One of the things that comes with Tiger that I wasn‘t hugely fussed about until I began to see the potential of it was Automator. I got the chance to view an introductory video about Tiger which showed building an Automator workflow. It really is superb, and over the next few months we’ll see more and more Automator workflows and plugins coming out that make working on your Mac easier or more productive or whatever. It has huge potential! Here are a few links to articles, actions, sites and the like dealing with Automator.

Apple - Mac OS X Downloads - Automator Actions

Automator World: “Automator World is dedicated the Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) scripting application Automator. Automator World is a clearinghouse of user-contributed Workflows and Actions, as well as Automator information, news and tips.”

Folksonomise your files with Automator: “One of the big buzzwords in personal (and digital) organization these days is ‘folksonomy’; the process of adding keywords, or tags, to data in an effort to arrange it into loose ‘clouds’ of connectivity. The influence of web services like del.icio.us and Flickr has spread far. If you want to use the same approach to your files and documents in Tiger, Automator offers the perfect solution.”

brilliantdays.com: Automator gems: “First there‘s the ’Add spotlight tags‘ from Adam Rice. There’s no download, you make it yourself in Automator. Save it as a plugin in Finder, for right-click tagging. Next time you download a file, choose it in Finder, ctrl-click it and choose Automator>Add spotlight tags. Let‘s say you’re working with a project, and the file downloaded is a picture that belongs to that project. So add some tags belonging to that project with this Automator action. Next time you use Spotlight to search for that projects tags, the file will show up, wherever you have put it on your drives.”

brilliantdays.com: Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight: "By using Spotlight and Automator, and the new Smart folders in OS X 10.4, you can change all those messy files on the desktop to something useful.

MacDevCenter.com: Write Your Own Automator Actions: “Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) introduces Automator, which lets users string together preinstalled script steps (Actions) into a sequence (Workflow) that can be run and saved. The sequence is a rudimentary data flow, or pipe: typically, each step outputs some data, which becomes the input to the next step. ”

MacDevCenter.com: Write Your Own Automator Actions: "Besides the more than 200 Actions installed by default in /System/Library/Automator, we may expect to see many third-party Actions in the near future, which the user will install in /Library/Automator or ~/Library/Automator. You, the developer, can participate in this movement by writing and distributing your own Actions."

Fraser Speirs - Flickr Automator Action 0.1: "o I quietly released my first Automator action, for uploading to Flickr. You can download it here."

Engineered Cement Composites : Bendable concrete: "

Victor Li, at the University of Michigan has developed a new fiber-reinforced bendable concrete. Li claims his Engineered Cement Composites (pdf) are superior to other fiber-reinforced concretes because his composite not only uses microscale fiber reinforcements, but they have also designed the ingredients to the concrete itself to provide more flexibility. The 40% lighter ECC is also 500 times more resistant to cracking, 37% less expensive, consumes 40% less energy, and produces 39% less carbon dioxide than regular concrete.

via wmmna | Physorg

"

(Via Future Feeder.)

I have been playing with Mac OS X Tiger for about a week now, and overall I'm really impressed. It actually does represent a significant improvement over previous versions. General thoughts:

• Faster? Well it certainly doesn't feel any slower! On a 1.5Ghz Powerbook with 1Gb RAM, it flies but then so did Panther. On my 450Mhz (*2) G4 tower I haven‘t noticed any real difference. I couldn’t really say with any authority - it‘ll certainly be interesting to see how it feels on my G3 500Mhz Powerbook - mind you that’s only got 256Mb RAM …
• Dashboard - yeah well it does what it says on the tin. (BTW the cool ripple effect, and the zoom in both require half decent graphics cards - and that seems to exclude the ones in the Mac Mini. Overall … it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months in terms of what is developed. Worth a mention at this point is Amnesty, which allows you to run Dashboard widgets outside of the Dashboard environment - could see this being useful.
• Spotlight - haven't used it much per se. More on this later. Suffice to say that it really does work and well.
• Mail 2. Some people don‘t like the new interface - I think it’s OK. On the other hand smart mailboxes eg Today‘s mail, or All New Mail or whatever … absolutely awesome. Loving it. So far that is where spotlight is shining (haw haw pun intended) - inside applications (address book is great for the same reasons). Maybe I’ve just been using Quicksilver too long to worry that much about finding stuff!

More later ….

