Dec 15 2009

Hyperspaces 1.0 and The CocoaBots

There’s more about this over at the new CocoaBots blog, but I just launched Hyperspaces 1.0. Further to that, The CocoaBots is now a full-​time venture — check out the new site for more info!

I’ll put together a post about going indie soon (I promise!) but for now all I can say is that I love it!

Comments

Gravatar for Geoff Tay­lor.

Woot! Con­grats!

Lovin’ Hyper­spaces. I reg­is­tered this past week.

Posted by Geoff Tay­lor on

Gravatar for Harlemite.

First, con­grats Tony. Well done by you.

I have a quick and easy ques­tion for you. Are you going to offer a fam­ily pack? I have more than one Mac I’m con­sid­er­ing installing your prod­uct on.

Again, well done by you. ;o)

Posted by Harlemite on

Gravatar for Tony Arnold.

Thanks Harlemite! I haven’t really sorted out what I’m going to do re: bulk dis­counts — shoot an e-​mail to support@​thecocoabots.​com with the num­ber of licenses you were think­ing of pur­chas­ing and I’m sure I can work some­thing out.

Posted by Tony Arnold on

Gravatar for Alex Coles.

Would you con­sider a dis­count for peo­ple who might have donated to your VirtueDesk­tops project?

Posted by Alex Coles on

Gravatar for Tony Arnold.

Just send an e-​mail to support@​thecocoabots.​com and we can have a chat about it. Gen­er­ally, I’d say no — VirtueDesk­tops was an entirely dif­fer­ent project — and I stopped work­ing on it almost 3 years ago.

Hyper­spaces is my bread and but­ter now, but I’m a rea­son­able sort of guy :)

Posted by Tony Arnold on

Gravatar for Kevin Willis.

I just found your product today, and I wanted to let you know what I’m using it for: showing a background image on headless Mac OSX Servers. Since Quartz Extreme doesn’t load on headless X-​serves, it’s impossible to change to background on a headless machine in OS X. What do I care, you ask? It’s headless! Isn’t that the whole point?

The whole point is when you have four or five servers (or twenty-​five, or fifty) that you administer via Apple Remote Desktop or Timbuktu, it can get pretty confusing as regards to which one you are looking at when they all have the identical bland blue background.

Hyperspaces fits the bill nicely here. I’m not using the space customization function at all – I’m using the fact that it does something, while running, that makes my actual selected background display. I’m also using the labeling function, which is very handy – not because I’m labeling spaces, but because I’m labeling the name of the server.

If you get an opportunity, you might really want to take a look at Hyperspaces on a headless server, and either make a headless server “version” that’s just for displaying backgrounds on headless servers (you could call it “Headless!”) with a label (something very commonly needed on headless servers), or tweak Hyperspaces so some of the stuff that’s flaky on headless servers becomes less flaky. For example, trying to move the label around barely works, and there’s no visual feedback (via ADR on a headless server).

I’m not kidding about a Headless app. You’re already most of the way there with Hyperspaces, and it’s a need that comes up repeatedly, with no good set solution. The solution for most people is to attach a dongle that pretends it’s a monitor to their server, but that doesn’t work for everybody, as the majority of our older X-​serves don’t even have video capability, and can only be administered via ADR.

Posted by Kevin Willis on

Gravatar for Tony Arnold.

@Kevin — great thoughts. I’ll definitely give the idea of a headless helper app some thought — it sounds like (as you say) I’m almost there with Hyperspaces anyway. Maybe once 1.1 is out I will take a day or two to build a simple one space only version of the app that just renders a desktop image.

Thanks for the idea!

Posted by Tony Arnold on

Sorry, this conversation has finished.

This post is a bit old now, so I've closed the conversation. If you're keen to keep talking about it, please email me directly.