AudioCodex is one of the coolest applications I’ve stumbled upon in recent history. What it is, is a whole new way to experience your music. It incorporates all your iTunes files and whatever other multimedia files it can find on your hard drive, and consolidates it into a fairly easy to use interface which in my opinion, is pretty ordinary and dull; but you shouldn’t get AudioCodex because you’re looking for an iTunes replacement, look at it as more of a media “enhancer”.

By “enhancer”, I mean cool application with lots of neat sound editing features, coupled with some of the trippiest visualizers you’ll ever see. It’s really a lot of fun just to pick one of your favorite songs, and mess with it. The results range from straight-up bizarre, to downright hilarious.

If you’ve ever had any experience with DJ equipment, then the interface should look pretty familiar. You have your pitch distortion knob, your time (tempo) adjustment knob, a basic equalizer, some reverb adjustments, volume control, and pan (balance) adjustment. All these controls are found on the bottom of the player itself. If you activate the Inspector (command+2) then you get a much more precise version of the same controls

As mentioned previously, the software also comes bundled with some really cool visualizers. My personal favorite is “Rock Fandango”, a spinning star that pulsates to the beat and which you can drag and rotate. It’s a really cool effect that has to really be witnessed in order to really be understood.

While this is a cool application and is currently free, it will not be free forever. It is currently in public beta, but the developer plans on releasing it as shareware on April 1st, 2008.

[AudioCodex]

Below is a sample of a song I modified using AudioCodex. Major brownie points if you can guess which song it is

I just recently noticed a simple method of making certain applications start themselves up upon logging in. If an application is in the dock, you can right-click it, and put a check next to “Open at Login”. This automatically adds it to your list of startup items.

Alternatively, you can open System Preferences, the go to the Accounts tab, and click on the Login items tab. Here, you can delete startup items, as well as add new ones.

Some applications which I suggest you run upon login (which aren’t already automatically launched upon Login) are Caffeine, NetNewsWire, and Mail.app. While Login applications may be convenient in many cases, don’t have too many of them, or else it could affect the performance of your computer.

Safari 3.1 was just released hours ago on both Macs and PCs, and the new features that come along with it really improve the browser! Download it from here, or simply launch Software Update from the Apple icon in the menu bar.

The most noticeable new feature for most users should be the new ability to double-click on the tab bar to create a new tab, a feature which already exists in most web browsers. Before the update, you could get this functionality through a plug-in called Twicetab.

Other new features in Safari 3.1 are the newly added support for CSS Web Fonts and animations, and video and audio tags in HTML 5, which most (all?) browsers do not yet support.

Gizmodo has a great video of CSS animations in action here.

If the Safari 3.1 update doesn’t seem to be working for you, you should try restarting your computer.

Macworld has put together an article for their “Leopard Survival Guide” about the Dock and Stacks. The article explains how to optimize and hack your Dock and Stacks to better fit your needs. Let’s start off with Stacks.

They go over a variety of small hacks that can be made to Stacks in order to improve your life. My favorite is the addition of a Trash Can Stack. To do this, open a new window in Finder, and type in “~/.Trash” then drag the folder into the dock, next to the other Stacks. Take not that the .Trash folder has no icon and thus shows up as a plain folder (see picture).

Another hack they go over is one we’ve already covered here at MacTips, and that is the addition of a Recent Items Stack. To read more about this, click here. This Stack is particularly useful because it can display all kinds of information such as Recent Documents, Recent Applications, Favorite Volumes, etc. To select which mode you wish to use, right click the stack and put a check next to the desired setting.

There are a few other interesting Stacks hacks, but let’s move on to the Dock. There’s one hack that allows you to add spacers to your dock, much like adding spacers to your Finder bar; but my personal favorite is the ability to temporarily enable Dock magnification.

I usually have Dock magnification off because it eats a little RAM and is quite pointless in most cases. But sometimes, late at night, or early in the morning, my eyes just refuse to work; for these scenarios, I can hold control+shift while mousing over the dock. This temporarily enables magnification.

