Along with the update to Coda, I’ve updated the TEA for Coda bundle (find the most recent version on the dedicated TEA for Coda page); all of the scripts will now perform their actions in the active document even if multiple windows are open. Additionally Indent New Line should be significantly improved performance-wise. The scripts do now require Coda 1.6, though; if you’re running an old version of Coda expect buggy behavior.

I am unlikely to improve the TEA for Coda scripts anymore; my new goal will be to get the Textmate bundle items that I know and love into Coda using the plugin interface. This will necessitate learning some Cocoa, though (since some of the key actions require user input), so it may be a little bit of time before I’m able to get a working plugin up and running. In the interim (or until someone else does it), TEA for Coda is still the best way that I know to get Coda to behave like a full-blooded HTML editor.

• The HTML Tidy script is now a universal binary! At long last, our PPC friends can run it just as easily as those with newer hardware.
• The Format with Em and Format with Strong scripts now keep your text highlighted rather than moving the cursor to the end. This is not only more congruent with Textmate’s behavior, but I think it makes better sense, particularly if you ever need to wrap the text in more than one tag (or wish to add a class name, or…).

You can get the update from the dedicated TEA for Coda page. Unless you use PathFinder or have some other way of viewing invisible files, you’ll need to replace the entire HTML directory (if you’ve made changes to the scripts, you should copy them into the new directory before replacing the old one). If you are comfortable with invisible files, then you’ll just need to replace the .lib directory and the Format directory.

“Dude,” said Samuel. “Wicked neck bolts, man.”

“Raaaaurgh!” said Frankenstein’s monster.

“Hey, no prob,” said Samuel. “We all have days like that.” He put on his customer face, all raised eyebrows and sincerity. “May I take your order?”

“RAAAAurgh!” said Frankenstein’s monster.

“One number two with supersized fries, coming right up,” said Samuel. He punched some buttons on the greasy keyboard in front of him. “God, I wish my shift was up.”

“Raaaurgh! RAAAurgh!” said Frankenstein’s monster.

Samuel turned back to the window. “Hey man, I didn’t choose to be here. I just need some goddamn spending money. Never thought I’d end up hawking pseudo-food and doing my small part to perpetuate the evils of corporate America. But what can you do? Just gotta take what you’re dealt and make the best of it.” He eyed Frankenstein’s monster’s pallid demeanor and ragged stitching. “Course some of us get a worse deal than others, but judging by your wheels you’re doing alright.”

“RAAAAURGH!” said Frankenstein’s monster, pounding on the steering wheel.

“Dude, I am right there with you! All the hopeless consumption we engage in is just a distraction from what really matters, and here you and me are, buying straight into it. But you know, you have to eat and you have to get from place to place, so why not do it in style? Sometimes you just have to say to hell with it all, and live it up while you can. You’re destroying the environment and I’m working for the quintessential exploitative corporation, but at least in fifty years when we’ve consumed all our natural resources and our society is crumbling around us we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Well, at least I had fun.’”

“Raaaaurgh!”

Samuel grimaced. “Yeah, sorry. I don’t get many opportunities to really talk to people on the job, though, you know? Most people don’t like to think critically about the implications of their lifestyle. They just drive up and want an automaton to hand them food.” Samuel stiffened his arms and moved them jerkily back and forth. “Would. You. Like. Fries. With. That. I mean, I guess we’re all what society has made us, but still.” He paused and glanced at Frankenstein’s monster’s neckbolts and shrugged. “You more than most.”

A coworker walked up behind Samuel. “Hey, order’s up.”

Samuel grabbed the paper bag, stuffed some ketchup packets inside, and handed it out the window to Frankenstein’s monster. “That’ll be $7.59.” He grabbed the proffered bill, pressed a few more greasy buttons, and handed the change back. “And hey, thanks for letting me unload on you, you know? It’s nice to connect with people sometimes, and damned hard to do it working here.”

“RAAAAAAURGH!” said Frankenstein’s monster, and he peeled out of the drive-through, leaving Samuel coughing in his exhaust.

“What a jackass,” growled the wolfman in the backseat of the Hummer. “He totally ignored you when you ordered me a number seven. And you asked for it like five times.”

“Raaaurgh,” said Frankenstein’s monster sadly.

“Yeah, I know it,” said the wolfman. “Kids these days are so oblivious.”

Unfortunately, after reading Understanding Progressive Enhancement I realized that the article didn’t actually define progressive enhancement. It had a great description of the concept of graceful degradation, but when it got to progressive enhancement it became abstract to the point that I don’t think someone who isn’t already passingly familiar with the idea would understand it.

I am not a mover and thinker when it comes to web design and development, but at the least I can offer a complementary explanation for Gustafson’s workflow-oriented description.

As Gustafson says, graceful degradation focuses on building out a great site, and then testing on older browsers and tweaking things to make sure the users have at least a half-assed experience.

