Posts tagged Toolbox

One of the indispensable tools we use at Second Gear HQ is a utility application called TextExpander from our friends at SmileOnMyMac. TextExpander works by listening to your typing and expanding abbreviations you type in into longer-form snippets of text.

This really helps out for dealing with common support issues. For instance, I have a snippet with a link to a direct download of the latest version of Today. I type ‘dltd’ into an email and TextExpander will automatically expand it into a full-fledged URL.

The AppleScript support is also an awesome timesaver. When pasting long URLs around the Web, I like to shrink them using bit.ly. There is a script that will automatically take the link on your clipboard and convert it to a bit.ly-fied URL.

TextExpander is $29.95 and well worth the price if you are a keyboard cowboy like myself.

We spent some time this afternoon cleaning up some things on the Second Gear Web site, and I thought I could take some time to share how I keep the site up and running.

Many companies use content-management systems like Wordpress and ExpressionEngine to keep track of their content, but I’ve found that for the main Second Gear site managing everything using just PHP and Panic’s Coda is a much better solution for me.

Coda is an integrated Web development environment that combines the functionality of four apps I used previously into one. I previously kept CSSedit, BBEdit, Transmit and Terminal open all at once when I was working on a site. With Coda, I just have the single Coda window up and it has the same functionality of those four apps integrated.

The biggest drawback for many with Coda is the lack of visual page creation. Coda is very much designed for someone that hand codes Web sites. If you want to have a visual editing environment, check out Sandvox from our friends at Karelia.

Coda is $79 for a license. Give it a try.

Periodically, I am going to use Downshift to highlight some of the third-party hardware and software used at Second Gear HQ. The Mac is chock full of excellent independent and small Mac developers. It’s one of the most redeeming qualities of being a Mac user in my opinion.

During the development of Today, I became a big fan of site-specific browsers (SSBs) and this is completely thanks to Todd Ditchendorf’s Fluid. Fluid allows you to create an dedicated Web browser for any Web site you happen to visit. We host our Subversion repositories at Beanstalk and use Porchlight to keep track of our bugs and milestones so having an SSB for each of these in my Dock is great. Being able to command-tab or invoke my bug repository via Quicksilver is awesome.

Fluid is a free download and requires Mac OS X Leopard. If you use Web applications like Gmail or Backpack extensively, it’s definitely worth checking out.