To read the whole article, click on the link below

[Macworld]

Whenever you choose “Save File As…”(or Link As… and so forth) in Safari it opens the typical window that allows you to choose whatever folder to want to save the file by mouse. However often I want to save an Emacs or Vim configuration or script to their respected hidden folders (~/.emacs.d or ~/.vim) and you can’t choose a hidden folder by default.

The inefficient way is to just download the file to some visible folder and then either move the file in the finder or use the mv command in the terminal. The efficient and smart way is to go to the “Save File As…” window in Safari and do Command-Shift-G. The window below will come up:

Now you put in the folder that you want, for example I would put in ~/.emacs.d and it would come up and I can choose so save my file in the hidden folder.

Enjoy!

For the all the geeks out there who read a lot of README, config, and MAKE files (and other text\* files without extensions) but hate having to either browse the file in TextEdit or if they want to look at it in their favorite text-editor; second-click, and then select Open With MacVim (or other) rather than simply double-clicking. Thankfully there is a way to fix it and here’s how:

1. Get RCDefaultApp
2. In RCDefaultApp go to the MIME Types tab
3. In “text/*”, “text/plain”, and “text/rtf” settings set the Default Application to your text-editor

And you’re done; now you just have to double-click on the file and it will open in your editor automatically.

Here’s how to use RCDefaultApp for assigning default applications to files with extensions easily.

Your Mac already comes with Apache installed, but getting PHP and MySQL setup can be a headache. Marc Liyanage has a great set of packaged software for making this easier, but this can still be too advanced for some users.

Introducing MAMP, Mac - Apache - MySQL - PHP. MAMP is the easiest way to get MySQL and PHP running on your Mac. Simply download, run the installer and you’re ready to go. Running the MAMP application brings up a very simple dialog for starting and stopping the services:

What I find most interesting about MAMP is you can run either PHP 4 or PHP 5. You can also enable the Zend Optimizer and various caching systems such as xCache and eAccelerator.

MAMP allows you to configure the default ports for MySQL and Apache and change your document root. It provides enough configuration to give you some customization without becoming overwhelming.

MAMP also comes standard with phpMyAdmin, a great tool for working with MySQL.

PHP comes configured with most packages you’d need: GDLib, Zlib, Mcrypt, Curl, SSL and many more.

Overall I was impressed with how simple MAMP is to setup, and how much flexibility it allows in configuring your services. It even comes with a dashboard widget.

On one or two occasions I’ve had a problem stopping and starting the services. Besides that I’ve found MAMP a great solution for anyone who wants to get a MySQL/PHP development running on OS X with no fuss.

Download MAMP (MAMP is big at 127MB)

File this one under somewhat obvious–but I never noticed it before. The divider between your applications and your documents on your dock can act as a resizer.

Very useful for changing the size of your dock on the fly without venturing in to System Preferences.

There’s a short video below demonstrating this. If you can’t see the video–you may have to click through to the site. Still experimenting with the best way to embed videos.

We’ve talked about VIM before as one of the most powerful text editors ever created. For your normal Mac user, the power in VIM is not needed. But for developers, VIM can send your productivity through the roof.

Recently I lost all of my VIM settings due to a malformed script. Little did I know it was a blessing in disguise. As I rebuilt my settings I discovered over 15 built in color schemes.

To access these color schemes, open VIM. Hit : (colon) to enter a command. Type “colorscheme” followed by a space. Now you can press the Tab key and cycle through every available scheme.

This is much easier than designing your own scheme, which we may cover in a later tip.

Highlighted below are some of the more appealing ones I’ve found:

Elflord

Slate

More previews after the jump.

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I have no clue why this functionality is not already native to the iPhone. It’s a feature that users have been asking… no, begging for since day one, much like this feature from Leopard, except this time, Apple hasn’t listened (keep sending those emails, they’ll cave in eventually)

Thankfully, someone has and they’ve gone and developed iCopy, a webapp that enables copy and paste for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Hit the jump for videos on how to use it…

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