This is super timely, I know, but I’ve been meaning to get around to making this for a while. As far as the book goes, my wife read the first chapter to me (about the creation of the Swiffer) and it might’ve been the most tedious grouping of words anyone has ever uttered in my direction. It’s like a magical spell that causes boredom.
In fairness to Jonah, I can’t imagine anyone interviewing Bob Dylan and not having to make up the quotes he said.
Creating your own themes is a really easy process, and I’m sure if you’ve figured out how to import the files, you’ve also learned to export them and how to tweak the colors to your particular fancy. That being said, I’m going to go ahead and explain it anyway.
Finding a color scheme that both looks good together and can cover the various facets of web code can be tedious. Unless you’re a design nerd of have some level of OCD that requires that everything have the same six corresponding colors, using a web app to help you pick them is a lot easier.
I’ve found that one of the best places to start is with Adobe Kuler. I like to pick a cool looking Kuler group and base my colors around that. Kuler is also a great way to do this, because you can upload your own images and have Kuler extract the color theme automatically. If you’re not into Kuler, there are several other sites, including ColourLovers, Pictaculous and Daily Color Scheme that provide the same basic function. Get about 6 colors to work with.
In any particular language you’re going to have to have around 6 categories to assign colors to: Numbers, tags, attributes, comments, strings and functions (I realize this isn’t true across the board, but it’s true enough).
HTML is actually the language that you’ll have the most trouble giving colors to because it has to incorporate everything into one screen. But remembering that comments are comments, numbers are numbers and strings are strings regardless of the language helps in the ultimate coloration of the final product.
The easiest way to do it is to have Kuler up on one side of your screen and use the magnifying glass tool in the color selector screen just drag it over the color you want to assign. You could always drag the selector around the color wheel and shade it to taste, but I’ve never had that much time in my life.
Unfortunately, there’s no super quick way to do this, so you’re going to have to click on the color box next to the words and repeat the process until you’ve either finished or decided that you have something better to do. You can also use the radio boxes to the right of the color box to either bold or italicize the particular aspect of your code.
It’s important to realize that there are 5 different HTML color files: ASP-HTML, JSP-HTML, LassoScript-HTML, PHP-HTML and plain ol’ HTML. I usually only bother to change the PHP-HTML and HTML files, because I largely just edit wordpress themes. Honestly, you should only change the files you’re going to use the most.
Finally, when you’ve gone through the process you just need to click the export button and save it to a file. It’s a good idea to export the original files (or you could just download them from here) just in case you want to restore everything to the factory settings.
You have to export each individual file and save them as the file type as the name in the designated folder. Either save just the files you will use most often or go through and make an entire theme.
Shortly, I’ll have a video ready that I’ll put here as a walkthrough. But it probably won’t be until Friday.
If you want to share them with others, leave me a comment and I’ll post them here on my site. I enjoy seeing people’s designs and want to create a library of coda seestyles that people can download from a single site.
I’m a little disappointed with CreativeBe, who apparently became Incredible Bee and stopped providing the world with Sponge, the winner of this week’s Magnetic Oreo Award. The good news is that the award can still go to CNET, for their website versiontracker.com which essentially has preserved an app that Mac didn’t see fit to put in their newfangled app store. But still this little application can save you a ton of space on you hard drive, as well as making it impossibly easy to delete files that are critical to your OS functioning properly. Win-win.
Sponge is an app that scans your hard drive and tells you what is taking up the most space, helping you find space wasters and reclaim your hard drive. It does this in three ways: Listing applications by size, scanning volumes for data hogs and pulling up duplicate files.
You might ask yourself, "Why does he have three different versions of Microsoft Office? Why doesn't he delete all but 2011?" The answer, my friends, is delirium.
When I said that this was the greatest app, what I meant was that this was a pretty good application with one great feature. And this is it: Sweep Data Hogs. By selecting one of the volumes on your computer, Sponge instantly starts calculating which ones take up the most space and ranks them in order of size. Obviously, if you’re like me and you have a lot of movies and music on your computer, these are going to be the data hogs. Sponge lets you track every folder in the entire hard drive, helping you find duplicates, undeleted podcasts and other non-essential space killers and put them to rest forever.
