July 10th, 2008
Instant message has become a part of my daily life. I use it pretty much non stop for work, and my work involves writing a lot of code. It isn’t uncommon for me to send something like
if ($a=($b+$c))
I like iChat (Adium of course is the old favourite, but hasn’t been used much since I moved to Leopard and Apple improved iChat so much), but sometimes it’s too cute for its own good. This is especially true of the “helpful” way it converts :) and ;) into 
and 
respectively. Helpful in the same way that Clippy was helpful.
This behaviour gets very annoying when one is trying to look at code. The above code example becomes 
. You can image how annoying this is when every third line of chat is code. So I went hunting through the iChat preferences to find a little box I could uncheck and turn off smileys, only there was no box to be found.
A quick trip through google didn’t turn up too much either, but I was able to figure out where iChat kept its preferences for that. A minute later, I had figured out a way to turn them off. Here’s how:
Browse to /Applications/iChat.app, and “Show Package Contents”.
Next up, browse into Contents/Resources/English.lproj and look for a file called SmileyTable.plist. This is where all the smiley definitions are stored. Without it, iChat can’t translate smiles, so rename it to “SmileyTable.plist.banished”. If you ever want smileys back, just reverse the process!
There, that feels better
Continue reading “Turning off smileys in iChat 4”. Posted in
How-To, Mac with 4 comments 
June 16th, 2008
I've been kind of in isolation the last week or so, (more on that in another post) and I've not even taken the time to read my RSS feeds latesy, only skimming a few things here and there, or marking things for reading later. So today, I had a bit of time, and boy am I glad I took the time to re-visit those! Here are a few wonderful things worth your time to read.
- How To Make An IP-To-Country Tool With PHP and MySQL. Mathew Pennel, web monster and editor of Digital Web Magazine has written up a wonderful article here. I find myself linking to one article every month or two that this guy writes and nodding my head knowingly. This guy is great.
- Doctor Jones has completely made me re-examine Apple's Spaces with his article My Day With the New Spaces.
- jQuery for Designers has written up Coda Slider Effect. Its sexy as all get out. GREAT work there Remy. This is super well done. I will be
stealing inspired by you soon!
- Continuing on the jQuery train of thought here is the always excellent jQuery blog. Recently they wrote jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects which contained a few big tidbits in there. Biggest? API standardization. Unless you're a nerd of pretty high-order, that's probably not as cool to you as it is to me, but something that everyone can enjoy - Enchant (the effects library) is being rolled into jQuery proper. I think this is an immensely smart choice if only for marketing jQuery to new users. New users tend to compare feature by feature and make decisions, well now there's a big checkbox in that column. Nice work guys!
- And finally, Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices from Smashing Magazine.
Man, there was some good stuff on tap! Something from each of those will be making their way into my work in the very near future.
Continue reading “Things worth reading”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, Javascript, Mac, PHP with 2 comments
May 04th, 2008
I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6. If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot. Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!
A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently. The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut. It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.
There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it. Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of
$this->lang->line('something');
and paste it all at once. Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again. Its also open sourced under the MIT License.
Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse. I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse. The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think. Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain. Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons. Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).
On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program). That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)
Continue reading “CodeIgniter textmate bundle and other stuff that’s saving me time”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Mac with 5 comments
June 13th, 2007
In case you missed the news from any one of a thousand different news outlets, fan sites or blogs… Apple has released their Safari browser for Windows. Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone on Windows would care, but I’m glad to see it released. Apple has a cache that most companies don’t have, so heck, anything that makes people aware that they are using a browser is good as far as I’m concerned - I still get surprised by people who have not even heard of Firefox before. Mind you, these are usually the same people who, when asked if they’ve heard of Netscape, nod absently. I guess its nice that developers on Windows can test out their work without buying a Mac (or begging me for more screenshots… you know who you are!).
Even now that I’m on a Mac, I find myself going to Firefox at least 90% of the time. In truth, I can’t live without Firebug or the Web Developer extension. Heck, even colorzilla has a special place in my heart! So now I start the process of hoping that Apple makes it as good on Windows as it is on a Mac.
As a sidenote, the Safari page is beautiful. Check out the “12 reasons you’ll love Safari” list on the bottom. Brilliant use of Scriptaculous if I do say so. Note to self… steal that idea....
Found an interesting article on Apple’s website. It seems they recommend you calibrate your Mac’s battery. I’m giving it a shot right now, although I can’t imagine I’ll notice a difference… makes me wish I had read that before I’ve been on this thing for 8 hours a day.
Also read that your Mac does not want to be “optimized” by which they basically mean defragmented. Fun times.
Oh yes, and cool kids keep their docks on the left (or right… currently its left ;) ).
The beautiful wallpaper is courtesy of Wolfgang Bartelme . In fact, he even makes the Photoshop source available. If you’re interested, he has a short tutorial on how he made it available as well.
Continue reading “Mac : an excellent daily source of “kick ass””. Posted in
Mac with 5 comments
April 27th, 2007
Ever been working along and say to yourself “whoa, where’d the time go”? Then you look back and can’t believe how much you’ve got done? Sometimes it just magically happens to be sure, but I think the tools I’m using must play a big role in it (and turning off my email and cell). These are the tools I find myself using in those spontaneous moments.
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Firefox and plugins, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Coda and the interweb.
Notice how the operating system is not there? I haven’t found any noticeable difference between operating systems, as long as my macbook is plugged into a nice big monitor. I do notice a decline as my screenspace goes down. That said, there is something psychological going on there, since I want to use the Mac more then I ever wanted to use a pc. I must be influenced by all those ipod and “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. I’m such a slave to media…
I’ve always liked Dreamweaver (yes its expensive, but feature for feature as good as any editor I’ve ever seen including Textmate), but I absolutely hate it on my Mac - and truthfully, its only 1 thing… I hate all those dopey floating panels. I’ve been spending a bit of time with Coda. Yeah there’s a lot of hype, but it isn’t undeserved. I like the integrated environment, I have absolutely no need for a CSS editor (its nice that its included, but I don’t use it anyhow), and I find the terminal completely adequate. I might just buy it since the trial runs out in a few days.
CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine have completely revolutionized the way I build sites in the last year. Fireworks has been my “go to” image editor for a long time now. Its combination of vector and bitmap tools have been ideal for me, although a switch to Illustrator might happen if I find the right project.
What tools do you find yourself using when the magic moment strikes?
Continue reading “Productivity Tools”. Posted in
Browsers, CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Mac with 10 comments
March 15th, 2007
I’ve re-started this post three times now trying to think of something witty to say. Bottom line, I’m typing this post on my sexy new Macbook. Yup, I’ve succumbed to the allure of the Mac. I’m not sure if its those clever but over-played “Hi I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” commercials that I always skip through for some other cosmic factor, but here I am.
I figured it would be a pretty easy transition. I frequently flip operating systems (Windows and LInux). Pretty much every app I rely on is either open source (Firefox, Tunderbird, Open Office, Apache, etc), or is available on the Mac (the Adobe suite). The ones that aren’t have nice Mac equivalents (I liked HeidiSQL on Windows. The Mac has CocoaSQL).
Continue reading “Switched to Mac”. Posted in
Mac, Noteworthy with 18 comments
