Screenshots are a web guy’s best friend. Well maybe not best… but they’re useful. If you’re running a Mac, here’s a quick cheat sheet for the OSX screenshot hot keys.

• Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
• Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
• Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
• Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard

There were also minor irritations, like the infamous missing “view background image” button and other random features I got comfortable with in my Firefox based workflow. Google answered them with the (I thought) clunky and unpleasant “Inspect Element” window, but since I had been used to my hotkeys and whatnots from FF, I held this new feature in default distain.

Fast forward a few months and I came to a startling realization that may have been immediately obvious to my more learned and ninja-esque colleagues.

You can design in the Developer Tools window.

I discovered this eye-widening option while I was in the middle of a particularly irritating round of float-the-div-clear-the-content when I started clicking around in the Dev Tools window.

I was aware you could enable and disable particular styles using the checkboxes in the styles sidebar, but I didn’t realize you could double-click the styles and edit them inline. Now, granted, the changes only took place on the currently cached version of the page, not the actual source, but still. Experimentation suddenly seemed considerably easier. The edit-upload-refresh cycle was immediately eliminated.

Moving forward, I also realize you can add new styles to elements. It was awesome. My interest was piqued. The next move I made was to the “Elements” window, which is basically an interactive view source window. I grabbed one of the divs and dragged the code into another section of the document. The element moved on the web page in realtime. My eyes went wide. The holy grail.

All of a sudden, a frustrating coding session turned into a painless game of dragging stuff around, then when the appropriate outcome was staring at me, I bounced back over to Coda, and mirrored the changes in the actual source.

Layout updates done.

Before all the the web Jedi come crawling out of the woodwork to set my on fire over my garish n00bness, you can Póg ma thoin in advance. I think every coder can relate to getting set in their workflow, and then finding a new, easier way to do what you’d be doing before. It was just a cool find, and it’s made my life easier.

If you didn’t know about this feature of Chrome, maybe it can help you out too.

Thanks Google, you’re my new bestie.
For today.

• Brain dumping all tasks into a pile
  (without trying to sort or process them)
• Filtering tasks quickly by (basically) whether it’s your problem or not, and if it is, how much of a problem is it.
  ( do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it )
• Perpetual reassessment based on changing situations
• Accept what isn’t getting done

There are some holes in the GTD method though. GTD is great at shuffling all your stuff into a way that you know what is out there to do, but it does remarkably little to control what happens when you’re actually DOING.

For me, that’s where the Pomodoro Technique picks up.

The Pomodoro Technique was created by an italian guy named Francesco Cirillo, which to me, sounds like a prime name for a monk. Just saying. He also did it in the 80s, so that’s pretty amazing in itself. While everyone in America was buying shoulder pads and cocaine, Brother Cirillo was on task, somewhere in Rome. Go figure.

The basic premise is recorded time blocking with forced breaks at regular intervals. Each work-break block equals a “pomodoro”. Apparently his timer is shaped like a tomato. Whatever. The whimsy must be lost in translation, but I’m not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

By recording how many “pomodoros” a given task requires, it gives you a mental awareness of long individual tasks will take. There’s also a series of worksheets and other accoutrements, but I don’t bother with any of those (I use software that does all that tracking part **see below).

If you bill hourly for certain services (like website updates or graphic design) this is an ideal way to guesstimate quotes for things your clients request. After you do it for a couple days, you start thinking of your tasklist in terms of how many pomodoros a particular task will require. If it’s less than one pomodoro, it’s one of those GTD items you can just do real quick, if not, it gets scheduled and estimated.

“Do keyword analysis for SallysSlipperyUndergarmentShoppe.com : 2PD”

The Pomodoro Technique comes in several languages and is totally free.

You can download the PDF in english here: Pomodoro Technique PDF

There’s also a great (aforementioned) open source timer/tracker that sits up in your apple menu and tracks where your mortal hours disappear to, as they are finite and perpetually count down to your eventual and unavoidable death.

You can download it for free here: Pomodoro Technique for Mac

While there’s still apparently a handful of people who can opt out of the upgrade with special software, this is a welcome acknowledgment from Redmond, which it would seem, lets web developers off the hook for backward compatibility.

