Entrepreneur Geek

I love books, I read some of what I collect! I may go from one book to another without finishing it. I love coming back to books I read earlier. Two weeks ago, I bought 26 books in one shot. The largest purchase of books I ever made. I was fulfilled!

My library case is already filled up and I needed a way to organize the books I have. I had tried with a spreadsheet earlier, but I wanted something better this time. I did not even want to type in all titles and details myself. That would be too much of work! I would rather read a book in that time!

Enter Books! A MacOS X application that can read barcodes using the inbuilt camera on my MacBook and fill up book details! Just what I needed! (It’s Open Source too)

Books - Add a new book screen

I used it and I can describe the experience in one word – Delightful! I was so happy with the ease, I have already shown the app to my family. That’s unique – does not happen for a lot of apps!

• It correctly detected ISBN for most of my books.
• I did not have much luck with 13 digit ISBN – though detection worked, I was not able to find book information from Amazon/others.
• Especially so with Indian publishers. For many, I had to enter the title and pull info manually.
• I wish Gujarati books had ISBN too! Would have made it so easy! (I inherit a huge collection of Gujarati books from my dad
• In just two hours, I could add about 90 books to the system! That was cool!

Books - Main Screen

I have been playing around with a lot of Java tools these days! I was trying out XPlanner and when I ran the startup shell script, it spit out the infamous error!

The JAVA_HOME environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program
NB: JAVA_HOME should point to a JDK not a JRE

I tried a couple of things, but they did not work. A bit of Google, and found an easy way.

Here are the steps!

• Open Terminal.
• First confirm you have JDK by typing “which java”. It should show something like /usr/bin/java.
• Check you have the needed version of Java, by typing “java -version”. My setup shows java version “1.5.0_13″
• JAVA_HOME is essentially the full path of the directory that contains a sub-directory named bin which in turn contains the java.
• For Mac OSX – it is /Library/Java/Home (There are other directories too, but this is the simplest!)
• Set JAVA_HOME using this command in Terminal: export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
• echo $JAVA_HOME on Terminal to confirm the path
• You should now be able to run your application

This sets JAVA_HOME only for this session. If you want it to persist, you will have to add the command to your ~/.profile file.

For more details on this, refer to Sean Brown’s blog post.

I got .bin and .cue files from a friend. And was wondering how to use them on my Mac.

What are .bin and .cue files?

They are essentially CD/DVD image files. The .BIN / .CUE CD image format was made popular by the CDRWin software. Afterwards many programs have started supporting or partially supporting it, including: Nero, Blindwrite, CloneCD, FireBurner. The .CUE file contains the track layout information, while the .BIN file holds the actual data.

.ISO is also a CD image format, but is sometimes used for 'ISO9660 format' (standard, recognized by all applications) and sometimes for unique Easy CD ISO format.

So how can you open them on a Mac OS X?

Apple's DiskUtility does not support these formats. Roxio Toast or other CD burning software can open and burn from .bin+.cue files. But if you don't want to do all that, there is an easy way!

Use the bchunker command line program! You can download a Mac compiled version from James Sears' site and run a command like this to get an ISO file. This ISO file can now be easily mounted by DiskUtility.

Resources:

• .bin / .cue / .iso Frequently Asked Questions
• How to play bin and cue files?
• bchunker on Mac OS X

Are you building an iPhone app? Or have an idea? Do you want to mock it up quickly? The iPhone UI PicKit can help you!

This is a kit of widget images that you can use in your image editing software. This way you can easily create prototypes of different screens and share them with others. There is also a layered PSD available.

iPhone UI PicKit

No need for the iPhone SDK! No need to learn Interface Builder! Just grab the screens and mock your iPhone idea! Thanks Daniel!

(BTW, if you are through with the idea, let us know if you want to develop it. We do iPhone development!)

What do you attribute Apple's success to? Steve Jobs? Usability? Cutting edge technology? Innovation? Or their extra ordinary marketing skills?

I think much of Apple's success is because of their marketing focus. The customer experience focus comes from marketing focus.

Steve Chazin, an Apple veteran, has written an insightful eBook - Marketing Apple. The eBook uncovers the secret of marketing that Apple uses. The principles are very smart and I believe if you use them, you would be successful too!

This is a must read for anyone interested in Apple or Marketing.