Macaw: Could this be the front end web design tool we’ve all been waiting for?

If you’re a web designer or developer and you haven’t been living under a rock this week (or on tight deadlines and trying to stay off twitter).. then you’ve probably already seen the screencast walkthrough of Macaw.  Quick Links: Macaw website Sneek Peek  @attasi on twitter @gesusc on twitter It’s generated a fair bit of interest from people in my twitter stream, however the under discussed, yet arguably the most impressive feature of the entire video really comes at the last second – the code. This is the first time i’ve seen a WYSIWYG style editor that is trying to deal with modern issues, like responsive design, that produces decent markup.   I’m sure that in practice there is a workflow that would need to be learned in order to get Macaw to actually generate clean semantic markup – however this is a massive leap in the right direction. One might even argue that this is what Muse should have been. The other interesting tidbit is that @attasi alludes to the fact that the app is built on top of HTML/CSS technology, wrapped (assumedly in a Webview) – for a purely HTML application, the interface looks pretty...

Edgy Theme – Sublime Text 2

What is it? So, I’ve actually been using this for aaages. But the other day, someone looked at my laptop and noticed my editor and asked what it was. I said, oh it’s Sublime – to which i received a “no it’s not.”.  Boring conversation about how i’d skinned it to look like Brackets.io ensued… The end result is, i’ve made it into a github repo – so see if other people are interested in changing how sublime looks. Basically my problem was always the same with Sublime as it was with Eclipse – it’s tabs are all big and curvy and i don’t like them. Get the theme:  Github repo: https://github.com/soyrex/sublime-theme-edgy  ...

Retrofitting Responsive CSS

I’ve been working recently on getting together a responsive design solution for clients that already have a website and just want to add responsive in order to be accessible on mobiles and tablets. Major caveat: this is not a best practice, in fact it’s pretty inefficient and clunky – but it does fill a gap. Basically, the idea is to create a new CSS file that applies the necessary media queries and overrides the styling for the site to make it respond for mobile users. The client prompting this is Costhetics – as a content producer, they have existing practices in place (as well as a pretty big library of content) and needed a way to enhance the experience of consuming their content on mobile without needing to immediately reimplement their site. The results of this process are now in staging and I’ll update this post with links and notes after go...

Coda Plugin: HTML Word Counter

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...

PHP Simple Tweet

SimpleTweet is a class to load recent tweets for a particular twitter user. It uses the search API (which requires no authentication) to load the tweets and store them in a simple local filesystem cache file. Note: This functionality has since been removed from the twitter API – this code now needs to be updated to support Oauth in order to be compatible with the twitter API version 1.1. Links: PHP SimpleTweet on github Download...