Progressive enhancement has very similar results (cutting-edge users get the best experience, users with older or otherwise limited technology get a less ideal experience), but comes from a different angle. Gustafson says that progressive enhancement is all about the content, and then goes into a long, slightly flawed metaphor about Peanut M&Ms. Mildly wonky metaphor aside, he’s right about content being the important thing; he just needs a succinct definition and concrete examples.

Progressive enhancement is the idea that you should design your content in a way that is accessible no matter how your users access your site, and then add Javascript interactions and advanced CSS afterwards to make the lives of people who have capable browsers easier and more beautiful.

For me, I find this best illustrated with a pair of examples.

I have two sites I have been working on recently. For both of them I am the interface coder; I receive Photoshop designs, and am responsible for building them in HTML, CSS, and enough PHP to tie into the developer’s backend. The first project is a Web 2.0 startup that I inherited from a previous developer. The second was designed by a professional print and web design house and handed off to me for conversion to HTML.

For the first site, the code I inherited uses a lot of Javascript to make the interactions work. The user enters the site, types some information, and things swoop across the screen to quickly lead them through what the site has to offer before depositing them on a signup form. If the user has Javascript disabled links don’t work, the form fields remain populated with filler text (apparently a background image), and the user never sees the signup form. This site was designed for (eventual) graceful degradation. The designers and coder took their perfect world vision and implemented it, and were planning to go back over everything once it was done to make sure that some semblance of a workflow would exist in older browsers or browsers that don’t support Javascript.

For the second site, the designers provided me not only with the Photoshop files, but with a complete user experience description. The user experience description included a semi-interactive Flash file on the homepage, an automatically scrolling list of article titles that reacted to mouse movements, and other bells and whistles. First, I built out the in HTML and CSS and once I had tested everything I added the Flash and Javascript interactions (making sure that should those technologies not be present the site would fallback to my original vanilla designs).

This second approach is a limited example of coding using the idea of progressive enhancement. I knew that what was important was that no matter what technology the user had available, they should be able to reach the content, so in my first iteration of code all links lead somewhere, all navigation elements were present, and even a user with a stripped-down mobile browser would be able to navigate and read the site (even if it looked terrible). The Javascript and Flash thus enhance the user’s experience, but are not necessary for the user to experience the basic content and interactions the site has to offer.

The problems with graceful degradation in the first site should be self-evident. By focusing solely on making their interactions slick and perfect immediately, the first coder crippled the site for any number of users. Content delivery in all situations isn’t the focus; instead “fixing” old browsers will eventually be the focus.

The reason progressive enhancement is an important idea for web designers to get their heads around is that if you use progressive enhancement to guide your design you don’t have to patch obvious failings but instead build an ever-improving user experience on a solid foundation. Not all browsers may look and feel the same, but regardless of the tools at their disposal users will be able to access and interact with your site’s content in ways that were part of your overall design. Even if they can’t articulate it, users can tell when their experience is an afterthought rather than a priority, and as a result you only stand to gain.

Sometimes we are given the end of the story. Maybe the budget is cut. Maybe the storyteller recognizes the end and has the discipline to finish it. Perhaps the ending was planned from the start. Whatever the reason, we find ourselves sliding through the denouement and gently deposited at the final page, the last paragraph, the happily (or not so) ever after.

There is a satisfaction in knowing the end of the story. All the truly great stories end.

When it comes to those great stories, the ones that capture our imaginations and hearts, there are two types of storytellers: the artists, and the merely talented. Where you discover what type you are dealing with is at the story’s end.

The talented storyteller ends the story in a timely fashion, draws all the threads together, and knots them. We smile as we leave the theater or close the book; at last, the final battle has been fought, the lovers united, the epilogue complete.

The artist, however, cheats. We reach the final page and discover that although the storyteller is finished, the story has not ended. Instead it lives on in our imaginations. The world or the characters – often both – haunt us. We take the story and play out possible futures in our heads; we make our own stories.

This is the difference between good and great, talented and true artist. Whatever we think we want, it isn’t for the story to end. It is for the storyteller to finish telling their part of the story in a way that encourages us to take up the story for ourselves and make it a part of our lives.

Harry Potter was an excellent story. It captured the imaginations of millions of people and led them on a journey spanning books and years. Yet at the end of the seventh book, J.K. Rowling revealed that while she is extremely talented, she is not an artist. All the threads were tied up. We were given a world in which the relationships have played out as we expected them to, and the future (the children) is merely a repetition of the story we just completed. The epilogue shuts down our imagination, closes off the imaginative space that existed while the ending was still in doubt, and leaves us with a really good story that is, unfortunately, not our story. Perhaps with time J.K. Rowling will become an artist (I hope so; with her talent and reach she could be great in ways most storytellers can’t even fantasize about), but the ending of her first story revealed her as merely talented.

