A rare site administration message: I’m moving the focus of this blog away from Undone. Essentially, Undone was a bit of development I did while figuring out some technology, and it now seems like a rather rough and unready piece of software. I’m going to leave Undone running as people are still using it, and you can create new accounts etc if you want too. That said, for serious project management / to do lists etc, I’d recommend something like TaDa lists or installing Redmine or DotProject.
The new focus for leftcolumn.net will be to cover “Web Sites and the Macs we make them with.” This means Web Development, and also Mac OSX Software: both development tools and general apps like iTunes, Safari etc. These are rough plans, and I’m going to see where it takes me.Â
Cheers!
Posted in site admin.
Tagged with site admin.
Â
DigitalColor Meter is handy for sampling on-screen colour
Installed with every Mac, DigitalColor Meter gives you accurate readings of on-screen colours: you can inspect individual pixels, and copy and paste RGB values. When used with Safari or Firefox and a great text editor, it’s a lightweight but powerful tool. Here’s an overview…
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- Find it in /Applications/Utilities/
- For using with HTML and CSS, Â set the colour type to “RGB as Hex Value, 8-bit”
- Command+Shift+c to copy the current colour as text – perfect for pasting straight into a .css file, alternatively, click and drag from the swatch area to copy the current colour as text (switch this on in preferences first)
- Command+Shift+h to hold the current colour
- Set the magnification factor to maximum and the aperture size to minimum for pixel-perfect sampling. Handy for ‘borrowing’ font colours from other sites!
- Reduce the magnification factor and increase the aperture size for getting an averaged colour – say, when you’re working with gradients or photos
- When DigitalColor Meter is the active app, you can use the arrow keys to move the aperture in one-pixel increments
- You can also save the current hovered area as a .tiff file, or copy it to the clipboard.Â
- Set the window to float and keep it in the bottom right of the screen, so it’s always there at a glance.Â
One last point: on Tiger at least, if you switch users to a user who has DigitalColor Meter running it will crash. But that’s an annoyance at worst…
Posted in web development.
Tagged with digitalcolor meter, mac, web development.
Update 8th April 2009: Apparently as of 1.7.6 $this->view->[helperName()] now works with no extra work required so the info in this post is only necessary if you’re using <= 1.7.5. Thanks to Mike van Lammeren for the heads up, Â see Mike’s comment below.
If you’re relatively new to Zend Framework, some of the little details can stump you. To call a view helper from within another view helper, you need to give the helper some, er, help. Helpers will try to call a function called setView to set up $_view, so just add it:
Add these lines to the view helper:
private $_view;
public function setView($view) {
$this->_view = $view;
}
then to call the View Helper you need, use $this->_view->anyHelperYouLike();
Edit: I found this information somewhere on the web, but can’t remember the source. Any information appreciated!
Posted in zend framework.
Tagged with zend framework.
UPDATE 24 March 2009: Retrospect 8 for Mac OS X has been released!
Just saw this on MacNN: EMC Retrospect 8.0 on chopping block? (ok, it’s months old), so it looks like version 8 definitely isn’t coming to the Mac. Is it just me or does this seem like an opportunity for some hungry Mac developers to build a really good backup system that suits Small Office Networks, has provision for offsite backups like Retrospect does, but sports a swish Cocoa interface and is Universal?
Because basically Time Machine covers local backups but doesn’t serve the same ‘Backup Server’ role that Retrospect Workgroup does…
I know there are some good small backup apps for the Mac out there, but do any backup a network of Macs and provide backup set management?
Posted in backup.
Tagged with backup, leopard, mac, retrospect.
UPDATE 24 March 2009: Retrospect 8 for Mac OS X has been released. So, given the limitations of Leopard’s Time Machine, it might be worth a look…
…At least in our office. With the imminent arrival of Leopard, my attention’s turned to the upgrade process. At the moment, the only application that I can foresee having problems is Retrospect. No real reason for that, other than it’s not Universal and is generally old and clunky! But Time Machine might take care of most of our backup needs pretty simply, so I’m considering just ditching Retrospect. The only snag is that we do offsite backups with Retrospect – every week I retrieve one drive and send the other.
So how to replicate the offsite part of the backup system? If Time Machine supports multiple drives and therefore Multiple backups, it would be simple. Perhaps an online system, e.g.: .Mac or S4? Is Apple doing this to drive more customers to .Mac?
I’m in two minds about the departure of Retrospect, it really is flexible and it has done a great job, but the interface is arcane and non-Intel native (and with no upgrade in sight!). It also requires a bit of administration overhead, so I’m angling to reduce that and go for a more Mac-like backup experience – it should just work!
Posted in backup.
Tagged with backup, mac.
There is an interesting bug where if you edit a published Wordpress post with Adobe Contribute it sets the post type to ‘future’ and changes the publish time to several hours in the future. The post disappears – so after Contribute publishes it, it will load the blog’s 404 page as the post it has edited has effectively been unpublished.
I think there is something going on with UTC & local times – maybe Contribute and WP are both adjusting the time and so they decide the publish time needs adjusting. Interestingly, If you open the post in Contribute, then change the post time before publishing, it works fine – so it may be the initial time calculation by Contribute that is breaking.
This has been tested on two separate Wordpress 2.3 blogs using Contribute CS3. Strangely, googling this issue has revealed no other case, so maybe it’s specific to my Web Host. Anyone else seen it or know a good reason why this happens?
Posted in wordpress.
Tagged with adobe contribute, bugs, wp.