Reed Olsen

Quick tip:

To take a screenshot on your iPhone or iPod touch, simply hold down the home button for about two seconds, then tap the power button. Then take a peek at your Camera Roll to find your image.

I’m sure most web developers have come to hate the variety of layout engines that web browsers are built on. My site will look perfect in Firefox (Gecko) and screw up completely in Internet Explorer (Trident). Thankfully, the Web Standards Project is starting to push browser developers to comply to a set of best practices for how their browser displays pages.

One way that they’re (attempting) to do this is with Acid Tests. Both the Acid2 and Acid3 tests have become benchmarks for CSS compliance. Presto, WebKit, and Gecko have already made huge strides towards better browsing by making their layout engines render…righter

Unfortunately, Microsoft has no incentive to improve their browsing, as they have over 2/3 of the browser market under their belt.

Regardless, I’m very impressed with what MobileSafari has achieved in the latest iPhone/iPod Touch firmware release. A perfect rendering of the Acid3 test can be found here:

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

When I ran the Acid3 test, I came up with the following page:

Not bad! Especially when considering that Firefox 3.0.1 only scored a 71:

Quicksilver has long been hailed as one of the best productivity tools available for Mac OS X. However, with Apple’s release of Leopard, (and the consequential beefing-up of Spotlight,) many users have uninstalled Quicksilver, and have never turned back.

Leopard’s upgraded spotlight can do some pretty neat tricks that were just a tad bit clunky in Quicksilver. For example:

• Calculator! (try cbrt(3) for some cube-root fun).
• Dictionary! Get definitions on the fly.
• Search email messages without opening Mail.

Despite all of these cool tricks, I haven’t quite given up on Quicksilver. There are two cool things that I did today that revived my faith in this awesome app:

Shell Command Hotkeys

I’m sure there are cool *nix ways to accomplish this, but here’s the Quicksilver way.

Step 1: Install the Terminal Plugin in Quicksilver

Step 2: Go to ‘Triggers’, click the plus button and select ‘HotKey’.

Step 3: In the field that says “Select an item”, type ‘.’ which will send you into text-mode. Then type the command you would like to run in the Terminal.

Step 4: Hit Tab to modify the Action field, and start typing “Run a…”. You can then use the arrow keys to select the appropriate action from the expanded list. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should see “Run a Text Command in Terminal” show up.

Step 5: Now it’s up to you to configure this custom trigger. Highlight your new command, and click the button to expand the options panel.

Step 6: Finally, bind your command to a Hotkey and you’re good to go!

Firefox 3 Bookmarks

Firefox 3 and Quicksilver don’t seem to play together nicely. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Firefox and Quicksilver won’t catalog your bookmarks, here’s a lil’ fix for you:

Step 1: In your address bar, type in about:config and accept Mozilla’s disclaimer.

Step 2: Using the filter, locate “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML”

Step 3: Double click on this line to change its value from false to true.

Step 4: Restart Firefox, restart Quicksilver, and rescan to find your newly exported Bookmarks. Now that these are indexed, you can bind them to hotkeys, or use the launcher to get to ‘em.

Hope this helps!

I was asked to give a brief tour of Xcode and Interface Builder at our monthly Cocoheads meeting last night. Here’s my segment:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/byucocoaheads/videos/1/

Huge thanks to Vara Software who provided us with a copy of Screen Flow. If you haven’t seen it already, you’re missing out! Screen Flow