Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than “quick” would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.
quicktip, terminal
Update: I worked with a couple of readers to make a localizable version of this. I haven’t had time to fully polish and post it, but if you want to use this geeklet in a non-US English setup, contact me and I’ll help you get it running. Currently only German is complete, but the strings file is easy enough to fill out.
geeklet, geektool, nerdtool, tutorial
Tunesque just popped up on my radar today. It’s a free utility that searches the iTunes store, Spotlight-style. It runs in your menubar, and when you enter a query it returns instant, as-you-type results from all areas of the iTunes Store, App Store and Mac App Store. Hovering over an item displays item details (the way Lion Spotlight does). With light and dark themes and the ability to filter what results you see (and from what country’s store they’re from), it’s about…
appreview, itunes, search
We just completed the first day of a cross-town move to our new house. It’s my first foray into home ownership, so this is exciting and a little bit nerve wracking. Thanks to all of our friends who helped make what would otherwise have been an overwhelming task into a fun afternoon.
personal
Eternal Storms has provided five Yoink App Store promo codes for me to give to readers. I’m happy to be able to share; Yoink is one of those unobtrusive utilities that provides important functionality in an elegant way.
appreview, giveaway
If you want to be popular, you need to spend most of the party loudly pontificating on really, really nerdy stuff. It will seem like it’s not working at first, but keep going. I promise everyone will love you in the end. Here are a couple of inspiring topics for your next soire (this intro paragraph is me trying to justify a rambling post that will likely not make me many friends).
git, markdown, nvalt, wiki
Update: found a little bug (well, stupid mistake) in the HTML to Clipboard command. Download version is now 1.2.1, update if you grabbed 1.2.
markdown, markdownservices, scripting, service
I was looking at some numbers on a web page. A wide variety of fairly large numbers. The web page didn’t provide any kind of average for the numbers, and I was curious. Curious, of course, meant writing a script to solve the problem. Yes, I could have copied the numbers out, punched them into a calculator one by one, or opened up Numbers and pasted them into cells… bah. I wanted to be able to copy text with all kinds of other junk in it and just get the average of all the values in…
experiments, scripting, service, textmate
The Markdown Service Tools–which already received one update today–just got a little bit of Chrome support. The “md - Links from Safari Tabs” now has a Chrome counterpart. At the time that I first wrote the Markdown Service Tools, Chrome didn’t support AppleScript well enough for this to be feasible, but opening up the AppleScript dictionary now reveals a full set of commands and objects. Nice to see.
markdown, markdownservices, service
In response to a tweet from @gl3media, I’ve added a quick modification of the MultiMarkdown to HTML service to the Markdown Service Tools project page. It simply renders the selected text to HTML via MultiMarkdown 2 (Perl) and SmartyPants, putting the result on the clipboard and leaving the original text alone.
markdown, markdownservices, multimarkdown, service
I tweeted the other day that @eternalstorms is way too good at solving my problems for me. What I was referring to was Yoink, which just became available today. It’s an uber-simple app which provides a drawer for dragging files between spaces and full-screen apps. I wrote it up on TUAW this morning, so I won’t go into detail here.
appreview, lion, macos, utility
Anyone who’s read this blog, used my projects or has talked to me about anything nerdy for more than five minutes knows I’m a fan of Markdown. The question doesn’t come up often, but occasionally someone dares to ask–despite the apparent probability that it will lead to a lengthy explanation–why I use Markdown in so many of my workflows. I give just about the same response to seasoned nerds as I do to my not-so-computer-savvy friends. This isn’t the Markdown…
blogging, markdown, text, writing
Joe Workman put out a utility today for sharing Application Support folders between machines using Dropbox. It uses symlinks to allow moving the folder out of and into your Dropbox but keeping it accessible to the application. This is a great trick, and the Joe’s utility makes it dead simple to pull off. The biggest concern, however, is the possibility of corruption and other issues if you run the application on multiple machines simultaneously.
dropbox, scripting
I’ve heard complaints over the last year that apps such as nvALT and Marked slow down when handling large documents. I’m constantly working to optimize the code and the preview processes, but here’s a tip that I hope will be taken to heart: split your longer text documents into manageable portions.
nvalt, text, writing
