What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I saw that the great guys at Panic have released Coda 1.6.1 with quite a few improvements. I've been seeing quite a lot of traffic on the Coda mailing list - a good deal of which was a pretty nasty thread about Git integration. Now I'd love it if they supported CVS and Git, but I'm not going to get out of hand if they don't - face it, the tools don't have to be integrated to be useful.

It's a wonderful took for working on non-Java web sites. Nothing wrong with that. But it would be nice if they had CVS and Git support to the tool.

This morning I was spending a little bit of time trying to see if I could add in a few nice section headers using the h2, h3, etc. headers. I knew from experience what I liked in the defaults, but I wanted to dive into the CSS and see if I could make them better, and more logical - like why is the first one I like h3?

Well... it turns out to be an interesting problem and because the WordPress Theme makers use these in their layout as well, it's not really up to the posts to change these. For example, h1 (in my theme) is used for the title of the page, h2 is used as the title on the post, etc. If I wanted to make an h1 for the post, I might be OK, but if I did that to h2, I'm going to have a problem with the title of the post.

So while the might have explicitly used a class="post_title" to indicate what they were doing, I can see why they chose to use the more familiar h2. After all, these are probably not modified by a ton of folks, and if they are, then, like me, you're going to see the problems and then decide how to get around them.

It's all possible to fix - but it involves essentially re-writing the entire theme and putting in the class tags to make sure that there will be no conflicts with the default post tags. Not impossible, but more work than I wanted to do today. I got what I needed - two levels, and that's going to be more than enough for what I've been doing.

I decided to check and see if there was an update to iTerm - and there was! The latest release hits the transparency problems as well as removing updating threads to limit the contention issues and pasting big hunks of text. While I'm probably not going to switch as Terminal is still better with the workspaces feature, it's nice to keep up to date and see what's happening with the project.

Who knows, maybe it'll leapfrog Terminal again? I still like that I can remove the scroll bars in iTerm. Wish I had that in Terminal.

I got a tweet from Gus M. at Flying Meat that VoodooPad Pro 4.0.2 is out with a ton of bug fixes. I read the release notes for a good 5 mins. There are changes in the Python interpreter for plugins, lots of crashing bugs fixed, and a complete WebDAV update. Sounds like a great update - had to get it.

Interestingly, now the tabs for the pages I have open are ordered differently, and I can't figure out how to order them manually. It's not a huge deal, but it'd be nice to know what the magic was to getting them in any particular order. Seems dragging them is the key, but what if one is off screen (to the right), due to a window being smaller than the combined widths of the tabs? Hmmm... no solution there, my friend.

Work-around: maximize the window, move the tabs, and restore it. Not bad.

This morning I noticed that Fantastico had updated WordPress to 2.6.5 (from 2.6.2) to keep up with the security fixes, etc. and three known bugs. I'm sure they are also making strides in the UI to keep things fresh, but that's OK too. I'm happy that Fantastico is keeping up with things. It really makes using HostMonster a lot nicer.

Interestingly, there was a fake WordPress 2.6.4 floating around, and because of that the WordPress Team went from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 with this release - making it a lot easier to know if you have the right copy. Interesting play on trojans. These guys are nasty at times.

I must say that this is about the fastest Fantastico has updated WordPress. I was planning on doing 2.6.3 on Friday, and then today shazam! it's 2.6.5. Impressive.

Calc Board is a wonderful little Dashboard widget that I use at least once a week. Little sums, or calculations that I need to do and don't use a calculator for because I want the results to hang around a while. It's got a lot more capability than I use, but it's nice in what it does, and if I ever need the help, it's nice to know it's there as well.

Excellent little widget.

This morning I was reading the feeds, like I always do, and came across a reference to a piece of code done right. The author was talking about how the best software gets out of your way and does everything that's needed without you having to think about it. In this case, it was shared, remote filespace. The app/service was Dropbox.

What made this so useful to me was the fact that I had gone through the headache of setting up a WebDAV server at home for just this reason - a place to throw things that I could get at form other machines. The problem is, I was still limited by my home bandwidth, I wasn't being intelligent about sending diffs, and the clients for other operating systems were web browsers or FTP-like clients. It worked, but it wasn't what I wanted.

Dropbox is exactly what I wanted. It's a smart, version controlled, remote file repository. It's got clients for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Once you register for it, you simply have a directory that "hot syncs" to the repository in "the cloud", and sends the updates to your other registered machines.

I have a laptop and two desktops. I register them all. I see on each machine an identical set of files. Make a change in one, and it'll be mirrored to the others in a very efficient manner. Drag a new file into the folder on my laptop, and it'll automatically be sent to my two desktops. Simple.

I still have the file on my laptop - which makes this a ton better than WebDAV, and the syncing is done automatically, but clearly visible so that I know when something's happening. There are default folders for public content, photos, an easy way to make URLs for accessing the files... the list goes on and on.

Certainly one of the nicest features of this is the fact that it's really a file repository so you can go to the Dropbox web site and see the files you've deleted. And get them back! You can't beat that. It's like Time Machine built-in.

The first 2GB of storage is free, and for $9.99/mo or $99/yr you get 50GB. I'm sold. The version on the app is 0.6.402, and I'm guessing they do an automatic update, but we'll see. I feel so much better with the idea of installing this on my machines and then being able to really share files on the 'net. Incredible app.

This morning the Flying Meat guys released VoodooPad Pro 4.0.1 with lots of little crashing bugs fixed and with the tag line: the inevitable .1 release. I believe there must be people hitting this a lot harder than I am, but then again, that's probably not that hard. In any case, it's out there, and get it. I like what he's done with the UI changes, and the scripting support is nice as well.

Gotta support the indie Mac developer group.

Apple seems to have gotten a ton of issues about the stability of Safari 3.2 so this morning they had something fun for all of us on Software Update - Safari 3.2.1. While I'm sure there are reasons for this, it comes a week after 3.2, so they really must have been bad bugs. I didn't notice anything, but then again, I don't hit a ton of sites, but I hit enough. Well... anyway, it's out there and it's a reboot to get it.

Gotta do it.

The guys at MacVim have fixed up the forking issue and updated the latest fixes from the Vim core code, and have packaged Snapshot 39. It's something I expected them to do, given the fact that they had discovered it right after creating Snapshot 38.

Just one of the best editors on the best platforms ever.