I recently found two Finder toolbar scripts which are really going to make my life easier.
The first one, Open In TextMate, will open either the current folder, or the selected item(s), in TextMate.
The second, Open Terminal Here (and icon modification), will open a Terminal window at the current path.
Read MoreLinks for February 10th through February 27th:
I tend to work on local copies of my websites, which have either corresponding vhost entries in my local Apache configuration, or are simply symlinked to my ~/Sites folder. That way, I can test to make sure everything’s 100% before I make changes live.
This has typically been a bit of a messy workflow – I make changes, and then when happy, either open up a terminal and rsync the whole lot over, or open up Flow/Transmit and manually copy the changed files over. The whole thing makes me disinclined to make changes at all!
That is, until on a whim, I did a google search for a Textmate FTP bundle, and found Bernhard Fürst’s FTP/SSH Bundle for Textmate. This little gem lets you configure FTP settings for a project, then hit Option-S to save to the remote server, or Option-R to reload from the remote server. This way, when I’m happy with the changes, I just whack Option-S to send them to the server straight from Textmate.
That makes me happy.
One little caveat – the bundle does an odd thing with the project directory, opting to use the parent folder of the Textmate project file, something which won’t work for ad hoc projects, when one just drags a folder into Textmate (one of my favourite features). A quick fix:
$PROJECT_DIR definition on line 15 to:
$PROJECT_DIR = $_ENV['TM_PROJECT_DIRECTORY'];
Voila!
Read MoreIntroducing the Unwired Usage Dashboard widget for Mac OS X: View your Unwired usage statistics right on your Dashboard. No more logging in to check on your quota.
Displays both on-peak and off-peak quotas, and shows time remaining right alongside your quotas so you can compare your progress through the billing period.
Download it here:
Unwired Usage 1.0.1
I have iTunes and my iPhone configured to sync tracks automatically, without requiring manual intervention. Smart playlists, coupled with my application, Autorate, pick my favourite tracks, and make sure they’re on the iPhone. I previously wrote an article on my iTunes playlist setup; this draws on that prior setup, but this is slightly more refined.
Like the prior setup, I have two standard playlists: iPhone Exclusions and iPhone Selections, which allow me to manually include or exclude tracks.
I then have three smart playlists which work in tandem to select the top tracks, not including the exclusions, and including the selections. The top-most smart playlist is then selected as the playlist with which to sync tracks for the iPhone.
Read MoreI find myself frequently writing HTML code in comment forms which support use of HTML formatting, which means that I have to encode the html entities if I want them to show up (as in representing ‘>’ with ‘>’, for example).
This gets rather tiresome, particularly if there’s a fair chunk of text to encode by hand.
I used the always-useful ThisService app with a short PHP script which does a htmlspecialchars() on whatever’s passed to it, to create a OS X service called ‘Encode HTML‘. Put it in your Library/Services directory, possibly log out and back in again, and you’ll be set.
Select the text to encode, click the system menu, Services, Encode HTML, and it’ll be automatically encoded in place.
Read MoreI’ve been using Twitter for a while now, and I’ve just started doing ‘global’ status updates across Twitter, Facebook, and my instant messenger account statuses for iChat and Adium. Usually I use MoodBlast, a really nice application which lets me use a global keyboard shortcut to quickly enter a tweet and hit enter to update everything simultaneously.
However, if I want to update from, say, Twinkle on my iPhone (side-note: Wow, Tapulous need to do some serious SEO – their Twitter site isn’t even on the first page of Google hits. I’m on the first page of Google hits for it, ferchrissake) the sync won’t happen. This Ruby script will do the trick.
Read MoreThe good folks at entropy.ch have packaged up a pre-compiled version of PHP to replace OS X 10.5 Leopard’s barebones installation. The entropy.ch build contains most of the good stuff that the Apple folks in their infinite wisdom didn’t see fit to include – entropy-phpinfo.pdf
See the instructions at Entropy’s forum, or read below.
sudo mv /usr/local/php5 ~/Desktop/php5.old
curl -O http://www2.entropy.ch/download/php5-5.2.5-6-beta.tar.gz
tar -xzf php5-*-beta.tar.gz
sudo mv php5 /usr/local/
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf /etc/apache2/other/+entropy-php.conf
sudo apachectl restart