Andrew Bednarz

Andrew is a professional software developer who loves Apple products, music, professional wrestling, his wife and his cats; although not necessarily in that order. He is also a founding partner in HawksBed Studios, who make Cartoon Studio for iOS.

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Last week DynDNS released its beta support for Wide Area Bonjour and DNS Service Discovery. This means that if you own your own domain name, and you have a Custom DNS service with DynDNS, you can configure your Apple AirPort device (AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express and […] Read more »

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Recently, I’ve been migrating the functionality of my old Ubuntu Linux server to my wife’s old iMac. Since a big part of the reason to decommission my old Linux PC was to reduce my total power consumption, I wanted to fully utilize Snow Leopard’s Wake On […] Read more »

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Last year I took a look at a number of Subversion clients for OS X, finally settling on Versions as my client of choice for my personal coding needs. At the time, I was running a Linux server on some old generic hardware from the days […] Read more »

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I think I’ve spent more time playing games on my iPhone than I have on my old Playstation, Playstation 2 or Wii. It simply boils down to the fact that whenever I’m standing around waiting in a line, waiting for the train or in a dentist’s […] Read more »

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“Audio Scrobbling,” as defined by Last.fm, is the act of submitting to a central database the details of what songs you’ve been listening to (what album, by who and when you listened). Scrobbling to Last.fm is the main reason I use the service these days, especially […] Read more »

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I’ve had a rant building up for a few weeks. A rant about developer’s treatment at the hands of the App Store submission procedure. However unlike many rants on the topic, mine is not directed towards Apple. It is directed towards the iPhone developers who complain […] Read more »

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Recently, Elgato released EyeTV for the iPhone (AppStore Link). At a cost of $4.99, its marketing blurb offers the following functionality: With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to […] Read more »

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Hot on the heels of the release of VMWare Fusion 3, the folks at Parallels have released Parallels Desktop 5, matching the features of VMWare Fusion 3 and adding some new ones to boot. You can get a quick overview of the newest features in the […] Read more »

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When Apple first allowed in-app purchases for third-party apps on the iPhone platform it was restricted to paid apps only, even if the app was only 99 cents. Today, Apple informed all registered iPhone developers that it was now allowing free apps to contain in-app purchases. While […] Read more »

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Here in Australia, the supermarket chain Woolworths has been freshening its look (and rebranding in some states from Safeway to Woolworths) over the last year, which includes a nice modern looking new logo. This new logo, which Woolworth have stated is a stylised “W” was submitted […] Read more »

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NewsGator released todayNetNewsWire 3.2 for OS X. At the end of July, NewsGator announced the ending of its news feed subscription service and released a beta version of NetNewsWire 3.2 with Google Reader synchronization. The way NewsGator handled the ending of its service and migration to Google […] Read more »

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There are few iPhone games that I will immediately buy. Most of the ones I do, however, are the classic games I played as a teenager. The iPhone/iPod touch is more than powerful enough to handle these games and it seems that there are many people […] Read more »

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Smart Playlists in iTunes have always been a powerful way to create specific playlists to meet your needs, from creating a rotating fresh playlist for syncing to an iDevice to creating a specific playlist for a party. Being able to say “give me my music that […] Read more »

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One of the most compelling new feature in Snow Leopard is Grand Central Dispatch, which can make it easier for developers to write software taking advantage of the multiple cores in our computers. On Sept., 10 Apple released the user library component of Grand Central to […] Read more »

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The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the application, making working with it more pleasurable — if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable. They’ve also added some new core functionality […] Read more »

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The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from […] Read more »

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If you were to navigate to lingon.sourceforge.net or smultron.sourceforge.net today, you would see the following text on your screen: “Hi! First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have […] Read more »

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The Boy Genius Report is claiming to have received a tip that Blu-ray support will be coming to iTunes 9, which may be arriving as soon as next month. Also reportedly in iTunes 9 is the long sought-after ability to arrange iPhone/iPod touch icon positions from […] Read more »

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As much as we all love our Macs, we still generally live in a Microsoft business world and need to connect and work with Windows boxes. While Microsoft does release its own Remote Desktop application to facilitate Mac users connecting to Windows machine, I’ve never been […] Read more »

