A new icon for MacVim that complies with Apples icon design guidelines for OSX and doesn't hurt your eyes.

I didn't like the retro look of the original MacVim icon and I personally prefer icons that instantly communicate the purpose of the app they belong to.
Our MacVim replacement icon in VIMs signature green color, mixed with subtle metal gradients to both represent VIMs solidity and fit Apples favorite material to built their computers from. It is Mountain Lion and Retina ready, which means you can watch its details scaling it up to 1024x1024px.

Install

Right click on the MacVim app and choose 'Show package contents'. Just replace the original MacVim icon found in Contents/Resources inside the applications package with the one from here.

Get it!

Download Icon for the MacVim editor application Format: .zip |  Size: ~500 KB

This will enable you to lock your screen (by showing the login screen but keeping your session open) with a shortcut of your choice. All without the need to enable “Require password after sleep or screen saver begins” in your System Preferences and will work with Macs without the eject key, e.g. the current MacBook Air.

You will create a tiny Service via Automator, which you can easily assign a shortcut to, via the 'Keyboard' settings in your 'System Preferences'.

Creating a Service

1. Open 'Automator' from your 'Applications' folder
2. When asked to choose a type for your document, pick 'Service' and proceed
3. From the library of actions (left side), choose 'Run AppleScript' from 'Utilities' and drag it to the right side of the window
4. Make sure you chose 'Service receives no input in any application' in the drop-down menu on the top
5. Replace (* Your script goes here *) with the following code:

   do shell script "'/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession' -suspend > /dev/null"
   return input
   

6. Save everything under a name of your choice (it will reside in ~/Library/Services from now on)

Assigning a shortcut

1. Open 'Keyboard' from the 'System Preferences'
2. Go to the 'Keyboard Shortcuts' tab and choose 'Services' on the left side
3. Somewhere near the end of the list that shows on the left side, some service with the name you chose when saving your service from Automator will show up
4. Double click on the far right side of that services name and you can assign a keyboard shortcut of your choice (I chose Ctrl+CMD+L)
5. Close 'System Preferences'

That's it. Now you can easily lock your mac with a keyboard shortcut of your choice without being annoyed by having to type in your password every time your display goes to sleep our your screensaver starts.

Ever asked how to set up Rails to work with a mysql-instance installed via homebrew? Here is how.

After installing Homebrew, Git and MySQL, add the MySQL Gem via gem install mysql2.

Now you should be able to create new rails apps set up to work with your mysql-instance via rails new yourappname -d mysql or edit your database.yml according to this:

development:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: yourappname_development
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password:
  socket: /tmp/mysql.sock

...

Time for some fresh, colorful and simple wallpapers. The "smooth" wallpaper set is easy on the eyes and won't distract.

The colorfulness especially takes effect, when your OS shifts automatically through every version of the "smooth" wallpaper set. For OSX for example, go to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, choose the Desktop tab, add the whole smooth-folder and check Change picture with a timing of your choice.

Get it!

Download "smooth" 5 Wallpapers in 2560x1600px size Format: .zip |  Size: ~1.5 MB

This small chunk of code recursively outputs all (active) categories within a Magento store into a nested, clean, ordered list.

This is the perfect start to build your own category menu for your Magento based store. With some small modifications it's possible to only display the childs of the currently active category and attach something like class="active" to the corresponding link within this list.

<?php 
  $helper = $this->helper('catalog/category');
  $categories = $this->getStoreCategories();
  
  function printCategories($categories, $helper) {
    if( count($categories) > 0 ) {
      echo '<ul>';
        foreach( $categories as $category ) {
          echo '<li>';
          echo '  <a href="'.$helper->getCategoryUrl($category).'">'.$category->getName().'</a>';
          if ( count($category) > 0 ) {
            printCategories($category->getChildren(), $helper);
          }
          echo '</li>';
        }
      echo '</ul>';
    }
  }
  
  printCategories($categories, $helper);
?>

A bunch of handy snippets for {LESS} CSS with useful variables and mixins, for example to ease the use of CSS3 features like box-shadow, transitions and so on.

