Station Master's Journal

This week we’ve decided to review Coda, a fully furbished text editor built by Panic Software. Our office has recently started using Coda and since Panic offers a free trial we thought we’d download it and try it for 2 weeks. Having been long-time Transmit FTP owners we’ve really appreciated the quality of software that Panic has produced in the past we were certain that this would amount to a killer of a text editor.

What caught our eye initially about Coda was it’s feature set. Here are just a few of the features that Coda boasts their product offers:

• Advanced Site Management
• Top-Notch Text Editing
• Visual CSS Editor
• Live Web Preview
• Built-in SSH Terminal
• Comprehensive Reference Material
• Real-time Collaborative Editing

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Continuing the saga of interesting media I have found this week… I heard the song “Code Monkey Like Fritos” for the first time on TWIT.tv and just couldn’t help but track it down and add it to my blog. For all you programmer’s out there with day jobs you do not enjoy, this one is for you! It’s great to listen to even if only for a few laughs.

 

 Code Monkey Like Fritos [3:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Taking a browse through LifeHacker today I caught this post on making Powerpoint slides less boring through the use of photographing stickies. Just one more way you can bring a unique style to those important presentations. I thought the idea was great.

I just spotted the new Philips: Drag & Draw Technology on Youtube today. A very interesting laser based technology that will allow kids to draw all they want on a wall, then point their magic wand at their drawing and watch as it comes to life. The best part is that unlike pencils or pens, these drawings won't require you to paint over them.

I wonder if there are any practical business applications for a tool like this. I could see it being an efficient way to flowchart thoughts in a meeting if it was articulate enough – say goodbye to that whiteboard and eraser. Interesting.

The recent announcement of Apple's iPhone has caused a massive amount of buzz on the net. After watching the keynote last week all I could say was "I want one" with one of those jaw dropping expressions that I'm sure the majority of the global geekisphere was performing. It is very clear that the phone will be revolutionary and I can only imagine what the CEO's of Blackberry and Palm stated after watching Steve's keynote. I believe it would go like this:

Well there goes that... what the [insert old-English curse word here] do we have that can compete? How long is it going to take us to get something similar out there?

Luckily it doesn't look like Apple will be targeting enterprise users with this initial glimpse at the iPhone (so Blackberry and Palm may be able to hang onto that market for a little while longer), but it sure will blow away the competition in the personal pda phone arena. The combination of Mac OS X + Movies + iTunes + Camera + WiFi + Bluetooth + GSM + Multitouch screen will definitely put Apple substantially above the competition on a number of levels. This phone will also be a web designer's dream, since it will run Safari, and with any luck it will spark a revolution of devices that utilize modern browsers (I'd love to see Firefox run on an iPhone competitor). Wouldn't it be great if you never had to design a separate CSS stylesheet for cell phones?

There are a lot of positives about the iPhone, but I think there's been so much buzz about how awesome it is that there has been very little coverage of some of the potential down-sides (and Apple's potential solutions). The first thing I thought of while watching the keynote was: What if you are driving? (more...)

Well I'll have to be designing on the road for the next 2 weeks. I'll be out of the office and away in Boston on a business trip. Everything should continue to operate smoothly as I can collect both phone and email messages.

There is actually one very good skill that has developed out of all this constant travel over the last few months and that has been my growing affinity with the trackpad on my Powerbook.

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We use the Magpie RSS reader to display the list of 'Recent Journal Entries' on the front page. It does its job well, but it sometimes fails to display HTML entities like apostrophes and quotes correctly. Instead, they appear as a '?'. This problem comes up with some frequency on the Magpie mailing list, but I wasn't able to find a working solution there. (more...)

For those of you who haven't already heard, a new version of Firefox (the best web browser on the planet) is out. The award-winning Web browser from Mozilla is now faster, even more secure, and totally customizable to your online life.