In contrast, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (available on Amazon or Kindle) is the work of an artist. Like Harry Potter, The Graveyard Book is about a special boy who lives in a fantasy world hidden within our own, but where Rowling’s ending revealed that she had not reached her potential, Gaiman’s shows the artistry of a practiced master. When I finished The Graveyard Book I was delighted to find that it hadn’t actually ended; Gaiman had instead passed the story on to me and for several minutes I savored the feeling of Nobody Owens’ tale continuing to unfold in my imagination.

I wish that more storytellers aspired to tell stories like The Graveyard Book, that fewer people gave in to the temptation to extend their story indefinitely or end them so finally that the reader’s imaginative space is locked away. In my perfect world, all storytellers would both understand that the true magic of a story occurs when they let it free for their audience to take up and consciously strive to achieve such that level of artistry.

We don’t live in a perfect world. But fortunately, we do have Neil Gaiman and The Graveyard Book.

ScreenFlow, for those who aren’t aware, is an all-in-one screencasting solution. The general idea is that ScreenFlow captures positively everything that happens on-screen (while simultaneously recording audio, of course) and after you’ve recorded everything you can go in and highlight certain mouse interactions, add iSight video clips, change what part of the screen has focus, etc. If you are using ScreenFlow, then you are almost certainly intending to do a fair amount of post-production work on your screencast from within ScreenFlow before you share it with the world.

iShowU HD Pro, on the other hand, has no post-production capabilities whatsoever but enables you to post a finished screencast in the shortest amount of time possible. Unlike ScreenFlow, once you finish capturing a screencast iShowU HD Pro compresses it down (very quickly, using your graphics card to accelerate the process), and then provides you one-click access to post the video on YouTube (presumably more upload options will be provided in the future). Depending on the length of your video and amount of compression you can have it online and shared with the world literally seconds after you finish recording.

Unlike the original iShowU, iShowU HD Pro also allows you to visually highlight mouse clicks and keyboard events, or record from your iSight simultaneously while recording your desktop. Aside from the iSight recording, however, these features are all or nothing. When you start the program (and before you start recording) you can toggle mouse and/or keyboard capture on or off, and then for the duration of your video you’ll either have highlighted mouse and keyboard events or you won’t. You can also position an image over some or all of your recording area if you want to, say, have your website address displayed along the bottom of the screen. Sadly, this too will last throughout the entire movie.

iShowU HD Pro and ScreenFlow are doing very similar things from a technological standpoint (allowing you to capture high definition video or your entire screen), but the programs are obviously catering to very different crowds. iShowU HD Pro will be perfect if you need to record screencasts as quickly and easily as possible. It is one of those wonderful programs where you can be completely comfortable with the program within three minutes of launching it just by playing with the interface. If you need to record screencasts to share with your friends, or are a software developer who just wants to show users how to use a small feature without spending hours producing a video, then iShowU HD Pro will be an excellent choice. (It’s worth noting that iShowU HD Pro also supports drag and drop export to Final Cut Pro, so it likely has an audience with those people who like ScreenFlow’s capture capabilities but who feel limited by its post-production features.)

ScreenFlow will be much more appealing to the crowd who want to disseminate their screencasts a bit more widely and don’t mind putting in the effort to first learn the program and then do post-production on their recordings.

I’m pretty surprised that iShowU HD Pro hasn’t made more of a splash on Mac news sites and so forth; the program has a few issues and feels very much like a 1.0 release, but is still obviously a good contender in the screencasting software arena. Sure, it isn’t as flexible as ScreenFlow, but for some people who just want to get a good-looking screencast up as fast as possible, iShowU HD Pro at its cheaper price point will likely be the perfect solution.

Wrap Each Selected Line in Tag does about what it sounds like. Select a bunch of lines, run the script, and you’ll get a dialog where you can enter the tag and its attributes (identical to the current Wrap Selection in Tag). Once you’ve entered your tag, the script will wrap all of the lines with it (and ignore lines that are nothing but whitespace). This is incredibly handy for creating lists.

Indent New Line isn’t inspired by anything in the Textmate HTML bundle; rather it’s inspired by Textmate’s automatic indenting. When you run the script it will take your cursor (or any selected text) and stick it on a new line at one more level of indentation (based on what you’ve selected in the Coda preferences). This script is a great complement to Insert Open/Close Tag: type div, run Insert Open/Close Tag, and run Indent New Line to end up with:

<div>
	|
</div>

(pipe represents cursor)

Indent New Line is also super useful for keeping your indentation clean when working with Javascript functions; just type your curly brace and run the script to get a nicely indented place to start coding.

I have now completed all my “must-have” items for TEA for Coda, so let me know if you have any favorite actions from Textmate (or elsewhere) that you’d like to see added to the bundle. I’m always open to suggestions. As always, you can get the most up-to-date info about the script on the dedicated TEA for Coda page.

