Developing software in the Real World
When writing blog posts, I write directly in HTML, mostly from habit and because I've not set up mark-up text processing on WordPress. I'm comfortable enough with simple HTML that it's never seemed important enough to sort out, especially with MarsEdit's macros for common HTML tags. One thing that I need to do relatively regularly is to HTML encode code snippets for use in <tt> and <pre> tags. I have been doing this via a… continue reading.
I have so many photos that I can't store them all on my hard drive and keep them on my NAS. While on my home network, it would be convenient to automatically mount the NAS folder onto my Mac as I keep forgetting before I open Lightroom. Usually I would use automount to do this, but Lightroom cannot see automounted folders, so I decided to use a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. Mount a… continue reading.
I regularly print to PDF on my Mac, This is done from the print dialog by selecting Save as PDF from the drop down in the bottom left of the dialog which is a bit of a pain to get using the mouse. I recently discovered that I could create a keyboard shortcut to make this much easier. In System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts you can create a keyboard shortcut to… continue reading.
I use Apple's Reminders app to remind me about things that I need to do. It has the useful feature of syncing across my Mac, iPad and iPhone and I can add to it via Siri in my car. When I am notified on my Mac, a notification alert appears with two buttons: Complete and Later. Clicking Later offers a set of options to dismiss the alert and have it reappear in 5 minutes, in… continue reading.
Incredibly, macOS Mojave comes with Bash 3.22 by default still. Apparently this is due to licensing reasons, however Bash 4 has lots of lovely features including associative arrays that I'd like use. Hence, after reading the Internet for a bit, I've installed it on my Mac. This turned out to require just 3 commands:
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$ brew install bash $ sudo bash -c 'echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /etc/shells' $ chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash |
Close the terminal and open a new one which now has Bash 4! Using Bash 4 in scripts Any script… continue reading.
My favourite tool for working with APIs is curl, though I recognise that lots of people like HTTPie and seem very keen to tell about it every time I mention curl… With curl, I particularly like using the -i switch to view the status line and headers too without the additional cruft of -v: This generates an output that looks like this:
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$ curl -i https://api.joind.in HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:51:46 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.4 Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * Content-Length: 363 Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf8 {"events":"https:\/\/api.joind.in\/v2.1\/events","hot-events":"https:\/\/api.joind.in\/v2.1\/events?filter=hot","upcoming-events":"https:\/\/api.joind.in\/v2.1\/events?filter=upcoming","past-events":"https:\/\/api.joind.in\/v2.1\/events?filter=past","open-cfps":"https:\/\/api.joind.in\/v2.1\/events?filter=cfp","docs":"http:\/\/joindin.github.io\/joindin-api\/"} |
What I would like to do is pretty print the body if… continue reading.
As I add more and more of my own script targets to my composer.json files, I find that it would be helpful to have tab autocomplete in bash. I asked on Twitter and didn't get an immediate solution and as I had already done something similar for Phing, I rolled up my sleeves and wrote my own. Start by creating a new bash completion file called composer in the bash_completion.d directory. This file needs executable… continue reading.
I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as pdfpc and on Mac there's Keynote. Keynote doesn't read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O'Neill's PDF to Keynote. This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it… continue reading.
I like to use Finder in Column mode (⌘+3). i.e. this view: One feature of this view is that you can resize all the columns to fit by alt+double clicking on the move handle between each column. There doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this operation though, so I created one using Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro can move the mouse around the screen and click with it which is exactly what I need.… continue reading.
I've written before about how I tend to use my Mac via the keyboard as much as possible to minimise pain in my arm. Possibly the best application on macOS to facilitate this is Shortcat which enables me to point and click at any UI element in any native Mac app. I rely on it a lot and it makes nearly every app I use accessible to me. Recently, Slack updated their desktop app so… continue reading.
Rob Allen is a sofware consultant and developer concentrating on HTTP APIs. He develops in PHP, Python and other interesting languages, contributing to rst2pdf, Slim Framework, Apache OpenWhisk amongst other OSS projects. Based in Worcester, UK, he runs Nineteen Feet and is the author of Zend Framework in Action.
Around the web:
Framing Focus blog
Twitter: @akrabat
Instagram: akrabatic
Flickr: photos
GitHub: Rob Allen
IRC: akrabat on freenode
