to try this as a last resort... or sell it on eBay to someone with a crazy, laptop-fixing, pyro bent.

DIY obsolete iBook logic board repair - Link

MacMod.com is running a Mac modding contest for the month of August. Entries can be submitted for everything from extreme overclocking, to slick case mods, to OS and software customizations. And, yes, there is a category for iPhone mods too. In proper hacker spirit, the submissions require a full howto guide in addition to the finished product, so even if you don't win the all-access pass to MacWorld 2008 you'll at least have given the world a cool hack or two to play with.

The video above is last year's winner, the Bang & Olufsen MP3 player Mac. It has a custom interface written in Applescript which accesses the iTunes library and is completely controlled by the slider hardware on the front.

The Great MacMod Challenge 2007 - Link
Bang & Olufsen Mp3 Mac Mod - Link

A couple people wrote in today in response to my post about WiiRemote, the Windows Wiimote input device driver. More specifically, I've been reminded that I completely left the similarly capable DarwiinRemote for OS X out of the discussion. In all fairness, there was a driver roundup back in March that mentioned it, but what the heck - it's a cool app and deserves a little more attention.

So this hack goes out to all the Mac diehards who have an older machine sans Apple Remote. You folks don't need to upgrade your trusty system just to control Keynote or iTunes from a distance. Just pick up the cheap (relatively speaking) Wiimote and download DarwiinRemote.

When you start the program up, you'll need to hold down the 1 and 2 buttons on the Wiimote. This will let the device pair with the DarwiinRemote application, and you should start seeing the three lines on the graph go up and down as you move the device.

At this point, you're set. You can use the arrow keys on the Wiimote just like the arrow keys on your keyboard. The home button is wired up by default to hit apple-esc, which will launch Front Row. The A button is a left click by default, etc. etc.

You can change all these settings in the preferences menu. Most of them are set up fairly logically, I thought, but one nice feature is to set the 2 button to trigger the F9 key. This will help you quickly navigate between applications with your new airmouse.

This brings me to the cool part. Hit the 1 button and you can now control your mouse by tilting the Wiimote forward, back, and side to side. Your buddies with the fancy new macs and Apple Remotes can't do that, now, can they?

You can adjust the sensitivity in the preferences as well. It's a little goofy until you get the hang of it, but it gets easier with a little practice. Just call it payment for looking like a Wiimote wielding rockstar in your next otherwise booring business presentation.

References:
DarwiinRemote: Wiimote as a Mac input device - Link
WiinRemote: Wiimote as a Windows input device - Link
Control Your Applications With a Wiimote - Link

First, get HandBrake - Link. There are also PC versions of HandBrake, it might work about the same way.

Install it, run it. Pop the DVD in. Pick the DVD volume. Choose your settings, I use the defaults usually.

It takes about 30 min or so, it runs fine in the background.

Drag the MP4 file it makes in to iTunes, in videos tab in iTunes for the iPhone select the movie, click Sync.

In a couple minutes it transfers over.

It's about a gig.

The video is in the videos section. iPod / Videos.

It looks and sounds great!

*Joe notes - I found if you create a new preset for iphone in handbrake and set the video dimensions to 480x320 you can crunch movies down to a much smaller size optimized for the iphone native resolution.

Here's how:

• Hold Apple+S when booting to enter single user mode
• #sh /etc/rc
• #passwd yourusername
• #reboot

If you can't recall your user name, you can either look in the /Users folder (the directories are named by user), or run "niutil -list . /users".

Also, on older systems the /etc/rc script isn't available, apparently. If that second step fails, try mounting and starting the base services manually:

• #/sbin/fsck -y
• #/sbin/mount -uw /
• #/sbin/SystemStarter

I've had to do this a couple of times for friends when they've bought a second hand machine, and once when I had a momentary brain lapse and forgot my own password. Works like a charm, though you'll loose any passwords stored in your keychain.