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MarsEdit: Powerful Blog Authoring Made Simple
BibDesk: The Free BibTeX-based reference manager and PDF library for the Mac intosh
A nice writeup of using BibDesk with Subversion:
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p>BibDesk, BibTeX and Subversion – An academic’s necessity:
I decided I’d choose based on 1) open formats, 2) documentation, and an 3) open development model (open source). After looking through RefWorks, vanilla BibTeX files, ProCite, EndNote, Reference Manager (the application) and BibDesk, I chose BibDesk.
This is really cool: Fran Allen, a founder of the field of program optimization and compiler analysis, will be the first woman to receive the Turing Award. More info, including a description of her accomplishments, is at the ACM press release.
If you use BibDesk, I want to hear how you use it – what features you use most, and how you have it set up.
I’ve added a page to the BibDesk wiki to share User Screenshots – add a section there about what you do with BibDesk, and share your experiences. I added my own thoughts already, to get things started.
(Note, image uploading on the wiki is broken right now, I’ll fix it as soon as I can and update this post. Please add text anyway!)
Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater acquires MarsEdit. Congratulations, Daniel, and good luck!
I think this is great news for MarsEdit users. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with it.
If you only use X11 for XTerm, it might seem like the handling of the clipboard in Apple’s X11.app is broken. You can select text and paste it with a click of the middle mouse button (opt-click on my Powerbook), and that works when pasting into other X apps, but it doesn’t change the Mac clipboard at all.
Why not? Is X11.app just ignoring the X clipboard?
No – X11.app does synchronize the two clipboards. The problem is that the selection pasting in XTerm is using a completely different buffer. There’s a full and clear explanation, with some interesting details about (X)Emacs’ behavior, at jwz.org.
If, like me, you only use X11 for Emacs and XTerm, you might want to link the selection in XTerm to the X clipboard, so X11.app will then sync that with the system clipboard and you can select in XTerm and paste with Cmd-P in say, Mail.app.
I’ll tell you how in a sec, but first the caveat – I said if you only use X11 for Emacs and XTerm because what we’re going to do is make setting the XTerm selection always overwrite the clipboard contents. If you use X apps that use the X clipboard, sometimes you don’t want that. So beware. If you use Emacs, it just pushes onto the kill ring, so you’re good.
OK, now that that’s over, add these lines to your ~/.Xdefaults:
XTerm*VT100.Translations: #override\ <BtnUp>: select-end(CLIPBOARD,PRIMARY)\n\ <Btn2Down>: insert-selection(PRIMARY)\n\
Note that the backslashes at the end of the lines are important.
Update: The first version of this post didn’t include the Btn2Down action. Without that, the original paste behavior goes away – the man page doesn’t really explain the “#override” keyword, so I’m not sure why.
A couple days ago, Daniel Jalkut wrote a quick note wondering if the future is writing native desktop apps in languages like Python or Ruby, dropping down into C/Obj-C only for performance reasons. It’s been an interesting thread since then, in comments and other posts. Notably, today Bill Bumgarner responded with a long and informative ramble about how the dynamic language future is already here.
Specifically, he notes that the Python-ObjC bridge has been working for quite some time, and is even in use by a few commercial apps.
As official support for this kind of development grows, I bet we’ll find more apps written with mostly Python (or Ruby) and a few ObjC/C/C++ bundles or frameworks. I really don’t think this will be a performance problem – from what I can tell, performance problems in desktop apps are more often algorithm problems or I/O problems – overheads of small constant factors due to using an interpreted language are in the wash.
I’ve probably written as much Python (not using the bridge) as Objective-C, and my experience is that I feel like I’m solving the problem faster with Python. I particularly like the more compact syntax for common data structures like lists, dictionaries and tuples – I’ve written and modified a couple of very small Cocoa apps using PyObjC (including Python plugins for VoodooPad), and it feels like I’m getting away with something when I pass inline lists + dictionaries to AppKit…
In case you’re wondering about what Py-Cocoa code looks like, there are a lot of great examples on the PyObjC project site. Looking at it now, it’s like I’m reading Cocoa email-pseudocode, and I like that.
I usually like the link selection I get from the Joel Reddit, which usually has good software-related essays at the top. It seems to avoid links to uninformed rants about consumer electronics or industry politics, for which I have no use.
I’d like a social links site for software professionals on the Mac – does one exist?
Or am I missing the point of these sites, and there’s a feature in each of them to get only the links I want?
I’m curious – how do you get your mac-related links?
Update: From the comments and some emails, I heard three main ways. A few people just rely on the feeds they check regularly, trusting that if something’s interesting enough, eventually someone they read will post about it. This was basically my strategy.
A few other people plugged Scott Stevenson’s Cocoablogs.com, which I remember seeing a while back but overlooked when I wrote this post. He’s doing a good job of collecting interesting links and highlighting blogs you might want to check out – keep an eye on that site. To paraphrase Scott, he wants cocoablogs to be the ‘anti-digg’, a site where you can guarantee someone actually read the article before they recommend it to you. I’d say that’s a good idea – I don’t have patience for mob voting.
Finally, another suggestion was to follow the ‘cocoa’ tag on del.icio.us, something else I should have thought of – this is nice and social like digg and reddit, but it seems less likely that someone will tag an article they haven’t read, so I think it’s a stronger vote.
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions!