Recently released Wezwij Taxi is surprisingly no.1 free application in Polish AppStore since few days, and became no.1 one day after release.

I have just learned that AppStore is amazing phenomenon. It is quite impossible to predict impact of an application before it gets released. Some “silly” apps stay on top for weeks, while some real gems are quickly forgotten. So it is worth to test even most crazy wicked ideas against iPhone users putting them into life as AppStore app.

It is high time to release own application iPhone after spending a while doing apps for companies. So I decided to make something useful for myself what others can appreciate too.

Here are my very own apps:

• Strefa a Wirtualna Polska Strefa MP3 streaming audio client. Strefa MP3 is a portal containing over 100’000 songs of amateur and professional polish artists, every day brings tens of new songs. IMHO that is much better than commercial radio stations serving all those boring pieces we already heard before thousand times.
• Wezwij Taxi a polish taxi catalog and taximeter in one app. Now this program has one purpose: keep updated database of taxis for major cities of Poland. But in the future, I think this app can turn into some kind of one button taxi call, using your GPS position without a need to call or name your position to the operator. Useful for those traveling to unfamiliar cities.

Update: Strefa is already available at AppStore, Wezwij Taxi waits for fixes and resubmit.

Updates

1. It uses now click menu instead of keystroke “System Events” command, because in some cases when you had this script assigned to shortcut that used Ctrl or Shift modifiers, those modifiers were sent together with Cmd to “Terminal” producing invalid behavior.
2. It waits 0.5 second when window is busy just in case Terminal.app was not running and it is just loading the shell which makes it busy for short while too. Fixes incorrect behavior of opening extra tab when Terminal.app was not running.

If you ever wondered how to open specified path in new tab of Terminal.app or reuse current one if it is not busy (running a command), here’s a script you may use:

tell application "Terminal"

    activate

    set windowCount to (count of the windows)

    -- Terminal may be just launched loading the shell, wait a bit
    if windowCount is greater than 0 and first window is busy then
        delay 0.5
    end

    -- Still busy / no windows? open new tab
    if windowCount is greater than 0 and first window is busy or windowCount is 0 then
        tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal"
            click first menu item of first menu of second menu item of first menu of third menu bar item of first menu bar
        end tell
    end if

    do script "cd #{e_as(e_sh(dir))}" in first window

end tell

Where #{e_as(e_sh(dir))} is your desired folder. This is modified chunk of TextMate‘s command script found at Mark Eli Kalderon’s Blog. Thanks Mark!

Note: Mark’s TextMate command script does not open anything when Terminal.app has no windows or it is not running.

I just received confirmation mail from Apple‘s technician regarding this bug and 10.5.7. Thank you! It took them a while to nail it down, but finally we can change spell checker language w/o restarting Mail or Safari.

A story with happy ending

Since a while I am a happy Mac OS X user, would be happiest one… if only I could write my mails easily…

Even I find myself often talk too much I am neither a perfect speaker nor writer. So something commonly called “spell checker” is an invaluable tool in my daily work, especially when sending bunch mails per day. Short after my transition to Mac I was very excited finding out that spell checking is built into the system. Unfortunately as a spelling mistake prone Pole speaking usually English at work and Polish privately I realized that having no Polish spell checker makes my doom.

(more…)