Paparazzi! snaps my web pages
This one is too cool for words. I think this one came to me from Dan Counsell of Realmac Software. Anyhow, as are most of my articles about apps, this app is the perfect tool for any web designers toolkit (well what did you expect from a web designer). I find there are a lot of times where I just need a little (or a lot) more space on my screen to see what’s below the fold on my web designs. Well there is a great little app called Paparazzi! that takes care of all that for you and will take a screen shot of any URL you throw at it. But it won’t just snap what your browser can see, it takes a picture of the whole thing, from header to footer.
It’s free for the time being and I don’t know if there are plans to make it a paid-for app but it would be certainly worth it to me. To get an idea of how insanely col this app is, take a look at this image of an extraordinarily long wed page that I posted on Flickr.
Here lies the empty shell of a blog post that once was
This was the place where I happily showed you a website for a big company that I was contracted to write code for on behalf of another company. One company (which one, I don’t know) failed to notify me of any NDA’s or otherwise useful contract agreements that may have made light of the fact that I may not promote myself as a “provider” of the bigger of the two companies (for which I feel I did not do).
There are two things at play here:
- Uh… yes I can. In Canada we live through intolerable copyright laws that do nothing to protect the original author or creator of creative works and instead, protect he/she who commissions that work. However, there is a nifty little piece of the copyright law that covers the moral rights to said works that, under most normal circumstances, entitles the author or creator of said work to be associated with their work if they so choose:
from Kerr and Nadeau; Barristors and Solicitors, Patent and Trademark agents:
“Moral rights are closely related to copyright, and are also protected under Canadian law. These provide the author of a work with the right to the integrity of the work, and the right, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with the work as its author by name or pseudonym, as well as the right to remain anonymous. Moral rights may be waived by the author, but such waiver must be express. It is important to remember that an assignment of copyright does not, in and of itself, waive moral rights.” - And that brings me to my second point. Never take on work without a written contract. I took down this blog post for the good of the business relationship, but I didn’t have to. I didn’t have a contract, nor was I informed of inclusion in a contract between company A and company B, that waived any such rights so my own moral rights are still intact.
What is the lesson? Never chew gum while eating rice; it does nothing for the flavour.
Plink, plink!
Plink, plink, plink, plink Water drips into the sink It’s hard for me to think and think With water dripping, plink, plink.
Drip, drip, drip, drip I’m going crazy, I’m going to flip Into a sleep I’ll never slip With that water going drip.
Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop The waters filled the sink like soup From this night I won’t recoup With water dripping bloop, bloop.
Sneak peek #4 and more
So the bulk of all of the boring work is done on this project. Now I am getting into the super sexy stuff, the money making stuff… I must say that even the boring stuff looks goooood though.
And also…
So I have another project due out this Tuesday. I can’t give any details but it’s for a heavy hitting client of PUMP Communications. It should have been a fairly simple one but there were a few hang-ups in the beginning (design by committee sort of hang-ups) and in the end I don’t think anyone was taking me seriously when I said the French translation might take up to a week or more (which it did).
Anyhow, with a few days to spare I managed to get the project up and fine tuned ready for release this coming Tuesday. Look for more on it then.
But wait…
Some time ago I worked for a lab in the automative industry and to shorten the story some, they recently needed a website, a place to download some of their docs. So in record time (less than a day) I pumped out this site. I mean it’s not ground breaking but it’s better than a kick in the ass for a day’s worth of coding.
Sneak peek #3
I just wrote a new php function today that looks at the directory of the current page, extracts each folder name and then parse that information into a functioning breadcrumb trail. It’s not as truncated as I would like it to be, but I just can’t wrap my head around the problem enough to make the script smaller than it is.
So far everything but the header images on this new project is served up dynamically depending on the page you are on. But the really sexy part of this whole project is the skin! This thing is put together like… WOW! I can’t wait to show you more.
ExpanDrive expands my horizons
I’ve been pretty quite about ExpanDrive despite my HEAVY usage of it over the last week. I kept quiet simply because I really wanted to drill this one to death before getting behind something with this kind of power.
For those looking for a way to best describe ExpanDrive, it’s like iDisk without a .Mac account, it’s like Jungle Disk without the transfer rate$, it’s WebDAV without jenky WebDAV protocol (can’t pass many programming commands since WebDAV uses those same commands) or it’s like an external Firewire or USB drive that you access anywhere with physically carrying an hard drive around… ExpanDrive brings mounted disk functionality to remote storage locations.
Like I said, I have been driving this thing to wall since I got it last week, and yes it gets a little shaggy at times (which could be to blame on the server or the ISP as much as the app itself) but overall, this is a must have app. I have been beating the snot out this doing web development from the Finder (or Path Finder, truth be told) once I need to move beyond local development yet not ready to go live. I have installed and run apps directly from ExpanDrive drives. I have used it for storage, a file server… the reality is, anything you use any mounted volume for you can use ExpanDrive.
It’s brilliant.
Be warned: I have found that when using it as a web development platform the odd edit I make to a remote file will suddenly render that file useless leaving me no option but to replace that file with a local copy (this happens most often with style sheets). I have yet to watch my console to really see what’s going on but when I find out, I’ll let you know.
Sneak peek #2
Oh it’s coming along so nice. Did I say Easter? Well, yeah, I guess that’s probably a realistic goal, but I just feel at times that it could be so much sooner. If it weren’t for all these paying gigs getting in the way… hehe.
So I’m stoked about ExpanDrive, have you heard of it?Man, this little app is a gem! I am going to get more in depth on NutMac but I can tell you this much; developing php and mysql on a local machine is all fine and good, but there comes a time when you just have to move it live. ExpanDrive is making continued live development a dream, like it’s still local, but with the power of the web server behind it.
Did I say Easter?
Cmd-tab and quit
Here is a quick little tip that surprisingly few mac people know about, switchers and veterans alike. I’m sure Windows users and most Mac users will be familiar with the alt-tab(windows)/cmd-tab(mac) method of app switching, if not, just try it. You’ll see a heads up display of your running apps which you can tab to or mouse to in order to select a running app to bring to the front.
But what many people aren’t aware of is the fact that you can use this method as a quick way to quit a bunch of apps. On a Mac, simply cmd-tab to the app you want to quit and while still holding the cmd key, press the “q” key and that app will quit right then and there. Keep depressing the cmd key to quit other apps as you go. It’s that simple.