Beckism.com

I’m sure this is self-evident for anyone with halfway decent knowledge of the Unix command-line, but it took me some searching through multiple sources to figure it out. (Kept getting env: python\r: No such file or directory errors whenever I tried to run the script on its own.)

If you need to run a Python script in the Mac OS X Terminal, save the script somewhere on your hard drive and run the following command:

python path/to/script [options]

Obviously, replace [options] with any options or arguments that the script accepts (or leave it off entirely). Remember that if you’re using bash for your shell, you can hit tab to autocomplete paths (which speeds things up a lot) and you’ll need to escape any spaces in paths with a backslash:

python ~/Documents/My\ Python\ Scripts/script.sh

Please note: I’m using OS 10.5; I believe the above will work with 10.2+ (since I think that’s when Python was bundled with the OS), but your mileage will vary. If you’re having issues, the Python documentation was one of the best resources I found, and of course the help file for the python command was useful once I figured out I needed to use a command other than running the script (type man python to access it).

I hate the fact that A&W now caffeinates their cream soda (caffeine makes me weird), so in my search for alternatives I picked up a 12-pack of Jones Cream Soda at the store the other day.

Unless you are a hummingbird, do not drink this stuff. It’s like drinking syrup (sans the viscosity). My girlfriend, who normally is of the opinion that more sugar equals more fun, ended up pouring most of a can down the sink. I drank a can with lunch, and while I made it all the way through the resulting headache argues I should have followed her example. This stuff is ridiculously sweet.

Perhaps Jones Soda has always been sickeningly sweet (I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it before, and lord knows there’s a market). If so, and you’re not already a fan (or hummingbird), consider yourself warned. As for me, the search for a lower budget cream soda alternative continues. I do love me the Thomas Kemper Cream Soda, but it’s hard to justify the cost for day-to-day consumption (as a side note, their Ginger Ale is also to die for).

Although it’s been a mere nine short months since the last time PathFinder was on the MacUpdate promo, it’s come back for another run. I highly recommend PathFinder; along with LaunchBar, it is one of the tools that I can’t make it through a work day without. Basically, if you haven’t experienced the PathFinder tabbed interface and drop stack, you haven’t lived. For today, May 8, 2008 only you can get PathFinder for $19.95, 43% off its normal price.

Even if you miss the deal, you’ll likely still be able to get PathFinder through MacUpdate for a discount a few days to weeks afterward. Here’s a direct link to the PathFinder page, so feel free to check it out.

If you take a close look at my current Dock, you may notice something rather ridiculous:

For those who didn’t get past the funky CandyBar-ed Finder and Trash icons (courtesy of Icontraband), icons number four and five are both RSS readers: NetNewsWire and Times, respectively. NetNewsWire, of course, has been the de facto standard of Mac RSS readers for years, but Times is a newcomer to the scene (released only last week). I discovered Times via Daring Fireball and on first glance agreed with John Gruber’s analysis; it was an appealing looking interface, but probably not for me. With the various software blogs and so forth that I follow for Tagamac, NetNewsWire handles about 140 different feeds, and Times’ newspaper-style interface didn’t look nearly robust enough to handle them.

It isn’t. In fact, along with that discovery a quick review of my first Times impressions is none too pleasant:

• Times is incessant nagware. I don’t mind if a program reminds me there’s a demo period when I launch it, but when it does it periodically throughout the time while it’s running, I start wishing that I could somehow transmit electric shocks through the internet to the developer.
• Times can’t keep track of unread feeds to save its life. When you have a lot of feeds to read, you need to know which articles deserve attention and which don’t. Times is extremely buggy in this regard. If I’m lucky, it will mark unread articles with little blue bullets for a single feed on a single page. If I’m unlucky, it won’t mark anything unread at all.
• Times is slow. Aside from the slowdowns that you occasionally get from all the Core Animation shenanigans, Times by design moves at a casual pace.
• Times has a criminal lack of keyboard support. By default the program doesn’t even have shortcuts for commonly-used menu items like “Mark all articles as read”, never mind any semblance of keyboard navigation.
• Times feels buggy. Overall, Times works well, but it didn’t take me long to start running across small, frustrating bugs (like Times loading external article text for Daring Fireball’s linked list, despite my checking the “disable full article downloading” checkbox).
• When something fails, the user gets no explanation and often no feedback. Multiple feeds that I’ve added have simply failed to work (despite validating in Times, and working perfectly in NetNewsWire); no explanation by the program of why. Given the number of small bugs that I’ve come across in just five days of use, this is extremely foolish on the part of the developer because it means that I can’t communicate to him accurately what isn’t working.

Yet despite that impressive laundry list of cons, I used Times for four days, then moved it to a permanent place in my Dock and purchased it. And I don’t have a single regret.

