Posts Tagged ‘workflow’

My OS X Lion Horror Story

October 13th, 2011

OS X Lion was released in July 2011 and includes a number of new upgrades. Some of these are very impressive, such as complex touch gestures for the trackpad. Others are more mundane, such as fullscreen mode for applications and hidden scrollbars. But all things considered the upgrade is definitely worth it.

The problem isn’t Lion, it’s how it has to be installed. You can no longer pick up an install disc from an Apple Retailer, instead you have to download the upgrade from the App Store. For slow connections this can be a nuisance, since the file is almost 4GB.

However, the main problem is that there is no discernible way to perform a clean install. Rather, Lion installs itself on top of Snow Leopard, and then deletes the installer. (Savvy users may know about the clean install method.)

Furthermore, if you have a problem … Read more…

Tags: adobe, apple, dev environment, installation, Lion, mac OSX, workflow
Posted in dev environment | 6 Comments

Handy CSS Cleanup Tool

August 27th, 2008

Inevitably, when finishing development of a front-end, I find myself going through the painstaking process of cleaning up extraneous CSS styles. This style was for debugging, this block was for a page that got nixed, this piece I used when conceptualizing the site another way: I don’t think it’s possible to develop a website without removing some styles at the end. Dreading another round of CSS cleanup, I considered programming a tool to spider a site and tell me which parts of the stylesheets were used. It seemed a daunting task so I checked online, and sure enough, someone had already developed it, and far better than I could have. The tool I found, Dust-Me Selectors, is a Firefox extension that makes cleaning up CSS a snap. It can spider an entire site or a group of pages to determine which CSS blocks are unused … Read more…

Tags: CSS, front-end, plugins, workflow
Posted in front-end

Dashalytics: Google Analytics for Mac OSX

April 7th, 2008

If you’re anything like me you open up Google Analytics with your morning coffee, check your email, then reload Analytics, just in case the cache has refreshed. There’s a new version of an OSX dashboard widget, Dashalytics, that will revolutionize the amount of time you can spend obsessing over minute statistics. Dashalytics puts Google Analytics at your fingertips, providing a quick access point to some of the most used Analytics reports, directly from the dashboard in Mac OSX.

How to use Dashalytics

Configuring Dashalytics is simple, just enter your Google Analytics account information; it even supports multiple Analytics accounts through the keychain on OSX. After logging in, you are able to access the three most used tabs: visitors, content, and traffic sources. Within each of these tabs, there are three different reports, but these sub-reports are essentially only the overview of each tab.

Additionally, Dashalytics provides common … Read more…

Tags: analytics, mac OSX, widgets, workflow
Posted in general web | 1 Comment

Spaces in Mac OSX Leopard – Best Workflow

March 22nd, 2008

At first glance Mac OSX Leopard looks like Tiger with a new, sleeker skinning. A few new applications are available, and a few others are broken, but overall basically the same thing. That is, until you discover the Spaces command.

Spaces are great, they’re like the Expose flyout but taken up a level. With Spaces, you can arrange all the windows on your screen, all the clutter, into multiple, separate areas. Each of these areas functions like its own desktop, when you use the Expose flyout, only the windows in that Space are seen. And the best part is that you can set programs to open by default in certain spaces. I love this feature, since I am always working on such disparate things. Now my web development can be separate from my web design and … Read more…

Tags: apple, mac OSX, workflow
Posted in webdev

Workflow: Mac vs Windows

February 26th, 2008

Everyone knows the value of improving your workflow. Well it turns out I work a whole lot faster on a Mac, both in web development and web design. I think the OSX developers must have thought a great deal about workflow, because Mac has a lot of great features: from much more drag-and-drop integration between programs than windows, to little things like the mouse command to fly out all windows or show the desktop (this saves me so much time). But workflow on a Mac goes much deeper than these features.

Web development is great on a Mac, since the programs you need for coding run very quickly and the terminal is really handy for doing lots of things, its really easy to move between the terminal and the finder/other programs. Also since the terminal is Shell based, its … Read more…

Tags: apple, cross-platform, integration, mac OSX, shell, web design, webdev, workflow
Posted in personal | 2 Comments

Launched YogaEnergyHeal.com

June 28th, 2007

About a week ago I started work on YogaEneryHeal.com. The site is relatively small, so I opted to go with plain old HTML pages for the majority of the pages. The only php is on the article page, which is a switch to make coding easier, and the contact page in order to process the form.

Overall I wanted the site to be very simple and to have a soothing appearance. I got some great photographs from their photographer and even one that I incorporated into the header (at first I didn’t notice how low res the photos were, and I ended up working with one of them, ugh).

There was a registered trademark of another company that we were using on the site, which set back our launch date by a couple days. Although I followed the trademark specifications of the client, there were several … Read more…

Tags: webdev, workflow
Posted in webdev