If you’ve spent any serious amount of time building for the web, to valid standards, only to open your site in IE7 to watch it all come apart at the seams… you should be breathing a sigh of relief right about now.

In fact, I think I’m going to have a shot of Jameson’s… right now.

Microsoft cites the reasoning behind the upgrade as “The Web overall is better – and safer – when more people run the most up-to-date browser. “, which is true.

It’s also true that with more and more users accessing content in non-traditional browsers that the share of developers willing to play special ball with a picky, waning behemoth is dwindling.

HTML5 and CSS3 are right on the edge of the horizon now, and Microsoft no longer has the clout to ram its proprietary happycakes into everyone like it once did (**COUGH**silverlight**COUGH**).

Don’t get me wrong, IE9 doesn’t follow web standards around like a Chrome puppy, it is notably better about them than previous incarnations. Though the unrelenting assault of malware against Windows users is still probably the primary motivation for the move… but who cares? If the result is that I’ll never have to care about IE7 again, sounds good to me.

I realize in practical application, this isn’t going to mean the end of IE’s reign of hassle. There will always be stragglers and administrators who fight the tide and make developers lives harder than they should be.

The one thing it does buy us the ability to mark everything prior to IE9 as **officially deprecated** which, for the vast majority clients, is enough.

Well there’s my present. A fat Christmas goose. God bless us, every one! I think I’m going to go outside and dance in the street for awhile now… yelling.

Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. Read it right from the mouth of Redmond over here: http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/12/15/ie-to-start-automatic-upgrades-across-windows-xp-windows-vista-and-windows-7.aspx

For years I’ve been using Textmate, which is without a doubt, a great editor for programmers. Macromates has built a ton of functionality into a quick, clean app, and they’ve been the go to editor for myself and a load of other developers too.

I’m right in the middle of coding a new front end for the e-commerce store at Rocket and have spent the past twenty minutes playing pair the closing

to it’s opening buddy, when I realized that I was just flittering time away on nothing. Awesome.

While I love me some Coda, one of my major issues with the software is its lack of code folding. It does have a fairly sweet code navigator you can put bookmarks to make your code more browsable, but that doesn’t help much for long, unruly template files, so hey.

Since it had been a minute since I checked in to see if Panic was any closer to an update (2.0?) to Coda that would add the mythical code folding feature.

I came across this post and it introduced me to Sublime Text 2. While I didn’t go out trying to replace Textmate, I have to say, I opened up Sublime and almost practically fell in love with it. I kind of want to sleep with it, it’s so sexy… but… it’s intangible, so the logistics were too complex. I decided to settle for writing a post about it instead. Decidedly less filthy, I know.

In addition to an eye-friendly inverted color scheme and multi-language code folding, it also features a shrunken code view in the margin that makes quick jump navigation really pleasant for large files. I dunno, I just like it.

I’ve only been using it for a couple days now, so it hasn’t kicked Textmate out of bed yet, but I definitely have been opting for the newcomer over old steady.

I still unintentionally say “sweet” in my mind everytime the editor window opens, so that’s something.

It’s in beta and currently a free download, so you should head over and check it out.

http://www.sublimetext.com/

Functionality like video, geolocation and local storage in an HTML4 world needed to be handled with third party extensions, such as Flash. Now with HTML5, standard (validating) implementations of that functionality is available as a central part of HTML5.

HTML5 is already well supported by most modern browsers (and mobile platforms) so there’s no reason to avoid adding this tool to your box.

Mark Pilgrim has written up a great web primer on HTML5, to check it out head over to http://diveintohtml5.org/

Endowments give your small non-profit a stable backbone of capital to tap that alleviates some of the pressure that can occur when you’re trying to get the rent paid and meet payroll.

Donors like endowments as well. It shows not only financial saavy, but also projects that you plan on being around for a long time, fulfilling on the mission that drew them to you.

They’re definitely worth looking into more for your organization.

http://lifehacker.com/#!156196/geek-to-live–organizing-my-documents