I found the movie Troy on my hard drive in an obscure section of my iTunes music folder as well as nearly 20GB of podcasts I thought I’d deleted. That freed up an incredible amount of space my drive.
BE CAREFUL THOUGH! Sponge lets you delete any file, big or small, essential or nonessential. Don’t go deleting random files in volumes like User or Library— you could FUBAR your OS. Only delete the files you know don’t belong, or else you’ll get to erase your entire hard drive.
I used this once. It was worth it. It just looks for files with the same title, but I have never needed it. It’s worth trying on your iTunes folder and maybe docs. The only thing it found on my computer was a couple of ebooks I copied into my documents and never got rid of from the downloads folder. So it saved me a couple megabytes.
Overall, Sponge is this week’s winner of the Magnetic Oreo award. The application is free to download from version tracker and worth it. GET IT TODAY, PEASANT! I’m sorry, that was a little rude of me.
I’ve used the new Mac App Store twice. The first time was the day it came out. The second time was to see if they had Sponge, this week’s winner of the Magnetic Oreo Award, which —of course— they didn’t. Wait. Three times. I went again to get screenshots for this post. I might use it again in the future, but let’s be honest- it’s pretty much the least useful thing Apple has ever given us.
Unlike my phone, which I use to play Words With Friends while I’m pooping, I actually use my computer to work. So I have the applications I need already. And if I do need an “app” there’s a little thing called the Internet that actually has a bunch of them available for download. I don’t really need a one-stop shop for applications, because I’ve already got one. And I already get that a majority of PC users utilize their state-of-the-art laptop or desktop for solely for facebook stalking and solitare, but those people should just get an iPad and leave the processing power for people who’ll use it.
Another problem with the App Store is that Apple decides what belongs and what doesn’t. I hate having a filtration system between me and my programming buddies out there. Look, if it wasn’t for Rob Johnson, I would never have known about Coda, a product that I use almost daily (And Cabel Sasser will get his Magnetic Oreo Award soon enough. He’s an awesome, awesome person).
The App Store takes away all the fun of discovering a website like OpenSourceMac.org (which hasn’t updated in years, btw) or finding an app like Mongo DB from github.com. It just makes buying applications like a high school party. It shows me who’s popular, who’s fun and who’s new. But it doesn’t show me the kids they didn’t invite, because they’re at home making really great applications in their basements.
In fact, of the ten applications I use most (Chrome, Coda, Final Cut, Photoshop, Twitter, Firefox, Transmission, Think, GarageBand and Handbrake) only three are available on the App store. I’m not interested in games, educational apps or tracking my diet. I’d just use the internet for all of those things (onemorelevel.com, wikipedia.org, dailyburn.com or just set up my own spreadsheet on Google docs). I guarantee you that the majority of people only use three apps on their computers anyway- a browser, a word processor and a game (or two).
Bottom line, if you’re interested in playing Angry Birds on your desktop, sell your iMac and buy an iPad. The sad truth is if you want good “apps”, don’t bother asking Apple- they’ve lost interest in providing those.
I’m not an avid Firefoxer. In fact, I used Safari for years and switched to Chrome the day it came out and I’ve never looked back. So I never have given Firefox a fair shake. Fortunately, being an Internet professional, I often have to use several browsers. And every once in a while, those browsers will include Firefox. And I’ll even concede that Firefox is the best browser, because it is, but Chrome is just so much cleaner. And I have wicked computer OCD. I digress.
Every once in a while, I’ll make a purchase on Firefox from Amazon, NewEgg or some other shop I frequent. And that’s why I’m so glad that I happened upon InvisibleHand, as it automatically checks to make sure you’re getting the best price available on whatever it is you’re trying to buy.
I saved $10 today thanks to this plugin
Blam. That’s all you have to know about this app. It’s discrete, appearing only when you’re browsing through an online store. And if it turns something up, it’s only one click away. I’m not making any money by saying that this is the greatest Firefox plugin for the average internet shopper, but they’ve saved me enough that I don’t mind giving them some good press.
These are good folk, aren't they?
So without further discussion, I’m pleased to award InvisibleHand with the very first Magnetic Oreo Award since I reviewed Finding Forester for a high school English class. Molodetz.