Tag-Archive for » development «
Hot on the heels of the similarly titled post, I have a few other gems I’ve come across or been pointed towards to make life on the good ship MacBook that little bit more simple. Not that it’s difficult in the first place, just different if you’re used to Windows.
Note: Feedback from the family, who are a mix of casual and regular PC users, would suggest the Mac is easy to use. So fear-ye not Mac virgins, this is not a platform (only) for the uber-geeks.
That said, if you *are* an uber-geek, there’s lots (and I mean lots) to float your boat here.
So, what do we have in the bag this time?
As you may heve read from previous posts, and at the risk of boring any regular (aye right!) readers, I got a MacBook a short while back. It’s a bit of a migration for me, having uset a PC for most of my career. I published a list of keyboard shortcuts previously and heres a list of other things I’ve hunted down as ‘essentials’ for day to day work/play.
I know there are alternatives to all of the below, but these are the ones I plumped for. One prevailing factor influenced the choices below; they’re all open source/freeware. My budget for toys is dry following the arrival of the MacBook, so it’s cheapies or freebies for me for a while.
So here goes:
Unusual for me I know, but I thought I’d try to bring a little culture to the blog.
So, without further ado, here’s a spot of Japanese poetry…
Fluttering around,
Pausing only for a while,
Then to something new.
OK, it’s a pretty poor haiku, but it gets my recent frame of mind across nicely. My focus has been suffering lately, lots of little things to occupy time; the blog, the iPhone, the MacBook, even reviewing stuff on DooYoo, but nothing substantial. I was working on the principle of working on lots of little things in the hope that something may stick and give me a sizeable target worth shooting for – the next big thing, I suppose.
The last to-do list I published on the blog had the effect of spurring me into action fairly well. So well in fact, I thought I’d do it again; not because I’ve stopped doing stuff, more so I have a reasonable list that I can work to and tick off against.
bimbogami
- restructure db for better stats, better season handling & for ‘new concept’ season 3
- separate the reg/login audit from the answers
- calculate elapsed time and puzzling time per question on completion of question
- calculate these valuse for past users
- amend HoF to show both elapsed time and puzzling time
- amend HoF to sort the players in ‘first past the post’, ‘elapsed’ and ‘puzzling time’ order
- apply my new found CSS skills to the site, progressively (but not extensively)
- look at the structure of things to cater for the ‘new concept’ for season 3 proper
- see if we can bang out another wordle-based music one to keep things moving
- run through the ideas book and see how many decent questions are kicking about
book
- put some structure to the working concept
- write the first chapter
- write a synopsis
(but not necessarily in that order)
blog
- Write a review of CSS Mastery
- Write a review of Don’t Make Me think
I’ve been working on developing a new website on and off for the last couple of weeks. It’s a site for my daughter, who is venturing out on her own as a Marketing Advisor.
It’s a fairly straight-forward site of half a dozen or so pages, and a chance to try out some of the nifty CSS techniques I’d learned from the previously mentioned CSS Mastery book.
I got some new domains, for future projects.
- www.kayleighmccallum.com – for my daughter’s start-up marketing site.
- www.manicmorff.com – for my design/dev (and other things) site, and this blog, in a rejuvenated and organised state will end up there too.
- www.stevemccallum.com – just because.
So that should keep me busy for a while.
OK, it’s official, I’m now a convert. I never thought I’d say it but I’m now officially a big fan of Firefox (version 3 of course, its predecessors I remain unconvinced of)
It’s great to develop for and the fantastic Firebug is a CSS developers dream. If you code, and use CSS, download it, now, and do it in FF.
I read in a few places a while ago that you should develop in FF and then hack for IE. For years I’ve been doing it the other way round and boy, do I feel stupid. If the stats from bimbogami are anything to go by, FF is catching and overtaking IE in terms of visitors to the site.