soyrex

Digital Color Meter is basically your Photoshop colour picker for your entire mac desktop. Gone are the days where I needed to open a PSD just to work out the hex codes for a colour off a site.

DCM lives in the Applications/Utilities folder on your mac When you open it you are presented with a small window, the left of which shows a small zoomed image of what’s under your mouse and the right allows you to choose the type of colours you are interested in. For our purposes as a web developer we want hex codes, so we choose RGB in Hexadecimal (8bit).

The true secret to working this tool into your workflow is the keyboard shortcut to copy the colour as text. To do this, you just hit Apple-Shift-C while the correct colour is shown, this will copy the text of the hexadecimal colour into your clipboard.. something like: “#186231”. This can be pasted directly into your CSS or HTML. It’s somewhat annoying that it copies with quote marks… but still a real time saver.

** Updated! Version 2 supports reading thousands in correct english.**

Download the plugin here - 8.5Kb

So Coda 1.6 has been released. The major change appears to be the addition of a plugin system for adding functionality. Basically this allows developers to write small scripts that manipulate text from Coda. These plugins are then displayed inside Coda in the Plug-ins menu (or with keyboard shortcuts), so that they can be called easily.

Now, since i spend half my life in Coda, i wanted to play around with this and see if there was anything i could add to the community. Problem i found was, i dont really have many problems with Coda’s interface - it already does pretty much everything i want. BUT.. while writing an article for Smashing Magazine (which was required in HTML), i noticed that i didn’t have a good way to count the words in my article (since it was in HTML - Coda didn’t have a word count at all). Now, the whole beauty of Coda is in its all-in-one interface, so it kind of annoyed me that i couldn’t get a word count for my article without either opening it in some other program, or copying the content into my terminal and using wc.

Anyways, in order to flex my proverbial developer muscles a little and play with the Coda plugin interface, i built a simple plugin that will strip HTML and count the words in a document - it’s simple (like super-uber-simple).. but it does the trick.. and i figure there might be someone out there who might appreciate it. Basically, it strips the HTML tags out and then counts the words and then uses the OSX say command to read the word count out audibly - it supports either a selection block or the full document.

Please leave a comment too :)

Seriously.. where’s the care in Applecare?

I’ve been a mac user ever since they first released the andonized aluminium G4 powerbooks with OSX preinstalled (so coming up on 5 years…). I love my macs, i convert my friends, i bitch about windows… etc.

However, my global “warranty” really gets me worked up. I have just bought a Core 2 macbook and taken my previous macbook to the apple shop here in Barcelona to be repaired. It has a crack in the case where my wrists rest, and also the CD drive is being obstructed by something.. i can’t get disks to go in.. super!

So, after arguing with the guy (in my broken spanish) I finally get it logged for service.. he tells me it could take a month.. i laugh.. he says he’s serious. Anyhow, they fixed it in about 3 days… great! So why am i complaining? The fixed the case (new bottom case assembly) and they replaced the SuperDrive… I was like.. hrm.. could have sworn it was a problem with the casing not the drive.. but whatever. So i get home, and disks still don’t go into the machine. ARGH! So i go back the next day, with a CD and show the guy in the shop - and it works? wtf? I apologise, feeling stupid and head home to reinstall OSX.. and the DVD wont fit.. which is when i realise that DVDs are in fact thicker than CDs. So, the following Monday, back to the shop, only to be told they can fix it.. but it wont be ready until the 26th of this month.. because they’re closing for holidays! The dude was nice, he suggested i bring it back on the 26th and get it done then… which would be fine.. except the warranty ends on the 11th… argh! So when i explained this, he agreed that the best option was to leave it there for 3 weeks.

Anyone wanna place bets on whether they try to tell me it’s out of warranty when i go to pick it up? pah.