• Ragel State Machine Compiler – DSL for state machines in many languages
• The Kid Should See This. – Stuff on the nets that kids can get into that isn't dumb
• Zulkey.com – "They don't necessarily act like they're thinking, "get a load of my rad sock-shoes," but you can tell that there's something slightly suspicious going in their mind."
• SFMOMA | Exhibitions + Events | Calendar | Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams –
• Online Backup for Mac | Arq | Haystack Software – Backs up to S3 – selling point is it's careful with file metadata…

Textmate sucks

Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Emacs.

Ted’s probably the funniest person blogging about tech that I’m aware of.

Take note of the filename of the image he used for this post…

He just seems angry toward the end, but I’d say his technical points are awfully valid.

On the other hand, nothing’s stopping anyone from using a Mac and developing on Linux – just use emacs over X11, and keep your great Mac apps for mail, chat, web browsing, etc… Honestly I never understood the need to have things work on your laptop if you’re actually going to run it on some other server. Isn’t that what networks are for?

@mikemccracken: It would be cool if there was a way for well-used & loved GUI software to gracefully show its age, like a good leather wallet…

I still like this idea, and I loved the example that Bryan Knight replied with – the OS 8 Color Picker crayons, seen in the third “Colour Selector” image on the OS 8 GUIdebook page.

However, it just occurred to me that it’d be hard to design a UI that shows its age or use gracefully without looking “dirty” and triggering the kind of OCD that makes some of us empty the trash just because the icon looks full. I can think of a few other things that do that to me:

• Of course, the full trash can
• Unread counts of all kinds
• MS Word 08 showing “[Compatibility Mode]” in the window title for files that aren’t .docx format
• Badges on files in the finder that show source control status – I tried this once and it drove me crazy

There are probably more. Share yours in the comments if you like. I’d also be really interested in other examples besides the crayons where UI changes gracefully as you use the software more…

I decided I’d share what I’ve learned recently to make getting started a little easier. I’ll give a short description here and post the resulting code to bitbucket at py-launchd.

Note: This was written and tested on OS X 10.5.8 with the default /usr/bin/python, version 2.5.1. Since I wanted to use multiprocessing, I used the backport to 2.5 available at google code: python-multiprocessing . For convenience, it’s included in the repository, and so is its license.

Goal

What we’re trying to do is have some python code that gets called when launchd notices someone connecting to a UNIX domain socket. UNIX domain sockets are local-only, so this is ideal for agents that only serve local apps. We’re also using launchd “agents” not “daemons”, so we’re assuming that it’s OK to have one agent process for each user. If you’re managing access to something that needs to be unique system-wide, then this won’t work (but you can still use Launchd).

launchd overview

The launchd process will read a launchd plist you give it (at login, via launchctl or the 10.6 framework), and listen on the socket you tell it to. Once it sees a connection, it’ll start the agent program you specified in the plist, and that program can make some calls using the launchd C API to get a file descriptor for the socket that was connected. This is important – you don’t need to call bind() or listen() on the socket, because launchd already did. It’s just handing the open socket’s file descriptor straight to you and your code can just call accept() on it.

Using launchd with Python

You need to create a C/ObjC tool that can do the launchd check-in to get the open file descriptor, then pass that off to your Python code. This is pretty straightforward using the Python framework included in OS X and the Python C APIs.

What I’ve done is create an agent loader that I called PyLaunchd that loads and runs server code in Agent.py. It expects Agent.py to be in the same directory.

PyLaunchd is built separately and copied into the test app’s Resources folder with an XCode script phase.

I have the app delegate copy PyLaunchd and Agent.py to ~/Library/Application Support/PyLaunchd/ on loading. It also customizes the launchd plist to set the path correctly for the current user, then writes that to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, and loads it. (Actually it first unloads it, then reloads it. I’m not convinced this is the right way to do it). It uses system() to call launchctl, but I believe in OS X 10.6 there’s an API you can call to do it directly.

Finally, the sample app is really simple – it just opens the socket using the multiprocessing Client class, and sends whatever you type. The example Agent I’ve included will ROT13 it and send it back.

Please let me know if you have any comments, questions, or improvements.

I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me – I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I’m working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I’d just see if I get any size feedback when I make a rectangular selection. Turns out there’s a nice feedback status line in the bottom right – clicking toggles between measurement in pts and in inches.

I like how this solves my problem without adding a lot of new UI for measurement – no rulers, no extra tool to measure length.

Anyone could nominate an app, and the developer community would vote on who wins, in just a few categories.

I’m thinking the categories could be a little more user-centric than Apple’s. For instance, I don’t really care about best adoption of OS X technologies, but something like “best refinement of a common task” or “best default behavior” or “best scriptability” would be interesting, and something that’d be easier to use as a marketing badge…

This is just off the top of my head, so there are probably others. “Least data lock-in”? “Easiest to learn?”, “Best plugin community”?

I made a view that displays a zoomed out view of a string from a text view, with indentation, along with a rectangle showing where the text view is in the file.

You can click around in the view to move the It also highlights the selection, and draws lines in blue if they contain the string in the NSFindPBoard, so you can see all the lines in the file that match when you use the Find panel.

This is available under a Creative Commons license, and I’d ask that if you make any improvements, you send them back to me or join the ‘leverage’ sourceforge project, where the code is hosted. I wanted to eventually make this into a Cocoa text plugin like my I-Search plugin.

Here is the SVN repository for the textshape code.

There was also a Source code Tarball with a demo app, shown in the screenshot below:

Mac OS X LocationChanger – TECH.inhelsinki.nl.

It’s great to see new life for one of the few alternative desktop mail clients for OS X, and while there’s no info on their plans for it yet, there’s some great discussion of possible features on the google group mailsmith-talk.

I’ll be curious to see if any of the design choices will be changing – for example, no IMAP support and no inline HTML display… I have to use IMAP, and despite common abuse, I do think HTML email is useful.

edit: Looks like no Mailsmith IMAP: “Not any time soon…” – @siegel on twitter