The Unheard Word

That’s right folks, WebJam is finally coming to Perth. Whoo hoo! So, what is WebJam? To put it in Myles’s words, WebJam is an event where: …we have a number of presenters who get 3 minutes to show us what they are working on, why it is cool and why we should vote for them. […]

MailTags is probably the single most productivity-increasing plug-in/utility I use, and I thought it might be useful for other folks to get an idea of how I integrate it into my workflow. MailTags is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail application. It allows the user to assign keywords, project names, notes (and you can even replace […]

The word “should” is one I took a dislike to years ago, ever since the man I married at 19 (when I was too young and naive to know better) would say to me, “You should not do this. You should not feel like that”. By definition, “should” is unrelated to reality, except to exemplify […]

Quite by accident, I just figured out a neat new trick in NetNewsWire, which (for the uninitiated) is a fantabulous newsfeed reader for OSX – the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried every one on the market that I have come across. Bearing in mind that I’m a software junkie, that’s more than a few!

When viewing posts in NetNewsWire’s preview pane […] there’s no option to open the web page right there in the preview pane.

There are a lot of coding tools available these days that offer some form of snippets. The idea is to save sections of code that are re-used often, in an easily accessible format. Dreamweaver, for example, has a snippets panel. But it can still get tedious to locate the snippet you need, especially when it’s one you use a lot.

TextExpander is a nifty Mac OSX Preference Pane utility that, upon a trigger or pre-defined keystroke combination, inserts “snippets” of text anywhere in the OS.

It’s already two weeks after the event, so it’s about time I put pen to paper (so to speak) and blogged about Web Directions South. (Actually, it’s about time I blogged about anything at all, it’s been so long!)

Plenty of people have talked about the sessions and how much they gained from them. I’ve found it fascinating to see the different areas in which different people found value.

For myself, because of my hearing (or lack thereof) it’s not so much about the sessions: it’s about the people.

For those of us in Perth, this is just a reminder that the Perth WSG meeting will be tomorrow night. Nick Cowie is presenting on making web forms both attractive and accessible. Nick is a great guy who really knows his stuff, and together with the networking fun (and the nibblies! and the cheap drinks available at the bar!) it will be a great evening.

When I say “Set your own standards”, I’m not talking about creating our own web standards here but about the quality of our work.

Marketing guru Seth Godin writes, in his article Better than they deserve:

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards — and living up to them — is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

Did that ever strike a chord with me!

My 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop shares the same screen resolution as my 20-inch iMac. Obviously, to fit the same number of pixels on the screen, those pixels are going to be a lot smaller on the MBP than on the iMac.

I have good eyesight, but there are many sites I view on the MBP where I find I have to bump up the font size because the text is painfully small.

A version of one of my favourite Firefox extensions has now come to Safari. Safari’s offerings still can’t quite match Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar, but with Safari Tidy it’s now possible to see at a glance if a web page validates.