The reason is simple. All of my feeds fit neatly into one of two categories: feeds whose headlines I skim, and feeds where I read every headline and often read every article. NetNewsWire is great for the former category; Times is perfect for the latter (minor bugs notwithstanding).

When I first ventured into feed readers, I liked NewsFire because it was easy to scroll quickly through the “New Items” list and keep track of which feed I was looking at while I went. This meant I could quickly skim the feeds I didn’t care about much and read the ones I did care about more carefully. When I switched to NetNewsWire (prompted by NewsFire’s lack of updates and several annoying shortcomings), I organized my feeds into two primary groups based on how much focus I gave each (further organized by topic in most instances). However, I was never happy with NetNewsWire’s workflow because its Latest News area is worthless (particularly compared to NewsFire’s). It’s just far too difficult to keep track of what feed a headline comes from when that info is stored in columns. I found myself clicking around in the NetNewsWire sidebar for every feed that I cared about, and then skimming through collections of feeds in folders for the ones I didn’t care about. It worked, but it never really sat well with me.

Times is completely inappropriate for skimming through large numbers of feeds, but it’s perfect for a small number of feeds where you want to focus on every headline. The program uses the metaphor of a newspaper, complete with different pages and sections within those pages. Two of the three sections can contain multiple feeds, and you can resize the sections to provide a couple variations on the basic three-section page. By default, when you click a headline, Times folds or slides down to reveal the full text (your choice; I chose slide as the less superfluous and quicker of the two). If the feed doesn’t contain full text, Times tries to fetch it from the webpage to display for you (extremely handy for major news sites that provide a couple sentences or less, although sure to give them headaches in the bandwidth department).

I didn’t expect to enjoy browsing through articles in Times, but I do. Not only does it provide an easy way to track just the feeds I want to read, but the attractive interface, ability to read full text without the distraction of the flashing ads normally littering the page, and just overall laid-back and friendly attitude of the program make using it a joy that offset my frustration with its various small bugs and shortcomings.

I didn’t really fall in love with the program, though, until I added a couple keyboard shortcuts using the System Preferences “Keyboard & Mouse” pane. Adding shortcuts to just two menu items made all the difference: “Mark All Articles as Read” received command-K and “Return to Page” (the command you have to trigger while reading the full-text version of the article) got the plain old left arrow. With these two commands, using Times became a relaxing one-hand maneuver: I use my right hand on my laptop’s trackpad to scroll through any sections on the page or click article headlines. Spacebar or two-finger scrolling takes me through the full text, and then it’s a short reach for my pinky to the left arrow to return to the page. When I’m done, command-K is again a very short reach away and all is right with the world.

What clinched the deal for me, really, was that the developer has been fixing bugs as fast as he can. Although he hasn’t been particularly responsive, he’s surely facing a mountain of feedback, and I’ve seen multiple bugs (and a small feature request) that I ran across and reported fixed within days. Plus the dude’s 19 years old and probably has homework or term papers to write. Given how polished Times looks (even with its usability shortcomings), I’ve got high hopes for its future. The newspaper metaphor is a great alternative to standard feed readers, and makes Times vastly different from the rest of the crowd. And if we’re lucky, Acrylic Apps will take the newspaper metaphor even further (I want to put the webcomics that I read on a single comics page in Times; who’s with me?) as they continue to refine and improve the program.

Despite my expectations and initial impressions, I’ve ended up a happy user of Times and NetNewsWire both, and I highly recommend Times for anyone who wants an elegant way to track a small number of feeds they care about. This is certainly not a program for everyone, but if its presentation of news makes sense to you, I doubt you’ll look back.

Web Snapper is a fantastic little utility (most recent update released today). Web Snapper does exactly one thing: it takes screenshots of websites. However, it does this one thing extremely well, with multiple export options (including vector PDF), the ability to catch Flash and DHTML in the act (if you use the Safari plugin), and more. I’d never heard of it before, but as coincidence would have it I discovered it the day after I had to go through a bunch of websites for my employer and take screenshots. This entailed a lot of work stitching them together and so forth that would have been completely unnecessary with Web Snapper (which would also have provided better quality screenshots). D’oh!

Although the $15 price tag will probably dissuade casual customers, if you ever need to take a screenshot of a number of websites, Web Snapper is a godsend. I highly recommend it. It’s a particularly powerful tool in the arsenal of the website designer who needs to showcase sites in their portfolio.

The Tasty Apps website is a fun experience in worthless DHTML, too (worth a visit just for that, really). Dragging the price tags is my favorite. I only wish they had dedicated pages for their various apps; the all-in-one thing doesn’t work for me at all.