Jul 15
2010
Safari 5 has brought several solutions for managing lists of open tabs, from the simple (like my TabLinks extension) to full session-management capabilities (see the beautiful Sessions extension). However, I’ve found I still like using my EverSave script in many situations, primarily because it allows me to annotate, tag and sync my important sessions for later retrieval. One thing’s been bugging me, though, and that’s the inability to do a mass restore on a tab list (i.e. open them all at once)…
May 07
2010
I’ve seen a few people around the ‘net sharing their TextExpander snippets, so I thought I’d join in. Not familiar with TextExpander? It’s a Mac utility that expands short snippets into full text you’ve defined. There are quite a few programs that do text expansion (see Typinator), but TextExpander currently holds my heart because of its extra features such as shell scripting, completion suggestion and a new Fill dialog for variable input.
Most of my snippets are specific only to me, such as email signoffs and abbreviations for companies I work for…
Apr 28
2010
I’m fascinated by http://to. It’s a url shortener with no TLD. Some browsers, and apparently some DNS setups, don’t like the urls it creates (they want a .com or .org or anything at the end), so it’s not exactly in heavy usage. Still, I wish they had an API. In lieu of that, here’s a quick Ruby script that will run on a stock OS X install as a System Service. It’s so simple that I’m not even going to package it up… It’ll be a good chance to show the steps for creating your own utilities using Snow Leopard Services:
require 'net/http' require 'cgi'input = STDIN.read http = Net::HTTP.new('to.')
Apr 17
2010
It’s probably old news to most, but I just realized this today. Since Leopard, OS X’s multi-talented Preview.app can compress needlessly large PDF’s in a matter of seconds. My clients (and today, my mother) often export PDF’s from various programs that don’t flatten or compress images, ending up with files between 8M and 90M, in my experience. Obviously, when you’re building a website, you want to get filesize down as much as possible. I’ve always used Acrobat to shrink these, usually reducing the size to about 15% of the original…
Mar 20
2010
Songza.fm has moved to Songza.org, so I’ve rewritten the old Songza Lucky Link Service for Snow Leopard to match. This new version of the service runs without dependencies, so it should work for any Snow Leopard setup right out of the box. It’s a bit silly, but what it does is take your selected text and run it as a query on Songza.org, parse for the first result (if there are any), shorten that link and insert it after your selected text. A fast, easy way to punctuate your obscure music references in emails and on the web…
Mar 06
2010
Another post, quickly and with less explanation…
The fact that Evernote processes HTML so much better than it does plain or rich text got me thinking and tinkering. I use Markdown (actually, MultiMarkdown) constantly, and it does a great job of turning plain text into valid markup. With (Multi)Markdown, even plain text becomes HTML that–when imported into Evernote–retains most of its formatting. To answer your question, no, I’m not obsessed with Evernote, I’m obsessed with problems I think I could solve. It’s unhealthy…
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…
