I spent an inordinate amount of time not doing useful things today. During this non-productivity bender, I got a little obsessed with making the HTML5 video encoding process easier. I’ve been working on a tutorial site for the Blogsmith Bundle, so this whole deal needed to be sped up. I came out with a script which, when combined with the right command line utilities, takes 90% of the manual labor out of creating the multiple formats needed.
automation, html, terminal, video
Formalize CSS - Teach your forms some manners! So, so nice. Consistent and beautiful form styling. 10 Omnigraffle tips you might not know (plus one bonus!) Trying to get a little better with OmniGraffle lately. My DuckDuckGo travels led me here… Using Git Versioning inside your XCode Project Automatically fill in CFBundleVersion and CFBundleShortVersionString when using Git. 6 .htaccess Tricks for Better WordPress SEO & Security Some great ideas in here. I especially like…
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Hey, TextExpander users! Wanna see something cool? I made a little tool this morning to allow any of my TextExpander groups to be installed with your own custom prefix. You can now use whatever is “standard” for your shortcuts. All of the group links on the project page now go to this tool, and you can open it directly for access to all of my groups.
experiments, textexpander, tools
Thanks to Thomas Borowski, the Characters group in my TextExpander project has been expanded to include Home, End, Control, Escape, Enter and Delete symbols. Check it out on the TextExpander project page. If you already have the group installed from the URL, you can update it from within TextExpander.
textexpander
trash Use Finder’s trash method from the command line. This build enables the “Put Back” feature in Finder for undeleting files. asprint View color-coded output of compiled AppleScripts from the command line. Dropbox Forms: Receive files from your web site to your dropbox! Handy upload possibilities for getting client files. Opening Ruby gems in TextMate - TextMate Good primer on setting up your own tab-completion sets in Bash. rsync + Automator = free and easy backups…
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I just added a TextExpander group called “Filesystem” to my TextExpander project page. It’s just a small set of paths that I find myself typing often in support emails, but here’s the cool part: they also work in “Go to folder” mode in Finder dialogs.
finder, snippet, textexpander
I use TextMate for editing most of my Markdown. I could name a dozen reasons why this is the case, but let’s leave it at auto-pairing, wrapping and the Blogsmith Bundle features. Anyhow, I got a bug yesterday to make TextMate work in “concentration” mode (ala WriteRoom). Not because I think that will improve my writing habits, I just wanted to see if it was possible. A few Google searches later, I have a pretty good solution.
experiments, minimalism, textmate, writing
I’m fascinated by this whole minimalism concept. I don’t practice it very well, and I don’t feel terrible about that. I have to admit, though, that all of those pictures of barren desktops and minimal computer systems actually appeal to me. That was the first motivation for this experiment.
minimalism, work
A Pinboard redesign built off of the styles started by Josh Pigford, I’m providing a bare stylesheet which works with StyleBot on Chrome and User CSS on Safari. The Chrome version can be installed straight from Stylebot.me. Stylebot.me also has a userscript version which could be used with Greasemonkey, but my styles don’t seem to translate well to Firefox, yet. I’ll work on that when I have time.
css, design, experiments, pinboard, webdesign
Ruby for Newbies: Working with Directories and Files Good overview of the basics of Ruby file and directory handling. jessegrosjean/DropboxSync - GitHub An iOS framework for incorporating Dropbox in a way that allows it to perform like it does on other operating systems. Thanks Jesse! WordPress Upgrade Class for Commercial or Client Plugins – WordPress and Ajax Work in progress, according to the author, but a great option for WordPress plugin authors for handling automatic…
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After my epic three-part post on Saturday, I spent the rest of the weekend doing more “useful” things. Now it’s Sunday night (Monday morning, I think), and I’ve got some kind of minor food poisoning which is currently keeping me awake. Thus a “hey, cool trick” post.
automator, macos, ruby, service, webdesign
A simpler and faster alternative to wireframes – Attack Of Design Amen to that. sergeche/xmlview - GitHub Another “holy cow” Safari Extension. This one works in tandem with the XML Viewer plugin and provides Espresso-esque styling, XPath searching and sidebar nav for XML files in Safari. Snipe by Joseph Schmitt One of the coolest Safari Extensions I’ve seen yet, both in functionality and design. It lets you instantly jump to any open tab by typing any part of the tab&…
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We’ve covered a small truckload of Bash scripting ideas for Mac and OS X in the previous two posts. It’s time to put them to use and create an Automator app that we can use as a droplet in Finder. If you skipped straight here, it probably means you don’t really want to know about the messy details of the scripts, so this post won’t go into a lot of Unix mumbo jumbo.
automator, macos, terminal
In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic Terminal commands we’d use to grab a Mac application’s icon from the command line. In this post, we’ll flesh out the script a little and turn it into a Bash function with some added features:
macos, terminal
