Posts tagged: MACOS

Missing in action for many months after a server hard drive failure, the webkit2png utility by Paul Hammond reappeared in August. It uses WebKit to automatically render PNG images of web pages. It beats regular screen grabs mainly in its ability to render full-length images – as if you had an infinitely tall monitor. By default it produces three versions: an actual-size “clipped” version, an actual-size long version, and a thumbnail-size long version (here’s an example). It requires that you have PyObjC.

For reasons that will remain mysterious, I was asked about the possibility of an OS X program or script that would allow you to quickly rotate the contents of any window 180 degrees. I had written some image processing scripts before, but nothing involving screen capture, so I got interested. I came up with this Applescript, View180, which if nothing else is a neat demo of a couple of undeservedly obscure OS X commands, sips and screencapture.

This is nifty – Locomotive, from Ryan Raaum, a complete Ruby on Rails environment in a self-contained 30MB bundle. And when I say complete, I mean complete: Locomotive contains not only Rails itself, but the Ruby interpreter, RubyGems, the LightTPD webserver with FastCGI, the SQLite database engine, bindings for MySQL and PostgreSQL (though not the server binaries, wisely), and all the other bits and pieces needed for turnkey Rails. There’s also an expanded version of the package with even more goodies. If you have an existing Rails installation, Locomotive will run politely alongside it without messing anything up.

It’s been a sore point among Macintosh users that almost all of Google’s desktop software is currently Windows only. A couple days ago I learned that Google had started a search for Macintosh developers. As of today, listings for Senior Macintosh Developer (8+ years experience) and Macintosh Developer (3+ years experience) are on Google Jobs.

Only Google can say what they’re up to, but note that Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, and Google Talk are all mentioned in the ads.

All the keyboarding I do, on top of motorcycle commuting, means that my wrists work very hard. For the past couple weeks I’ve been experimenting with a program called AntiRSI which tries to keep you out of trouble by recommending short “micro pauses” and longer “work breaks” – based on how much continuous keyboard/mouse work you have actually been doing, not just on the clock.

If your rhythm is such that you are naturally taking breaks from the keyboard, AntiRSI stays out of your way. But when the pace increases, it will pop up with a reminder. It’s the ten-second “micro pauses” that I think are saving me. One nice design detail is that these notifications aren’t modal and don’t get in the way of your typing. So if you want to spend a minute or two deferring that “micro pause” while you finish a thought, go right ahead – AntiRSI waits patiently, but doesn’t remove the notification until you actually take that ten-second pause. When I get there, I take the opportunity to do some Bob Anderson style wrist stretches.