Archive for February, 2008

Did you know? QuickPick

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Computers are getting more and more reliable but backing up your data on a regular basis is still vital. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things we often forget until it’s too late, like going to the dentist.

If you’re a .Mac user then you can delegate that hassle to Backup 3, the aptly named backup program integrated with .Mac. And even better, all the Pedias are integrated as QuickPicks so you can pick them out of the list quickly (they really have a knack for nailing program names over there in Cupertino) and have Backup 3 include the programs’ data in your regular backup.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

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Did you know? Pedia group in Address Book

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Now that your friends have seen your cool Gamepedia collection, they might want to borrow a few games. You probably know how the borrowing feature works already (just drag entries from the Library into the Borrowed collection) but did you know that you could create a separate Pedia group in your Address Book to make the borrowing process even simpler and faster?
This is especially useful if you have a lot of entries in your Address Book but only a handful of those are friends with borrowing privileges. With the Pedia group, the autofill feature will respond quicker to your suggestions and load faster too.

To create a Pedia group in your Address Book, open Address Book and choose ‘New Group’ from the File menu. Name the new group ‘Pedia’ and drag the address book entries you want into it. After that restart your Pedia application.

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And don’t worry if people who are not in your Pedia group want to borrow something at some point – you will still be able to choose them by clicking on the Address Book icon when you mark an entry as borrowed.

Did you know? Gcards

Friday, February 15th, 2008

One of the reasons we collect things is of course to impress others. So what’s the best way to impress your friends with your latest Super Nintendo Space Invaders? If they’re Mac users, and of course any real friend of yours will be, send them a gcard.

Gcards are files that you can quickly create by dragging an entry from Gamepedia’s table view to your desktop. Attach the resulting file to an email and send it off to all your Mac-loving friends. All they have to do is download the demo version of Gamepedia, double-click the gcard to open it and marvel at your latest aquisition.

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(Of course the other Pedias have this feature as well, only the files are called bcards, dcards and ccards, depending on the program.)

To really bowl your friends over, send them whole collections. What the heck – go for your entire library! For that, use the .gamepedia export format found in the export feature.

For the coders: gcards are standard XML and could be used by any program or scripting language, including web servers. Furthermore, they use the Apple Property List style, making it a snap to use in a Cocoa environment. They can be imported to any program with the following line of code:

NSDictionary *importedGCard = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:pathToGCard];