saturn return to sender

Wired article: Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye with Apple’s New Animated OS

Core Animation will allow programmers to give their applications flashy, animated interfaces. Some developers think Core Animation is so important, it will usher in the biggest changes to computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped three decades ago.

Leopard’s Core Animation will [give] the next generation of developers a set of tools that will allow them to easily create new, nonstandard, interactive interfaces.

I think Wired is being purposely provocative here, fishing for indignant outcry at the idea that user interfaces ought to be flashy and nonstandard.

Is animation good? It’s neither good nor bad: it’s just another tool in the designer’s toolbox. Like color, it can be used to good effect, or abused. Core Animation won’t change the rules of the game at all. It just gives designers one more way to do their job, or to shoot themselves in the foot.

There is certainly a danger of abuse here, but I trust Apple and most Mac developers to mostly get it right. I know I’m going to use it.

So Leopard’s native file system will be ZFS. That’s cool. It’s nice to know that you won’t be exceeding the logical capacity of your file system unless you happen to have a computer that’s 136 billion kg of pure energy.

Alex has officially announced that our web development business is now called Crowd Favorite. You can still get your vote in for your preferred domain name. I don’t know if we’ll go with the crowd favorite for Crowd Favorite, but … the meta-ness is irresistible, no?

I use TextMate. I often want a quick way to get files (and folders! yay TextMate!) into TextMate without moving my hands from the keyboard. If I’m on the command line, I have an alias (for bash):

alias edit_in_textmate="open -a TextMate"

With tab-completion, opening a file or folder is usually just a few keystrokes away. In other contexts—mostly Finder—I’ve been using Quicksilver’s Open With… trigger to send the current selection to TextMate. That requires a keystroke for the trigger (I have “Command Window with Current Selection” mapped to ctrl-option-space), then a few strokes for “Open With …”, then a few keystrokes for “TextMate,” though QS usually figures out what I want right away.

That’s too much work. I just spent 20 mintues trying to figure out how to make a single-key trigger that will send the current selection to TextMate. It wasn’t obvious how to do this, which seemed odd. QS is otherwise spectacularly robust and well-designed. I hunted on the QS fora a bit, but this post by Dan Dickinson held the secret: it turns out that the ability to make a custom trigger that pulls the current selection requires you to enable QS “advanced features.” Your catalog will then contain an extra item called “Proxy Objects.”

Once you enable Proxy Objects, “Current Selection” can be keyed into the object pane of the trigger creation dialog. I assigned ctrl-option-T to the trigger to send the current selection to TextMate. Works like a charm! Yay!