The most recent release (2008-09-25) adds Insert BR, a script that inserts a <br /> element at the cursor (warning: will replace any selected text), fixes an annoying cursor position bug for anything that positions the cursor (cursor was previously overshooting by a character), and vastly improves on the behavior of Insert Open/Close Tag by allowing it to intelligently handle self-closing XHTML tags like img and link.

If you’re already using the scripts, you can update by replacing the HTML folder in your Coda scripts folder with the one in the download. Newcomers should follow the installation instructions in the Read Me.

All of which is pretty cool, but isn’t what has me jazzed about Espresso. To be honest, the screenshots make it look like an underpowered Coda (it certainly doesn’t include reference books or a built-in terminal, both of which I’ve found extremely handy when using Coda), although the text editing capabilities may well be superior (I know for a fact the CSS editing will be exactly what I need).

What excites me about Espresso is not that it’s a direct all-in-one competitor to Coda; what makes it sound fantastic to me is its extensibility.

Espresso offers “Sugars”, a plugin interface using XML files. Although it remains to be seen how much flexibility is offered by the Sugar API, extensibility out of the box means that Espresso will be offering my favorite parts of all-in-one editing (synchronization and HTML/CSS in an integrated interface) along with the customization that up until now I’ve only associated with TextMate. Sure, Sugars probably won’t be as powerful as TextMate bundles, but get this:

Snippets in Espresso can be much more than quick pieces of text to insert into your document. Tab stops, placeholders, conditional expansions: it’s all there.

The thought of a program that can deliver on TextMate’s extensibility along with the all-in-one sweetness that more recently prompted me to dabble in Coda has me tingling with anticipation. Perhaps Espresso will not achieve the tantalizing promise of its screenshots and marketing speak, but given that I’ve bought every MacRabbit app I’ve tried within five minutes of downloading the demo, I think there’s cause for excitement on the part of users and alarm on the part of text editor developers.

For those who missed my previous hating on StuffIt, I’ll recap: do not buy it, and you probably shouldn’t update if you already own it. It is redundant, outdated, buggy, and a sad excuse for professional software whose company makes money by bumping the version number for every minor update. Back in the day, StuffIt was a must-have tool. Now it is an example of why giving complete control over a product to a marketing team is a terrible idea.

If you need a file compression and archiving solution, do yourself a favor and try something like Springy or BetterZip instead.

I’m always so glad when I can spend $8.00 rather than $0.75.

Whoever at Amazon approved that section is an idiot. Plus at least one of those books is available from Feedbooks for free (always check for a free version before you buy a classic).

Sometimes I wonder why more publishers aren’t gunning to get their author’s books onto the Kindle. And sometimes I don’t.

Tom stood on his porch, hands gripping the barrel of his shotgun, and wondered where the hell they had all come from with so little warning.

Jemima stuck her head out the door. “Tom, what the hell are you doing out there with a shotgun?” she said, and then looked beyond him at the waving grass and within it the teeth and twitching wet noses that flashed in and out of sight. “Good merciful God,” she said.

Tom turned his head and spat off the porch without taking his eyes off the hill. “Get out of here, Jemima,” he said. “I don’t know if I can hold ‘em.” His grip on the shotgun left his knuckles standing out white and bloodless against the black of the barrel.

“What are they?” said Jemima. “Tom?”

“Never told you what I was hunting all those times I went east,” said Tom. “Didn’t want to worry you.”

At the crest of the hill, two prongs of quivering shadow thrust into the sky, silhouetted briefly against the red glow of sunrise as something raise its head to sample the air. Tom’s arms jerked in an aborted attempt to swing the shotgun up into place, but the thing dropped out of sight, disappearing back into the grass as it proceeded down the hill with its brethren. The wave of swaying grass had almost reached the circle of dirt that bordered Tom and Jemima’s home.

“Jesus God,” said Jemima.

“The son-bitches,” said Tom. “I never thought they’d swarm like this. I could have swore I cleared them out years ago.” With a practiced gesture, he broke the gun open and checked its magazine.

“Bastards can have both damn barrels,” said Tom as he slammed the action home and gave the pump a pull.

Jemima at last gave the shotgun more than a passing glance. “Christ, what’s that?” she said. “That’s not your shotgun. I thought those things were only in movies.”

“Bought it off eBay,” said Tom, taking his eyes off the grass for a moment to admire the sleek, semi-automatic, double-barreled beauty of his firearm. Its matte black surface had an infernal glow in the strange light, every oiled line of its body speaking of barely-restrained brute force. “Had to mortgage the house to get it.”

Jemima went slack-jawed. “You did not mortgage our damn house,” she said. “God, you did not.”

“I told you to run, Jemima!” said Tom, his attention snapping back to the hill. “They’re coming out!”

