TOKYO (MacHouse) – This year is almost over. It’s been a terrible year for me since my beloved mother passed away at the beginning of last November. Anyway, before a new year starts in several days, let me announce I submitted a new software title to Mac App Store several few hours ago. I would never have been able to complete this new release without Apple Developer Technical Support’s (DTS) assistance. This new release is called Text 1-2-3D.

Text 1-2-3D is a desktop application that utilizes the SceneKit framework (a group of APIs) that lets you create 3D text objects over a 2D scene plane. There is no limitation as to how many 3D text objects you can create. Grab a 3D text object, which you freely move with your mouse pointer around the scene canvas. Adjust the position of the light source and also change light types to illuminate text objects dramatically. You have an option of showing or not showing a floor that displays the reflections of 3D text objects.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – I’m very slow this month partly due to the family tragedy that occurred last month. Yet, I’m finally ready to introduce the second software title of the month, which I submitted to Mac App Store a few hours ago. This new release is called AskKey Essential.

AskKey Essential is a desktop application that comes with a status menu. It gives you quick access to common characters and their corresponding ASCII code numbers or HTML notations. Regardless of the development platform, ASCII code numbers are important for software developers. It’ll be sometimes easier for them to produce a particular character with a code number, depending on the programming language they work with.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – It’s been one month and two weeks since I submitted a software title to Apple‘s Mac App Store. It’s been a long time, considering that I used to release 4 to 5 applications every month. The thing is that my mother passed away all of a suddent at the beginning of last November. As a result, I lost my will to develop Mac applications. Wait, wait a minute… I just submitted the first software title of the month to Mac App Store a few hours ago. It’s called tiffPack.

For those who use Xcode 5 or 6 to develop Mac applications, it’s not a secret that Xcode combines a non-Retina image and a Retina image (@2x) into a tiff file. That’s what you see if you explore an application package. Xcode will create a tiff container file even when you have a non-Retina and a Retina image in JPEG.

tiffPack is a desktop application that lets you batch-create TIFF packages. An advantage of using tiffPack is that it’ll take this application Retina images (72 dpi x 72 dpi) only to create TIFF containers.   Continue reading →