In case you haven't heard about {LESS} yet, here is some info from its website:
{LESS} extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. {LESS} runs on both the client-side (IE 6+, Webkit, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js.
I can note here, that there exist other convenient methods to use it, like with a Mac-App for direct compiling.

Get it!

View its github reposotory or download the latest version directly:

Download "{LESS} snippets" Via github Format: .zip

The goal of this tutorial is to get PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) up and running, create a public (shared) key and the corresponding private key. With them it is possible to encrypt information like mails, documents and files in a very secure and asymmetric way so that only a specified recipient can decrypt and open them.

PGP Cheatsheet

There are many implementations for PGP on OS X, however the one we'll be using in this tutorial is MacGPG, a Mac OSX port of GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). It follows the OpenPGP standard, is completely free and offers an easy to use installer.
To have a handy overview about the gpg terminal commands I've created a small cheetsheet in PDF-Format a while ago.

Installing PGP

1. Download a copy of MacGPG2 from the projects website.
   It's not a bad idea to get the MD5 checksum of your download with the terminal command md5, followed by the filename of your download and to compare it to the official checksum of MacGPG2's current version.
2. Mount the disk image and follow the installation instructions.

Generating a public (shared) key

1. Open the Terminal and type gpg --gen-key to start the whole process.
2. Select (2) DSA and Elgamal.
   RSA and DSA/Elgamal are both considered to be very secure, but until more recently, GnuPG didn't use RSA, so legacy GPG users might have a problem.
3. Confirm the default DSA keysize of 2048 bits
4. Confirm 0 = key does not expire and then again by entering y.
   For most purposes, either accepting the default or specifying 1y for one year, should be appropriate.
5. Now GnuPG wants to construct a user ID to identify your key
   Enter Real name, then Email addres and then optionally a Comment. Confirm by entering o for (O)kay.
6. Now you should get a dialogue box, asking you to enter a passphrase.
   The passphrase is a crucial part of the system since it's the only thing that protects your private key in case your system should get compromised. It's very important that you don't lose your passphrase. Without it your key pair is useless and you won't be able to decrypt messages sent to you using that key pair.
   Now GPG will start generating a key pair. During this period, GPG will ask you to do some activity on with your computer. This serves the purpose of creating more randomness (which computers in general are not very capable of) and helps in generating a more secure key.
7. GPG will print the outcomes of its activity on the terminal, after the key pair has been generated.

Key management

In order for someone to be able to send encrypted messages or files to a receiver, that someone needs to get hold of the receivers public key. For example the receiver could post a ASCII armored file somewhere on the internet or use one of many special keyservers on the web.

Listing your keys

1. By entering gpg --list-keys you can list a short overview of your public keys.
2. By entering gpg --list-secret-keys you can list a short overview of your private keys.

Export your public key

If you want to share your public key by yourself — maybe on your website, maybe engraved on your doorplate — you need to export it as a ASCII armored file first:

1. Within Terminal app, switch to a folder where you want your file to be created at.
2. Type gpg -ao publickey.asc --export name@domain.com where 'publickey.asc' should be substituted with your desired filename and 'name@domain.com' with the email-address belonging to your key.
3. After a second you should have your 'publickey.asc' file created in the folder you switched to in step one. It might look similar to our public key file.

Using keyservers to share your public key

If you use a keyserver to publish your public key, you might want to create a revocation certificate first, to be able to tell the keyserver that the key is no longer valid if you lose it somehow or it gets compromised.

Create revocation certificate

1. In the Terminal, switch to a folder where you want your certificate to be created at.
2. List your public keys with the command gpg --list-keys.
3. The line pub   2048D/XXXXXXXX 2010-07-04 is important, as 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID for your public key, which you will need in the next step.
4. Enter gpg -ao certificate.asc --gen-revoke XXXXXXXX, where 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID for the key.
5. Enter a number from 0 to 3, to specify a reason for the revocation, 0 or 1 are probably good choices here.
6. Now enter a description for the certificate, if you want to.
7. Confirm your inputs by entering y.
8. After a moment you should have a file 'certificate.asc' created. It might look similar to your ASCII armored file, but most likely shorter

