TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – I like summer days except that I hate to sweat. I feel that the end of the year is almost there when summer days are over. Anyway, I have worked very hard for the past two weeks despite those scorching temperatures. So I have a pair of software releases to announce today. One of them is Family Track Central.

Family Track Central is a desktop application that helps you keep track of geographic locations of your family members in real time through their iOS devices. These days, most high school students own smartphones. When your child doesn’t come home before their curfew, wouldn’t you want to know where they are right now? Or wait for 72 hours so that the police can handle it as a missing person case and get a warrant by court from the cellular company? Wouldn’t it be nice if you get a local notification from your Mac when your family member approaches an area they are not supposed to go to? That’s what Family Track Central is about. It will let you pinpoint geographic positions of your family members on the map so that you can quickly find out where they are.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – It’s been more than a month since I introduced the last iOS or macOS software title. Anyway, here comes a new release. It’s called Quick Sub.

Quick Sub lets you add a subtitle to your movie by adding one more text layers to it.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – After absence for two weeks and a half, I’m back with introduction of another desktop application. It’s called Quick Clip.

Quick Clip is a desktop application that I have developed so that I can easily clip a specific area of a desktop movie I record with QuickTime Player. QuickTime Player is a great piece of software that we all get to use. One problem is that it records the desktop movement for the entire screen. I often record a portion of it like 1,440 points x 900 points starting at the top-left corner in order to introduce a new desktop application that I have developed. If I record any mouse activity inside that portion, then a finished movie will look awkward. So I want to trim an area with no mouse activity. I also want to add one or more audio tracks to a desktop movie. And maybe watermarking a movie with a small image? So I’ve eventually ended up with Quick Clip.  Continue reading →

TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – It looks like the summer is almost there although the yearly rainy season hasn’t started yet. Before it does, I have something to report to you. Oh, yeah, a new app, right? Yes. A desktop application that I submitted to Mac App Store some 30 seconds ago is called Desk Shots 3. Yes, Desk Shots Version 3 is ready to roll!

  Continue reading →

TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – I’m back with another edition of a macOS application after a break of some seven weeks. During this break, as usual, I watched a lot of crime dramatization stories from Crime Watch Daily and Paula Zahn’s On the Case. Crime Watch Daily often discusses a case where investigators put things together, plotting the locations of cellular towers on the map, which made me think to myself “Hmm… Could I build a desktop application to make a map like that?” So here it comes. A desktop application that I submitted to Mac App Store just 10 minutes ago is called Tower Points.

Tower points is a desktop application that lets you visually document a case (a murder case, a stalking case, a series of burglaries in the same neighbor…) with positions of cellular towers and objects. Erect dozens of tower pins on the map based on their geo-coordinates. Place an object (body, car, blood, DNA, gun, knife, money…) at the spot where you click on the map. You can measure the distance between two objects you select or between an object and a tower you select. You want to draw a 5-mile-radius circle around a dead body? That’s a piece of cake. Actually, what you can do is document a case by placing tower pins and objects on the map and visit the actual scene with an iOS device since you can share map data with an iPhone and an iPad through iCloud Drive.   Continue reading →