Beady eyes peered out of the grass, and as one a line of pink, yellow, and white fuzzy bunnies shuffled from the grass and onto the dirt. There they paused, their adorable little paws shuffling quietly in the dust as their beady eyes surveyed the porch.

Tom whipped the shotgun up to his shoulder. “Try it,” he said. “I’ll take the lot of you.”

Jemima looked confused. “But they’re bunnies,” she said. “Like at Easter.”

Some of the bunnies wiggled their button noses. Others twitched their precious little ears. Tom’s finger tightened on the trigger, the gun’s barrel moving first left, then right. The pause went on for an indefinite second, tension suspending bunnies and Tom and Jemima in a timeless state of adrenalin. Then, without any apparent signal, the bunnies surged forward, more bunnies in the grass hopping over the heads of the front ones even as they pelted for the house, the grass whipping as if in a hurricane as bunnies poured over the hill in a now visible stream, leaping and kicking their feet in a frenzied animal rush.

With a roar Tom’s shotgun went off and punched a hole in the front line of bunnies, blood misting the air as bunny bodies tumbled and spun violently backward. Jemima screamed once, loud and shrill, like an angel starting its fall from heaven and realizing how truly far it had to go. The desperate dual shunk-shunk of Tom’s pump action melded with Jemima’s scream, and then the bunnies were there, bouncing wildly, eyes black as the inside of a coffin.

And then there was silence. Pink, fluffy silence.

However, I recently took another look at Coda when it was updated to version 1.5 because the update came out at the same time that a project which benefited a lot from Coda’s all-in-one interface hit my plate (gotta love remote editing with SSH access in the other split). Although nothing can salvage Coda’s craptastic CSS editing (nothing but a straight-up duplication of CSSEdit’s fantastic auto-complete and intelligent indentation, that is) with a little Applescript I was able to emulate four of the functions from Textmate that I find absolutely critical to my coding happiness and productivity. Without further ado, I give you the Textmate Emulation Applescripts for Coda:

Download TEA for Coda

TEA for Coda currently offers four of my favorite actions from the Textmate HTML and Hyperlink Helper bundles (in slightly less elegant and feature-rich implementations, of course, given that it’s Applescript and Coda’s less-powerful editing environment):

• Insert Open/Close Tag: this is the functionality that I can’t live without. Just type the tag you want and run the script to have the tag automatically created and your cursor inserted inside (you can also type a tag with attributes, select it, and the script will intelligently exclude the attributes from the closing tag). The only thing that makes me sad is that Coda doesn’t have Textmate’s intelligent text indentation, so adding divs with the script is still a little frustrating.
• Tidy HTML: this runs Tidy HTML optimized to correctly indent your code rather than clean up messy code (Coda lacks automatic code indentation, and I write clean code anyway; see the Read Me for info on changing Tidy’s default options if you’d rather use it to fix Word HTML, for instance).
• Wrap Selection in Link: this mimics the basic functionality of Textmate’s Hyperlink Helper Wrap Word as Link, but without the cool automatic title attribute generation or tab controls. It will automatically grab whatever’s on the clipboard, though, making it easy to create links if you’ve copied them from elsewhere.
• Wrap Selection in Tag: use this script to wrap the selected text in an arbitrary tag. Like Textmate, it allows you to enter attributes but doesn’t stick them in the closing tag. Unlike Textmate, it forces you to use enter the tag in a dialog box; about the same speed, but much less elegant.

Make sure after installing the scripts that you customize yourself some shortcuts either using the System Preference Keyboard and Mouse area, or with a utility like FastScripts. The ReadMe includes a list of the default Textmate shortcuts for your reference if you’re a Textmate user.

Hopefully these scripts will help other people who want to leverage the awesome HTML editing capabilities of Textmate along with the all-in-one sweetness of Coda. If you’re an Applescript ninja and decide to improve on or add to the scripts, please let me know! I’d love to implement better solutions to my own workflow, and I’m a bit of an Applescript noob so the scripts could doubtless be improved.

As far as my own plans for the bundle go, I intend to add a script to emulate Textmate’s Wrap Each Selection in Open/Close Tag and I’m also hoping to increase the intelligence of some of the scripts by offloading some of the logic to shell scripts; just need to work on my Python-fu or something before that can happen.

While Coda is still a jack of all trades and master of none, the TEA for Coda bundle has at least made it usable for me on those projects where its collection of features and awesome split abilities make it a better choice than Textmate. I just hope that Panic will implement some intelligent indentation for a future version, as that’s still the most glaring omission when trying to perform basic text editing, even with TEA for Coda installed.

Minor update Sept. 1, 2008: With thanks to Brian Haslanger, Format with Em (menu title: Em) and Format with Strong (menu title: Strong) are now a part of the TEA for Coda. If you’ve already installed the bundle, just redownload, copy the HTML/Format folder into your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Coda/HTML folder, and add the cmd-I and cmd-B shortcuts in System Preferences.

