If you need a slick client for your Gmail account –  up to four –  Notify is for you. It integrates itself into the menu and has more features than the simple google notifier.

“Since Notify sits up in your menu bar, it stays out of the way until you need it. When you do need, it, you can easily access all of your mail accounts in a manner that provides a much smoother user experience than traditional menubar notifiers.”

Website of the day: sequelpro.com

Why:

Because it’s design is sleek and beautiful, the information on it is very well structured, because is about mac

and  because they offer for FREE the best mysql admin tool for OsX.

We’re starting  a new category today called website of the day.

We’ll try to add here the sites we encounter in our daily surfing on the net  and catch our attention somehow: by beauty, weirdness, the useful information it has, etc.

Today site is  minimalmac.com

The site tries to gather resources on how to create a minimal mac – is not this the way a mac should be ? – that leads to improved productivity and of course brings beauty to our desktops.  Anyway, the site is not only doing this  but it presents applications, news, user submitted setups and even interesting quotes from more or less known people.

Keeping a minimal setup improves your productivity, as we said before, by removing the clutter on your desktop, minimizes the used resources of the machine  and in time  it trains you into keeping thinks simple( KISS ?). Enjoy.

It’s been a year and a half  since I moved on OsX.  Coming from the Linux world it wasn’t that hard  to get used to the new operating system. At that time I had some issues to make the perfect selection of softwares and tools I need for my work.

My expertise is PHP, JS  (MooTools),  HTML+CSS  and sometimes I  design –  though it’s been a while since I opened the Photoshop.

I will try to present what software I use  and I hope you will comment with your setups – maybe this will help some others to make their perfect setup.

Let’s start:

Filemanager(s): – Forklift :

Why? Because it reminds me of Krusader, the perfect filemanager for me, even is not that good. It is capable of remote connection –  FTP/SSH that I fully need as I work on a remote server  almost all the time.

I like a lot the “buffer” that it makes between my remote folders (ftp or ssh) and my editor.  It has some nice features like quicklook, folders sync (I love this),  synchronous browsing.

What I would really need would be a diff plugin to help me make a diff between 2 folders/files selected.  But in the end I think it’s the best filemanager for OsX until now.

Browser(s):

As my primary browser I use Safari.  Don’t get me wrong, I Like Firefox, but it still needs to get on a diet – it eats lots of RAM and it’s slower than Safari.  For developing I’m  usingMozilla for its Firebug extension.  For testing purposes I have installed Opera and Camino and  a windows machine that I control by using SynergyPlus (read below to find out about)

Editor(s):

There is only one  - Textmate. It takes a while to get used with but after you did it’s addictive. At the moment is the best editor I’ve worked with. The code completion ,  snippets and bundles improve the productivity very much. Nothing more to say.

Communication:

Adium, Skype and Tweetie

Graphics:

Photoshop and Preview

Other tools:

For the server side when I cannot reach my remote server –  MAMP -

Is just like LAMP, only for mac. It works nice and smooth and you don’t need much to do.

Sequel pro -

The best mysql admin tool I’ve seen. It can connect to any mysql server using sockets, normal way or even ssh.

Screen grabbing – xScope -

A nifty tool that helps you with the screenshots, there are nice measurement tools, a loupe, a “screens” tool that gives you an exact space you have in the most popular browsers at a given resolution.

ImageOptim -

A wrapper for useful tools that optimize images –  it keeps  the images at the same quality-  only it removes the extra information from it. I use it after I finalize a project on all the images in the site –  it can save you  a lot of bandwidth.

Terminal+Visor –  Terminal( command line interface ) +  a nice plugin that hides the window for you and let you call it in any space you are.

Reggy -

A regex tester, very useful.

Growl –  the notification system

Quicksilver -  needs more introduction?

Versionapp – the most beautiful svn client ever

SynergyPlus

SynergyPlus is a some sort of virtual KVM which allows you to share a mouse and a keyboard between computers with different operating system.

So this is my setup – or better said the tools I use when I work. What about yours ?

iPhone is a nice platform to develop for. The Appstore made possible to transform a hobby or a simple idea into a good income source due to the popularity of iPhone and the low prices of the apps found there.

Bu what about the rest of the coders that come from the pure web side of the programming (like me) – php, javascript, ROR, etc ?

Below I’ll try to make a list with components you can use to develop for iPhone using only what you know, or learn only few things more.

Apps for iPhone are separated into 2 groups – native apps and webapps.

Native apps use their SDK and runs native on and from the phone, while webapps run inside safari, and are fetched from an external sever.

Frameworks

Here comes one type of projects , that managed to make a bridge between the 2 types of applications, using a native instance of webkit to render and use html/css/js files – from local space of the device and/or a remote server.

Usually the frameworks expose some native device functions –  camera, accelerometer, contacts, geolocation to javascript methods, so you can use it on your apps.

Big5apps -  it lets you access some features of the device using javascript –  like image, camera,sound,geolocation

Phonegap - is intended to be a cross-device platform, covering iphone,blackberry,android.

Liquidgear – seems to be a fork of phonegap but oriented on the iphone only, so the development of this framework get another course, more specific for the iPhone device.

Quickconnect - allows you to use a template for dashcode or for xcode to develop for iphone using web technologies.

The above frameworks needs only the effort to learn a little of xcode usage.

