I’m one of those people who hates Flash with a passion. Not only did it make your Mac browser crash a lot in Leopard, it also used disproportionate amounts of CPU time and made your laptop heat up like a stovetop. It’s virtually impossible to not use Flash online, though – it’s mostly Youtube that forces me to use it on a daily basis.

What if I told you that Youtube’s Flash requirement could be history? Somehow I missed the news that ClickToFlash, a brilliant open-source plugin I’ve been using for a while, now has a setting that will load all Youtube videos (including HD content!) in Quicktime instead of Flash.

It even allows reliably skipping portions of the video without having it completely loaded. This is a feature that didn’t work for me in Flash most of the time. I’m donating to the project, as it’ll probably keep my computer running cool and stable for the years to come. I suggest you do too!

Since I recently stopped using an old and dented Macbook Pro that was otherwise perfectly working as a computer, I tweeted about having turned it into a media, file, and Bittorrent server. I got a lot of responses asking for my setup, so here’s a guide for turning a Mac that would otherwise gather dust in disuse into a useful server.

My primary demands were gathering content from the internet through FTP and Bittorrent, serving them up to the Macs and Playstation 3 on the network through streaming, and function as a secure public-facing server so I can log in and grab some files when I’m on the go.

I’ve divided this post into three sections, dealing with getting stuff, serving up stuff, and all the nice other things you can do with an always-on Mac. Note: I will not be liable if you melt, damage, or hurt your old Mac in the process of following this guide.
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After Apple showed off its new Snow Leopard artwork and packaging, I immediately wanted to update my previous wallpaper, which was based on the first artwork Apple had made for it. However, I had a lot of other things to do during and after WWDC. Now, finally, after a few weeks of picking away at this during night hours, I present you new Snow Leopard wallpapers. There’s even a Server edition.

By popular demand, versions have also been included without the giant ‘X’.

Snow Leopard Wallpapers – 3.9 MB

It goes without saying that this wallpaper is intended for personal usage and desktop customization only. I cannot guarantee your safety if you use it on cars, nuclear devices, and other things that are obviously not your desktop. Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ is © 2009, Apple Inc.

There’s been so many iPhone OS 3.0 feature roundups that I’m not even going to bother doing a roundup of UI changes, as most users are quite familiar with this newest version of the iPhone firmware already.

This is a post about the details, but there’s a few things I won’t go into. For instance, please don’t get me started on those pinstripe icons. Seeing them on a huge banner at WWDC was painful enough, and then having to recreate the same stripes for this blog post’s graphic was the proverbial needle under my fingernail.

However, it’s worth a blog post to look at those nice little touches that have been added to the already impressively well-designed iPhone UI.
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It’s official: I never had as much giggles in an evening designing this poster for Cocoaheads WWDC. Scott asked me if I’d like to speak at the well-known Mac developer event, and I happily obliged. I also did a bit of poster art for the presentation screen and for, well, fun.

The lineup of speakers:

• Delicious Monster‘s Wil Shipley
• 280 North‘s Francisco Tolmasky
•  Dirk Stoop from Sofa
• Joachim Bondo of Cocoa Stuff
• and me. Perhaps an excellent chance to give away a shirt?

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It’ll be held Wednesday June 10th, 7-9PM, at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco.

I’m really looking forward to WWDC this year. Hope to see you all at Cocoaheads or elsewhere during the week!

And yes, those are little Xcode hammers in the smoke.

It’s often said that there is great value in having a distinct shirt at WWDC, and while I’m not very preoccupied with that notion myself, I do have great fun in designing shirts. I first wanted to print a larger version of my twitter user picture, but I was curious if I could design something that was a bit more relevant to my work.

And I settled on this design. Hey, doesn’t everyone love exploded items on shirts these days? A nice large version of the shirt design is up on my flickr.

I’m printing 6 of these shirts today, and one of them will be sent off to a happy owner in a new giveaway post that’s coming up soon. Let me know if you’d like one of these shirts; with enough demand, I might print a few more.