September 2011
10 posts
Labeling the Back button →
by Neven Mrgan
The Back button should never show the text “Back”.
Simplenote gets this one wrong.
I also noticed this: the top level view in Instapaper is titled ‘Instapaper’, but ‘Folders’ is shown in the back button on the level below. I think it should always be ‘Folders’.
Save as HTML in Lion TextEdit
I had an existing Rich Text Format (RTF) document open in TextEdit, and it wasn’t immediately obvious how to convert this to an HTML file. There is no longer a ‘Save As…’ command in Lion, and TextEdit does not have an Export command either.
It was obvious after I worked it out: you have to duplicate the document (File > Duplicate) then, when you try to save, you can pick a format.
Notational Velocity’s protected editing space
I just saw this issue on Notational Velocity’s GitHub page: Never unmounts hidden RAM disk when closing Notational Velocity.
It seems the RAM disk can not be unmounted, and causes shutdown to take a long time. This explains why my Mac took about a minute to shut down (compare to booting, which takes thirty seconds).
Scrod points out that this security feature can be disabled by setting the...
Sitting and Standing at Work →
from Cornell University Ergonomics
When choosing a desk, I’d say this: it’s easy to sit at a standing height desk (on a high stool), but bringing a sitting height desk up to standing height is far more difficult.
Safari 5.1 performance
Tim Bray
John Gruber
Marco Arment
I mindfully keep my usage of Safari lightweight (no tabs; close things when I’ve finished; offload to Instapaper), and haven’t seen any general performance problems in Safari 5.1.
I have often seen big delays when starting ‘Find…’. It annoying, but doesn’t bother me enough to go looking for alternatives.
Speaking of Notational Velocity, did you know… →
by Brett Terpstra
I just found this old, but excellent, trick.
If there is a URL on the clipboard, and you use Notational Velocity’s ‘Paste as New Note’ command (⇧⌘V), “it will actually download all of the text of the page the link leads to, title it and insert the original url at the beginning”.
In the comments, Zachary Schneirov (Scrod, creator of Notational Velocity) adds:
You can...
So I was trying to create a Steam account, but I couldn’t do the captcha thing to ‘verify my humanity’. I tried three times and it said I didn’t enter the characters correctly. Madness.
Update: I think it’s just that their servers are having problems. Maybe there are too many people trying to sign up to download Portal for free.
Of Java Annotations →
by John Hunt on The Register
I was looking for an explanation of @Override in Java. It’s an annotation. This is the clearest explanation of annotations I found.
Google Squared →
I just went looking for Google Squared, and this is what I found:
As part of the phasing out Google Labs, Google Squared was shut down on September 5, 2011. Any saved Squares have been deleted. We will continue to use Google Squared technology to improve search, as we have already done with question answering and related searches. We hope that you have enjoyed using Google Squared as much as...
What happened to the GetFileInfo and SetFile command line tools in Lion?
I used these with Automator to batch fix date created and modified after re-encoding movies from digital cameras. I wish movie file metadata wasn’t so lacking…
