albino irishman

Most people who know me know that I’m a bit of a Google fan when it comes to email, RSS, and organising my life with a calendar. Not only is everything online and accessible, but each of Google’s tools have a clean streamlined interface that gets out of the way and lets you get the job done.

Well today, Google Reader just got that much better. If your a user of Google’s RSS reader you’ve probably been frustrated in the past with its inability to search back through your feeds for that specific one you forgot to star and is now lost in the sands of time. Located above the main feed section there is now a search box with a handmade drop down menu that lists your folders and subscriptions. Now searching is as easy as selecting your category, smacking in your search terms, and clicking search.

I must say, it’s about time.

In addition to the search box the “Loading” notifier got an update as well. Instead of hogging the middle of the screen it’s now located at the top middle of the screen is smaller and has a little spinner to let you know it’s doing its thing. Very nice.

Well I’ve been seeing so many people talking about a “blogging”:http://macromates.com/blog/archives/2006/06/19/blogging-from-textmate/ bundle for “Textmate.”:http://www.macromates.com/ This is hot on the heels of a “Textpattern”:http://textpattern.com/ “bundle”:http://www.consking.com/article/bundle-for-textpattern-reborn released recently. Being into that sort of thing, I thought I’d give it a shot …

If you’re using a Mac for web development and you haven’t heard of Textmate you’ve probably had your head removed from your body and stored in a glass jar somewhere, well away from an internet capable computer. Textmate has been popularised as the best editor for writing “Ruby on Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.com/ web applications and after “using”:http://www.jedit.org/ a “few”:http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ “editors”:http://www.radrails.org/ over the past year or so I’d have to say it wins that claim hands down.

Recently, a programmer by the name of “Brad Choate”:http://www.bradchoate.com/ decided he’d write a bundle (application extension) to allow Textmate users to compose and post blog articles from Textmate, thus removing the need for applications such as “MarsEdit”:http://ranchero.com/marsedit/ and “Ecto.”:http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ Note, I claim that there was the intention to remove the need for other blogging programs - a claim that the author has not made (yeah, I’m covering my backside on this one). But why write a utility like this if that wasn’t the intention?

Anyway, before I get really off-topic about the appropriateness of such a plugin (bundle, add-on, whatever), the verdict is that it’s a pretty sweet addition to an already highly competent editor. If you haven’t given it a go, take 10 minutes out of your day, brew some coffee, and give it a whirl.

I do apologise for the last couple of posts being concerned with the new technologies that I’ve been playing around with to post to this site. It does remind me of the reaction after my 4th post about updating the look of the website a while back.

Promise better content :)

Thought I’d give “Flock”:http://www.flock.com/ a whirl this morning. I’ve been across Flock before but dropped it mostly due to the fact that it didn’t (and still doesn’t) support native OS X widgets. This still hasn’t changed but my distaste for non-native OS X widgets has lessened somewhat due to my reliance on Google services (Gmail, Google Reader etc). It also has some nifty “features”:http://flock.com/tour/ built in that could be handy when they receive a bit more polish.

First impressions are pretty good but it’s certainly a beta product and still has a few bugs running around that need a squashing. I’ve just been playing around with the blogging tool.  While being a breeze to setup it certainly lacks many features that most blogging backends provide as standard.  If you’re into playing around with newish technology and think you could use a browser with built in RSS, blogging, and photosharing capabilities (and plenty more) give it a whirl. You could be converted.