hasseg.orgUse Unicode Emoji as Image-Free Icons in iOS Web Apps
Posted on July 20, 2010
Filed under Programming, Scripts, iOS
In version 2.2 of iOS — Apple’s “mobile” operating system used in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad — support for Emoji was added. These small 12×12 pixel icons are meant to be used in text messaging in Japan but because they’re implemented simply as unicode symbols in the device they can be used as icons when we know they’re available.
How to Display Events or Tasks on Your Desktop With icalBuddy
Posted on July 13, 2010
Filed under Featured, Mac, Miscallaneous
I don’t really have any statistics about this but I’m quite sure that an overwhelming majority of the users of my icalBuddy program are using it to display calendar data on their desktop via GeekTool. Several tutorials on how to get this done have been written by different people, mainly for relatively non-technical users, which I think is great. The problem seems to be that many people don’t know how to configure icalBuddy to give them the kind of output they’d like and end up copy-pasting the commands from these blogs (some of these blog posts also contain outdated information about a bunch of things). Hopefully this short tutorial (and the usage examples page) will offer an easy way to make a more informed decision about how to get this done.
Getting a List of Installed Fonts with Flash and Javascript
Posted on July 13, 2010
Filed under ActionScript 3, Flex, Miscallaneous, Programming
When implementing the feature in the icalBuddy examples page where the font used for the output examples could be changed interactively I needed to get a list of all the fonts installed on the current user’s computer. This blog post from 2006 explains how to do it, but it refers to the deprecated ActionScript 2 API so I had to figure out how to do it with AS3.
Prevent iTunes websites from opening the iTunes app using GlimmerBlocker
Posted on April 17, 2010
Filed under Mac, Miscallaneous, Scripts
A few minutes ago I clicked on an iTunes store link on a website and had to again completely lose it because of the iTunes app popping up without me asking it to. This is a common annoyance that people have found a bunch of different ways to combat, ranging from messing with the system’s (or the browser’s) mapping of URL protocol handlers to rewriting parts of web pages via a browser plugin (e.g. GreaseMonkey) or a localhost web proxy (e.g. GlimmerBlocker).
Trash files from the OS X command line
Posted on March 9, 2010
Filed under Featured, Mac, Programming
I spend a lot of time in the Terminal on my computer — a lot of things are just better done with a command-line interface than in the GUI. When removing files via the command-line people usually just, well, remove them (with the rm command), but this means that they’ll be eschewing the Trash, one of the user-friendliest things (even relatively) modern operating systems have had to offer for a long time.
Print AppleScript files with color-coding in the Terminal
Posted on March 3, 2010
Filed under Mac, Programming, Scripts
Even though I curse and hate its syntax, I have to admit that AppleScript certainly provides one of the nicest things OS X has to offer in comparison to other operating systems: almost-ubiquitous scripting of GUI applications (one could argue that this is not due to the AppleScript language itself, but the Open Scripting Architecture which AppleScript is simply a language for, but that’s just semantics). Recently I’ve had to work with AppleScript files a bit more than usual while implementing Tagger‘s front app scripts feature, and I noticed that I often wanted to print out the contents of (compiled) AppleScript files in the Terminal. The built-in command osadecompile does just that: it reads in the AppleScript file, decompiles it, formats the code and nicely prints it out. I’m used to seeing my code with syntax highlighting, though, so I decided to write a small program that works similarly to osadecompile but uses ANSI escape sequences to format the output.
My Custom GeekTool 2 Build with Support for ANSI Colors, UTF-8 and Different Writing Directions
Posted on July 8, 2009
Filed under Mac
A year ago I released version 1.0.8 of my icalBuddy command-line application that I initially wrote as a way to get nicely formatted lists of my events and tasks from the OS X calendar store on top of my desktop background picture using GeekTool. This particular version was notable in my mind because it introduced initial support for formatting the output via ANSI escape sequences. The initial formatting was static (that is, you couldn’t change it) and very simple (it only made the titles bold), but since then I’ve implemented all kinds of different customization options that can be used to specify how the output should be colored and otherwise formatted. The only problem was that GeekTool didn’t support ANSI escape sequences, which meant that instead of the nicely formatted output I wanted GeekTool would display a bunch of gibberish if I used the -f icalBuddy argument.
Quick, Declarative UML Sequence Diagrams
Posted on June 4, 2009
Filed under Scripts, jEdit
I recently had to create a few UML sequence diagrams, and I decided that I didn’t want to spend too much time manually tweaking and fixing the diagrams themselves (which is what I probably would’ve done, had I used OmniGraffle or something similar), but instead focus on the content — the depicted workflow itself. This is when I remembered the bookmark I had in my browser for the Web Sequence Diagrams online service.
Markdown and POD Syntax Highlighting Modes for jEdit
Posted on April 21, 2009
Filed under jEdit
In The Pragmatic Programmer¹, the authors Andrew Hunt and David Thomas empasize the power of plain text, as well as “generators” that take the canonical form of some document and generate different representations of it. This is very much in line with the way I like to work with a lot of documents, which is why I’ve been using the Markdown and POD (Plain Old Documentation) syntaxes for a couple of things. As jEdit is the editor I prefer to use for working with most plain-text formats, I wrote highlighting modes for it for these two syntaxes.
Quick Look Plugin/Generator for Image Folders
Posted on March 27, 2009
Filed under Mac, Programming
One of the things that I’ve always thought Windows XP did better than OS X is how it displays the thumbnails of contained images on the icons of folders that have image files inside them. I always felt this to be quite useful, but couldn’t think of any reasonable way to implement it on the Mac before OS X Leopard came along with its Quick Look plug-in architecture.
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