In This blog-post I will explain my setup for using GameMaker:Studio on a Mac. This is not an exact step-by-step—I will assume basic knowledge of installing software and using Google. This is how I do it and it should work fine. I am not responsible for eventual data-loss or other trouble you may encounter.  

GameMaker is a great tool for quickly making games and prototypes.

If you’re working on a Mac, you can only get the discontinued GameMaker 8. GameMaker:Studio is Windows-only. If you’d like to use it on OSX, here’s what you need:

• VMWare Fusion or a similar Windows-Virtualization-Tool like VirtualBox or Parallels.
• A Windows-Disk-Image. You can grab a free trial-version from Microsoft’s own modern.ie.
• The GameMaker:Studio-Software.
• A Dropbox-Account (Optional).

You can get all of this for free, at least for trying out whether it works. Please note that this post is not about using Bootcamp to run Windows natively.

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Ever got a »You have Mail«-Message in your terminal? If you’re an occasional command-line-user, this might confuse you as it did confuse me.

I recently did a fresh local WordPress-installation on my Mac for testing-purposes. Since then I got the message  »You have Mail« whenever I started a new Terminal-session.

Turns out WordPress tried to send an E-Mail to the admins address. The delivery falied and the response ended up in the /var/mail folder.

So in case you want to get rid of »You have Mail«, empty your /var/mail folder.

When you drag a GIF-animation into Keynote, it won’t animate.
You’ll just see a static frame.
There’s a little workaround, though.

This is a way to quickly add an animated gif to Keynote as a video.

1. Go to Keynote-Settings
2. Activate “Optimize Movies for iOS” in the general settings
3. Rename your *.gif-file to *.mp4 (“animation.gif” should be “animation.mp4”)
4. Drag the file into Keynote
5. Enjoy

I make lots of screen-grab-GIFs with LICECap to collect UX-Elements from Apps and Websites and I’m using this trick to collect them all in one Keynote-File.

April Update: Keynote now supports animated GIFs natively!