Nik Fletcher
Brighton, UK - http://twitter.com/nikf
Despite a background in classical music, Nik works for a small Macintosh software company in sunny Brighton, England. Since joining Download Squad in 2007, he's also spent time writing for Download Squad's sister site TUAW, as well as penning a couple of articles for The Guardian newspaper. Nik also spends a fair amount of time travelling to the US - be it for Macworld, SXSW or just holiday, and makes no secret of his plans to move across the pond at a date yet to be determined.Like almost every other person on the planet, you can follow him on Twitter - he's @nikf.
Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Blogging, Web services, Yahoo!, Shareware, web 2.0
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Nov 6th 2009
Every now and then I find myself working on slides in
Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course,
Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and
Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where
Viewfinder steps in.
A native Mac OS X application (requiring
Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.
If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the
Viewfinder webpage.
Filed under: Audio, Windows, Apple
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 19th 2009
If you're searching for a free alternative for iTunes on Windows,
DoubleTwist - the handy media player for Windows and OS X - just became even more attractive with today's launch of version 2.4 that includes support for iPhone and iPod touch syncing.
If you're not familiar with DoubleTwist, it's a company founded by
'DVD Jon' Lech Johansen - who reverse-engineered the encryption in DVDs and the iTunes store - that now offers a desktop media player for Mac and Windows.
DoubleTwist just recently announced their plans to
add the Amazon MP3 store to their desktop software, and with today's announcement of iPhone & iPod touch support DoubleTwist is fast becoming a worthy - and highly competent - competitor to
iTunes.
iTunes has long been an app we all love to hate. It looks like iPhone and iPod Touch users will now have a solid alternative that won't try to slip in a browser, codec, or who knows what else every time it updates.
[Via
Lifehacker]
Update: We should also point out that, given Apple's cat-and-mouse game with Palm over the Pre syncing with iTunes, it's highly possible that Apple might break this functionality in a future update to the iPhone / iPod touch OS. Game on....
Filed under: Developer, Open Source
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 10th 2009
This is definitely one for the developers amongst you, but if you're developing an application in PHP and need to handle the reading of RSS feeds,
SimplePie is a god-send. Some folks will point you in the direction of PHP5's built-in SimpleXML module, however it's highly intolerant of malformed XML - and certainly doesn't have any
extra features such as caching that you get with SimplePie.
If you're looking for an easy way to work with RSS or Atom feeds, SimplePie is both easy to implement - and thoroughly documented to help you build on it. I've used SimplePie in a number of projects in the last year - from multi-feed collation to simply showing a list of recent blog posts in a sidebar - and every time I use it I find myself grinning like a cheshire cat at the amount of time it has saved me.
SimplePie is available under the BSD licence for your hacking pleasure, and the developers are currently seeking feedback for version 2!
Filed under: Web services, iPhone, web 2.0, Microblogging
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 10th 2009
We've covered iPhone Twitter clients to death here on Download Squad, but we simply couldn't help but post about
Tweetie 2.0 which launched just yesterday. If you're not familiar with Tweetie - which won an
Apple Design Award earlier in the year for version 1 - it's often touted as the best Twitter client for the iPhone platform, and this new version raises the bar in terms of features and experience.
There's a tonne of new features (and an all-new underlying core to the application) - so here's just a few of my favourites that I've noticed:
- Searching within timelines - super-handy if you're trying to find that tweet without having to scroll back through your Twitter history
- Swipe-to-refresh - if you're at the top of the list of tweets, Tweetie allows you to swipe up and hold momentarily to refresh without tapping a refresh button. It's a really smart touch (though, assumes that you've read all the updates that are in front of you).
- More integration with location services and image services - If a tweet contains GPS data, or an image from the likes to Twitpic, Tweetie shows you a small preview of the information below the tweet.
- Multiple-draft support - version 2.0 allows you to save multiple drafts for posting later, and also allows you to post all drafts, whether a tweet or direct message, with one tap.
- More services - There's built-in links to the likes of Favrd, Favstar.fm and many other Twitter mashups when you're browsing user profiles.
Tweetie 2.0 also heads into uncharted territory by being the first iPhone app to have a paid upgrade. Whilst this has caused much bickering from certain "celebrities", given that a copy of Tweetie 2.0 is just $2.99 for all users it's not going to break the bank. You can pick up your copy
on the App Store.
Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0, Web
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 4th 2009
Facebook have always worked to make sure that the service is available in as many languages as possible - from French to Føroyskt, Polish to Pirate, the service is available in 70 languages for the site's worldwide audience. Yesterday, however, the Facebook team have
rolled out a Latin localisation of the site to help students, noting that "the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away".
As someone who studied Latin at school, it's nice to see a often-mocked-as-dead language rise from the ashes and brought to life on Facebook - though, I'll admit I won't be leaving the language as my default setting any time soon.
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 4th 2009 {4 comments}
At the end of August, the NFL decided to institute a number of rules prohibiting the use of social media by teams and referees on match day - as well as rules that banned the media from providing live play-by-play coverage of matches.
As was pointed out at the time, the rules are easily imposed on officially-sanctioned media reps at matches - but what's to stop the average Joe in the stands ...
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 3rd 2009 {0 comments}
It's been quite a week here at Download Squad - and contrary to popular opinion there's been more than Google Wave in the news, so here's quick roundup of the news from the last seven days alongside some other stories that we simply didn't get a chance to cover.
...
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed)
Oct 3rd 2009 {9 comments}
For the last few months I've been working on a small side-project away from Download Squad that requires the use of GPS co-ordinates. Whilst the system I'm using has some default co-ordinates built-in, I really needed a way to find out the latitude and longitude for a few other locations around the world to give my little project a test. After wrangling with Google Maps URLs, and trying to ...
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Oct 1st 2009 {20 comments}
Earlier in the month we covered Cheese or Font - a fantastic perpetually-running time-waster that challenges you to choose whether the name displayed refers to a cheese or a font. However, the web is buzzing (at least, in some circles) about a far more nerdy variant: Helvetica vs Arial in Ironic Sans' "So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?" quiz. You're shown 20 logos, each rendered in ...
by Nik Fletcher (RSS feed) Sep 30th 2009 {2 comments}
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (otherwise known as ICANN) has, since its inception in 1998, enjoyed been strongly ties with the US Government's Department of Commerce - something that's irritated international governments who've wanted the body responsible for domain names and the entire Doman Name System to be more internationally-balanced. In particular, ICANN has been ...
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
