MeFi Projects

I built two macOS apps that turn your desktop wallpaper into a rotating mini-art-gallery. (Art not included, though!)
posted by archagon on May 7, 2018 - 1 comment

Have a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar? Wish it had a really tiny fiddly two-octave keyboard? Then this is the program for you! Fully polyphonic, choice of all 128 sounds from the General Midi orchestra. Here's a demo video.
posted by grahamparks on Nov 26, 2016 - 0 comments

I wanted to use something like Microsoft Paint on my Mac, but I couldn't find any existing such app that I liked, so I decided to create one. This two year project finally reached full fruition this week with its launch as a paid app in the Mac App Store. [more inside]
posted by OCDan on May 17, 2016 - 7 comments

I'm a lighting tech and a photographer who loves to make time lapse movies of shows I work on, when I'm there for the whole run of an install. Occasionally the show finds out. Sometimes I get in trouble and sometimes I don't...my latest time lapse is a 7 week long shoot of the set change from the the set change from the Jon Stewart Daily Show to the Trevor Noah Daily Show. [more inside]
posted by nevercalm on Sep 28, 2015 - 7 comments

Backgroundifier is a Mac OSX droplet-style app that converts image files of any size into pretty desktop backgrounds. Any image will work, but fine art and illustration looks the best. (You can see examples of the output on the app homepage.) There's a command line mode in addition to the GUI: if you go into the Backgroundifier.app bundle, you can either call into the Backgroundifier executable directly from Terminal (with the caveat that you can only save to and read from your ~/Pictures directory — sandboxing, sorry!), or alternatively extract the un-sandboxed command line utility from the Resources directory. On my laptop, I've even set up an Automator script that watches my primary pictures directory, automatically converts any new additions via shell script, and outputs the results to the directory I use for my desktop backgrounds. The app costs a buck, but most of it is open source. (I decided to exclude the UI nib file from the repo, at least for the time being.) It's written in Swift 2. You can find the repo here. Unfortunately, it's just a little bit out of date, but all the image conversion stuff should work fine. [more inside]
posted by archagon on Sep 27, 2015 - 0 comments

Monkey Pop is a local 2-player game you play on a shared keyboard. You can play it right in the browser, or download a Mac or Windows version. Computer only, no mobile version, sorry. It's sort of a retro single-screen platformer in the vein of Joust or the original Mario Bros, except with monkeys and saws and brain control helmets. [more inside]
posted by churl on Jul 27, 2015 - 2 comments

Interesting instant-search dictionary app for iOS and Mac which finds words based on some of the letters they contain irrespective of order. For example you can type KQV and it will find you the only 13 words that contain all those letters (like EQUIVOKE). It's remarkably useful for word games like Letterpress (whose dictionary it is wrapped around) or for checking goes at Scrabble, or for a lot of word-related messing about. [more inside]
posted by w0mbat on Mar 20, 2014 - 5 comments

Rather than let an old Mac SE with dead drives go to waste, I built a new ARM motherboard running Linux for it that reuses the classic 9" 512x342 monochrome monitor and power-supply. Luckily many X11 applications still support 1-bit visuals, so it is fairly usable with modern programs, although the low-resolution makes me wonder how we used to work with such minuscule displays. [more inside]
posted by autopilot on Feb 3, 2014 - 4 comments

Make large triangles out of four smaller ones. It's a simple concept, but you score more points and earn more time by extending your triangle combos into more complex shapes. A completed combo returns a newly upgraded tile, and you match those up the same way. There's a timer, and you push it back by gathering initial tiles. By making different shapes, you can unlock symmetry, mirror and kaleidoscopic bonuses and even capture other tiles to raise your score multiplier up to 20x or more. Most games take about 5-10 minutes to complete. There are 30+ achievements and 3 leaderboards to measure your skill; Game Center supported on iOS and OSX. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett on Jul 12, 2013 - 1 comment

Use OmniGraffle on the Mac or iPad? Download hundreds of stencils from the newly redesigned Graffletopia website. (Stencils are free clip art files you can download and install using OmniGraffle.) [more inside]
posted by mokolabs on Dec 30, 2012 - 1 comment

iTerm2 is a terminal for Mac OS. It's the successor to iTerm, which had been abandoned. I picked it up about a year ago and fixed lots of bugs and added lots of features. It snowballed from a quick fix-up to a major project! If you spend a lot of time in Terminal, came from Unix to Mac, or hunger for more power at the command line, this is for you. [more inside]
posted by jewzilla on Jul 7, 2011 - 11 comments