Gaston Garcia

Essential and non essential apps for my Mac

Gaston — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:00:55 +0000

My hard drive gave up. Now I’ve got a brand new 320 G empty hard drive. Only OS X 10.6 installed. This is a great time to see what I need to make it.

These are the apps and docs I’m installing in sequential order (not of importance, but there might be a bit of that too):

Textmate. The editor of choice of all smart people.
Chrome. Best browser there is for mac. Probably Windows too.
Coda. Amazing integrated FTP/Text editor.
iTunes update (from 8 to 9.2) so that I can re-sync my iPhone
Dragging tons of Movies from my backup drive to my computer
Dropbox. Working without this is suicide nowdays.
VLC. Best video player. Ever.
Perian. Adds support of tons of video formats to Quicktime.
TextExpander. Text snippets for the lazy at heart. A must have.
Movist. Another video player. I like it.
LaunchBar. Get it now. It’s the best alternative for Quicksilver. I’ve written about it here.
Skitch. Screen capture tool. A must have.
Fluid. Allows me to create URL specific browsers. I usually have Gmail and Basecamp created as Fluid apps.
Git. Version control.
Gem update
Sinatra. Lovely web framework written in Ruby.
Mailplane. Gmail on steroids. I use it all the time.
Fontcase. Font management. Not crazy about it.
MacVim. A good Mac GUI version of VIM.
1Password. Is there someone who still doesn’t use this?
Little Snitch. Do I wish to connect somewhere? Now I decide.
Microsoft Office (sadly this is still needed)
Acorn
Pixelmator (Tryout, instead of big fat Photoshop). Latest version is a damn fine product.

Edit. These are the ones I forgot to install:

Adium. All my instant messaging needs.
XScope. Holy cow. I survived like 3 days without it.

I’ll start working now. If anything else shows up that I needed, I’ll be adding it.

One thing that’s been a pain in the ass is syncing my iPhone with a new iTunes library. Holy crap what a mess.

Spending time with Ruby

gaston — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:05:21 +0000

This is where I’m spending a few minutes each day lately. Bits of Ruby and fun ways of looking at things.

As a guy that works daily on websites there’s one thing that’s been the most important these weeks. Seems like in the Ruby community people are actually exploring how to use programming to their advantage. How do I do stuff quickly? How could I write less HTML and do more work? How do I use programming to make things better?

I don’t know. It’s just kind of stupid that people are not asking these kind of questions all over the place! So even though I still don’t get most of anything I read and try in Ruby, it’s been enlightening to have new ideas about the web and how to use it.

Command line days

Emacs stuff to remember

gaston — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:45:57 +0000

I’ll just keep stuff I do here while I try to use Emacs. So this is a post in progress.

Note to self: Remember, have fun. If not, forget about it. I don’t have to, it’s for fun.

OK, so here’s what I did first. I downloaded Carbon Emacs and installed it. I got it from here.

Then what I wanted was to replace the default Emacs that OS X uses and use my installation of Carbon Emacs. I did it by adding this to my .profile file:

alias emacs="open -a /Applications/Emacs.app"

Oh oh. Seems like if the file doesn’t exist it doesn’t create it… it only works for files that exist. : P (fix?)

Added some keyboard customization from this file in Github. (Thanks topfunky). Now if before you kill yourself, this is where it should go (I think so)

/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp

7 days of Emacs

gaston — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:03:48 +0000

Geoffrey Grosenbach, producer of the PeepCode screencasts gave me some quick advice on how to get started with Emacs (here).

Unless I have some really urgent work to get done, for which I’ll surely fire up Textmate, I’ll give Emacs a try. I’m already an every once in while VIM user and remember it was hard to learn it.

Anyways it’s good to not be that mechanical and always do the same things in the same way. My baby always reminds of this. So just as today I brushed my teeth with my left hand, I’ll switch Editors for a few days. I’ll see what happens.

My new blog theme

gaston — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:22:29 +0000

I just switched themes. I had this one kind of ready in Photoshop. It’s based on Blueprint CSS with a custom column and margin width. It’s 1180 pixels wide.

It’s totally not finished. I still have to work on my Flickr Favorites thing on the left, maybe mixing it a little with stuff I enjoy from Youtube or something.

Also the Comments templates are still not looking good, and I have no comments enabled on the home page. I’ll get to this shortly.

