SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.
Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.
Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.
FluidApp.com
I seem to have an addiction when it comes to finding the best bug tracker out there - I’ve never been really been satisfied with the ones I’ve used in the past, and I’m just too lazy to write my own. As a result, I’ve ended up playing and installing a bunch of different apps, trying to find the bug tracker I like the most.
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Recently mediaRAIN produced a site for a local sculptor that features a video of the sculptor speaking about his artwork. He then came back to us and wanted us to make a few changes to the site, including the addition of a few animated elements on the site that were triggered by various points in the video. A perfect situation for using onCuePoint, right?
I set about making these changes, putting off adding the cue point metadata to the FLV files, as I wasn’t looking forward to re-encoding the videos. Even on a dual-processor PowerMac, it still takes some time to encode those FLV files. (There were three of them.) Plus, if I got one in the wrong spot, I’d have to re-encode the video again. So, like I said, I wasn’t looking forward to it. However, I found a very useful tool in FLVTool2.
FLVTool2 is an open-source, command-line tool written in Ruby for tweaking and manipulating your FLV files. You can trim FLV files, and add cue points to them after the videos have been encoded. Adding these cue points to my FLV files was a lot faster than it would have been if I’d had to re-encode each video. You just define the cue points in an XML file, point FLVTool2 at the FLV files, tell it where to find the XML file defining the new metadata, and then tell it where to put the new files. Once I ran the command, it only took about 15-20 seconds to update all three of my FLV files. I had to tweak the timing of one or two of them, and it was only a matter of seconds to run FLVTool2 again.
There are few other utilites I found that do the same thing, however, I like this one as it was open-source, and it will run under OSX, Windows, and Linux, which means you could even set it up to edit your FLV files on the server if you needed to. Very cool. If you’re doing a lot of work with FLV files and video in Flash, this is one you should check out. Of course if you are doing that kind of work, then you probably know about this one already. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
Link: FLVTool2
iClip lite is probably one of the most useful Dashboard widgets I have installed. Basically, it works like a clipboard that can hold 20 different items. Just copy or cut something, and drop it into one of the “clip bins” on the widget. You can then retrieve those items for use later.
One of the best parts is that the widget is free, and it works great with Flash. I use it to store snippets of code, movieclips, and graphics, so that I don’t have to copy one item, navigate somewhere on the timeline, paste it, return back to the original location, navigate again to the new location, etc. I can just copy everything from the original location, drop each piece into a bin on the widget, then move to the new location once, and drop everything into it’s new spot. Very handy.
Download: http://www.inventive.us/iCliplite/
Ever find yourself leaning in close to your monitor to check out how something looks in a design, to see if that’s a dot or a comma you’ve used in your code, or just to get a closer look at the details of what you’re working on? It’s something I do all the time, and it very well could be part of the reason my eyes are so bad, and keep getting worse.
To save yourself the trouble of leaning forward and squinting, there’s an option you can turn on in OSX’s Universal Access section of System Preferences to help out, and just make what you’re looking at bigger. Just enable “Zoom”, and you can use a set of keyboard shortcuts to zoom in on whatever your cursor is currently pointing at.
There are shortcuts for zooming in, zooming out, and if you like, once you’ve zoomed in, you can keep hitting the shortcut to zoom in until your cursor is too big for the screen. While this isn’t exactly the most earth-shattering bit of information, it’s still something that I’ve found useful, and thought I share for those who haven’t seen it yet.
A good friend and co-worker of mine, Jac Wright has recently launched a new service he and a partner have been working on for a while.
MyStickies.com is a free service that gives you the ability to place “sticky” notes on web sites you visit. Sort of an amped-up set of bookmarks. They require a free account on MyStickies.com, and a Firefox extension to activate. Essentially, when you find a site you want to remember some info on, use the extension to create a sticky note, place it on the screen, and when you return the site later on, it’ll be right where you’ve left it. It’s nice for remembering why you bookmarked a site in the first place.
You can also login to your account at MyStickies to view a list of all the sites you have left sticky notes at, and create note pages to jot stuff down as well. Currently, only Firefox is supported, both on Mac and Windows, and support for other browsers is on the way.
It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s pretty neat. So, you really don’t have anything to lose by trying it out.
Link: MyStickies.com
Many times when you’re working on a project, you need to keep track of the time that you spend on a particular project or task, either for billing, or to see how many hours you’ve wasted getting that idea or experiment of yours working.
I’ve looked for a good, cheap timer that I could use to track my projects, and have been using TimeLog for a while now. It works out pretty nicely, and does what I need it to, and it was cheap.
However, sometimes you don’t need all the charting and graphing, printing, or extra features that come with the timers you pay for. Lots of times, you just need to know how much time you’ve spent on something, and that’s it. At mediaRAIN, we use a time tracking system that handles the client info and report generating, so really all I need there is something that keeps a clock running for me, then I can transfer those hours into our tracker. TimeLog is great for doing contract work, but at the office, I just need the time and that’s it. Jac’s timer is great for that.
Jac needed a quick and easy to use timer as well, so he just built his own. It’s built in Flash, and wrapped with mProjector so you can run it as a standalone executable. He has both Mac and Windows versions available.
Download: Jac Wright’s Project Timer
As a side note, what methods or applications do you use to track your project time?
I’ve recently been looking for a good web-based bug tracker for my projects. So far, at work we’ve used a variety of packages, Mantis, FlySpray, and Eventum. But I haven’t been completely sold on anyone of them. I’ve used Bugzilla in the past with clients, but didn’t really like it that much either. But to be fair, it was a long time ago, so I’m going to be taking another look at the latest version.
What packages do you use? I’m curious to know what you consider the be the best package out there for bug tracking and other project management-type stuff.
Recently I’ve been doing some clean up of old files and other assorted junk on one of our servers at work. Between figuring out what needs to stay online, what needs to be archived, and what can be trashed, I noticed that several folders were much larger in filesize than they needed to be. Also, it was taking forever to delete folders because they had hundreds of unnecessary files in them. The files in question? Subversion .svn folders.
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As part of Opera Software’s celebration of 10 years of Opera, you can get a free registration code for the normally not-free broswer ($39). An unregistered version is available for free, but it will remind you that you should register often, and there are also ads. This free registration code will enable the full browser for you.
I very rarely use Opera, like most people I know, but it’s also good to have around for testing your sites across as many browsers as possible. And, if you can get a registered version for free, why not?
Just visit the Opera 10-Year Anniversary Party, and follow the link at the top of the page to get your free registration code.
Make sure that you’re registering the latest version - I tried to register version 6, which installed with Flash MX2004 on the Mac, and it didn’t work -, and if you don’t have it, you can download it here. Info on how to get the free registration code is on the download page, but you can also get the code without waiting for an email response from the link above. Just remember, This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).
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