Apr 2005

The Commentator

Are you a totally k-rad coder who just can’t stop cutting code to spare time for those silly comments? Cenqua’s Commentator was made just for you:

The Commentator uses revolutionary real-time language processing to actually grok your code and add the necessary comments on the fly. No more doco to slow you down. Just install The Commentator and watch as your coding elegance is eloquently decorated with insightful, nuanced commentary … as you type. What’s more, The Commentator’s powerful Personality Controls allow you to tweak it’s output so completely that it’s as if The Commentator is speaking for you. In your voice. Explaining to those that need it, so that you can get on and get busy.

It’s worth checking out just for the personality controls screenshot. SCO or chicks indeed!

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Flip4Mac's WMV Player

For those of you looking to play Windows Media on the Mac and absolutely loathe Windows Media Player, check out Flip4Mac’s WMV Player component for the Mac. For US$10, you can play Windows Media files in QuickTime player. (Though see the note about open-source players below; their support for Windows Media may be good enough for your purposes.) I bought it, and I’ve been quite happy with it. It will even use the QuickTime plugin instead of the dreaded Windows Media plugin to handle playback of Windows Media on the Web, even when they’re served those clunky .asx files.

Note: Several open-source multimedia players, such as VLC, XinePlayer and mplayerosx, will play .wmv files, but some WMV files have an advanced codec that these players don’t support yet, so they unfortunately won’t play all .wmv files. While I’m fairly certain that the codec will be reverse-engineered in time, for me, $10 is a pretty good deal to make sure I don’t have to deal with the pain of Windows Media Player ever again. (Of course, the arguably better solution is to use non-proprietary media file formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora!)

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CSV to Address Book Importer

Mostly for my own reference, here’s an awesome CSV to vCard webpage which will import CSV data, and output vCard (.vcf) format files. This is rather useful if you have masses of contacts to import into Apple’s Address Book program. Bonus coding-fu points for being totally implemented in Javascript!

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