MajicJungle
Latest
NZ earthquake hits Mac/iOS devs; Dejal Software creates relief effort
The magnitude 6.3 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand on Tuesday has caused incredible damage and hit close to home for many of us at TUAW. Developer David Frampton (@majicdave on Twitter) from Majic Jungle Software had a particularly scary few days. Although Dave lives in Wellington on the North Island, his mother Ann Bodkin was trapped in rubble for several days before being rescued. We were thrilled to read Dave's tweet when she was close to being rescued: "Mum is alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Still trapped, but talking to rescuers. So so unbelievably happy and relieved." Another developer and regular on the TUAW Talkcast is Layton Duncan (@polarbearfarm) from iOS development house Polar Bear Farm. Layton was at work when the earthquake hit, and he quickly started sending photos and videos via Twitter. You can see his office in the photo above, and read about his experience on his blog. We were very glad to see that he made it through the devastating quake unharmed, and we can't wait to talk with him on the next Talkcast. Relief efforts will continue for some time, and New Zealand expat developer David Sinclair's Dejal Software (@dejal) is helping out with an incredible deal -- he's donating 100 percent of all profits from the sales of his Mac Apps (Simon, TimeOut, Caboodle and BlogAssist) between now and Sunday to rescue and relief efforts in New Zealand. Here's your chance to do good and get some great software at the same time. Many thanks from those of us at TUAW to David Sinclair and Dejal for this wonderful outreach to the people of New Zealand. Photo by Layton Duncan
iSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver
Some of you may have noticed that some of your screensavers don't work after upgrading to Snow Leopard. If you're running a 64-bit instance of the operating system, you won't be able to use most of your old third-party screensavers because they're probably not compatible. Many of our favorite screensavers weren't working... so instead of waiting for the developers to release them in 64-bit, we decided to see what else was out there. iSight Screensavers from Majic Jungle (the creators of FluidTunes) isn't new, but it's something we've never covered here on TUAW. It was one that showed up first in our search and ended up killing our productivity for the rest of the day. And the next day. In fact, we've not really recovered productivity since we clicked the "test" button in System Preferences. Majic Jungle has made a killer screensaver that allows you to interact with different effects and filters using the iSight camera, or any webcam attached to your mac. I won't get into the countless scenarios we created (we're pretty easily entertained), but here's a list of interactions from the creators' site to help explain what it does: Fluid - Play with a beautiful fluid dynamics simulation Particles - Create magical looking brightly colored particles wherever you move Champagne - Immerse yourself in a champagne world and watch as bubbles appear all over you Fire - Set yourself or your desktop on fire - in a painless kind of way! Water - Ripples appear wherever you move Flipping Grid - Can you get all of the squares to flip over together? Core Image - Over 30 configurable effects using powerful Core Image filters iSight Screensavers is Universal Binary and Shareware. If you'd like to remove the watermarks, you can purchase a license for $4.99 -- pretty cheap considering my wife and I are more entertained by this than by a $25 night at the movies.
