Review: Dymo DiscPainter
I have a mountain of CDs and DVDs in my office. Some of them are in sleeves, others are stacked on spindles. For the most part, my disc labeling consists of grabbing a Sharpie ultra-fine-point marker and scrawling something right on the top of the disc. I’ve tried sticky labels before, but stopped after I had a few CDs that wouldn’t come out of my iMac’s SuperDrive slot.
Dymo, the labeling company, is now shipping the DiscPainter. It’s a single-duty printer designed for one thing; printing directly onto inkjet-printable CD and DVD media.
Size, Installation, and Setup
The first thing that hit me when I opened the DiscPainter box was how big it is. Given that it is a single-tasker, it takes up a lot of room on a desktop (roughly 5.75″ x 10″). For those with limited space available, this may be a reason not to buy the DiscPainter.
Following the included Quick Start Guide (yes, I RTFM), I removed the usual tape and plastic cruft encasing the DiscPainter, popped in the single ink cartridge, and connected the power cable. The initial user experience is excellent.
[Via: Dymo.com]
Popularity: 9% [?]
LiveDiscKit
Moments before our Macworld 2008 interview with Paul Kafasis he told me about the unique way the demo CDs they were giving out worked. What’s the main problem with software on CDs? Those apps are suspended in amber, frozen in time, and many other overused metaphors. The fine folks at Rogue Amoeba make living, breathing code. They don’t stop updating it for a second, and they wanted to make sure that the app you installed off of that CD was the most up to date version available.
Impossible, you say. Piffle! Not for Rogue Amoeba (that one celled organism is a determined little guy). They looked at the problem and thought of LiveDisc. LiveDisc is an application that is burnt onto the CD. This application points to the most recent versions of the actual app that you want the user to install (an Internet connection is required). A simple solution to a highly specific problem, which is why I like it so much.
Rogue Amoeba is now sharing LiveDisc with other devs in the form of LiveDiscKit, an open source plugin for Interface Builder. Simply tweak a few settings, point it at the right places, and you’re set to press a large number of CDs which will never go out of date (CD pressing functionality is not included with LiveDiscKit), that is assuming CDs stick around for much longer.
[Source: Rogueamoeba]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Mac 101: Get that “stuck” disc out of your Mac
Welcome to another Mac 101 here at apple. Mac 101 is our recurring feature in which we point out some tips and tricks for folks new to the Mac. Remember, if you’re a Mac expert this post isn’t for you.
Have you ever tried to unmount a disc in Mac OS X, but it simply wouldn’t come out of your Mac’s drive? Here are three ways to removing discs from your Mac’s drive. If your Mac is currently using the disc you won’t be able to eject it, so make sure that isn’t the case first. If the disc isn’t in use and you still can’t eject it, give these a try.
Step 1: Drag the disc to the trash can
Find the disc on the desktop and drag its icon to the Mac OS X trash can. As you start dragging it towards the trash, the icon will change to an eject button, release the mouse button when the disc’s icon is directly over the eject button.
Step 2: Try some command line good-ness
If you have tried to eject the disc by dragging its icon over the trash bin, then why not try a simple Terminal command to eject the disc. Open Terminal.app (found in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app; or use Command + Shift + U to in any Finder window to move to the Utilities folder).
Once you have Terminal opened, type (or copy/paste) the following command: drutil eject
Step 3: Restart your Mac while holding mouse button
If you’ve tried the other steps to no avail, then why not reboot your Mac while holding down the mouse button. Upon loading the Apple boot screen, your disc should be ejected.
Please note that if you have a disc that is actually stuck in the drive this will not help. Stuck discs may need the assistance of an Apple Genius or certified Apple repair professional.
Mac 101
Popularity: 10% [?]
Avery releases free Design Pro for Mac
Avery Office Products, the purveyor of labels, blank business cards, binder dividers, greeting cards, and iron-on t-shirt transfers, has released a free application called Design Pro for Mac.
This software was demoed at Macworld Expo in January and is now available for download (registration required) from the Avery website. Design Pro contains over 2,000 clip art and photo images, as well as over 1,300 pre-designed templates for various projects. It is integrated with iPhoto as well, so you can use all of your own photos to create CD/DVD labels, birthday cards, and other fun projects. If you’re burning your own music CDs, Design Pro can grab playlist or tune information from iTunes, and it’s also able to use your Address Book for doing mail merges.
Avery Design Pro for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Be aware - the download is 262MB in size!
Popularity: 6% [?]
temper4iPhone emulates Turbografx-16 on the iPhone
The guys at Touch Arcade are at it again — this time, ZodTTD has ported temper, a TurboGrafx-16 emulator, to the iPhone, and as you can see above, this means something amazing: Bonk on the touchscreen. Sounds like the audio has a few little glitches, but seems like the controls and graphics are working as well as could be asked — even in the slower Landscape mode (with the controls overlaid on the graphics), he says it was pulling about 50FPS.
There’s even an emulator for the TurboGrafx-16 CD PC Engine, as long as you do a little tweaking (and nab the bios from somewhere that may or may not be legal — same for the ROMs). temper4iPhone is still in beta, and just like all of these other emulators and jailbreak apps, we have no clue at all whether we’ll ever get the chance to see them on the (rapidly approaching) App Store. Still, it’s awesome to see — we’ve definitely come a long way from the NES emulator way back when.
[Via MacBytes.com][Read]
Popularity: 9% [?]
