Moving Towards an Action Logging Spec An example of the kind of thing that will be helpful for logging actions comes out of a more general discussion about tracking more general events. The sort of thing we may be looking for would allow anyone to track general events such as actions taken, exercise done, food eaten, measurements made or steps taken towards goals. These may be some of the desirable features in any kind of software developed:

Records or data points can be entered via any mobile device App, iPhone or Android etc but also from a desktop or laptop via a web browser.  On entry,  data types can be selected from a drop down list of previously entered or suggested event types Each event type may have different fields specific to that type. For example, if a button is clicked to enter a ‘running event’, this presents the user with fields to fill in such as distance covered, start time, end time, etc. For a heart rate reading, fields are presented to select after exercise or relaxed plus the pulse rate reading.  Users can add their own event types, depending on what types of actions and events they wish to log.  Users can then add different types of fields to event types The whole process must be optimised to be as frictionless as possible when logging events.  The user’s own data remains theirs and can be exportable in a format which may be used by other apps. 

The above outline towards a spec is strongly biased towards the active data collection methodology, with the user having to stop what they are doing and make a positive decision to type or somehow enter data into a device, whereas some people have suggested that passive data collection is the only way to go.  Passive data collection may be possible for monitoring some physical attributes which can be detected by sensors, but many types of events of the kind which need to be monitored require the subject to do a certain amount of intellectual interpretation of the event before it can be entered, so there may well be a perpetual need for this kind of database entry approach to action logging.

There’s also going to be a trade-off between flexibility and design for purpose, with the actionlogr app needing to be tailored towards the particular philosophy behind the idea, rather than trying to become an all-purpose event tracking process, but where we end up along that spectrum does not need to be decided at this stage.

I went to WordPress London meetup number #7 last night, hosted by Headshift at their office near Shad Thames, along the south bank of the Thames, east of Tower Bridge. Nice to have something on the East side for once, although south of the river, I wouldn’t normally mention the general location but for Londoners, having different travel options is essential and I was pleased to be able to exit the Transport For London  system at a zone 2 tube station, Bermondsey. WordPress London is not really a mainly social gathering like some of the bloggers meetups, it’s a business learning event and last night there were three sections, each packed with fast moving presentations full of detail, actionable insights and deeply understood data. First up, a round up of news from the world of WordPress from Chris Adams  of Headshift with a peek at the new drag and drop file upload interface for WordPress 3.3, out very soon. There was also a heads up for the ManageWP service launched this month, a service which I use myself and would also heartily recommend for anybody who maintains more than one self-hosted WordPress installation, in fact it’s brilliant if you have dozens or more. WordPress London Meetup Then David Bain delivered a comprehensive briefing about SEO for WordPress, including an outline of a hub and spoke structure for content based on using pages for the main parts of a site, supported by posts  All based around keyword targeting, which, while possibly on it’s way to becoming somewhat old-school,  is after all what search engine optimisation is all about. One or two plugin tips to be followed up there. Finally, Keith Devon a WordPress developer explained how and why to use WordPress Custom Post Types. Custom post types are not types of posts at all, but other types of content alongside of posts or pages. The example given was that of a real estate property rental site, for which the element “Property” needed to be a thing of itself, with it’s own display template in the theme, neither a post nor a page but with it’s own “add Property” section within the dashboard. This gave me some great ideas for how I might have designed one or two of my existing sites much better had the concept been around a few years ago. Keith showed us how to implement custom post types by dropping in chunks of code into functions.php “because it’s easier” but discussion from the audience suggests that using specialised plugins for the purpose may be the way to go if you want to be able to keep your site up to date with new software releases. Time for some brief discussions and an optional visit to a Samuel Smiths pub afterwards, so I walked back along the south bank and over London Bridge back to dry land. Hashtag: #WPLDN Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWordPress London #7

As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini

Patent holding firm Lodsys claims revenue from Apple iPhone and iPad 2 app developers, but critics say it is abusing the patent system

This article titled “Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th May 2011 16.24 UTC Apple’s legal department is understood to be “actively investigating” claims by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas, to have a claim against iPhone and iPad developers who use in-app purchase systems.

So far Lodsys has served papers on about a dozen iOS developers who it says are infringing its patent 10/732,102, which it bought in 2004 from the inventor, who filed it in the 1990s, covering user interaction over a network.

Apple is not expected to respond to the claims, which have been passed to it by affected developers, until later this week.

Lodsys is asking for 0.575% of US revenue for in-app purchase. Although that may not be substantial for individual developers, one told the Guardian: “0.575% of the in-app purchase market across all platforms would be a very nice figure to have indeed. And, of course, it’s 0.575% for this patent today. Tomorrow it’s another 1% from some other company, and so on.”

Lodsys says that Apple has licensed the patent covering in-app purchasing – but adds that it can still claim for payments that use the technology in developers’ own apps. “The scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide ‘pixie dust’ to bless another third-party business applications [sic]. The value of the customer relationship is between the Application vendor of record and the paying customer,” notes the blog’s author, believed to be Lodsys‘s chief executive, Mark Small. “The operating system is acting as an enabler and the retailers are acting as a conduit to connect that value.”

In a series of blog posts, the company notes that Google and Microsoft have taken out licences, but notes that “so far no one has asked” whether apps written on those platforms might be liable for licence fees.

A number of iOS developers received couriered documents last week from Lodsys claiming payments were due following their use of in-app purchases.

