This is a quick post to show how to turn off those annoying iTunes Store arrow links that light up next to every column in iTunes 8. Apple have taken out the checkbox to hide them in the preferences. I'm not sure if they did it to simplify that monster of a preferences window or if they wanted to send more people to the iTunes store, but! I'm glad they haven't disabled it altogether.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

That is all.

I dread backwards compatibility. I dread it because it means that for every product that I need to keep backwards compatible, the testing burden is at least twice as big. The math is simple: testing on two major OS versions and two processor types can be as much as 4 times of stuff I'd rather not be doing.

The last time I had to maintain a product with backwards compatibility, this is what I used to do:

1. Build then copy application to test machine.
2. Get it to fail. This is the one part where I don't have to work very hard.
3. Try to fix while scratching head then proceed to littering print statements all over the code.
4. Go back to step 1.

You can make this process a little less sucky by configuring Xcode to copy after each build, or by mounting a share so that there's no copying at all. But in the end, debugging with print statements alone is limiting and time consuming. There has to be a better way, right?

One of the feature in Voice Candy is the ability to add custom AppleScript actions to interact with different applications. One action that I think Voice Candy users might find handy is an action to send email with the recording in MP3 format. Currently, Voice Candy only records to the QuickTime movie format and so the "Send Email" action sends the recording as a .mov file which might not be accessible for recipients on PCs without QuickTime installed.

So, in this post I would like to show you a way to send emails with MP3 recordings by using an AppleScript action.

A Mr. Randy Harris comments about Voice Candy at MacUpdate:

I've been using Voice Candy for a few weeks now and I really like it a lot. I bought it with the intention of using it like a voice version of Apple's PhotoBooth, which my kids love.

After using it a little I quickly realized that Voice Candy is about the best and easiest to use Voice eMail program that I've run across.

This put a broad grin on my face because while the effects are cool, we really wanted to make a general purpose voice recorder that is useful in addition to being fun. It is satisfying to see someone reaching that conclusion.

Here is a tip for you Voice Candy users. The nice thing about the reminder clock is that you can easily set the time with just a click since it moves the hour hand to the position of the click. The downside is that you cannot drag the minute hand. You can however still adjust the minute hand by using your mouse scrollwheel. A bonus tip: When you are typing in the time and date, some characters will move the input focus to the next part. Those characters are: ; : / . , - in addition to the tab and left and right arrow keys. I personally find the period to be the most convenient because I use the numpad.