Click On Tyler Hall

A Guide to Highwire for Mac OS X

Wednesday, December 30 2009

So, what is Highwire? It’s a little complicated to explain at first, so bear with me. I’m still working on how best to introduce it to folks…

In a nutshell, Highwire is a competitor to Apple’s Back to My Mac service. You run one copy on your Mac at home, and another on your Mac at work (or at a coffee shop, etc). Highwire will then connect back to itself on your home computer and let you access all of its shared services.

Lost yet? What does this really mean?

Well, it means that when you’re at work you’ll be able to listen to your iTunes music stored on your Mac at home. Or browse your iPhoto library at home. Or access any of your shared folders and files. It all works pretty seamlessly. You just open up Highwire on each Mac, and instantly they’ll be able to share back and forth.

Make sense yet?

Getting Started

1) The first thing you’ll want to do after launching Highwire is to create yourself a Highwire account. This is just a simple online account that coordinates all of the data between copies of Highwire. Click the Register button to sign up.

2) Once you’ve signed in to Highwire, you’re given two options. You can either Share or Connect. It works like this: First, you share your Mac at home. Then, when you’re at work or at a coffee shop, you connect back to your home machine.

Sharing Your Home Mac

To share your home Mac, just click on the Turn on Sharing button. It’s that easy. Highwire should prompt you if it encounters any errors.

Note: In order for Highwire to work, you’ll need to have Remote Login (also known as SSH) enabled on your Mac.

Connecting Back to your Home Mac

Connecting back to your Home Mac is easy. Simply select your Mac from the list of available computers and click Connect. When prompted, enter your Mac’s username and password. (Note: make sure you enter your Mac’s short username.) If all goes well, Highwire should be able to connect back to your Mac and begin sharing your services.

How Do I Know if it Worked?

Good question. The easiest way to test is using iTunes.

1) On your Mac at home, start iTunes and make sure that network sharing is turned on.

2) On your Mac at home, launch Highwire and begin sharing.

3) On your other Mac at work or wherever, launch Highwire and connect back to your Home mac.

4) Once connected, if you open iTunes on your work Mac, you should see your home music library shared and playable.

5) Tada! You’re done!

So What Else Can Highwire Do?

The technical geek answer is Highwire will share all of your Bonjour services over the internet. In other words, your iTunes Music Library, your iPhoto Photo Library, your shared files and folders, etc. Any Bonjour service can be made to work with Highwire.

OpenFeedback Part Deux

Sunday, December 27 2009

A year and a half ago I wrote about OpenFeedback, an open source Cocoa framework for gathering feedback from your users. Initially, it was a sister project to Appcaster, my indie dashboard web app. Since then, Appcaster has grown up and morphed into Shine, but OpenFeedback remained unchanged. Tonight, though, I took a few hours off from Highwire and rewrote OpenFeedback from scratch.

The rewrite wasn’t strictly necessary, but it certainly didn’t hurt. The original code was hurried and in poor shape. I was able to cut the amount of code by 30% and give the dialog a more modern looking tab view.

Like before, adding OpenFeedback to your application is trivial — there’s no code required. You simply link your app against the framework and hook-up the appropriate actions in Interface Builder. In under five minutes you can have an elegant way to encourage users to ask questions, submit bug reports, and suggest new features.

My long term goal for OpenFeedback has always been for the Mac developer community to rally behind it, making it a drop-in standard much like Sparkle. That hasn’t happened yet (obviously), but Shine has been getting some good attention lately. If I’m lucky, maybe some of that goodwill will carry over and help kickstart things along.

Like the rest of my open source projects, OpenFeedback is MIT licensed and available on GitHub.

Switching From PayPal to FastSpring

Tuesday, December 22 2009

I’ve been wanting to switch my online store away from PayPal for quite a while now. Although there are a bunch of PayPal horror stories floating around the web (here’s a recent one), my main reason is to make my life simpler. As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to offer quantity discounts, coupon codes, and multiple currencies on top of the PayPal API alone. After a lot of investigation and much urging from friends, I made the switch Sunday night to FastSpring.

I couldn’t be happier.

In addition to what is quickly becoming legendary customer support, their e-commerce platform is a dream to work with. Without even reading the documentation, I was able to setup my store and fully integrate it with my backend license fulfillment system (Shine) in under two hours. And that’s doing things the complicated way. If I weren’t such a control freak, I could have handed over the license generation and email confirmation responsibilities to their system as well.

The only tricky part I came across was creating a custom theme based on their default style. The documentation for creating a custom theme from scratch is well written and easy enough to follow. But, unfortunately, if all you want to do is add a custom header or make a small tweak to their default style, there’s no easy way to do so, since they don’t supply a “starter” theme to work from. But, with a little patience you can reverse engineer things easily enough and extract the assets you need. And that’s just what I did to create the look and feel of my store. Once I had their basic layout copied, dropping in my Click On Tyler header was a snap.

You can download the default theme I put together, here. Hopefully it’ll save you some time. Or, better yet, maybe FastSpring would be kind enough to post it to their documentation page for everyone else to use as well.

Update: Did I say legendary customer support? I mean it. It’s a little after 1am here, and FastSpring just emailed me a quick thank you along with their official default theme. Awesome work guys (and gals).

Welcome Back

Tuesday, December 22 2009

After ten months and five days, I’m finally back to work on Highwire. Feel free to follow along on my development blog.