The move has worried app developers, who see it as a dangerous and slippery slope where they become liable for payments to third parties after using the in-system APIs that they are required to by the mobile OS company. Apple does not allow apps that use other systems for purchasing to be sold through its app store, and Google is also tightening its rules on app APIs.

Lodsys is also suing a number of larger companies including Samsung, Brother, HP and Motorola Mobility.

Lodsys comments on its blog that:

“There are lots of bills in life that it would be preferable to not pay if one didn’t have to. Lodsys is just trying to get value for assets that it owns, just like each and every company selling products or services is, trying to do business and make a profit. It’s odd that some of the companies that received notices had such a visceral reaction. Some of these companies have our favorite apps, for which we paid the asking price. We realise you have to get paid for your work and so do we.”

One developer told the Guardian: “They do imply they’ve have a horrible weekend, but then again, I seem to be the one who hasn’t slept properly since Friday, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who sent the letters in the first place! It feels very hypocritical for them to paint themselves as the victim here.”

Florian Mueller, who has tracked patent disputes in the US and EU, suggests on his blog: “Lodsys is trying to abuse the patent system in a way that could ultimately destroy the entire mobile apps economy, which is not only thriving on its own but has been and continues to be a key factor in making new mobile devices so useful and popular.”

He says: “It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid,” adding: “Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and” Lodsys, which bought them from the inventor.

Mueller fears that if Lodsys prevails it will buy more patents and use them against small app developers who would be unable to defend themselves; and other companies would follow its business model, “shaking trees for money that you just can’t lose because your opponents can’t even defend themselves”.

The risk to the mobile app economy is huge, says Mueller, and this move by a small, relatively unknown company might be the final straw needed to get the mobile companies, including Apple – which is the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue – to lobby the US administration finally to do something positive about software patents. The problem is, what?

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Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?

This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”

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I love my iMac  but I don’t sync.

This article titled “I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling” was written by Charlie Brooker, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 00.04 UTC In 2007, I wrote a column entitled “I hate Macs”. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word anti-Apple screed. Macs, I claimed, were “glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.” In 2009, I complained again: “The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them . . . I don’t care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that makes it piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.” The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it. They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium. Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple. Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes. Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating “.docx” Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet. Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven’t been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about “syncing” one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won’t tell you. It’ll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can’t understand why you’re crying. No one uses terms like “sync” in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It’s like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay. Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking. Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin. Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes’ tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple’s own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it’s not a patch on Amazon’s Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform “cloud” system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by “syncing” – but we’ll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.) Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they’ve changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30% cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app. So 30% less for authors and publishers, and 30% more for the world’s second-largest company. And that’s assuming they’ll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they’ll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad. Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it’s a superficial friendship. To Apple, you’re nothing. They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it’s on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog. So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I’m renting them from Skynet.

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The second video tutorial in this series about image editing concerns the use of the Clone Tool. In the first lesson we looked at image editing with Layers, and again I’m using the Seashore free image editing software for Mac but the same principles apply to many other image editing software packages. Image editing with the Clone Tool Click here to view the embedded video.

One simple use of the clone toolis to extend some background over part of an image that doesn’t fit in, effectively making some obtrusive feature vanish. The limitations to this are that the background has to be something relatively uniform. If you want to try your hand at editing the photograph used as an example in this tutorial then you will find it here on Flickr with a creative commons license that allows derivatives to be made and published, with attribution.

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Free FTP Client Software for Windows Filezilla is a free and open source FTP client software program used for connnecting to a webserver to update websites. Here’s a short tutorial video which deals with downloading, setting up and connecting Filezilla FTP to a website. I describe the twin pane approach, and show you how to download a website file, edit it , test and then re-upload so the new version is live on your website.
This Filezilla video can be watched from right here below as an embedded YouTube video, do try the HD (High Definition) and full screen options:

Or you can download the full original 84Mb video file onto your computer using the free file hosting service at divshare: Download Filezilla FTP Video Tutorial Filezilla FTP client software is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions.

Good alternative FTP clients apart from Filezilla are Cute FTP for Windows and Mac (small charge) , and on a Mac there are also Fetch and Cyberduck.

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I managed to get a mediawiki installation up and running on the city escapes domain with Servage web host in the end, and once working it does seem to be fairly robust as far as non-US web hosting services are concerned. Version: This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2007 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church and others. MediaWiki is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. MediaWiki is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. or read it online

MediaWiki: 1.11.1 PHP: 5.2.42-servage10 (apache2handler) MySQL: 5.0.75

http://cityescapes.eu/page/Special:Version

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I can’t remember where I first came across Seashore, but its been sitting in my applications folder and dock for a couple of months and on the odd occasion when I need to do do some image editing I’ve come to rely on it without really feeling the pain of a learning curve. So here’s my software review: Seashore is a native OS X application which does image editing on a Mac. Free and Open Source, it’s much smaller and lighter than Photoshop and easier to use than The Gimp, and being an installed application is much more responsive than an online image editor such as Picnic. So Seashore fits in nicely for anything a bit more than than basic iPhoto tweaking, and a bit less than full blown Photoshop pro tools. Seashore loads very quickly indeed on my underpowered Mac mini, and immediately presents a simple and recognisable tools palette. So you can get up and running doing simple stuff with images really quickly, but when it comes to more advanced operations, and inevitably the need arises sooner rather than later, then the shortcomings of Seashore in its present state become apparant.

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