Tag Archives: TechBits

Coda-Coda-Coda-Chameilian

Posted by on June 12, 2011 No comments

And other bad 1980′s puns.

The real title should be

I wish my websites where this simple

Came across what appeared to be a very nifty IDE. If you are making simple relatively stand alone websites Coda is absolutely genius. It’s available through the App Store, but I bought it via download.

What makes it so slick is that it’s a bit of Komodo, Safari, CSS Edit, FileZilla, SVN and Terminal in one package. It’s super easy to flip between Editing, Previewing, Uploading and working with version control all mixed into one. It has those nice little Mac touches (brace matching doesn’t just change the color of the brace, it hits with with a radar blip animation to really draw your attention).

What’s more it updates as you work, so working with CSS, this feels like a really really solid replacement for CSS Edit.

However, for heavy duty app work – I still find myself going back to Komodo, CornerStone, and Firefox.

Why?

  1. Debugging.

    If I need to debug something, Komodo’s integrated debugger is genius and that saves me more time than anything.

  2. Code Folding.

    Komodo supports folding code in the editor so I can quickly compress classes and functions and get a quick overview of my code.

  3. Better Completion

    Coda does a great job of offering completion suggestions for standard calls, but Komodo actually scans your code and most of the time does a great job of making suggestions from the local variables, or class definitions. that makes it a lot easier to use verbose or self documenting variables names.

  4. Batch Checking, Revert, and Compare

    I might be missing something but I couldn’t find a way to submit all my changes as once. Further, I couldn’t find a way to revert to the latest version of a file and I don’t see a way to do a quick file compare. Of course Komodo doesn’t support that last one either, but Cornerstone really makes these things easy to do.

  5. console.log() isn’t good enough

    There are times you just really need a javascript debugger and the one from Apple and Firebug are both fantastic.

  6. Syntax Highlighting Gets Lost

    For historical reasons we work with large files. Coda often gets lost parsing those files and we lose syntax highlighting. That’s disappointing.

All in all if I had a simple (view php file) website that was basically HTML and CSS then Coda is fantastic. I’ll keep working with it, but it’s interesting the things you can learn working with a new tool. What I really do love about it, is that it keeps all of my Site information in one package – Terminal login (so I can check out changes on the server). FTP so I can move files back and forth.

What would really be great of all these features is if Coda would implement code folding and fix the syntax highlighting. I’ll keep running it for a while, but at $99 it’s one of my more expensive tools.

Great iTunes Hack

Posted by on April 26, 2010 No comments

There’s so many things to learn, it’s hard to keep track of them all.  I found this one on Lifehacker.

I think like most people, I just don’t have the time to go through all my stuff.  I often wonder who does have the time to tag every picture with faces, or to correctly label all your music.  I’m sure it’s a wonderful thing if you do it, but my music collection has been a mess for… oh… 10 years?  When did I go digital?  Heck I don’t even remember.  I do remember seeing my first iPod way back in 99.  So it had to be shortly after that.

So I got a decade of crud built up in my collection and no amount of purging, murging or (what rhymes with *ging?) crying?  pounding?  well you get the idea.  Nothing has really made it better.  So we live in an uneasy truce.  My iTunes library holds yet another project I will never get to.

But today I found a very clever hack with smart playlists that lets me enjoy my music without cleaning it up.  Here’s the gist of it.  A lot like using SQL queries to get lists of information that you then run new queries against (called sub-queries or views) you can create a smart playlist, then use ANOTHER smart play list to filter it.  Essentially, you create 3 playlists, each that filters your music by quality and how recently it was played.  Then you create a master list that combines those three.  Songs you like a lot get mixed in more often.  Using shuffle, it’s every bit as good as Pandora.

For mine, I had to weed out Spoken Word, Children’s, and about a dozen other non-music related genres.  Then I created a list called “Banned” and anything that gets dumped in there gets excluded from my smart play list.  Over time I can go back and decide if I want to keep any of that junk.

Give it a whirl.  The only thing that confused me is that iTunes will change what options you have available depending upon what you are filtering against.  For example, select “Author” and you get one set of options.  Select Last Played and you get a different set of options.  Just play around to see which song attributes have which options.  Ultimately by combining different lists (rather than creating one UBER list) you can make some very powerful song combinations.  I’ve been listening to mine all afternoon and nearly all the things it’s playing are awesome, including some music I haven’t heard for a long time.

So give it a whirl.  It’s cool.