Amidst trying to get ready to launch a major website and playing with my own personal projects, I realized three things today. How important they are is debatable, and their usefulness depends entirely on what you’re working on right now.
aditi, emma, experiments, family, markdown, multimarkdown, voodoopad
I was sifting through my previous blog after Jeffery Zeldman kindly sent a lot of visitors in that direction for some TextMate starter tips. Whilst milling around, I stumbled upon an old trick I used to use in Quicksilver (before I gave up on it1), but had forgotten about since.
experiments, launchbar, service, snow leopard, terminal, url shortener
I love the keyboard, and I love keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of the reasons TextMate and I get along so well. There’s one thing that bothers me any time I’m editing text (in any application), though: having to move my right hand all the way over to the arrow keys just to move forward a couple of characters, say, after an auto-paired set of parenthesis that I want to get out of.
keybindings, keyboard, terminal, textmate
I just pushed a tiny little update to the GReader Instapaper extension. It shortens the default speed at which the notifications disappear, and adds a settings item in preferences so you can adjust it if you want to. I think the 1300ms delay is a pretty good one, it was 5000 before (and everyone complained). All better.
extension, instapaper, safari
Yesterday, I posted a quick TextExpander snippet for inserting placeholder images into an HTML layout using placehold.it. I took a minute today to convert this to a TextMate snippet as well, and wanted to share it as I find it immensely useful.
snippet, textmate
When designing for the web, placeholder images can come in handy during initial layout, and even during wireframing, if you happen to wireframe in markup. I’ve been using a TextExpander snippet to generate instant placeholder images at any size (almost) and with appropriate titles using Placehold.it. It’s a really handy snippet to have in your web design toolkit.
snippet, textexpander, webdesign
This is just a quick pointer to an icon I whipped up this evening for HootSuite. I thought I’d share it in case anyone else found the default icon packed with the Fluid SSB download (available here) unsatisfactory. Their icon is too big and looks awkward in my Dock, so I trimmed it down and vectorized the owl to clean up the lines a bit.
design, fluid, icon
You can count yourself lucky if you have no idea what “blue bags with red letters” might be, but I think you’ll get the idea from the lyrics to this song nonetheless. Within certain circles, the stamp bag1 is a common form of packaging powdered goods… at least in New York and other high-traffic cities. A small envelope, often blue in my day, stamped with red letters which spell out the name of the dealer/batch the contents are from.
music, personal, recording, something precious
This was a quick plugin I put together last night when I got too frustrated to work on my actual jobs. It lets you define a single shortcut key which, after you input your Instapaper username and password, will let you send the currently-selected article in Google Reader straight to Instapaper. It works fine with themes like Helvetireader (Safari extension), and functions in both list view and expanded view.
extension, safari
Instapaper Beyond version 1.8.9 is another small release with a couple of usability enhancements. Thanks to everyone who’s been submitting ideas and bugs, I’ll do my best to keep up!
extension, instapaper, instapaper beyond, safari
