Category: OS X
Blogging on the iPad
I wrote the last post “Not If, But When” on the iPad, using the iOS WordPress app. That was my first attempt at writing more than tweets on the iPad. I noticed a few things: I found that typing a long-form piece was a slower experience, but completely workable. I was frustrated, however, by the lack of any clear way to create links. After some more experimentation I found that starting to type “http://” makes the app ask you if you want to create a link. It would be nice to have a dedicated button, or at the very least a quick introductory message showing how to create one.
I wrote this post by starting it as a draft in Mars Edit, and then continuing it in the WordPress iOS app. I can imagine that my usual process will most likely involve the reverse: starting a post in iOS and finishing it in Mars Edit.
I still don’t see how to create curled quote marks with the software keyboard; I imagine that hooking up a Bluetooth keyboard is the only way to get those. I just installed a Markdown plugin on this blog, and using that syntax on the iOS app surprisingly works. So that gives me support for things like emphasis and blockquotes. Not bad.
Not If, But When
Last week Jordan’s four-year-old white plastic MacBook started to freeze up. Fearing the worst, I immediately cloned her machine to an external drive. A few days later the dreaded folder with a ? appeared (has that replaced the sad Mac face?) and it refused to boot up. I ordered a 250GB, 7200rpm drive off Amazon as a replacement. I guess that 250GBs is the new entry-level for laptop drives.
When the drive arrived today I dropped it into my toaster dock, fired up Super Duper! and cloned the backup drive back to the new drive. It took about one hour. Once I found my Torx screwdriver it was just a matter of popping the battery off, taking off three screws, pulling out the drive bay, and swapping the dead drive for the new one. I put everything back into place, fired it up, and…the ? folder popped up again. But only for a second. The Apple logo showed up after that, and the machine booted up cleanly.
The whole experience reinforced what I always tell my friends: hard drives will fail. Not IF, but WHEN. I think I’ve had three hard drive failures over the last ten years, including this one. Cloning your drive regularly can get you back up and running much faster than trying to take your computer in to your local computer repair shop and hoping they can dredge some data out of your dead drive.
What could I have done better? I should have been backing up to a laptop drive, so that I could have just popped that in instead of waiting a week for Amazon’s super saver shipping to deliver the replacement drive. I also need to start cloning both of our laptops on a more regular basis. I’ve gotten lazy with mine, since I also have online backup via Backblaze. A local, physical backup is still preferable to online backup for quick restores, however.
Word Navigation in OS X Terminal, bash Shell
Ctrl+A for start of the line Ctrl+E for end of the line
To enable the option key click that “Use option as meta key” checkbox in the settings, and that allows:
Option+F for the next word Option+B for the previous word
FDT, AS3, and OS X
Just set up the trial of the Flash Actionscript IDE FDT. There’s a few things to keep in mind when installing it on Mac OS X, however:
1) You need to download the standalone Flex SDK, and point to that in the Core Libraries Settings (Preferences > FDT > Core Libraries > AS3 Core Libraries). If you’re running the standalone Flex Builder and try to point to the SDKs in that install it won’t work. Make sure that there’s no spaces in the path to the SDK, either, otherwise FDT won’t be able to find it. I put mine in ~/Documents/sdks/flexsdk3/
2) You need to copy the playerglobal.swc file to a location without spaces as well, as suggested here. I put mine in ~/Documents/fdt/playerglobal.swc.
Those were the two big differences from the instructions in the Basic AS3 tutorial (Help > FDT User Guide > Getting Started > Basic AS3 Tutorial).
I’ll be putting FDT through its paces, comparing it to TextMate of course. I have a feeling for big projects it’ll be pretty useful, since it has the project-level hinting/completion that TextMate lacks.
Making greensear.ch Your Default Search Engine in Safari
Note: These instructions refer to the Mac OS X version of Safari. I sometimes forget that Safari is available for Windows.
Since I use Safari as my primary browser on my Mac, I was looking for a way to make Greensearch my default search engine. In Firefox this is a fairly easy thing, you just go to Greensearch and the search field drop-down arrow lights up in blue. Clicking on this gives you an option to add Greensearch as a search engine.