Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Microformats Plugin for Safari

Published
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Daz
on November 29, 2007
in mac and snippets
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microformats.png

I’m a fan of the Tails plugin for Firefox… Now Safari (on Leopard) gets its own Microformats Plugin! :)

Of course, in order to take advantage of Microformats and perhaps bring the information they offer onto your system, you need a browser that will read them - there’s Firefox plugins, and NetNewsWire 3.0’s built-in browser reads them. But what about Safari? Thanks to SIMBL, there’s a small array of Safari plugins available and from the maker of Safari Tidy comes Safari Microformats. Whenever visiting a site with Microformats, an icon appears in the right of the address bar (not unlike the RSS icon). Clicking it brings up a menu of available hCards and hCalendars you can add to Address Book and iCal.

via

Google Maps for Mobile Adds Positioning

Published
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Daz
on November 29, 2007
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Sounds like a good new feature…

Google is set on Wednesday to launch a new feature in its Google Maps for Mobile program that automatically sets your location even in phones that lack a global positioning system (GPS) device.

Until now, if you were in a cafe and you wanted to search for a nearby photocopy shop, you had to type in an address to set your location before Google Maps for Mobile could provide local listings.

The beta feature triangulates your approximate location based on nearby cell towers so you don’t have to type in your address. Given that less than 15 percent of mobile phones are GPS-enabled, this feature will be helpful to many people.

via

Color Wizard - Colour Scheme Generator

Published
by
Daz
on November 29, 2007
in snippets and webdev
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Color Wizard is an online colour scheme generator.

color-wizard.png

There are many of these kind of tools around, but I quite like interface on this one. The randomise feature is also quite useful.

via

Darwin Calendar Server

Published
by
Daz
on November 29, 2007
in linux, mac and snippets
. 0 Comments

At the moment I’m a very happy user of Google calendar and Spanning Sync for all my scheduling needs. But the geek in me fancies playing about with things so I’m thinking about setting up a CalDav server (when time permits) so Cat and I can organise our lives accordingly.

Here’s some pages I’ve been reading whilst doing my research.

Will possibly post more as and when I get a chance to play about with things…

Quick Look Folder and Zip Plugins

Published
by
Daz
on November 27, 2007
in mac and snippets
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This is yet another example of why I want to upgrade to Leopard…

quicklook-zip.jpg

Quick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn’t support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.

The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you’ll get…a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that’s pretty stupid. Taiyo’s Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder’s contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo’s Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.

via

IconGrabber

Published
by
Daz
on November 27, 2007
in mac and snippets
. 0 Comments

IconGrabber is a useful little application for getting an OS X applications icon for use on the web. It’s also available as a Quicksilver plugin.

It couldn’t be easier. Just drop the file or folder that you want the icon from onto IconGrabber, and choose a place to save it. The extension you choose determines the format, otherwise it defaults to tiff. That’s it!

via

Ack, a Grep Replacement

Published
by
Daz
on November 27, 2007
in perl and snippets
. 0 Comments

Ack is a grep alternative, written in pure Perl, using Perl’s regular expressions to do your searches (just one of the long list of reasons to use this over grep). I think i’ll be using this then…

ack is a tool like grep, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code. ack is written purely in Perl, and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.

via

Getting Gmail IMAP Running Nicely

Published
by
Daz
on November 19, 2007
in snippets
. 0 Comments

I’ve just managed to get my Gmail service upgraded to the new version with IMAP support,1 and as such i’ve been trawling the net for information on how to get this all set-up nicely. By this I mean moving my mail filtering rules onto Gmail itself and getting IMAP to play a bit more nicely with Apple Mail…

Here’s how to get Apple Mail to work as expected, thanks to 5ThirtyOne:

Similar steps must be taken to ensure that any emails sent, saved as drafts, or deleted are properly identified by Gmail’s servers. After completing the IMAP setup steps for Apple Mail, instructing Mail is a few simple clicks away. Once your Gmail IMAP account is added to Mail, you’ll notice your [Gmail account] in the left sidebar.

  1. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Sent Mail’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Sent’.
  2. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Drafts’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Drafts’
  3. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Trash’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Trash’
  4. Highlight ‘[Gmail] Spam’ in the sidebar and select ‘Mailbox’ (menu bar) > ‘Use This Mailbox For’ > ‘Junk’

Once properly configured, managing email from Apple Mail or the iPhone will be no different from managing emails within the Gmail web client - sent, drafts, trash, and junk properly sorted between your various email clients and web interface.

Read the full article for even more information (including iPhone set-up).

And the best hints for setting up slightly more complex filters in Gmail came from Lifehacker:

I needed to set up a filter that would apply label ‘work’ to any email that came from ‘xyz@workplace.com’ OR had the word ‘workoholic’ in it. Unfortunately, Gmail’s inbuilt ‘Create a filter’ feature’s dialog boxes are connected with an AND operator. Example: if I wrote ’ xyz@workplace.com’ in the ‘from:’ field of the ‘Create a filter’ page, and ‘workoholic’ in the ‘Has the words:’ field, then only emails that came from ‘xyz@workplace’ AND had the word ‘workoholic’ would be picked up by this filter. So, to get the desired result, I needed TWO filters. Unless…

[…]

Incorporate both the conditions in the ‘Has the words:’ field itself! So my ‘Has the words’ field reads as: (from:(xyz@workplace.com) OR (workoholic)). Voila! c’est fini! But the possibilities are endless!

Read the full article for more information.

  1. If you’re a user in the UK like me and are still waiting for your Gmail service to upgrade, simply navigate into your Gmail settings and change your language settings from ‘English (UK)’ to ‘English (US)’. This should make your Gmail switch to version 2 instantly! :) ↩

Top 10 Quicksilver Plugins

Published
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Daz
on November 18, 2007
in mac and snippets
. 0 Comments

I love Quicksilver, it’s one of those applications that makes working on the Mac really really great. Lifehacker has a quick rundown on 10 of the best plugins to help improve your Quicksilver experience:

Open source Mac utility Quicksilver isn’t just an application launcher—it’s a comprehensive keyboard interface. Launching applications and documents is just Quicksilver’s gateway drug: The more you get used to doing things with Quicksilver, the more things you want to do with it. Out of the box Quicksilver comes with the barest essentials, but once you add the right plug-ins that interact with menus, apps, documents, and settings, you can accomplish more and more complex tasks from that familiar three-paned prompt. After the jump, check out top 10 favorite Quicksilver plug-ins, and how to set them up.

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CSS Styled Tables

Published
by
Daz
on November 18, 2007
in snippets and webdev
. 0 Comments

Veerle comes up with another look at styling tables with CSS. A great read.

In 2005 I wrote an article about styling a table with CSS. After receiving so many requests I finally decided to give in and write another tutorial. Seems like a popular topic and an interesting one to share some tricks on how you can nicely style them. This article is about the proper usage of tables, for tabular data. How you can implement them with accessibility in mind and how to make them appealing for the eye using CSS.

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