Mac - Stephen Radford

Install High Sierra Emoji on Older Versions

29 November 2017 by Stephen Radford

I'm being extremely stubborn and refusing to update to High Sierra at the moment for good reason. The only thing that's really been annoying me is the fact I can't see emoji sent from iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 on Sierra but there's an easy fix. Emoji is just a font that renders the unicode characters. On a Mac this is called Apple Color Emoji.ttc and is located in /System/Library/Fonts. Because of this it's very easily overriden by placing a newer version in /Library/Fonts. Note the directory to place the new font in is /Library/…

The Mac Podcast App You Can't Have

16 July 2017 by Stephen Radford

I wasn't going to write this post because I've already said most of what I wanted to on Twitter. Yesterday though, I changed my mind when I saw this Tweet from Product Hunt. The Best Podcast Apps for Mac 🎙️🖥️Add your favorite 👉 https://t.co/S9X18oklTF pic.twitter.com/fGVNgRsYDH— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) July 15, 2017 It's a link to a question posted on Product Hunt over three months ago asking for a decent Mac podcast app because iTunes is dreadful. The recommendations are what really angered me: Downcast - The is the only remotely sensible suggestion as it's…

Setapp: Game Changing App Distribution

13 December 2016 by Stephen Radford

Distribution for indie developers on the Mac has been a sore point for a number of years now. The Mac App Store is just completely broken and discovery of apps outside of a centralised store is difficult and it takes a lot of effort to shine in the rough. Setapp aims to change the game by offering dozens of Mac apps, instantly available for a single monthly subscription of $9.99. It's the brainchild of MacPaw, the software house responsible for fantastic apps like CleanMyMac and Gemini. MacPaw also operate DevMate — a development and distribution platform so Setapp seems like…

Poolside FM

09 October 2015 by Stephen Radford

I fucking love Poolside FM. It's like the perfect playlist for summer. The only problem is I always had to keep it open in a tab on my browser. I was constantly accidentally closing the thing and because it's a website, it's not controllable through the media keys on your keyboard. I had a sift through their source and stumbled across their API. I tweeted that I'd love to build a little menubar app for Poolside. It would be a nice to have thing and I wanted to build my first Mac app. The Poolside guys Marty & Grant seemed…

Setup a new Mac in 5 minutes

04 February 2015 by Stephen Radford

I've just taken proud ownership of a shiny new iMac which meant I had the (dis)pleasure of downloading all of my applications and setting up my development environment. I thought this would be the usual manual process but thanks to Homebrew and Homebrew Cask it was all be automated. Homebrew Homebrew is one of the first things I always chuck on a new Mac. Installing it is just a one-line command in the terminal. ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" On first run it'll probably ask you to install Xcode's command…