I’ve been a BBEdit user for around 6 months now, and I can tell you that I am very happy with it. There are probably many who would say my love of text editors and plain text is a little crazy, or at least odd.
I’d probably agree with them.
It must be an insatiable desire, because somehow I now find myself considering a new text editor which, like BBEdit, could not be considered cheap. That editor is TextMate.
So. Today, silly me decides to sit down and do some homework. Read this article if you want to find out just why that was a silly thing to do. That is, now that I have made the switch to Pages ‘09, I felt the need to redo my default template.
However, I ran into some trouble whilst editing the template. I found that I could no longer delete any of the in-built Heading styles, nor the Body style.
I won’t go into it much further (watch the video), except to say that more people think the changes aren’t so great and Apple won’t do anything about it unless we politely ask them to. Lots of us.
Video running time: 4:29
So, if you also think that Apple should fix this, please submit some feedback! I do hope that they listen to faithful Mac users. Also, feel free to leave a comment below if you’re feeling the same thing, or if you happen like the change.
Finally, please excuse the quality of the video—as you can see that”s my entire MacBook screen crammed into a teeny space. Best I could do with the new QuickTime X!
—Sharpy
Last week my body decided it didn’t like me very much any more. That made me sad.
Hey there all. Spent a little time browsing the WordPress.org plugin site the other day and now I have some shiny new additions to tell you about.
The major addition is the Subscribe2 plugin which has officially moved in at this site. Why do I care? you ask. Well, if you’re at all interested in keeping abreast of what I have to say (and I hope that you are), then you can now elect to do so.1
Hopefully this will provide a very easy way for those readers who may not be RSS-savvy (or just don’t like it), to hear about what’s going on without going through all the trouble of typing all that stuff into your address bar.
If you register as a user of the site, you can also elect to receive email updates.
If you comment (and I really hope you will—it’s great for my self-esteem), you will also see a lovely little button letting you receive email notifications whenever someone responds. Then, of course, you can keep the comments rolling.
Nothing like a bit of dialogue to brighten your day.
So here’s what you can do:
—Sharpy
(UPDATE: From what I can see, Apple have made the reasons for this tutorial moot by changing the default compiler to GCC 4.2 for C tools, in Xcode 3.2 (Snow Leopard). Certainly, if you are still using an earlier version of Xcode, or you are interested in finding out a little about build settings in Xcode projects, read on. I also note that the default C dialect is the C99 standard, though it may well have been this way before I upgraded and I just didn’t notice.)
There are many reasons to change the compiler used by Xcode, most of which I’m probably unaware of. However, I’ve been informed by a reliable source that there are indeed some good reasons for doing so, and for my own purposes I needed to use the latest version of the GNU GCC compiler possible.
I just fell in love with Safari for Windows, and this is why: Preferences… -> Appearance -> Font Smoothing.
That’s not to say I didn’t already like Safari—it’s fast, Top Sites is a really nice alternative to a bookmarks bar, and it just has that beautiful Apple panache. (Forgive the peacock imagery—I mean to say, rather, style, or flair, or elegance.)
But when my browser (of all things) can take something ugly, like this:
…and turn it into this:
I just think, “Geez Microsoft. Would you hurry up and learn how to render fonts already?” The Web—nay, the world—would be a better place for it.
Please excuse the rough screen grabs, and, yes—I said nay.
You could call me any combination of fussy, perfectionist, OCD or just plain anal when it comes to matters of typography.
I wasn’t always this way—at least not about matters of type. I think the root cause of my problem is that I’m an intuitive learner. I can’t stand to learn things by rote and then spit them back out again; in fact I’m woeful at it. The way I learn is to understand things; once part of my working knowledge, I can reapply a concept or technique a theoretically unlimited number of times.
I have not been this excited in a long time. You know what’s caused this sudden, unanticipated precipitation of passion?
Change.
Some people hate it. Some people have an extreme dislike of it. Some even loathe it.
And yet, the prospect of simple, profound change in my church and the extraordinary opportunity to be one who effects said change has me, in a word, over the moon. Three words, I know. That’s how excited I am.
Wrestling with the decision of whether or not to buy a domain.
I need something that makes my site about me, that doesn’t limit my creativity or my ability to express my meaning.
I originally called my site And Then Some, but though it communicated something of what I wished to communicate, it did not communicate it all. What about my love of technology? Or designing things? Or typography? Or deep and challenging conversations? Of understanding things?
Changing SmartyPants’ default behavour in TextMate
I recently mentioned that I am currently trialling TextMate, as a possible alternative to Bare Bones Software’s eminently capable BBEdit.
Here’s one of the issues I initially had with Markdown in Textmate, and how I solved it.
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