SmileOnMyMac Blog

I’m in New York City this week, and decided to take a detour up to Connecticut to visit with Shawn and Lesa King, co-hosts of Your Mac Life, the Mac talk show of which SmileOnMyMac is a proud sponsor.

I had the fun of being a live in-studio guest on the show, talking about SmileOnMyMac, how we got started and my favorite products. I also got to experience the thrill of riding around the backroads of Connecticut on the back of Shawn’s motorcycle. We took a long tour from Danbury down to Westport. It was a beautiful day, not too cold. I borrowed riding gear from Lesa, in which I felt ready for a cameo on Battlestar Galactica.

The show is available as a streaming audio file at the Your Mac Life site until April 22nd. You can also subscribe to Your Mac Life at Audible.com, which makes it possible for you to download episodes to load onto your iPod.

I just got back Miami this week on a combination work/personal visit. I was born and raised here, and I never pass up a chance to come down to Florida during February.

I gave a presentation to the Gold Coast Mac Users Group, showing off PDFpen and DiscLabel primarily. Several members of the audience chimed in to share their happy SmileOnMyMac customer stories. What a fine and intelligent group!

I also gave a demo at the Apple Store at The Falls in South Miami. The demo coincided with the enormous power black-out that we had in Florida last week. The demo was postponed for the 45 minutes the power was out.

Apple Store customers are sure dedicated. Lots of people waited outside the store waiting for it to reopen. It was crowded almost before the computers had booted back up!

For the release of TextExpander we wanted to update the product logo to be more in keeping with our existing product logos. We also wanted to keep familiarity with the previous logo, so we kept its clean, simple geometry. Ultimately we wanted a smooth-shaded 3D look. Since the design is fairly simple I decided to render it myself. I’ve been interested in 3D for many years, and this provided a great opportunity to learn and get up to date.

The first step was selecting a modeling product. In my web research I came across this really incredible tool: Cheetah3D. I used it both to model and render the product logo. To my amazement it can also save a rendering as a Mac OS X icon!

The model is influenced by the look of an old-fashioned typewriter key. It’s rendered using radiosity and reflection, so that the outer edge looks something like reflective metal. Getting the lighting and color just so for a scene is never easy. One of Cheetah3D’s advantages is, being a Universal Binary, it performs very well on my MacBook Pro. Tweaks and repeated renderings are rapid.

We’ve had some feedback on the new logo, most of it about the TextExpander menu icon in the menubar. Some people are passionately attached to the old menubar icon, so we could make that an option in the future.

A few weeks ago, I was perusing the North Coast Mac Users Group (NCMUG) website in advance of presentation Philip (SOMM co-founder) was scheduled to give. The site shows a great line-up of Mac luminaries speaking at their meetings, including fabulous photos of everyone – except Philip, who is at least as good-looking as any of the rest.

As the recently-hired marketing/PR person, I put “get publicity photos” on my to-do list, and asked Philip and Greg to send me some.

Here’s what I got: an excuse from Philip, and this from Greg:

Great publicity photo… if you’re auditioning for “Flipper 2: Return to Coral Key”.

I guess I’ll have to take my own photos. Watch this space….