Minor update Sept. 2, 2008: TEA for Coda now includes the most recent version of Tidy (the HTML Tidy site provides binaries that are several years out of date). Additionally, the Tidy script will now accept selected text and only tidy that text (without inserting a bunch of useless body tags and so forth). If you don’t select any text, it will tidy the entire document. I’ve also revised the tidy_config.txt file to some more sensical defaults. Updating procedure is the same as before.

Minor update Sept. 25, 2008: TEA for Coda now has a dedicated landing page; please reference that for the most up-do-date information about the scripts. I’ve also updated the scripts with bug fixes and more, but I won’t be updating this post any more when I update the scripts down the road.

Minor update Nov. 10, 2008: So I lied about never updating this again; since this post continues to be a popular landing spot for Google, I wanted to let folks know that TEA for Coda now includes a Universal Binary version of Tidy HTML. If you’re using a PPC, definitely grab the download above and update (more info on updating in the Read Me, or here).

Minor update Nov. 11, 2008: TEA for Coda now requires Coda 1.6 (which is a free update for all Coda users), and the scripts will now perform their actions in the active document, even if there are multiple windows open.

Well, okay, that’s kind of cool, but to be honest it’s just one more damned web app that I’d need to track, so the ididwork service itself seems like more effort than I’m ready to put into it. Chris Bowler wonders whether there’s a desktop solution (so far as I know he’s out of luck, but maybe someone will tip him off to something wonderful and he’ll share).

For myself, though, ididwork makes me wonder why this kind of thing isn’t built into a time tracker. Currently, most of the time trackers out there can be used in one of two ways: you either track your time for a project in a chunk and write what you did in the notes (easier to manage, harder to see specifically how long a task took) or you can open a new timing ticket for every task (major pain in the ass, but makes retrospective analysis extremely simple). What if instead, while you were timing, you could hit a hotkey, enter a short description of what you just did, and the timetracker would log that snippet with the active session along with the time that you entered it?

I currently use OfficeTime because it’s the best of a large selection of imperfect solutions. Specifically I chose OfficeTime because:

• It lets me start/pause and stop/restart any timing session and only rounds once (rounds when you stop, removes rounding if you restart).
• If I start a new session (in another project or not) the current session is automatically paused.
• It allows me to pause any active session and start a session for any active project from the menubar.
• It has robust reports that let me easily filter past sessions, invoice sessions, and check off sessions as invoiced or reported.

No other time tracker that I’ve found has quite this configuration of features (particularly not in a package that’s so straight-forward and simple to use; interface bloat is a serious problem for time trackers). Where OfficeTime fails me is that it is incapable of showing me the times when I paused and restarted a project, and I usually forget to fill out the comments field as I go, which causes me some headache at the end of the day. Additionally, thanks to my one-session-per-project-per-day usage, when looking back after a week or two it’s almost impossible to remember how long a task on any given day took (assuming that I remembered to note it in the comments field at all).

If all that OfficeTime did was offer an easy way to enter comment snippets and associated them with a timestamp (either real time or, preferably, relative to the active session) then almost all of my issues with it would be solved. Heck, I wouldn’t mind if it just appended “2:13 Finished feature X” to the comments field of the active timer (assuming 2:13 is 2:13 into the timer, not 2:13 PM) most of the weaknesses of the program would be solved (from my workflow’s perspective). Additional analysis tools would be a nice bonus, perhaps, but might just be interface bloat.

Of course, I’m not picky. If some time tracker other than OfficeTime implemented comment logging (assuming that it already had my must-have reports, pause/restart, simple interface, and only-rounding-once features) I’d be more than happy to switch over. Because that particular selection of features sounds to me like about the perfect time tracker.

• She writes excellent fantasy, every time. There’s lots of really bad fantasy out there. Ever since the runaway success of Harry Potter, publishers have been pouring money into making crappy fantasy look worth buying. Briggs is consistently excellent and sometimes edges into outstanding. I really value an author whose books I can buy without worrying whether I’m in for a disappointment.
• She writes realistic fantasy. Too many authors forget how fragile human bodies are. In Briggs’ novels, villains don’t waste time monologuing; they kill the people they want dead. Injuries matter. Heroes sometimes win simply by surviving long enough for the villain to bleed out. Sure, there’s magic and so forth, but Briggs keeps reality firmly out of Superman-ville where bullets can be shrugged aside and there’s no need to fear for the hero because you know in your gut that they’ll make it through unscathed.
• She writes fun, believable characters and moves beyond stereotypes. Briggs’ characters are quirky, believable, and no one is irredeemably evil or good. She also has a flair for capturing social interactions; her werewolf sub-culture is fascinating and feels utterly realistic (assuming there were a subset of people who could turn into wolves).
• The books in her series are self-contained and always a decent few hundred pages long. I am not impressed by people who write epics, to be perfectly honest. Granted, there are some amazingly good epics out there (I was recently captivated by Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy — Assassin’s Apprentice, etc.) but writing absolutely every detail is lazy in a lot of respects (aside from the challenge of keeping someone’s interest through every little detail). I am much more impressed by authors who can compress a worthwhile story into a digestible chunk without letting themselves go. Briggs does this without fail.

