Recently I had a need to create a screencast to help my father learn how to use his new Mac. I’d seen Telestream Screenflow used in the past and from that, and a little play with the trial version, I decided I’d purchase the app for my Mac.

Although Screenflow is a bit expensive at 99USD, it has a lot of cool features, so I was all prepped and waving my credit card around ready to buy. Unfortunately when I went to Telestream’s eSellerate powered store it didn’t even list the application for sale.

Epic sales FAIL.

The chaps at Telestream however had made the smart decision to list their Twitter name on their site (@screenflow). So I tweeted a little note about how their store was broken when I had wanted to buy and that they had lost a sale.

I then went on to use Snapz Pro X, which I already own, to make my little screencast.

The next day, @screenflow tweeted me a little direct message asking for my email address, which I provided. Lo-and-behold, in response they send me a coupon code for a 100% discount for my troubles. Nice.

Thanks Telestream, that’s what I call customer service.

Call:

How do I update controls on my UI thread from the Asyncronous Delegate? I understand it’s not safe to just try to update it directly from the asynchronous thread, but I need to figure out how to update it somehow. Specifically I need to increment a ProgressBar and update text in a Label.

Thanks,
Michael C.

Response:

My name is Tyrone Hernandez. I grew up on the streets, so I’m familiar with this kind of shiznit. I am down with this, and I’m going to keep it real by top-posting.

In my hood, I have a homie named Shaniqua and some times she calls me on the phone in an asynchronous fashion. Now I’m hip to her jive, so I don’t wanna just hang up. If I feels like talkin to Shaniqua, I talk to her. If not, I use my power of “Control” to check “IsInvokeRequired” and if it is, I call Control.BeginInvoke() to upgrade my progress bar.

Well, I’d be likin’ to talk more, but my crack dealer is here so I’m going to call some of his methods. Peace out!

Made me laugh. And he’s correct. Found, here.

Speaking of good music and @Trent_Reznor, you should totally download The Slip. Nine Inch Nails are releasing all their music as totally free downloads (under creative commons licenses) these days.

Thanks to @trent_reznor’s blip.fm play list today I discovered Justice. If you’re at all into acts like Daft Punk I’m sure you’ll dig this album.

Buy it at Amazon or iTunes.

While saving a document in Word 2003 the other day, my colleague Phil witnessed Word spit the dummy and display this dialog.

Format what?

It appears to be some sort of vestigial error dialog from Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1.  Check out the awesome ASCII art bullet points and encouragement to format another floppy disk.

Sure I’ll just whip out and pop in a 3.5″ floppy and do that right away.

I just found an essential MacOS X add-on.

One of the things I find annoying with the Mac is the fact that there are no keyboard shortcuts for window management beyond minimizing and hiding an application’s windows.

My desktop screen is larger in both size and resolution than my MacBook’s built in display.  So when I’m travelling often I’ll open up an application, say iTunes for example, and the window will be larger than my screen can accomodate.  The borders of the window and the resize grab handle will be off screen with no way for me to mouse to the right place and resize the window to fit.

Enter MercuryMover.  This System Preference Pane provides customizable keyboard shortcuts and a nice little overlay GUI for manipulating windows with the keyboard.  Now I don’t mind paying the $20 to buy this app because it is damn useful, but this sort of feature should really be built-in to MacOS X.  Hopefully Apple will do that one day.  I don’t hold out much hope though.

Since getting my lovely new iPhone 3G I’ve only been able to connect to my apartment’s Linksys WAG54G V.3 using 802.11b.  It steadfastly refused to talk in “mixed” or “G-Only” mode when WPA-PSK encryption was turned on.

A little snooping behind the scenes, using the Organizer in Xcode to read the iPhone’s log, revealed that the poor little fella was having a problem with a “timeout waiting for authentication response” when connecting to the wireless LAN.

A little Googling and reading of anguished forum posts lead me to the solution.  I just needed to upgrade the Firmware on the Linksys to v1.00.46.

Now my iPhone can enjoy the benefits of 802.11G.

Perhaps this firmware upgrade will also fix my ADSL2+ signal strength issue too.  Time to test…

It is very weird to see a product you had a hand in creating appear on shelves in a local brand name retailer.

I randomly went into EB Games on Swanston Street tonight, just around the corner from my apartment, and saw this on the shelves.

Admittedly these are just empty promo boxes but it is still weird to see Heroes Over Europe on shelves.  Especially since the project has been a marathon effort from hell for all those involved.

For better or worse I played a large part in the creation of the mission editor for this game. So if the missions suck, I’m at least partly to blame.  My heart goes out to all my awesome ex-coworkers at Transmission Games who are feverishly beavering away to finish it.

Evan Williams on how Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/473

Too good not to share.

Yeah, I know it is old…