Odds and Ends

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Here is a good list of many, many Mac OSX Hotkeys. It originally started at 90, but is updated every week or so with a different application specific group of hotkeys. I will post a PDF soon if it is in demand. Here we go:

Note: Hyphens between keys like: “⌘-N” mean press keys at the same time. Also, ⌥ is the Option Key, ⌘ is the command key, and ⌃ is the Control key.

Startup Keys

Finder Shortcuts

Menu ⌘s

Universal Access and VoiceOver

Other ⌘s

Now lets get into some application specific hotkeys:

Textmate

HTML/CSS In Textmate

These are just a few of the many, many, Textmate hotkeys. There is literally a hotkey for everything.

I’ll probably add more Hotkeys as time progresses.

I dropped by my local Barnes and Noble today, and picked up a few books. Two of them are from the hit Web Design: Studios series (books 1 and 2 of the series, infact), and they are truly AWESOME pocket sized books. Note that I call them pocket sized books only because they’re 8×5.6 inches and although you couldn’t really fit that inside your pocket, they are quite small.

They feature 90 or so Web Design Studios, giving the name, “mission” or services that the studio provides, year founded, team size/members, tools used, location, awards, clients, and contact details. Each design firm has 2 pages to itself (you open the book and all you see if one studio), and there are full color screenshots of websites and work that the studio has done.

These books are excellent and a must for a web designer looking for inspiration or a web studio looking to scout out some community members/competition.  I think it’s great to see what the best studios out there are creating on print, and how’s this for an idea for taschen, the publisher of the book: Create a book with the best designs out there on the web. Get 100 of the best of the best from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) galleries, Smashing Magazine, and any other sources and put it all into a full color 8×5.6 book. Brilliant! 

Thinksecret has pointed to August seventh as the day that a new revised iMac, as well as a new iPod will be revealed. Newcomer to the Apple rumors gang is 9 to 5 mac, and they describe the new machine on their website:

 What seems to be known about the iMacs is that they will support a brand new metal enclosure which is much more sleek (under 2 inches thick) than the previous revision and lose much of their “chin”. Contrary to popular belief (that the 17 inch version was a goner) they will be available in 17, 20 and 24 inch varieties. The keyboard is also redesigned to be much more mobile and gain additional media controlling functionality (remote control anyone?) - oh and it is RAZOR thin.   

Another website, Appletell.com, says that the announcement will be delayed due to issues with the new keyboard. Whatever the case, it seems like the long awaited iMac revision will be out before September.

Unfortunately, I had a feverishly busy week, so I wasn’t able to post, but the carnival must go on.

Continue reading The Tech Blog Carnival for July 12th

Welcome to the July 5, 2007 edition of the tech-blog carnival. If you publish a tech oriented blog or online magazine, submit your articles and become part of the community. Continue reading to view the entries.

Continue reading The Tech-Blog Carnival: July 5th Edition

I have 6 Pownce invites for the few people who havn’t gotten in so far. If you’d like one, drop a comment below.

Earlier today I was playing a game of Band of Bugs on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a fun and addicting game, but there is no shortage of dialogue that you have to “hit A” through before, after, and even during a level. Yet it is possible to scan through the dialogue and still learn what they’re trying to teach you or what you’re supposed to do, because of the way the designers emphasized important words in the speech bubbles. They change the color of the text, and I thought that a slight modification would make an excellent idea for the web. Instead of changing text color, I propose slightly changing the background to emphasize the words more.

Because so many people scan web pages instead of reading them, wouldn’t it be great if all the most important terms or points in an article were highlighted? Yes, I know some websites/blogs already do this. I just wish the idea to get around and see where people go with it. Hit read the rest of this entry if you’d like to see some example markup to make this possible, as well as how to modify the Wordpress Visual Editor to display a background color button.

Continue reading Highlighting- Improving Scan-ability

After my last post about using the <code> element along with entities for > and < to display HTML or PHP on your blog, and setting out to better style the <code> element on this site, I wondered how others were styling the <code> element. So I thought I'd take a look at how Nyssa Brown, Andrew Nesbitt of Teabass, Veerle, Dan Cederhold of SimpleBits fame, Jonathan Snook(of Snook.ca), and Steve Smith(from Ordered List) style their code blocks.

Continue reading Make The Code in Your Blog Posts Look Great