A strange thing happened today. I have been trying to work on writing a paper in TextMate using LaTeX. I was really struggling with it and felt like I could make it work for me. I’ve had this experience before.

Then I realized that it’s because it looked too much like code and too little like text to me. I changed the colors (about 5 hours ago) to be black-on-white instead of white-on-black. Voila! It is all feeling very good to me now.

It’s amazing what a psychological difference those text editor colors can make.

Some impressions of Max 5 that were recently posted to the web: http://www.2secondfuse.com/archives/max5inthepipeline.html

This has made my life using CygWin soooooooo much better: PuttyCyg

I’ve been receiving Word .docx files on my mac and had to hunt down a converter. this Dashboard widget has come in very handy.

http://docx-converter.com/widget/

Hope it helps someone else too.

• E – the first text editor I’ve ever used on Windows that I didn’t hate
• ZigVersion – A groovy (but still beta) SVN client for the Mac.

I’ve been doing a little work with Ruby on Rails lately and stumbled upon a great little set of podcasts with rails tips. Ryan Bates has been putting together short (2-5 min.), to the point, and generally very useful little videos of tips on getting the most out of rails.

http://www.railscasts.com/

A link from one of my friends/colleagues: http://www.devjavu.com/

Free Subversion and Trac hosting for projects. Not sure how it works or how they pay the bills, but it could be a great resource!

Every once and a while I like to make a post about what software is really important to the everyday workflow of Electrotap. It has been quite a while since I’ve done this. I’ll also mention some pieces of software which generally aren’t useful to us anymore.

Most Important

• TextMate—my everyday text editor for every programming, web, writing, etc. task that I need to accomplish. I even use it for editing Max patches.
• Ruby On Rails—the new electrotap.com site, this blog, many of our internal systems, etc. all are built using Rails. It provides a lot of things, not least of which is a really nice way to interact with databases.
• Subversion—SVN is used for everything, including documents, code, circuit board layouts, etc. SVN makes a lot of things that are difficult with other version control systems very easy.
• Trac—an interface to our SVN respositor, and a wiki and issue tracking system for our internal development. I really wish SourceForge supported this so we could use it with Jamoma…
• Backpack—to do lists, etc.
• Eagle—it isn’t the best software ever, but it’s cheap and works well for our schematic and circuit board needs.
• Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop—the staples for anyone who needs to do graphics work. Too bad they are so expensive. I’m still using very old versions.

Basically Unimportant

• Microsoft Word—it is a rare month that Word gets opened more than once or twice, and even then it seems like an accident.
• Adobe Reader—Could this application be any worse? It can be avoided easily enough on the Mac where the superior Preview application is provided by Apple. But on Windows there is no real alternative. It takes forever to launch, when it finally does launch it starts bugging you to click on a bunch of annoying dialogs about updating, and then after some indeterminint amount of time it crashes. This happens on multiple machines, Mac and Windows, so I consider it utterly flawed and useless.
• FileMakerPro—This used to be the staple of my record keeping. But now with Ruby on Rails and it’s support for multiple database technologies, I don’t even have it installed on my newest computer.

One of my co-workers and colleagues over at Cycling ‘74 dropped me line this morning. Knowing that I use TextMate for much of my C coding on the Mac, he figured that he would give it a try. There is one thing that he immediately missed from Xcode: the ability to select an identifier and have Xcode jump to it’s definition (which is usually in a different file).

After spending a little time, he figured it out. There is a bundle called “ctags” that you can use (bundles is the term that TextMate uses for plug-ins).

First, the easiest way to work with bundles is to download a bundle called GetBundles that can be downloaded.

Then in TextMate (with a document of some kind open) Choose Bundles > GetBundles from the menu. You can get the “CTags” bundle this way.

Now you can select text and then choose Bundles > CTags > Find Tags from the menu (or use the key command) to jump to a definition elsewhere in the code. I changed the shortcut on my machine to cmd-shift-g because that is an old, similar, key command from Code Warrior that I used to use a lot.

Alas, there is a caveat. My co-worker discovered some bugs and problems in the CTags bundle. For simple C projects it works okay as-is. For more complex projects it is broken and doesn’t know where to jump in many cases. He did find at least a partial solution and contacted the developer. Even if it is partially broken, it’s a nice little add-on to have…

In working on Tap.Tools, Jamoma, etc. I’ve developed a workflow which is very good for me but that I believe is a bit different from what most others making Max externals are doing. I thought I’d share it.

Prerequisite: my text editor of choice for the last year or so has been TextMate. For one thing it is really gentle on my eyes (as opposed to Xcode which seems to have the effect of looking directly at a laser). It has really good syntax highlighting, auto-complete, etc. The undo history is great, and the copy-paste clipboard is kept as a history (so you can see everything you’ve copied during your work session and choose what to paste). As mentioned in the blog yesterday, it also has a built-in SVN client. Etc.

1. Duplicate an existing project, like ‘circle’
2. Rename files (i.e. circle.c —> foo.c)
3. Drag the .xcodeproj onto the TextMate icon (a drawer with the inner files will display)
4. Do a search and replace (i.e. replace every ‘circle’ with ‘foo’)
5. Save it; close it
6. Now open the source file(s) with TextMate and work away. To compile it use Command-B. There is no shortcut for clean, though I think you modify this somehow (it is in the Bundles menu somewhere).

Then you only have to burn out your eye sockets when debugging in Xcode :-)