Upload your public key

1. Inside the Terminal, list your public keys with gpg --list-keys.
2. The line pub   2048D/XXXXXXXX 2010-07-04 is important, as 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID for your public key, which you will need in the next step.
3. Enter the command gpg --keyserver keyserverurl --send-keys XXXXXXXX, where 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID of your key.
   A example for a keyserver url is hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net, a network of keyservers which regularly synchronizes with each other. Search the web to find others if you like to.
4. You can validate the correct upload of your public key by entering gpg --keyserver keyserverurl --recv-key XXXXXXXX with your according data replacing 'keyserverurl' and 'XXXXXXXX'

Export your private key

Its quite important to have a backup of your private key, because if you loose it, you will be unable to retrieve any information encrypted by your public key. For security reasons, we will also encrypt your private key backup with a passphrase and output it as an ASCII armored file.

1. In the Terminal, switch to a folder where you want your encrypted private key to be created at.
2. List your private keys with gpg --list-secret-keys.
3. The line sec   2048D/XXXXXXXX 2010-07-04 is important, as 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID for your private key, which you will need in the next step.
4. Enter the command gpg -a --export-secret-keys XXXXXXXX | gpg -aco privatekey.pgp.asc, where 'XXXXXXXX' is the ID of your key.
5. Now you will be promted to enter a passphrase and confirm it.
6. After a moment you should have a file 'privatekey.pgp.asc' created. It might look similar to your ASCII armored file.

Today, as announced in the last blog entry, we release our Administration-Theme 'Limpid', designed for maximum efficiency and user-friendliness when working with the backend of the Content-Management-System 'Made Simple'.

Created using latest webstandards and technologies for lightweight code and easy maintainability. For example only the complex icons are image-files, the rest of the user interface is realized via CSS only.

See the github repository for Limpid or our recent blog-entry about it for more information.

For bug-reports please use the issue tracker, or just submit a comment here..

Compatibility

CMS Made Simple

• Currently only extensively tested with CMS-MS ≥ 1.9.1

Browser Support

• Safari ≥ 5
• Chrome ≥ 11
• Firefox ≥ 4.0 and (with some CSS-awesomeness missing) Firefox ≥ 3.5
• Internet Explorer ≥ 7

Get it!

Get it while its hot from its github repository or download it directly:

Download "Limpid" Via github Format: .zip

A small preview for our upcoming Admin-Theme for the popular Content-Management-System 'Made Simple'.

The Login

No images of course — everything CSS here.

The CMS Homepage

The Homepage of CMS Made Simple. Note that the only images used here are the 7 icons for the main sections + the 2 icons in the main-menu.

Other pages

The content-pages.

The Module Manager.

Its considered good practice to publish PHP scripts without short opening tags for best compatibility with different environments.
If you need to convert a whole folder full of PHP files using short tags into full ones, here is how you can do it.

Simply using a regular expression — e.g. using the sed command — for parsing formal languages won't cut it. It's much safer to use a processor that knows about the structure of the language.

For PHP, you can use the built-in tokenizer extension. It has the T_OPEN_TAG parser token, which matches <?php, <? or <%, and T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO, which matches <?= or <%=.
To replace all short open tags, you need to find all of these tokens and replace T_OPEN_TAG with <?php as well as T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO with <?php echo.

There are already some good scripts out there to convert PHP short tags into the good old long ones, of which I consider this one by Daniel Norton to be written quite well.

If you want to use such a script to convert a bunch of PHP files in some folder, this command comes quite handy:

  find project/dir/ -type f -iname "*.php" -exec php -d short_open_tag=On php_replace_short_tags.php --overwrite {} \;

It recursively finds all PHP files in the folder project/dir/ and executes the PHP script for converting short tags you specify (in this example 'php_replace_short_tags.php' with the option --overwrite for each of these files.
It also switches short_open_tag=On while executing this command as otherwise the short tags could of course not be recognized.

References

• https://github.com/danorton/php_replace_short_tags/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/684587/batch-script-to-replace-php-short-open-tags-with-php/

Often needed, we put it in here for copy&paste purposes

1. First, check for .svn-folders in your current directory by entering
   find . -type d -name .svn
2. Now these can be removed recursively, starting from the current directory with
   rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

A small guide for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to set up the built in Apache webserver, install and configure a MySQL database management system and set up the also built in PHP scripting language, so that you run your own (MAMP-) webserver for local webdevelopment.