End of Year Tweet Deal

Tuesday, December 22 2009

2009 is nearly over and I’m thankful to say it’s been a great year. I’m lucky enough to have a fantastic day job that lets me run this little software business on the side. And, somehow, in twelve short months I’ve managed to release two new products — Incoming and Nottingham. Three if you count VirtualHostX 2.0.

Each one has benefitted greatly from all the suggestions and comments (both good and bad) I’ve gotten from you, my users. For that, I say thank-you! And, as a small treat, I’d like to offer a half-off coupon.

Between now and the end of the year, send me a note with a suggestion for how to make one of my apps better and I’ll send you in return a coupon for 50% off. It’s that easy. You can email me your suggestions or send it via Twitter. Either way, it’s a selfish way for me to get some great feedback and for you to get one last end of the year deal.

The Little Notepad that Might

Saturday, November 28 2009

This holiday, while family and friends ate good food and played Super Mario Bros. Wii, I found myself holed up in my office working on a small passion project called Nottingham. (Ok, I ate some food, too.) I wrote briefly about Nottingham last week, but wanted to take a few minutes to go into a bit more detail as it’s grown up a lot these last few days.

Above all things, Nottingham is a clone of the classic Mac application Notational Velocity. And I’m serious when I say that — I didn’t start out to write an app like NV, I started out with the intention of literally copying what they had created and then improving upon it. To merit creating such a similar app, my improvements had to be worthwhile. I started out with four goals.

First, it had to have a cleaner, more Mac-like UI. Notational Velocity’s current interface is purely functional. It’s efficient and stays out of your way. Unfortunately, it’s ugly, too. It no longer fits in with the UI polish users expect in 2009. I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I did make some common sense changes that make the interface friendlier. I replaced the current search box with a native Mac search field and removed any unnecessary padding around the UI elements. I gave the note field a legal pad treatment (inspired by The Hit List), enabled rich text editing, and replaced the “Date Created” column with a more useful “Date Modified” one. Also, since the goal of Nottingham (and NV) is to be totally keyboard navigable, I put a lot of thought into which shortcut keys I kept and which ones I altered. One of those changes was making the up and down arrow keys behave more naturally as they move through the list of notes and into / out of the search field.

Your data is precious. That’s why the second major focus of Nottingham was enabling sync support to keep your notes safe. I went two routes with this. First, I made Nottingham sync with MobileMe. This not only keeps your data backed up in Apple’s cloud, but it makes it available to you on all of your Macs. Unfortunately, MobileMe is a $99/year service that not everyone has, which is why Nottingham offers a second option to sync with Cloud Factory’s awesome Simplenote service. This gives you access to your notes from any computer via their web interface and on-the-go access with their kick-ass iPhone application. Any changes you make on your Mac will by synced over the air to your phone and vice-versa.

Finally, to give you access to your notes even when Nottingham isn’t open, I enabled Spotlight indexing. This makes it a snap to find what you’re looking for no matter where you are on your Mac.

And that’s about it. Nottingham is still very much a work in progress, but I think you’ll find it’s already stable and useful enough for everyday use. It’s quickly become a staple icon in my Dock. If, during your use, you find any bugs (which I’m sure there are) or have suggestions for improving it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

You can download the latest version of Nottingham here.

Black Friday Sale

Thursday, November 26 2009

Happy Black Friday, everyone!

In celebration of the first shopping day of the holiday season, both VirtualHostX and Incoming! are on sale for $10 today only! That’s over 50% off.

To take advantage of this sale, just click the “Buy Now” buttons. Your discount will be automatically applied at checkout.

Nottingham – A Simple Note Taking App For Mac OS X

Tuesday, November 24 2009

About a month ago (apparently late to the game) I discovered Notational Velocity — a slick little notepad for Mac. I really liked the idea of it — lightweight and totally keyboard navigable — but the UI and implementation bugged me. So I did what any good Mac developer does — I reinvented the wheel and wrote a clone I call Nottingham.

For right now it’s a straight-up rip of Notational Velocity. To its developers I say thanks for the inspiration :-) In the coming weeks I’m hoping to add my own bit of flair to the app, including MobileMe syncing, real Spotlight integration, and (for iPhone users) syncing with Simplenote.

If you’re curious and would like to give Nottingham a try, download it here.

As always, feedback is welcome. I’d love to know what features other users would like to see added.

20% Off Sale! – Get a One Finger Discount

Friday, November 6 2009

As part of the One Finger Discount going on throughout Mac-software-land, both Incoming! and VirtualHostX are 20% off their normal prices between now and next Friday. You can pickup a copy (or two!) of VirtualHostX for $14 — and Incoming! is available for $24.

Incoming! 1.0

Tuesday, October 20 2009

So it’s been almost two months since I last posted. I’ve had a lot going on, but mainly it’s because I’ve been hard at work pushing out beta releases of Incoming! — my Twitter search client — and gearing up for the big one-point-oh release. It’s been three months since the first public preview, and today I’m happy to announce 1.0 is officially available.

I want to say a big thank-you to all my beta testers and early adopters. I’ve received a ton of great feedback over the last three months — it’s helped make Incoming! a much better product than I could have built on my own.

Next Page »

On Tyler

Originally from Nashville, I'm an engineer working for Yahoo! in San Francisco and paying my way with PHP and Cocoa.