If you want to try out the beta, head on over to the product page at Puffing Bear and download it today.

I will hopefully be ready to release a version 1.0 of Shrinker fairly shortly. It’ll be free in the sense of “free beer”. Its primary purpose was as a learning project for me, so I’m not interested in opening the source at the moment. That doesn’t mean I won’t be at some point in the future, though.

I’m making it free for a few reasons. First, I don’t think I’d make any meaningful amount of money out of it. Second, it was conceived as a learning project for me, and to scratch my own itch – a lack of a similar tool for the Mac. And, finally, I’ve received so much wonderful help from the Mac developer community, both directly and through searching blogs and mailing list archives, that I felt I should try to contribute something back. I haven’t got around to it yet, but there I’ll put a full list of acknowledgements in the About panel and on the website before I release version 1.0

I hope you like Shrinker, and please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

(Click for larger version

And I didn’t Photoshop it, either.

(Click for larger version)

I predict that the iPhone SDK will be seen as a watershed in the history of computing, as important as the the first PC. For the first time, proper mobile computing will be a reality.

I can’t wait to get started developing my first app.

Today, I achieved the nirvana of a news reader with no unread items in it. I feel like I’ve had my house steam cleaned or something. I’m still not 100% sold on NNW, but, like NewsFire, its integration with my blog editor MarsEdit and my del.icio.us client Pukka is great and it has the killer feature of synchronising with Newsgator Online so that I can read feeds from my iPhone and keep the unread/read status consistent on my MacBook Pro and the phone.

I miss the beautiful interface and animations of NewsFire, but I fought the three-pane RSS reader for too long. I think I’ll be with NWW for a while. Maybe when David releases NewsFire 2 I’ll give it another look.

First off, WordPress is installed in /Users/jameshiggs/Sites/blog. Leopard comes with Apache 2.2 installed, but has PHP disabled by default. To correct this, go to the console and change directory to /etc/apache2 and open httpd.conf in your favourite editor. For me this means typing:

sudo mate httpd.conf

You’ll probably have to enter your admin password. Find the line that reads:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and uncomment it so that it looks like this:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Next, we need to make sure that your user directory allows .htaccess rules. To do this, create a file called jameshiggs.conf (obviously, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours) in /etc/apache2/users. The contents of that file should read:

<Directory "/Users/jameshiggs/Sites">
	Options Indexes MultiViews
	AllowOverride All
	Order allow,deny
	Allow from all
</Directory>

Again, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours.

The final piece of the jigsaw is to configure WordPress to use friendly URLs – which you do from the Options > Permalinks page. I’ve selected the second option which makes URLs look like this: http://localhost/~jameshiggs/blog/2007/12/25/sample-post/. If WordPress can write to the site root then it will automatically create the .htaccess file. If not, you’ll need to create it yourself in the root of your blog site. On my machine, the file should look like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	Options +FollowSymLinks
	RewriteEngine On
	RewriteBase /~jameshiggs/blog/
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	RewriteRule . /~jameshiggs/blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Finally, you need to restart Apache – the easiest way to do that is to go to System Preferences > Sharing panel and untick Web Sharing. Once Apache has stopped, tick it again and Apache should start up. And that’s it.

Let me know if you have any variants to this procedure.

Thanks to Bagelturf and Ariadoss for hints that helped me get this running.

Here’s what it looks like in practice (click for full-size):