Posts tagged osx
not particularly useful to a command line junkie like myself, but this is a beautiful interface that will hopefully introduce boatloads more to the wonderful world of less css.
i have been using fluid, the mac osx application for wrapping sites as their own webkit applications for a while, but only for beasts like gmail and google reader. then i realized, fluid makes a great sidekick for my new emacs driven development environment:
* it saves the previous session’s tabs, so you can preserve and separate your development from daily browsing.
* you can give it a global hotkey to pull it up quickly.
* you get to use webkit’s ever-improving, top-notch webkit inspector.
setting it up is super easy. for example, if you’re working in rails, create a new fluid app at the address 0.0.0.0:3000, call it whatever you want, give it a fancy icon and you’re ready to apple+tab between the guts and face of your project.
if you don’t use dropbox, the multi-platformed, cloud-backed-up, version-tracking storage-and-sharing application, you are most likely a) uninformed or b) an idiot. it’s one of those ‘how did i live without it’ kinds of things.
recently i started unlocking a new batch of syncing/redundancy potential through the process of creating symbolic links, which are aliases that jump to a different directory on your system. with these, you can dropbox-ize folders that would normally reside in your ~/Library directory. for example, crack open a terminal window =>
mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate ~/Dropbox
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Textmate ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate
this moves your textmate bundles and preferences to your dropbox, but to your mac they would seem to be in the same location. to use the same textmate set-up on a different mac, back-up your ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate folder and run the 2nd command on that machine. the same process works for coda or espresso library folders.
for more info on what else you can do with dropbox, check out dropbox’s wiki page.
another excellent option in using the font of your choice in your designs. textorize is a ruby script that creates png’s of text in any font for osx users. its ‘shining star’ feature is that it takes advantage of osx’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing when creating png’s. that’s something photoshop still can’t even do! it does have its shortcomings though: it needs a background color and there are the implied accessibility issues of turning text into images. that said, it is still an excellent option in certain situations.
a brilliant idea: porting the ruby on rails and jquery api’s to osx dictionaries, so you can do all sorts of system-wide things with them. you can search the api’s with spotlight, or if you use launchbar you can highlight a function name and trigger the ‘instant send’ action for opening with dictionary.app. you can also use the ⌘+control+d system-wide shortcut when hovering over a function name to get a small pop-up reference window.
with the release of firefox 3.5, the exciting reality of html5 <video> is really ramping up. kroc camen has his eyes right on this ball of change by putting together a test page that takes advantage of html5 browsers by using their built in video control capabilities, but also gracefully falls back to a flash player solution for the non-hip ones.
if you are unfamiliar with firefox’s .ogv format as i was, gruber pointed out a simple command line tool for osx called ffmpeg2theora.
update: taylan pince created a simple gui wrapper for ffmpeg2theora called oggifier for those who would rather not type in the commands. the best part is it taps into the sparkle framework for automatic updates.
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if you spend all day on a computer using fingers to type code and text, chances are you find yourself repeating certain things a lot. most modern osx text editors have some sort of snippet/clip functionality, but committing to one seems like an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ kind of scenario. i mean, how are you are going to use your coda clips in textmate 2 when it comes out?
as far as system-wide text expanders go, typinator is the best one i’ve tried, and i’ve tried them all because obsessing over productivity is productive, right?
setting up a local osx environment for web development is important, but it can also get hairy for designers who are scared of things like apache, mysql, and typing in the terminal. this is a smart guide on how to get up and running as quickly as possible through gui-based tools.
as someone with tons of projects, virtualhostx has been a true gem.
the vmware fusion trick has a great side effect when working from within panic’s coda. while in preview mode, you can use the browser icon in the toolbar to launch your locally running site in whichever terrible version of internet explorer you need to debug in.
compiling and sharing code, ideas, and tools for making better websites and applications.
by justin talbott {email me}
