TOKYO (MacHouse) – Let’s say that you work for a company. Or there are several people coming by daily. What would you do if you have to leave your desk for several minutes?

1. Just several minutes? I’ll leave my Mac as it is.
2. I have some important stuff. So I’ll turn off the computer.
3. I’ll put the computer to sleep.

Blinders will give you another option. It’s a desktop application that we submitted to Mac App Store a few hours ago.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – As you probably know, Mac OS X gives you access to beautiful emoji symbols. Some of emoji pictures are quite cute. You can explore hundreds of them by choosing Edit > Special Characters over TextEdit.

ePics is a new desktop application that we submitted to Mac App Store several hours ago. It gives you access to more than 750 emoji symbols and lets you save them as image files. All emoji symbols are divided into seven groups. Explore seven toolbar buttons and pick emoji symbols you are interested in. Then double-click to store the selected one. You can save the currently-selected emoji symbol in the top storage box as an image file by just clicking on the Export toolbar button. You can also save emoji pictures in the storage box all a time by choosing Export All under File.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – We’ve been absent for quite some time. It’s been almost a month since we sent our last software title to Mac App Store. Well, we all need a break from time to time. Anyway, we submitted a new software release to Mac App Store a few hours ago. This software submission is called Texture Series 1.

Texture Series 1 is a collection of high-resolution texture images, many of which are designed to look like satins, curtains and cloths. They are suitable for background images behind presentation slides. This collection comes with 64 6,480 px x 6,480 px royalty-free pictures with 180 dpi, which can be adjusted to 72, 96, 144 or 180 dpi. It’s quite easy to use. Choose a texture image to work with from the sidebar. And a larger picture (800 x 800 points) will appear at the center display. You can flip the selected texture image horizontally, vertically or both. Opening color adjustments panel, you can alter hue, saturation, contrast, exposure, gamma, sepia levels. What you see at the center display is a picture with a size of 800 x 800 points (not pixels). What you get is a picture with a size of 6,480 x 6,480 px. If you choose TIFF as an export format, a file size can be as large as 180 MB.   Continue reading →

Apple, Inc. made an e-mail announcement yesterday concerning Gatekeeper, a security Preferences pane, involving Mac App Store applications. The company intends to update the current version of Mac OS X Mavericks to 10.9.5 before releasing Yosemite. With the release of 10.9.5, the current code-signing signature will no longer be validated with Gatekeeper under Mavericks. The following is the exact message from Apple.



With the release of OS X Mavericks 10.9.5, the way that OS X recognizes signed apps will change. Signatures created with OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 or earlier (v1 signatures) will be obsoleted and Gatekeeper will no longer recognize them. Users may receive a Gatekeeper warning and will need to exempt your app to continue using it. To ensure your apps will run without warning on updated versions of OS X, they must be signed on OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later (v2 signatures).



The statement above is not clear as to what will happen to Mac App Store applications with a v2 code-signing signature under Mac OS X Mountain Lions or lower. Meanwhile, we will gradually update our Mac App Store applications accordingly. For now, please open System Preferences and set the radiobutton option of Security & Privacy Preferences Pane to Anywhere. Click here for more information on Gatekeeper.

I guess the rainy season isn’t over yet here. It looks like it’s going to stay for another week. Meanwhile, we’ve finished doing taxes, closing the book for the last accounting year. So we are back to software development business. So what’s the first software title to introduce? Well, we managed to submit the first Mac software title of the month to Mac App Store several hours ago. This new software submission is called ShapeWorks.

ShapeWorks is a desktop application that lets you easily work with vector graphics. Speaking of vector graphics, you don’t play with bezier curves as far as this application is concerned. All hard work is already done. ShapeWorks is loaded with more than 100 clip art vector shapes. So you’ll just have to pick one to work with. You can apply a simple color gradation map with two colors to the selected vector shape. Or you can open the gradation editor window to create a complex gradation color map with as many as 50 color stops. What you select is a vector shape, which is size-flexible. So you can easily resize the selected shape with your mouse by grabbing one of anchor points. And you can add a stroke to the selected shape with a color of your selection and a line type.   Continue reading →