But I’m happy to leave Thesis Theme. It’s a great theme, but it wasn’t mine, and I’m used to being able to just look inside and do stuff. It felt weird not to be able to work comfortably in my own blog.

Showing and hiding the file paths in Carrington Jam

Try Emacs. Or maybe not.

gaston — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:20:10 +0000

On the Nuby on Rails website I came across this post on Emacs. I was in a good mood with my mind full of curiosity and then a thought hit me. “Could it be that I somehow missed the good parts of Emacs?” I remember having used Emacs before, when I was using Ubuntu all the time. I tried as hard as I could to use it, but it was pretty damned hard.

So last night I went ahead and installed the Carbon version of Emacs. I started the tutorial, worked on it for some time, and then I simply closed it. “What a nightmare!”

I just don’t get the whole Ctrl+V command for moving around. It’s just not a comfortable position for my hands. Which finger are people using for pressing the Ctrl key? Do I have to take Hand-Yoga lessons from a Guru to feel ok with it?

: ) Nothing like VIM.

As you can see. I have no problem with the whole editor war thing.

Command line days

gaston — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:48:51 +0000

These days have been full of my Mac Terminal. It’s been both exciting and frustrating. I had previously used the command line quite a bit, in a brief period of my life when I decided that I was only going to use free software, and therefore used Ubuntu for like 4 months in the beginning of 2006. (This period ended basically in frustration at having to use Gimp for my graphic work as a web designer at the time.)

That time spent in Ubuntu was good none the less. I read Neil Stephenson’s “In the beginning was the command line” (which is maybe the coolest computer book). I learned to move around in my hard drive, I tried to install Apache (unsuccessfully), I tried to install MySQL (unsuccessfully), I tried to create a development environment (failed too). I learned to love VIM. I asked for help in message boards. It was a tough time, but hey, I was making it tough for myself. My all free software approach was too strict, and it wasn’t easy. (Plus it’s a habit. I’ve been a fundamentalist on almost anything I’ve decide to take on, only to have to learn to take it easy.)

So these last few days I’ve been learning Ruby. I’ve started reading Why’s “Poignant Guide to Ruby“. I also purchased Rails from Scratch part I from Peepcode. And I found the Learning Rails podcast (which is what I would recommend to a real beginner. The Peepcode screencast is of superb quality, but it’s not for a newbie. It’s so damn easy to get lost in a single keystroke when you’re really new to something. The pace of the Learning Rails podcast is more appropriate to someone who’s learning from scratch).

I’ll probably get the Meet the Command Line screencast. It’ll help me feel even more comfortable with the Command Line. And I don’t have time to waste for learning, all programmers and web developers I admire are involved in projects that require skills that go far beyond just coding HTML and CSS. SASS, HAML, Compass, Rails. It’s useful to feel comfortable moving around your computer, invoking scripts and installing stuff.

Now from these last 10 days I do have to remember something. I should expect a bit less results as I move along. Learning is a slow process and I get frustrated easily. I have to step back every once in a while and say “Alright, that didn’t work either. No problem. Do something simpler.”

Now I’ve for some reason you’re reading this and are new to programming, these are links that have been encouraging to me these days:

Why I won’t migrate to EE 2.0

Gaston — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:45:45 +0000

Well I had said that I was moving my blog to EE 2.0. But that won’t be happening anytime soon. ExpressionEngine seems to be lacking an import utility.

Version 1.6 of EE used to at least have an MT (Movable Type) import utility which could be used. But for version 2 EE doesn’t even have that.

So I’m sticking with WordPress. Which is probably the smart thing to do. I see myself telling friends “Use the right tool for the job”, and WordPress is the right tool for blogging.

So that’s that. Gonna make myself a Carrington-Blueprint theme of my own.

Thesis

Gaston — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:27:56 +0000

Sheesh. I was just about to edit my Thesis WordPress template and found out that it’s got it’s own very special way of handling template files and functions. Not sure I like that. I’m used to working with regular themes or the amazing Carrington Theme Framework. Related posts:Showing and hiding the file paths in Carrington [...] Related posts:

The best color tool for your Mac

Gaston — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:03:59 +0000

ColorSchemer 2 is out. This is the best color tool I’ve ever used for the Mac. It has tons of features:

Color Picker
Let’s you create triads and harmonies
Integrates with ColourLovers.com

It’s pretty much a must for anyone working in any field of design. It’s quite handy.

Essential and non essential apps for my Mac