dirtystylus

TextMate 2 May Never Come

John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to this particular post by Watts Martin on the choices facing current TextMate users. John Gruber quoted the humorous first paragraph which asks users to face the reality of abandonment, but it’s this paragraph that sums it up for me:

First off: if you are a Mac user and compatibility with TextMate is an absolute must-have, let me ask you two questions. Is TextMate 1.5 still working for you? Can you keep living with its limitations? If you answered both those questions “yes,” our work is done here. Go in peace.

At the recently-concluded An Event Apart conference in Boston I saw TextMate windows on a lot of laptop screens, (including the presentations by Jeremy Keith). That tells me that lots of people are still finding TextMate 1.5 to be an effective tool, despite its shortcomings. TextMate 2 may never come, but for many people (myself included) TextMate 1.5 continues to work just fine.

For the rest who can’t/won’t use any of the alternatives suggested by Martin, you can keep checking the TextMate 2 status page.

The NY Times Digital Subscription

I’ve been thinking a lot about the New York Times’ new digital subscription, and I’ve enjoyed reading the posts about it by Khoi Vinh and John Gruber. This post by Mandy Brown, however, sums it up quite nicely for me:

First, I resent the pay structure that the Times proposes: it is vastly cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday paper (a habit long ago abandoned) than to read the news on all my various devices. I can think of no other reason for this strategy than to protect the already dwindling print subscription model; as such, the paywall is a tactic for the way down—a means to temporarily sustain a business that is destined to fail eventually. I find it difficult to fund a ship when its own captain admits that it’s sinking.

The different pricing levels for mobile devices also irk me. It’s insulting because they seem like a cynical attempt to wring more money from users based on an artificial distinction between mobile device screen sizes. They remind me of how Hulu draws a similarly artifical line between a computer monitor (Hulu) and a television screen/mobile device (Hulu Plus), in the hopes of preserving the established business model that serves the networks and cable/satellite providers.

I certainly think that the NY Times has every right to charge for its content. I would have no problems paying for that content if it were coherent, and reflective of its value. But it’s not. Again, Mandy Brown says it better than I can:

Similarly, the high price of their subscriptions seems to stem from the assumption that they will be the sole paper anyone subscribes to; they have presumed their position as paper of record.

The net result is that this week I’m searching for alternative sources for my news. Perhaps the NY Times will finally settle on a pricing structure that makes more sense, but I wonder if I’ll care at that point.

Antipop

When I joined 160over90 I was assigned a 27-inch iMac. Great machine, except I found out that the iMac switches off the digital audio output signal after 15 seconds if there’s no sound playing. This isn’t that big a deal, except that the Headroom Micro DAC that I have hooked up to the digital out will just play static if it doesn’t have a digital signal.

After a bit of back and forth with Headroom support (which is excellent, by the way) I started looking for software to keep the audio signal alive even if music wasn’t playing. Enter Antipop. Problem solved.

Note: The developer is no longer actively developing for OS X, so Antipop could conceivably cease to work on future releases of OS X. For now, however, it works great.

Frustration

Found this today while dusting off an FLA from a very old project (written by someone else, I should add).

CakePHP and Model File Names

Another example of the little things that you learn when picking up a new framework: filenames for your CakePHP Models should be lowercase. For example, section.php and not Section.php.

I’d been working on a small CMS for a friend’s site, and even though everything worked perfectly on my local MAMP install, when I uploaded it to the production webserver for testing I kept getting an error when retrieving items that had an association with another model:

Notice (8): Undefined index: Section

In this case I had a Section Model that had an association with many Items. Section hasMany Items, in other words. When retrieving the Items listing the respective Sections could not be retrieved.

After I renamed my model files to lowercase and flushed the /app/tmp cache the associations were recognized, and the listing of Items showed the relationship to the associated Section objects.

I think this happened because I hand-coded a few of the Model files before switching to bake to scaffold things.

Oh, and a final note to self: the AMF/SWX CakeSWXPHP plugin appears to require PHP 5. Couldn’t understand why the AMF calls were failing until I checked the PHP version on the remote production server. Sure enough, it was still running PHP 4.