JavaScript/CSS/HTML  Llibraries

WebKit for iPhone or other mobile devices is a little different –  for example touch events, or hardware accelerated css transforms. For this you need to develop your own functions/methods, or to adapt other scripts to to use this.

Or, you can use one of the below js scripts/frameworks.

XUI

A simple javascript framework for building mobile web applications.XUI strives to be a framework for first class mobile device browsers such as WebKit, Fennec and Opera with future support under consideration for IE Mobile and BlackBerry.

MagicFramework

Magic Framework is a native iPhone UI imitator and HTML5 db interface built in html/css/javascript. It’s useful for online websites or on-device Webkit-based applications looking to imitate the native iPhone UI and/or use native storage without having to write native code.

Dashcode – Apple’s web toolkit

jQTouch

A jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

CiUI – CNET iPhone UI

Safire – Safire is an open source framework written in HTML/CSS/JS. It makes building/porting applications to the iPhone ridiculously easy.

iWebKit

iWebKit is a file package designed to help you create your own iPhone and iPod Touch compatible website or webapp. The kit is accessible to anyone even people without any html knowledge and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. In a couple of minutes you will have created a full and profes

iphone-universal

The framework is based on 1 stylesheet and several HTML examples, also, it contains original artwork so you can edit them in Adobe Photoshop CS and adapt it to your projects.

iUi 

Based on Joe Hewitt‘s iPhone navigation work, iUI has the following features:

• Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
• Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
• Ability to handle phone orientation changes
• Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Tools

Iphone Simulator – It comes with Apple’s SDK

Phonegap iphone emulator – use it to test apps built with phonegap

iPhoney 

iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development.

TestiPhone.com

This is a web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone Applications. This tool has been so far tested and working using Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 and Safari 3 in Windows, but you ned Safari to get the real experience.

Safari 4

Well…no comment here

Ok, almost all the above tools needs a mac to be able to use. But  to develop for iPhone you will need a mac anyway.

Have I missed something ? Let me know.

Following the previous post, we will see today how to check the syntax for JS.

In this case we will need a bundle wrote some time ago by Andrew Dupont here. (read the article , scroll down and download the bundle). 

Install the bundle.

In this moment you are almost good to go, as the bundle is set to run just as the previous PHP check syntax, when you save the file.

I say almost good to go, because there is an warning you get from ruby,  ”Insecure world writable dir”.
So open the Bundle Editor, find Javascript tools, click on the Quick Lint command and add a -W0 ( is a zero here ) after the ruby word, like this:

ruby -W0 “$TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT/bin/quick_lint.rb”

Close the Bundle Editor.

This is how it looks in action:

That’s it.

A nice “hidden” feature that Textmate has is to check the syntax of the php files you are writing and display a popup with the result.

How to do this?

Open Bundle Editor, search for the PHP bundle, scroll down until you find the Validate syntax command.

Edit the Save setting to Current File.

Now, depending on how you want it, you can alter the Activation setting or not. I set it  the same as saving the file, so each time I save the file, it makes me the syntax check.

Close the Bundle Editor.

From now on each time you save a syntax check will be done and a popup will show you the result

The result

That’s all.

If you need to import your Gmail contacts into the local Address Book, to be used by Mail for example, here are the simple steps you need to make.

Open safari and login to your Gmail account.
In the left side, under the mailboxes you have the menu Contacts. Click on it and it will open the contacts manager:

On the right side you have the Export link –  click on it

From the next screen choose what group you want to export, select vCard format, and click Export 

Safari will download the file, will open the Address Book application and ask you if you want to import the new contacts:

Click add, and you’re done.

Dashboard – nice eye candy tool, lot of widgets, from temperature stats to calculators, radios or anything else.
Why would I want it closed? Well being on a G4 , I want it a little faster, and faster…( we all want it, don’t we? ), so I need to close some apps/services for this, and to be honest I use dashboard once a week, so is not a big loss.

There is dashboard widget that close the dashboard – irony – but keeps the F12 active which is a nice trick, and save you all the hassle with restarting the dock with dashboard in it.

I tried other solutions, but this seems for me a nice and handy one, and here it is:
StopDashboard -Widget

Everybody knows SVN and “everybody” is using it. No doubt SVN is one of the best things that happend in the last time. but for a web developer, svn can be a little frustrating – at least for me.

Let me explain:

I am on a mac, a G4 one,so I cannot afford a MAMP running on my local machine. On the other hand, I use to let clients see in real time the evolution of their projects ( is a pretty good selling advantage , by the way ) so that’s why I need a remote working copy. I want to have a version controlling system but with my working copy on this server, and of course, lazy how I am, without a terminal where to write lines for commit and so on. You get my point.

On the other hand, I like the way a ftp program “caches” my transactions so my editor does not freeze every time I hit ?+S.

How this can be done? How can i accomplish this?

I would like to hear a good and practical solutions for this.

The solution I found is a nice one( of course because it’s mine ), but is very very sloooooooooow.
I mount a ftp or sftp drive with the working folder on the server on my mac, and I declare here to be the working copy. So in this way, I have a remote live working environment, and a versioning control that helps to keep my work in one piece and forget about backups – well almost.

The only drawback is that the Macfuse is very slow on mac so a commit or a simple update seems to take ages – but is a good excuse for a coffee, or another coffee, and another one…..

Do you have a better solution? I would really like to speedup the process, so please let me know your thoughts