Many people use predefined packages to run a local webserver, but Apples operating system brings nearly all of the required stuff to do this out of the box. The rest is installing MySQL (or a other DBMS of your choice) and a little configuring here and there.

After you completed all steps you considered necessary, start/restart your Apache Webserver aka Web Sharing via "System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing" or by typing sudo apachectl start/sudo apachectl restart into Terminal App.

You should now be able to access PHP-Scripts, PHP-Apps, etc. that you put into the Sites-folder inside your user-folder with your browser via http://your-computers-name/~your-(short)-username/.

Apache

Tell Apache to load the PHP-Module

1. Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
2. Uncomment the line LoadModule php5_module …

Activate the mod_rewrite-module

1. Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
2. In the <Directory>-section, change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All
3. Open /etc/apache2/users/your_username.conf
4. In the <Directory>-section, add FollowSymLinks to the Options-line and make shure AllowOverride All is activated

MySQL

1. Download the latest MySQL version
2. Install the MySQL-.pgk
3. Install the pref-pane
4. Start MySQL via "System Preferences > MySQL > Start MySQL Server" or by typing sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server start into the terminal

PHP

Fix mysql.sock location

1. Open /private/etc/php.ini.default
2. Replace all three occurences of /var/mysql/mysql.sock with /tmp/mysql.sock
3. Save the file as php.ini

Fix date.timezone-warning

1. Open /private/etc/php.ini
2. Uncomment the line date.timezone =
3. Add your timezone, for example date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin"

Activate PHP short tags

1. Open /private/etc/php.ini
2. Change the line short_open_tag = Off to short_open_tag = On

References

• http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
• http://www.glenscott.co.uk/2009/08/30/fix-php-timezone-warnings-in-os-x-snow-leopard/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293484/easiest-way-to-activate-php-and-mysql-on-mac-os-10-6-snow-leopard
• http://teeparham.posterous.com/configure-apache-for-mod-rewrite-on-mac

Why use harder to maintain and more ressource consumptive graphics, when it can be done with plain text too?

There are thousends of unicode symbols one can utilize for different tasks. Many websites list them all or let them search for specific ones.

Here's a small list of graphic characters we use for interface design on a regular basis:

Stunning Typo- and Graphic work in poster-format in the most sophisticated directory of this type I know: www.typographicposters.com/.

Especially like the work of Alberto Rodriguez and Bauer but have checked out only the smaller part of the directory yet. Any more comment from my side is unnecessary, the work shown off there completely speaks for itself ;-)

A new shirt is born — the IMEOS white Basic Tee.

Made from 100% cotton with a nice print of our logo-sign on the front and a small print of our name on the back.

Wanna have one too? Here's the link!

Available only in white in sizes from S-XL.

Styling HTML forms surely isn't the most popular task amongst webdesigners. Many obstacles need to be taken, to allow your CSS to format your forms perfectly. One of this obstacles is the weird rendering-behavior of HTML form-element <legend>.

From time to time you want to display your <legend>s just like headings or other block-elements. Optimisticly you start to assign display:block, reload for example your Gecko-Engine based browser and what happens? Behavior of <legend> is not like expected — it displays inline, just as before.

But what now, what to do if even modern browsers ignores such a basic CSS-rule? The solution is simple, however not very clean and will work with all major browsers:

1. Insert a <span> inside the <legend> you want to style
2. Via CSS, assign a certain width (like 100% to your <legend>
3. Assign display:block to the <span> inside the <legend>
4. Finally float your <legend> in dispute to the left (you can remove the diplay-property too) and you're done.

Note: IE 6 and 7 will still indent <legend>s by seven pixels. This can be fixed in context with your usual IE-Hacks by adding a negative left margin of the mentioned 7 pixels

The new blog integrated into CMS Made Simple is online, have fun.

Starting from scratch with this blog, we will post less frequent but more substantial stuff, mostly about technology and our company.

For interested CMS Made Simple users: We realized this blog with the CGBlog- & CGFeedback-Module.