Playful ways to share mobile phone snaps: "Yet another IDII thesis project I saw at the Greenhouse Effect show during the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Bernd Hitzeroth's Experiencing Mobile Image project explores new ways to share images on the mobile phone.

A first set of ideas allows to exchange pre-recorded images in real-time during a voice-call with another person.

Through a touch screen interface images are ‘pushed’ and ‘pulled’ to a shared viewing space. The analogue control allows for a variety of gestures, from the quick flashing of images, to rapid firing of image sequences to offering an image to be revealed by the other person.

An image can also be ‘loaded’ by linking it to a gestural shortcut and then ‘fired’ at will.

Another interaction I found particularly interesting allows you to mask or annotate the currently broadcasted image by ‘shadowing’ one‘s hand on the part you don’t want the other person to see or a sketch onto the images using the phone's camera.

A broadcast can be recorded and ‘bounced’ to an offline receiver. When the receiver has finished watching the broadcast he/she can give a gestural response to the content, which is automatically bounced back to the sender.

A second set of ideas explores sharing digital images through physical objects like stickers or concrete walls. The phone becomes the lens through which we can reveal images hidden in the real world. The interactions are prototyped using two connected touch screens as well as a mock camera-phone.

"

(Via we make money not art.)

Ring Thing Bottle Opener:
"ThinkGeek is selling the ‘Ring Thing,’ a simple piece stainless steel jewelry that lets you perform beer-opening magic tricks at the drop of a backwards ballcap. Since my cheapo keychain bottle-cap opener died (Thanks, Dogfish Head!), I‘m going to give this a go—as soon as I can find a ruler that measures in increments of ’sausages.'

Pop it on your middle finger, teeth-in, and grab the bottle firmly (but respectfully), levering your wrist up like a fop. Not a bad little bit of engineering for 10 bucks.

Catalog Page [ThinkGeek]

"

(Via Gizmodo.)

Foundcity : Virtual Tags for Physical Space: "

FoundCity, by John Geraci of NYU's ITP, allows users to tag interesting things in the city with their cell phones. The database of tags can be access online and visualized through Google Maps. Say, for example, I‘m walking down the street and I spot an abandoned building with a open back entrance. I would send a tag to foundcity.net titled, ’abandoned.building:123 city street:get in through the back'. As more people use the same tag to spot other abandoned buildings, the map grows. Foundcity currently runs only in Manhattan, but there are plans to spread it to other boroughs and cities. I think photos with tags would be a great feature.

"

(Via Future Feeder.)

papercrete, fibercrete, fibrous concrete - Living in Paper: “In the United States, we discard enough paper each year to build a wall 48 feet high around the entire perimeter of the country. Even though about 45 percent of discarded paper is recycled annually, 55 percent or 48 million tons of paper is thrown away or goes into the landfills. Figuring conservatively, it takes about fifteen trees to make a ton of paper. That means that 720 million trees are used once and then buried in a landfill each year. We are experimenting with ways to turn this prodigious amount of waste into low-cost, high-value sustainable housing. ”

At some point, I may get involved with some big run down of my impressions of this big ole upgrade, but not now!

For now I just wanted to note: If you have installed any of the following: MailPriority, MailEnhancer or MailAppetizer (these would be in ~/Library/Mail/Bundles), uninstall them before running Mail.app under 10.4. I didn‘t have the same issues that some are having - unexpected quits and so on. For me, I just couldn’t send or save as draft!

Hope this helps someone!

Bamboo is of the world's most prolific and fastest-growing plants, and is able to reach maturity in about four years, compared to the typical 25 to 70 years for commercial tree species in the U.S. Though most people are generally familiar with this beautiful and graceful plant, the average person is usually astounded when learning that there are more than 1000 documented uses of bamboo.

Bamboosa

Bamboo Textile

r a d i o q u a l i a: "r a d i o q u a l i a is a new online electronic portal into the eccentricities of antipodean radio space.

r a d i o q u a l i a is an online art collaboration by New Zealanders, Adam Hyde and Honor Harger. It was founded in 1998 in Australia.

Using various streaming media softwares, r a d i o q u a l i a experiments with the concept of artistic broadcasting, using the internet and traditional media forms, such as radio and television, as primary tools. We work in gallery, performance, broadcast and publishing contexts. r a d i o q u a l i a creates the latitude for musicians and visual artists to explore distances between cultural understandings. "