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The folks over at NewsGator have seemingly given up on consumer news feed syncing and have ceded to the superiority of Google Reader. First it was NewsGator’s Windows syncing feed reader Feed Demon that got the switch from NewsGator syncing to Google Reader syncing. Now its […] Read more »

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The iPhone/iPod 3.0 OS allows third-party applications to utilize the device’s Bluetooth capabilities for two-player games. The first (and only) application I had that supported this in an update was Flight Control, and since then, whenever my wife and I are on a train, we occupy […] Read more »

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[appreview] title=Phaze image=http://gigapple.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/phaze_icon.png price=$4.99 url=http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=317439506&mt=8 rating=silver [/appreview] Years ago I discovered a little futuristic hovercraft racing game on the PlayStation called Wipeout. The concept was simple, and in many ways it was pretty much the same gameplay as Mario Kart or Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart. What […] Read more »

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I love reading interviews with developers, finding out some of the behind-the-scenes information on the makings of their products — even more so when they’re my favorite products, the ones I use every day. Being able to put a personal face behind an end-user application puts […] Read more »

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I’ve never been as organized as I currently am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple, I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile […] Read more »

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Back in the Dark Ages (iPhone 2.0 firmware) jailbreaking your iPhone had many points of merit. It could give you MMS, Copy & Paste, tethering, video recording, info on your lock screen and more. However, the reasons I jailbroke were for MMS, Copy & Paste, and […] Read more »

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The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact […] Read more »

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Apple had finally released OS X 10.5.7, so I downloaded the combo updater in preparation to install on my three Macs. After installing the update on my MacBook Pro and my wife’s iMac without any issues, I ran the combo updater on my Mac mini that’s […] Read more »

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Quicklook is a great feature of OS X, allowing you to press the spacebar when a file is selected in Finder and quickly look at the contents. If you’re unfamiliar with Quicklook, check out this great introductory article. As great as this is, there are a […] Read more »

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Back in Feburary I took a look at the open-source database tool Sequel Pro and compared it against the commercial tool, Querious. Querious had the winning edge at the time, despite being for MySQL 5 only and costing money. It was only Sequel Pro’s support for […] Read more »

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As reported recently all over the blogosphere, the world’s first Mac-based botnet is active after infiltrating people’s systems in January by way of a trojan hidden inside pirated iWork’09 installers. If you downloaded and installed iWork’09 from a torrent, binary newsgroup, or any other source not […] Read more »

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Finally, the Rock has come back to video games, and for the first time ever, on the iPhone. Well, he did for a little while, anyway. WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania was released on March 24 and being an avid wrestling fan, I immediately bought a copy. […] Read more »

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Disk fragmentation is an old problem that has affected every operating system throughout history. File fragmentation occurs when a single file isn’t located in the same physical location on the disk, but is scattered around. OS X does a great job at minimizing file fragmentation by […] Read more »

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A few weeks ago I took a detailed look at two MySQL database tools Querious and SequelPro, comparing their feature set. These are by no means the only two options for accessing MySQL with a shiny UI — so here is a quick look at eight […] Read more »

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As great and as easy as the OS X user interface is, sometimes it is quicker or necessary to jump into the deep dark bowels of your system on the command line. OS X ships with the very competent Terminal.app that allows easy access to this, […] Read more »

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Who are you calling a Git? When I say ‘Git’, I don’t mean the British derogatory term that was immortalized by the TV show Red Dwarf. I mean of course the latest generation of revision control systems, designed by Linus Torvalds for use on the Linux […] Read more »

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Administering databases is not generally an exciting task, it’s right up there with TPS reports and their cover sheets. So why then, are you using the command-line MySQL client to administer your MySQL databases when you have a nice shiny user interface provided by OS X […] Read more »

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In the Windows world, system administrators are likely to be familiar with the Scheduled Tasks service. This allows you to schedule processes, scripts or applications to run regularly at a specific time. In the Linux (and UNIX in general) world the cron daemon has traditionally handled […] Read more »

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Subversion (also known as SVN) is a popular version control system. Accessing SVN repositories with OS X is easy – and there are numerous options to do so. In this article we’ll cover 12 different applications that let you access and use Subversion in OS X. […] Read more »

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Like the majority of Apple products and solutions, Apple’s App Store is sleek in its presentation to the consumer. However, one of the less polished aspects is the developer back end, iTunes Connect. Don’t get me wrong, this is functional, but it’s not targeted at the […] Read more »