BrockLi Soup

Quicksilver is one of the most useful Mac apps available, hands down. I don’t even know how to find things on a Mac without it anymore - which makes it distressing when it doesn’t work the way I expect it to.

I keep a list of project ideas and things like that at Documents/GTD/Someday.txt under my home directory. Straightforward enough, but I can never remember where it is, and thanks to Quicksilver, I shouldn’t need to. But Quicksilver couldn’t find it this afternoon, and a little digging proved that Quicksilver wasn’t cataloging any subdirectories in Documents. I’m pretty sure it used to - I’ve been using it for a few years and never noticed any problems like this before, so I imagine that this bug was introduced when I updated to ß54 a week or two ago, and I just hadn’t noticed yet.

Now, I call it a bug, but it’s entirely possible that the developers made the change on purpose. Even so, here’s what I did to fix it:

1. Open the Quicksilver Catalog.
2. Click User in the list on the left.
3. Select Documents.
4. Click on the i icon at the bottom left. This will open an information drawer. Notice that the Depth slider in the drawer is set to 1, but it’s disabled.
5. At the bottom of the drawer, click on the Attributes tab.
6. Click the Create A Copy button.
7. A copy will be created, and you are now editing that copy. Click back to the Source Options tab in the drawer and change the Depth slider to infinite (or lower, if you want it to catalog faster).
8. Click on User in the list at the left again. The checkbox next to Documents should have been automatically unchecked, since your new item overrides it. Uncheck it if it wasn’t done automatically.
9. If you want to update your catalog immediately, click the refresh button at the bottom right corner of the window.

I fumbled my iPhone good today.

Erin and I were waiting for the bus to go kayaking. I had just put on sunscreen, so my hands were all slippery when I went to text Aubri, and it just spilled out and landed face-down on the sidewalk. We both kind of looked at it for a second, not daring to pick it up and see the damage.

My first thought was, “Well, I guess I’m upgrading after all.” I had no intentions of getting the 3G version any time soon - what little money I have is much needed elsewhere. But then I realized that thousands of OTHER people are upgrading - and selling of their old ones in the process. I could just get a used one and drop in my SIM card.

Unfortunately, used first-gen iPhones are running about $250 on Craigslist here, and my search for “iPhone” returned a lot more want ads than sale ads, so it’s safe to say that demand is high enough to keep prices higher than I want to pay. Or I could pay $200 to get a brand-new 3G, at an extra $10/month for the data plan - an extra $70 over the course of the next year.

Either way, it sucks. I really don’t want to spend money on a phone right now. I suppose I could just get a super-cheap regular phone, but after having an iPhone for 10 months, could I ever go back? On the other hand, I’ll bet I would be able to receive MMS.

The screen is hard to read, but it still works, so I think I’m going to give it a week. I’m just hoping that prices on used phones will fall a bit, which might be a little too optimistic, but we’ll see what happens.

At some point in our lives - let’s call it “college” - many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else - let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.

AppZapper

Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.

AppZapper fills this hole - it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.

Transmit

It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.

TextMate

This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking - maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.

It took me forever to figure out what the dropdown at the bottom of the TextMate window is called - you know, the one where you select the language you want to use. As it turns out, “language” would have been a good starting point in the Google, but it took me a while to figure that out. It’s the one that says “Blog - Markdown” in this screenshot:

Anyway, I wanted TextMate to default to Markdown instead of Plain Text, and once I figured out what to search for, I found my answer pretty quickly.

To find the UUID for Markdown, I did this:

% cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Markdown.tmbundle/Syntaxes/
% plutil -convert xml1 Markdown.plist 
% grep -A1 uuid Markdown.plist 
    <key>uuid</key>
    <string>0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C</string>

And once you’ve got that, this line sets the default:

% defaults write com.macromates.textmate OakDefaultLanguage 0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C

Disclaimer: I don’t know if the UUID is specific to Markdown, or to Markdown on my machine. I would recommend running those first three commands first and double check the UUID before you try to do this. The UUID is specific to Markdown, so you can just execute that last defaults write line (thanks Drew!)

Also, blogging from TextMate is pretty handy. You may have noticed that the screenshot includes the beginning of this post, because I was writing it just then, right in TextMate. Handy, I tells ya.

Here’s a neat trick I didn’t know about. I already knew that hitting Command+Shift+3 will take a screen shot, and Command+Shift+4 will allow you to select an area of the screen to shoot. But if you hit Command+Shift+4, and then hit Space, you can take a shot of a single window without having to carefully select it.

Most of the text I edit is code. It’s just part of being a web developer. Sure, I do a little writing now and again for this here blog, but I usually do that in a web browser, so most of the time I spend in text editors is for code. But, I’m working on a pretty big documentation project for work, and I’m trying out Markdown for blog posts, so I’m spending more time in a plain vanilla text editor to do both.

These are the text editors I’ve come to know and love.

