Dec 31
2009

Down­load the Eval­u­ate Expres­sion Snow Leop­ard ser­vice: EvaluateExpressionService.zip

This is a stripped down ver­sion of a com­mand I have in the Text­Mate bun­dle we use at TUAW. It allows you to select any basic numeric equa­tion and eval­u­ate it, replac­ing the selected text with the results. It will ignore your text if it con­tains any­thing but num­bers and basic math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols. Sure, there are plenty of ways to do cal­cu­la­tions in OS X (Spot­light, Launch­bar, Quick­sil­ver), but I’ve had more and more inci­dents lately where I just wanted to do quick cal­cu­la­tions inline, so I whipped this up. A lit­tle explanation…

Con­tinue read­ing “A (fairly) sim­ple equa­tion eval­u­a­tion ser­vice for Snow Leopard…”

Dec 31
2009

I made a cou­ple of minor changes to the Clip­pable book­marklet, mostly in the way it han­dles Syn­tax­High­lighter code blocks. The Syn­tax­High­lighter plu­gin is used (too) often to for­mat and color code source snip­pets in web­sites. The result when clip­ping a page is that the code you get still has line num­bers, but no option to view the raw source with­out going back to the web page. Then you end up man­u­ally edit­ing out the line num­bers if you want to copy and paste the code, which can be a pain in most cases.

Since the point of Clip­pable was to deal bet­ter with things like code blocks (espe­cially for sav­ing snip­pets to Ever­note), it now removes the tool­bar and line num­bers from Syn­tax­High­lighter blocks. It also looks for another com­mon tech­nique: con­vert­ing lines in code to an ordered list inside of a pre block. This is just blot­ted out with CSS now. Those are the only two high­light­ing meth­ods it tar­gets at the moment, but I’ll tackle more as I run into them.

If you already have the book­marklet installed, you’re already ben­e­fit­ting from these changes (the book­marklet calls the source scripts on my server, so it is, in essence, auto­mat­i­cally updated). If not, just cruise over to the Clip­pable page and grab it!

Dec 12
2009

Erica Sadun recently released her lat­est app, Draw (iTunes link), into the wilds of the App Store. I take a spe­cial inter­est in this release because I designed the inter­face for it from the ground up. Erica, of course, made all of the magic hap­pen; she’d take my pho­to­shop sketches and send them back as amaz­ing work­ing inter­faces. In the end, it was a really fun process to go through and Erica was great to work with. Here’s a quick walk-through of the design process.

Con­tinue read­ing “Designing Draw…”

Dec 12
2009

Well, I’ve been out of touch with a lot of peo­ple for the last four days, and I thought I’d save some time and pro­vide a place I could link every­one to for a quick expla­na­tion. On Tues­day evening, in the mid­dle of what the weather ser­vice is call­ing our “worst storm in 20 years,” I started hav­ing stom­ach cramps. I won’t go into detail about what fol­lowed, but I’ll skip for­ward to the part where Aditi (my lov­ing and amaz­ingly ded­i­cated wife) packed me into her 4-wheel drive Pathfinder and headed out to Com­mu­nity Memo­r­ial Hos­pi­tal. After a brief sur­vey, I was admit­ted for observation.

Con­tinue read­ing “Where I’ve been this week…”