June 18, 2009 Lucy Annabelle
Allow me to introduce Lucy Annabelle. She was born at 12:04am by Caesarean section. She was 8 pounds even, and 21 inches long.
As could be expected, she’s already got her own website.
Here are some shots of Lucy Annabelle. ✓
Scribblenauts, the forthcoming Nintendo DS game from 5TH Cell, is getting a lot of attention from being previewed at last week’s E3 gaming expo. In fact, it has already received all kinds of awards, and has been nominated for Overall Game of the Show!
My good friend Chuck works for 5TH Cell and is a developer of the game. I’m very proud.
Update: They won “Overall Game of Show”! ✓
From the comprehensive list of enhancements in Snow Leopard:
All Mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures.
I wondered why my early-2008 multi-touch trackpad wasn’t capable of the three- and four-finger gestures. I guess it was just a software thing. Very nice. ✓
Among many other announcements, Apple released Safari 4 for both Mac and Windows today. I have to say I’m not terribly heart-broken to see the tabs-on-top UI dropped in the final version. Even though I think the idea and concept was right, the implementation was bad and left users frustrated.
Another beta frustration still exists, though: inconsistent behavior of a window resizing via JavaScript bookmarklet. If multiple tabs are open it doesn’t work at all.
Update: There are some other neat UI tweaks, including this status bar for downloading PDF documents:
Espresso Workflow Evaluation from Sean Sperte on Vimeo. ✓
almost.at is both beautiful and amazing. It’s a real-time event aggregator — displaying tweets, photos and news surrounding a certain event (e.g. a conference or expo). (Via Joshua Blankenship.) ✓
TEA (Text Editor Actions), by Ian Beck, brings TextMate-like editing functionality to the Espresso. It’s in beta (version 14 as of this post) and being rapidly developed and improved.
This might be the piece of the puzzle I’ve been missing when considering Espresso as a viable development tool for my workflow. ✓
June 1, 2009 On Text Editors
A web developer’s workflow hinges on their text editor. For me, TextMate is the perfect text editor. I use it both for web development and casual text manipulation. I like that it’s both powerful — with shortcuts, bundles and expandability — and light weight — in that it launches quickly and performs actions fast.
I’ve tried, and have licensed copies for, both Coda and Espresso, and I really like both, but not enough to switch from TextMate. I’ve been thinking about why, and I think it’s because I’ve never been educated on how to actually use them. I’ve read all the marketing copy, watched the developer screencasts, and even tried both in real-world situations. I must be doing something wrong, though, because I still don’t see the appeal over TextMate.
For instance, in TextMate, to “Insert Open/Close Tag” and add a paragraph, I type: ⌥+<, then tab, then write my paragraph, then tab again (to place the I-beam back outside the tag). Besides the actual paragraph, it takes three keystrokes. In Espresso there’s a similar “Insert Tag” icon in the menu bar, but no equivalent keystroke command, and even that doesn’t allow you to tab out of the tag. I haven’t found command like this in Coda.
So am I missing something?
Update: Indeed, I was missing something. Thanks to Ian Beck, I’ve discovered TEA, and the powerful potential of “sugars” for Espresso. I’ve posted a video demonstration evaluating how Espresso and TEA are used. Very nice.