I really can’t recommend Patricia Briggs highly enough. This is definitely the kind of fantasy that I’d like to be able to write myself, and I greatly admire Briggs’ ability to write realistic fantasy that maintains the excitement and fun of more clichéd fantasy. But as much as I like blathering on about how great Briggs is, you probably are more interested in which book to pick up first. Here’s my thoughts on that:

• Moon Called is the first book in the Mercy Thompson series (currently three books long, a fourth on the way). This is urban fantasy of a sort (set in Kennewick, WA), and likely to have the broadest appeal of any of Briggs’ work. Although I love Dragon Bones, I think this might be my favorite group of Briggs books.
• Dragon Bones as I’ve noted before is an excellent book, and my recommendation if you’d like to try some of Briggs’ more traditional fantasy. Raven’s Shadow is her other traditional fantasy duology, but it isn’t as strong as the Hurog books.
• The Hob’s Bargain is a decent standalone traditional fantasy, but not really one to introduce you to Patricia Briggs. Read it after you’ve finished some of the other stuff and need your fix one way or another.
• Cry Wolf is Patricia Briggs’ newest novel set in the same world and with a number of the same characters as the Mercy Thompson novels, but it isn’t a good starting place for two reasons: first, you’ll want to have read at least the first Mercy Thompson book or the world won’t make enough sense to you; second, the book picks up after a novella and the beginning third or so throws you abruptly into a relationship between two people you don’t know all that well (unless you read the novella). Cry Wolf is excellent, of course, but it’s more geared toward people already loving Patricia Briggs.

So go read Briggs. I certainly am glad that I’ve discovered her, and I’m looking forward to her next books.

That said, I did a vanity search for “beckism” (though I sometimes am tempted to vanity search my name, it’s always useless thanks to another, rather more famous Ian Beck; the fame doesn’t bother me, but what really pisses me off is that he’s an author and writes fantasy, which means if and when I’m able to get published I won’t even be able to use my own name). In any case, it turned up an interesting result:

Aside from the fact that the link (and as a result their index) is woefully out of date (I redesigned the blog back in February, which was when I changed my link structure), I’m curious how that image got associated with Dirt Man. It’s clearly some sort of clothing accessory, but aside from the fact that it’s an image that has never been on my servers, why on earth would it be associated with my site? I don’t sell clothing. I don’t even like clothing. Well. It’s nice when it keeps off the rain, I suppose.

I want to love Cuil, but it definitely has some kinks to work out.

In other news, the last time I updated Dirt Man was February 2006. Jesus. No wonder no one ever reads it.

MacUpdate often continues their sales past the “expiration date” of the MacUpdate Promo, so here’s a direct link to Jets’n'Guns at MUPRomo if you want to check if there’s still a deal available for it.

The only downside is that this appears to be the original Jets’n'Guns, and not the extended Gold copy. If you want the Gold version, you still save $10 by buying it at MacUpdate Promo and then upgrading at Rake in Grass’s website. A bit disappointing they didn’t just put the Gold version itself on sale, though.

The food was alright (although unlike any other Mongolian grill I’ve ever been to you didn’t get to make your own sauce, which was disappointing), but the best part of the trip was the poster displaying nine good reasons to eat frozen yogurt that was on the wall. Or, more accurately, “9 Reasons to Eat Y/O/G/U/R/T”. Your guess is as good as mine why they slashed it up.

1. Yogurt is easier to digest than milk

This seems to me like a decent argument for eating yogurt.

2. Yogurt contrubutes [sic] to colon health

Again, a healthy colon is certainly a plus in anyone’s book, although I’m a little perplexed why this is the second reason. It seems more like the kind of thing you’d slip tactfully in around reason number seven or eight.

3. Yogurt can boost immunity

We seem to be on a health kick here.

4. Yogurt aids healing after intestinal infections

Whozawha? “Aids healing in intestinal infections?” Purely aside from the fact that this seems more like something you’d find in a doctor’s office than a restaurant, how many of the customers here have intestinal infections? It must be a pretty significant number if the fourth reason you should eat yogurt is to help those pesky infections on their way. Suddenly the partially frozen meat that went into my dish is looking less and less like a good idea.

5. Yogurt can decrease yeast infections

Well, damn. As if the intestinal troubles weren’t enough, they wanted to be absolutely certain we knew the healing and preventative power of yogurt. Except that yeast infections are not something I want to think about when I’m eating. Yeast infections, in fact, manifestly put me off food.

