PanaGeek

Shoes, as I’ve mentioned before, is a great little GUI for ruby applications. I ran across an article last week about Google Translate and a command line interface for Linux called tw, and thought that I might be able to build something in Shoes with it. Well, I couldn’t get tw to build on OS X, but I found a ruby gem called rtranslate that works great! So, over an hour or so, I threw a quick little translator together in Shoes. It’s over at the ShoeBox. Please let me know if you try it (and like it – I don’t like criticism).

I used to be a die-hard Camino fan (starting back in the Chimera days). A few weeks ago I started using Safari. The reason is that I can copy snippets with text and images from Safari into Mori, where Camino only lets copies the text. Anyway, I decided to do an empirical test, to see how the browsers use resources. I’ve done this in the past, and Camino usually won. Now, Safari is getting the better of Camino in both CPU and RAM usage. I opened six identical web sites on both browsers and here’s what I’m getting:

Browser | CPU | RAM Camino 46.6% 72.4M Safari 25.6% 49.6M

and Camino is not responding, according to Activity Monitor. It makes me a little sad, considering that I’ve been a Camino fan for so long. Oh well, the browser of the day is Safari.

Well, I committed my Documents folder to a Subversion repository on my network storage device and dutifully checked it out onto my laptop again yesterday. Today, when I went to sync Quicken, I found that I couldn’t open the data file. This web site thankfully had the answer. Quicken uses resource forks on OS X (resource forks were a big thing pre-OS X, I didn’t think anything still used them). After running through the commands as shown on the site, I was more-or-less happily broke to the last penny again. While this wasn’t meant to be a subversion bashing, it reinforces my desire to move to a DVCS – specifically Bazaar. More on that in the future.

Shoes is a lightweight GUI framework for Ruby, created by _why. I don’t always understand his unique sense of humor, but he has created a great little package for creating simple GUI’s.

To use it, download the package and install it where ever you want. I put it in “Applications” on OSX, and in my user directory on Windows. Then just double click the icon; this will bring up a menu allowing you to select a file to run. Shoes comes with a healthy collection of samples that you can work through to learn the Shoes syntax.

The basic syntax is pure Ruby goodness – clean and simple. Here is a simple example of a button and a text field:

Shoes.app :height => 200, :width => 200 do
stack :margin => 10 do
button “Button One” do
@mytextfield.replace “Button One pressed!”
end
@mytextfield = para “This is a test.”
end
end

Which looks like this when it runs:

Try it out. I think it’s a great tool for creating simple GUI’s!

I saw this bundle for TextMate a couple of days ago, and it’s great! I’ve been taken with the concept of wikis ever since I listened to Andy Hunt talk about them at a NoVaLUG meeting several years ago. For those that might not know, wikis are kind of self-shaping databases, generally using words in CamelCase as links to other wiki pages.

The main drawback to most wikis (from my point of view) is that most are web based. I’m a little leery about posting too much info online (believe it or not). The best solutions that I had found before now were thew emacs wiki-mode and TiddlyWiki. They work, after a fashion, but never completely scratched my itch. But now I can have the best of both worlds – a plain text wiki, and TextMate. This may be the start of something great!

(if this were a review I’d go into more detail, but it’s not, and I’m tired, so that’s it for now)

I’ve been working on the GTD bundle, and gave it a couple of new features. The first is syntax coloring – now the different states of tasks have different colors. Not a huge change, but I like it. Second, I added a new state – priority (!). It works via a tab command, like all of the other state changes. Again, not spectacular, but nice to have. I have some other things in the works, and another GTD bundle user has provided some really nice templates for viewing and printing lists. If you are interested in the GTD bundle, stay tuned!

I have written about TextMate before. In a nutshell, I find that TextMate is a great text editor for OS X (I think it is the best, but I don’t want to start a flame war). One of the things that makes it such a great application is its extensibility. Even a user with limited coding skills (like me) can easily add new features or modify how existing features work. I created a GTD bundle for it, using other bundles for code and coding examples. Perhaps the most difficult part of creating a new bundle is sorting through the TextMate blog, wiki and mailing list for help. The answers are there; Allan Odgaard (the creator) and the mailing list regulars are extremely helpful. The only problem was that you needed to search for answers. I say this in the past tense because a new book brings all of the answers together.

TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, by James Edward Gray II, is more than a collection of the tips and tricks that you can find on the various web sites; it is a users guide and a programming guide too. The users guide section is great – James really emphasizes the importance of key commands. This is good for those coming to TextMate from the emacs world and miss the arcane “control-c control-x” functionality. It is also good for new users who like TextMate in general but may be overwhelmed by the plethora of key commands. The book them goes into a discussion of the basic bundles that everyone should know.

The second half of the book is the programming guide. This starts with the basics of snippets and tab commands and goes on to walk through creating language files – the place where the grammar of a language is described. The importance of language files is that they tell TextMate how to highlight text in a given language. One nice feature is that James builds a non-trivial example of a bundle as he goes through this section. The example bundle is like a picture – it’s worth a thousand words of explanation!

The bottom line is that this is a great book. I thought I pretty much knew everything I needed to know to develop bundles for TextMate, but I was wrong. After going through the book, I realize that I had only scratched the surface of the features of TextMate. I now have many ideas for new and improved features for my GTD bundle!

Things have been busy lately, but I’ve still been plugging away on things. The first thing that I will be writing about is a program I cobbled together to synchronize iCal calendars. The other extracts information from iCal to Remind. I should have something up on them in the next few days.

The two components of GTD, in a Harry Potter sort of way, are a Rememberall and a Pensieve. The Rememberall is a task manager, and the Pensieve is where non-actionable data are kept and retrieved.

As I’ve explained in other posts, I modified the TODO bundle in TextMate to make the GTD bundle, which is my Rememberall. I’m still looking for a Pensieve. I’ve tried DevonThink Pro (DTP) for about a month, but it really seems too cumbersome for me. One of the problems for me is that you can link folders (that part is cool) but you must manually synch the folder – I’d really like to see it automatically synch. The other issue for me is that DTP indexes almost every file. I still need to use another app to find everything.

So, my new Pensieve is the Finder (using Houdaspot as the search engine). Also, I am using Mori to collect random thoughts and web clippings. What makes this setup special is that Mori is a CoreData application, so Spotlight (and therefore Houdaspot) indexes its entries. What this all means is that Houdaspot is my one-stop-shop for all my data! I’ll write more after I’ve tried it for a while.

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Tangerine, from the Potion Factory, is a very interesting application. It somehow analyzes your iTunes library and can create custom playlists based on the tempo of the music. I’ve played with it a little, and the one feature I’d like it to have is the ability to limit which part of the library is used for the playlist selection. Otherwise I end up with a fast Barry Manilow song getting mixed in with Kiss and Golden Earring (actually, my iTunes library is 100% Barry Manilow free – really). Has anyone else tried Tangerine?