Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

I’ve been writing code in TextMate the past two days, trying to see if it could replace Xcode as my primary editor for Objective-C. I’ve always heard good things about TextMate, and since it’s been getting a lot of publicity lately I decided to give it a shot. I wasn’t expecting too much from it; I don’t have any real complaints about Xcode’s editor, and I figured trying to separate the editor from Xcode would introduce a lot of extra work whenever I want to start a build or start a debugging session.

Despite this, I haven’t had too many problems. There’s no getting around using Xcode, but TextMate does do a decent job of replacing the just the editor portion. You can manage the two in different ways; I prefer to use TextMate’s tabbed project mode for all the source files in the project, although you can also set TextMate as Xcode’s external editor, which opens a new editor each time you click a file in Xcode’s project window. For the actual build process you can save everything and switch over to Xcode’s build window, or use the tools from TextMate’s Xcode bundle. I find myself doing a little of both, depending on the situation.

I expect to go back to Xcode’s editor sooner or later. There are just too many small things I miss when I’m using TextMate, and although it’s a good source code editor, it doesn’t really have any one big draw to keep me using it (especially with Xcode 3.0 on the way). There’s no reason not to give it a try though; it’s probably the best alternative out there if you don’t want to use the built in editor.

MacHeist is finally wrapping up, and the final bundle is now available. Anyone can purchase the bundle, regardless of whether you’ve participated in MacHeist or not. The cost is $49, and it includes some great apps such as Delicious Library and TextMate. On top of that, 25% of your purchase goes to a charity of your choice. Have a look sometime this week.

Right on the heels of MacHeist, there’s Mac App A Day, offering a free shareware OSX application each and every day through the month of December.

I don’t know where this trend came from, or if the developers are getting enough free exposure to make it worthwhile, but I know I’m enjoying it. When My Dream App was still in progress, I picked up a couple neat little programs I probably never would have bought otherwise.

Phill Ryu started his follow-up to My Dream App last week, MacHeist. Phill is a genius at viral marketing, and I couldn’t help getting a bit excited about what’s in store with MacHeist (hint: it involves free OSX software). The official start date is Wednesday (although there’s already one freebie, if you hunt for it), and I’m looking forward to it.

MacHeist is currently invite-only, but you can enter your email address to be notified when there’s an opening.

Like most hosting companies, 1&1 includes free anti-spam protection. It includes bayesian filtering and a few other tricks, but routinely lets 3 or 4 through a day; not a big deal, but those interruptions get annoying quickly.

Thanks to John Gruber mentioning it on Monday, I gave SpamSieve a try. It’s incredible. SpamSieve doesn’t have a prettied-up UI, and it takes a little work to get it set up, but it’s extremely effective. My email addresses have been harvested by spam bots time and time again, and out of the hundreds of spam emails I get each day SpamSieve has let zero through once I trained it properly. That includes those .gif “stock tips,” the Japanese spam, everything; and I haven’t seen any false positives yet either. I love it.

Potion Factory released their newest application today, Tangerine. In short, it analyzes the beats per minute of songs in your iTunes library, which you can use to generate custom playlists. You might use it to create a playlist of fast songs for your workout, slow songs to listen to before you go to bed, or just beat match songs if you want to be a DJ without all the work.

I remember trying to find an “assign beat count” item hidden in the menus somewhere in iTunes years ago when I first bought my Mac. Since then, I’ve kept an eye out for an application like this; I’ve seen a few scripts and applications that served the same purpose, but Tangerine is the first one that looked nice enough to really catch my eye.

(I’m not just writing about this because Potion Factory is running a promotion if you mention Tangerine on your blog; I really am excited about this application.)

I haven’t used Internet Explorer for years, but as a part time web designer I’m glad IE7 is finally out (and soon to be included in Windows Update). When I write HTML or CSS I try to keep everything neat, simple and standards compliant, but there always seems to be something that didn’t work quite right on IE6.

Not that it matters too much; having a Mac centric website means around 57% of my users are browsing with Safari, 26% with FireFox, and IE coming in at a low 8%.

CoRD Project Home.

CoRD is a remote desktop client for Mac OS X ported from the UNIX program rdesktop. It is a Universal Binary, and allows you to connect to multiple servers concurrently. There are many features not yet implemented, but it is usable in it’s current form.

It’s currently in version 0.2, and it shows; I noticed a few bugs when I played with it, and the interface is pretty unrefined. Still, I could definitely see myself using it once it’s a little more mature. rdesktop on Linux has always seemed very full featured and stable, and although the Microsoft RDC application isn’t exactly terrible, it’s long overdue for a serious update.

Here’s my current rsync command, posted here so I can find it again in case I ever lose my bash history.

nice -n -20 rsync -aE --stats --progress --delete ~/ /Volumes/Firewire\ Disk/Backup/

To summarize, this copies all the files from my home directory to my firewire hard drive, ignoring files which haven’t changed since the last time I ran it, and deleting files which exist in the backup but not the original location. There’s nothing that’s not really explained in man rsync, but notice the sudo nice -n -20 command before it. That lets me keep on working or watching a movie, without rsync driving my poor G4 into the ground.

I purchased Mint a week or two ago, and I have to say that for $30 it’s a steal. I’ve used a few other statistical packages over the years, and the only things they seem to be good at are the tools I don’t need. I know there are people out there who care, maybe even get excited about terms like “Visitor Segment Performance” and “Goals & Funnel Process”, but my business is software design. I have under a dozen total pages on my website at the moment, and all I want to know is how many people are looking at them, and what they’re saying about my products. Most statistics packages can’t even get that right; they snip the end off of dynamic URLs when reporting the referrer, making blog and forum URLs (perhaps the most important sources of information) useless to me.

Mint gets it all right. It’s an easy to use package that seems like it’s tailored for people like me. Everything it comes with by default is actually useful to me, and the tools it didn’t have were easy to add via its plugin system. On top of this, it manages to be beautifully designed as well. How many other website admin tools do you know that have their own official Dashboard Widget?