Fortunately, though, after the first five reasons the author of the poster decided that they had extolled the virtues of yogurt for the digestive tract long enough.

6. Yogurt is a rich source of calcium
7. Yogurt is an excellent source of protein
8. Yogurt can lower cholesterol

Ah, now there are three reasons that a sheltered American like myself can appreciate. From Cheerios boxes to news anchors, calcium, protein, and cholesterol are all subjects safe for public consumption. Sure, they don’t have the shock value of yeast infections, but they’re also familiar enough that I don’t have to think about them. Which is nice. Because I still can’t get the thought of those yeast infections out of my head, and am cursing the impulse to add cauliflower to my meal.

9. Taste good

“Okay, there’s our list.” “But we said nine reasons, and we only have eight.” “Oh, fine, say it has a good taste. We already covered all the important bits like yeast infections.” “Alright. ‘Taste good’. Let’s go print this son of a bitch.”

Needless to say, despite nine very good reasons to eat y/o/g/u/r/t, neither my girlfriend nor I was tempted to try it.

It was probably because neither of us had a yeast infection.

(As an aside, this poster was almost certainly created overseas somewhere, and the cultural disconnect between Americans like myself, who value pleasurable flavors, and the authors, who evidently prefer restorative powers after intestinal infections, is quite telling.)

And it’s good. Really good. The Joker is a psychotic killer, but he’s an exquisitely well-done psychotic killer. Granted, it’s hard for me to reconcile this gritty Joker with the Joker of the 1966 Batman movie (Batman: “An exploding shark was pulling my leg!” Gordon: “The Joker!”).

But still. Good movie, lots of action, and definitely in keeping with Batman Begins.

Then, almost at the ending, Batman is lying on the ground, possibly unconscious and certainly hurt, while the Joker stalks toward him. One of the Joker’s henchmen (where does he get these guys?) leans over our prone hero, and reaches for his mask. There’s a spark from the mask, the henchman starts jumping back, and at that very instant, everything goes dark.

The audience sits silent for a few seconds while it sinks in. Something went wrong. The timing really was that perfect. Spark, malfunction. Then we realize that we’re likely ten minutes or so away from the end of the movie and the laughter and catcalls start.

Turns out the power went out (the whole block the movie theater was on looked to be out, although it was hard to tell since it was a gorgeous sunny day without a speck of wind; very surreal), so unfortunately my girlfriend and I have still not seen how The Dark Knight ends. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to use the free movie voucher the theater gave us. But still. You couldn’t have planned that kind of timing.

This kind of thing is why I think god probably does exist: if we can believe the Bible, he was into angry, jealous smiting to start (”Worship someone else? DIE!”), then when that didn’t work fell back to cajoling and offering bribes (”Come on, if you believe in me I’ll treat you real nice in the afterlife!”), and finally got old and tired and said the hell with it, I’m just going to fuck with them. Which describes just about every parent-turned-curmudgeon who I know.

I have to say, though, the short sequence where Batman waxes poetic on the appeal of guns is like hearing commentary for some gun enthusiast’s wet dream. No, Batman. Having a gun, no matter how sleek and well-oiled, does not make you God. It makes you someone who can very easily kill or maim someone else. That is all. Go get laid.

Tastes the same (aside from being very slightly colder and harder), but without the disgusting greasiness on the wrapper and outside that otherwise mars a perfectly decent candy. Brilliant.

Thanks to my girlfriend for introducing me to frozen Reese’s. Definitely the way to go. The only downside is that the inner wrapper is slightly more difficult to remove, but I’m willing to live with that.

Open up Versions beta. Connect to Beanstalk. Right-click folder and choose Rename option. Rename folder quickly and easily. Hooray!

Have a thought. Switch to Cornerstone. Click folder once, then hover cursor over it for a second or two. Folder name becomes selected with a typing cursor. Oh. Right.

Exit out of the renaming, since the folder is no longer typo-a-rific in the repository. Check toolbar for a way to refresh the repository. Fail. Right-click the main area. Fail. Double click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Fail. Right-click the repository nickname in the sidebar. Doesn’t even have a context menu. Open the gear menu in the sidebar (bizarrely positioned at the top). Fail. Go through every menu and sub-menu a second time. Fail. Attempt to rename the folder in the hopes that it will encourage the repository to refresh itself. Fail. Bizarre error message.

Quit Cornerstone. Trash Cornerstone. Hope for Versions to be a real product soon.

I highly recommend anyone who is looking for a better way to manage their favorite recipes to take a look at MacGourmet Deluxe. It’s a program that I don’t use all that often, but when I need to find that favorite recipe I can count on it being in MacGourmet and super easy to find and access.

MacGourmet Deluxe will also be available as boxed software, so good luck to Advenio and Mariner Software in spreading the word about the best recipe software on the Mac to an even larger crowd.