Mac attack! And cetera.
So finally it’s here – my new Mac Mini, ready to save my designerly reputation by fixing all those SNAFUs on Safari. Well, I say “my”; actually it belongs to The Company, who have foolishly bought it on my assurances that it is absolutely essential for the efficient operation of our design department (i.e. me).
And very nice it is too! The super-smooth (if entirely superfluous) animations and cute icon transitions immediately illustrate why it is the “proper” designers platform of choice, and once I get into it I’m sure I’ll start making excuses why I need to do more and more of my daily work on the Mac instead of the trusty old PC. If only I could get a G5 Powerbook for the same price!
Anyway, I have a favour to ask – can any “power” Mac users let me know their favourite tips and tricks, recommended downloads, that sort of thing? Help me make the most of my new toy!
Hate that guy
I thought I knew Javascript, you know? I’m unobtrusive, DOM-compliant, all that jazz. I know what I’m doing – and it’s pretty good.
Or at least I thought so, until I decided to take a look behind-the-scenes over at ShaunInman.com – check out the hardcore object-oriented scripting going on over there! I can’t even begin to make sense of some of those functions – so onto the ‘To Do’ list it goes – I need to learn me some Javascript, OOP style!
Hopefully some of it might even make it into v3 of this site, coming in the November reboot.
Scriptaculous
Speaking of hardcore programming, I came across this pretty cool site the other day; Scriptaculous is a “Web 2.0 script repository” – Javascript, AJAX and Ruby on Rails collide in a demonstration of functional enhancements, some of which are very impressive, but some are rapidly becoming “seen it before” due to the techniques becoming so widespread.
The code examples are incredible to someone with no experience in using Ruby – check out the simple form preview code example: 2 lines! More stuff to learn…
Geographic traffic
Finally, via SimpleBits I signed up with gVisit, a new site that uses the Google Maps API and a little bit of Javascript to generate a geographical map of recent site traffic – here’s mine.
Pointless but cool.
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Previously: Build it and they will come - how to promote your site online
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Comments
- Matthew Pennell
- 1837 days ago
- I’d forgotten about that post of yours Dan – some great links on there, cheers!
- #2
- David Horn
- 1835 days ago
- One thing that I have come to love over the last few days is skEdit (http://www.skti.org/skEdit.php) – I’d been looking for a DW replacement and found this to be much more straightforward than BBEdit or even TextWrangler. Thoroughly recommended.
I also find this screen rule unobtrusive and handy:
http://www.artissoftware.com/screentools/
And last, but by no means least, Sidenote – a lovely, simple little app for copying little bits and pieces of info that I’ll need later on:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/sidenote.html
There’s tons of good things out there to explore though,
Happy hunting!
David - #3
Anyway, in my post I asked to a load of tips and advice and had some pretty good stuff posted.
Article here