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Now testing: Pages
You can now add static pages to your blog, with a few very useful options.
Sure wish I could Like this more than once … great addition to an already stellar platform.
I absolutely love the new design of the Omnigroup site. It’s a very clean design and the header images are beautiful.
iPad Aesthetics
When the iPad was announced, there seemed to be a lot of people complaining that the UI was a little off and that the icons on the home screen looked a little lonely.
I suspect that a good part of the people making this complaint look at a desktop like this every day:
Or perhaps their iPhone home screen makes the iPad look sparse:
And hey, as long as a person can be productive with that type of setup, all the power to them. But as someone who prefers tidiness and iPhone screen real estate, I think the iPad interface is a step in the right direction:
And one last thought: if there is one thing I can appreciate about jailbreaking your iPhone, it’s that many of the nice themes use smaller icons. It greatly adds to the overall look and feel:
“On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.”
Speaking of elegant Applescripts, Justin Blanton has a great one for creating timed reminders.
[ via Shawn Blanc ]
Improvements in Character
One thing I neglected to add to my post yesterday on counting characters was that there is most likely various different ways to achieve what I did with Applescript and Automator. That’s another sometimes positive, sometimes maddening aspect of OS X — there are so many different ways to fiddle.
Along with that fact, I should have added the caveat that there was no doubt a more elegant possible use of Applescript to achieve my desired final result. And there is — reader Jay from The Practice of Code sent me a version that is so much nicer and cleaner than mine. His does not make use of the clipboard, as you can see here:
This was originally how I wanted the script to work. I didn’t want to use the clipboard, but hunting through the library in Applescript did not yield the simple “input as text” I needed. If interested, grab the code here.
Thanks Jay for sharing your knowledge. And thanks to many others who passed on their suggestions. All were good, but Jay’s was the best.
No surprise here — standing appears to be healthier than sitting for long periods of time. Forget that Herman Miller Aeron, get a standing desk instead.
Counting Characters
When a client sends in an completed ad to the Fusion mailbox, they include the accompanying text that sits beside the ad graphic. Because we allow a max of 80 characters, care has to be taken to ensure that there is no more than 80 characters included. It sounds obvious, but from time to time, a customer forgets the limit.
And so there are many times when I’ve eyeballed the text and thought, “That looks a little large.” At this point, I have no desire to squint at the screen and count characters. Normally I would copy and paste the text into another app, such as MarsEdit or WriteRoom. Apps such as these have the ability to give you a character count, which is great when you are writing and already using the app.
But it was enough of an inconvenience to me to have to open one of these apps to paste the text into. When I’m in the middle of an email session, those apps are never open. What I needed was a way to simply select any block of text, hit a key combo, and get a message with the text stats I desired.
Ah, the joy of being a Mac user …
System Services
Applescript is definitely a little weird and quirky, but it’s also flexible. A quick search on the Net found the following script by Rob Griffiths:
set myWords to count words of (the clipboard)
set myParas to count paragraphs of (the clipboard)
display dialog “Characters: ” & myCount & ”
Words: ” & myWords & ”
Paragraphs: ” & myParas
This would be best to create as a system wide service, accessible via a keyboard shortcut. I created one right away in Automator and it worked okay. But I first had to copy the text to the clipboard since the script accesses the text from there. Typing CMD + C is not a big deal, but it still felt awkward and unneccesary.
To get around this, I had to add the following Apple code to Automator:
tell application “System Events” to keystroke “c” using command down
return input
end run
This would not work within the same script that calculates the text statistics — it had to be added separately. Here’s how the service looks in its entirety.
And this is the result:
This is why I love being a Mac user. Solving your own problems is often possible, and usually fun.
You Want to Eat It Too?
While discoursing on the subject of Flash again, Gruber says this about Apple:
It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for.
Yet Apple has shown no concern in this regard for the developers of the applications for the iPhone. The current App Store infrastructure is not set up so a developer can quickly fix a bug. Unless he/she works for Apple.
He says later in the piece:
I say what Apple cares about controlling is the implementation.
Maybe, but I would say they only care about their implementation.
Crush + Lovely launched a redesign of their site today and it’s worth a look. I especially love this piece, created by Meagan Fisher I do believe.