Notepad

Everybody starts with Notepad. I think I wrote all of my HTML and fledgling Javascript in Notepad back in high school - Dreamweaver just felt unwieldy, and I didn’t know about any other options at the time.

UltraEdit

It’s been a long time since I’ve used UltraEdit, but it was my go-to editor for most of college. I really only used it because I could open several files in tabs - pretty standard these days, but that was the first time I’d seen it. I don’t even know what else it was capable of, because I just used it as a basic text editor.

Zend Studio

Zend Studio has been my primary IDE since I started my current job two and a half years ago. I love it because of the code completion and debugging for PHP, but I wind up using it for just about any text I need to edit quickly while I’m working because it’s always open. I also use it on my MacBook if I’m doing stuff for work.

TextMate

TextMate has been gaining ground in my workflow. It’s a pretty powerful little editor, but I barely take advantage of it. I use it all the time to edit plain text, but I almost never code in it - Zend is a far superior IDE for PHP, so it never made sense to use TextMate for it.

The real power in TextMate comes from its bundles. I just finished a project with Code Igniter (more on that in another post soon), and TextMate turned out to be a lot more useful thanks to the Code Igniter TextMate Bundle (for the record, I found a second bundle when trying to find the link to that one, but I haven’t tried it yet). I like Zend’s code completion, but I was able to develop in TextMate a lot quicker with the shortcuts provided by the bundle.

It also has a Markdown bundle, which adds some keyboard shortcuts, provides a quick cheat sheet, and makes it easy to preview while you’re writing. In fact, I’m writing this in TextMate right now.

Update: I love it even more now that I’ve watched this video about blogging in TextMate. You can post new entries and edit existing ones right in TextMate!

WriteRoom

To be honest, I haven’t actually written anything in WriteRoom, except for the couple of times I’ve played with it to tweak the font and such. Basically, it gives you a solid black screen with a narrow column of simple green text and a blinking console cursor. The colors can be customized, of course, but the point is that it gives you a stripped down, no frills, typewriter-like interface where you can write without the distraction of menus, bouncing dock icons, or IM windows. It really makes me wish I had something to write, because it just compels me to spill everything into words on the screen. I thought I might start using it with Markdown to write blog posts and stuff, but that was before I found all the shortcuts in TextMate. Still, WriteRoom just begs to be used, and I wish I had more than two days left in my trial so I could see if I can’t find a use for it.

After Guitar Hero made its way to mobile phones, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: The game has (unofficially) made its way to the Commodore 64. Creator Toni Westbrook calls it Shredz64. We call it a ridiculously cool labor of love, and the best thing we’ve seen today.

People like this make me wish I was geekier. Full article on Joystiq.

Remember when I was complaining yesterday about the dock in 10.5.2? Well don’t I feel silly.

I guess I didn’t really bother looking for an answer, because 30 seconds on Google got me a forum thread about this very subject. To use the folder’s icon in the dock, you just need to remove it and re-add it to the dock, or switch it from folder view to stack view and back again. For some reason though, restarting the machine won’t do it (I tried that first, just in case).

And since I didn’t describe it well, this is what I had to start with:

And this is what I’ve got now:

The Finances icon was made for me by the lovely and talented Sarah Friedlander, and I made the Atheist icon using the same tool she did, Can Combine Icons.

MacTipcs .org has an article about the new Stacks features that came with the latest update to OS X. The big thing everyone has been talking about is the ability to display a folder as a folder when you’ve got it in your dock. Up until now, a lot of people have been using the method explained here: basically, put an icon file in the folder you’re going to put in the dock, and it will appear at the front of the stack.

Now, the folders in the dock will actually look like folders. This is a start, but it would be a lot better if they actually used the folder’s icon. For example, I’ve got two folders in my dock: Atheism and Finances. I want icons for each dock item to make it clear which is which - an X icon (or something else) for Atheism, and a dollar symbol for Finances. I was accomplishing this by dropping icons in those folders so that they would appear at the top of the stack, but it’s not an ideal solution. Now that the dock can display these as folders, I would rather use that for consistency.

The problem is that they just look like folders in the dock. I mean, in a perfect world, the Finances folder would have a dollar symbol on it, just like the Applications, Documents, Music, and other folders in OS X have icons to denote what they’re for. So I put an icon on the Finances folder, but alas, the icon isn’t used in the dock; it’s still just a boring folder. Everything else in the dock has the right icon - why not my stack folders?

I discovered this by accident this afternoon when I was wiping off my screen.

With the screen of your iPhone off, hit the Home button twice. iPod controls come up on-screen.

I usually use the clicker on the headphone wire when I’m using my phone as an iPod, but you can’t just plug in the headphones and click the button to start playing. It also seems to “forget” you were listening to music if you pause it and do anything else on the phone. Until now, I thought you had to tap the iPod icon and navigate back to what you had been listening to. This little shortcut is pretty handy, methinks.