halter, david

I develop nvALT, a fork of Notational Velocity, as well as the occassional browser extension, applescript, or OS X service. This tumblr contains threads for code, freeware, tricks, tips, alterations, altercations, infighting, etc. email elasticthreads, or...

[davidhalter]

OtherBrowser

[Update 5:30pm 8/29: I made a small change to OtherBrowser to make it less intrusive when you run it. It will no longer pop up in your dock for a second while it runs. There's no update mechanism though. So re-download below and install as before.]

Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, and with it Safari 6, I’ve been doing my hardest to switch back to Safari as my default browser. I can’t really say why, maybe I’m just in the mood for change. Chrome is a fantastic browser. So is Safari. Safari’s UI just seems more polished, and less intrusive. I LIKE it. Anyway’s I’m trying.

I’m also trying to keep from installing Flash system wide, which means I can’t view flash on Safari. So I find myself switching between browsers a fair amount. I know other folks have offered up excellent tips, tricks, and scripts for grabbing your current page in Safari and opening it in Chrome. But none of them offered up what I wanted, which is a bookmarklet sitting in my bookmarks toolbar that I click and, shazam, the current page in the current browser is opened in the other browser. So I did some fiddling. And came up with OtherBrowser.

OtherBrowser is a VERY simple (21 lines of code) applescript application that makes it very simple to send a url to a specific browser (chrome and safari only) on your mac. The main use case here is a bookmarklet in your browser’s toolbar that will automatically send the current page to your other browser. I use this a lot when browsing on Safari I come across a site that requires flash. Hit my OtherBrowser bookmarklet (cmd–5 in safari for the fifth bookmark in the toolbar) and that site pops open in flash supporting Chrome. OtherBrowser works in the reverse direction as well (Chrome to Safari), it just requires a slight change to your bookmarklet.

OtherBrowser works by using OS X’s URL scheme support. OtherBrowser registers two new URL schemes:

otherbrowser-safari:// 

otherbrowser-chrome://

Anytime you open a url on a mac with OtherBrowser installed that starts with one of those schemes (instead of, say, http://), that url gets sent to OtherBrowser instead of your Mac’s default browser. When OtherBrowser gets its hands on that URL, it sends safari url’s to safari, and chrome url’s to chrome.

So along with the app itself, I've included a javascript bookmarklet for each browser that takes the url in your current tab at switches it to one of these URL schemes. Which sends the URL to OtherBrowser which sends it along to the other browser. I should say this sounds like a lot, and is a mouthful (or keyboardful) to write. But goes very quick in practice. Almost instant.

I can’t imagine this not working. It’s very simple. But I’ve only tested it myself. Let’s call it a beta and all disclaimers related to it being a beta apply.

There’s more potential here. I might could build a browser extension that lets you use the OtherBrowser bookmarklet from a contextual menu. So right-click on a link and send that from Safari to Chrome. But this is a start.

You can dowload OtherBrowser here.

To install the app:  

Drag OtherBrowser somewhere on your mac. Your Applications folder is fine (as it is an application), but it’s a tiny app that you never launch directly. I keep mine in ~/Applications/.

Right-click (or control-click) on OtherBrowser to bring up the contextual menu and select "Open" to launch it once. All this does is get you past Mountain Lion's gatekeeper (sorry, I haven't signed this) and to make sure OtherBrowser's URL schemes get registered with OS X. The app will launch and immediately quit. And nothing else noticeable will happen. This is expected.

To install the bookmarklets:  

Open the text file titled “OtherBrowser Bookmarklets” in a text editor (TextEdit is fine).

Copy the browser appropriate bookmarklet.

Go to the browser you want to install the bookmarklet it in, create a new bookmark, paste the bookmarklet in as its address. Name it whatever. I use “toChrome” and “toSafari”

To Use: click bookmarklet when alternate browsing experience is desired…

Enjoy,

David Halter

aka ElasticThreads

P.S. Purely as a reference, so you know what you’re installing and how OtherBrowser works, I’ll paste in the Applescript source code below (you can also read it by showing OtherBrowser’s package contents, and checking out …/OtherBrowser.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/main.scpt)

on open location a_URL set offs to offset of "://" in a_URL set this_URL to characters offs thru (count of a_URL) of a_URL as string set this_URL to "http" & this_URL as string set offs to offs - 1 set daScheme to characters 1 thru offs of a_URL as string if daScheme is "otherbrowser-chrome" then tell application "Google Chrome" open location this_URL activate end tell else if daScheme is "otherbrowser-safari" then tell application "Safari" open location this_URL activate end tell end if end open location

[davidhalter]

Haven’t touched iphome in a long time, during which I’ve learned a bunch more HTML/CSS/Javascript. Also the download link died. Fixed the link, fixed a bunch of nagging annoyances, tweaked the CSS. Thought I’d reblog.

A brief description of iphome:

… my iPod’s home page, a search engine, shortcuts page, lets me easily search 16 search engines and websites. Includes quickly accessing twitter and gmail. And as my browsing habits change, it is easily modifiable to suit my needs.

…

[davidhalter]

nvIt for Chrome update

I've updated the Chrome version of my nvIt extension, which gives you various ways of creating notes in nvALT from your browser. Couple things about it:

Back when I originally released the Chrome version, I did not implement an auto-update mechanism correctly. Apologies. So if you already have nvIt installed in Chrome: Go to chrome://extensions and remove the old version. Then install the new version. Auto-updating should work from here on out, so this is the only time you'll have to do this.

The update fixes a bug in the extension (caused by a change in Chrome itself) that removed all paragraph and line endings from selected text if you went to create a note from selected text. The result was an unreadable, condensed block of text. Now fixed.

The update fixes a bug that screwed up creating a note with selected text on a web page whose URL contained a certain set of funny characters.

The update does not fix a bug in the current beta (version 2.2) of nvALT (since the bug is not in the extension) that causes it to crash when creating a note by importing from a URL. This bug will be fixed in nvALT in the next beta update. In the meantime, I recommend only using the extension to create notes using selected text. Once the bug in nvALT is fixed, the extension should work just fine.

Safari users: no update for you. Pretty sure that version works fine already. Also, the auto-update mechanism already works for the Safari extension. 

Download the new version of nvIt for Chrome, here.

It's not an update, but here's a quick link to the Safari version of the extension.

[davidhalter]

nvALT 2.2 Public Beta

nvALT has Lion’s in-line Find and Replace

Brett and I are excited to announce the public beta phase for nvALT 2.2; which includes Lion compatibility stuff, many bug fixes, a handful of new features, and a new markdown engine. You can read about new features and bug fixes below. We want to get this release beta tested a bit, and we’re hoping you’re up for the task.

2.2 definitely runs on 10.6 and 10.7. It should run on Leopard, but I am unable to test it. As with 2.1, and going forward, we’re unable to support PPC Macs. Apologies.

Since this is a beta, I just want to disclaim the standard disclaimer: its a beta! There will be bugs. You should back up your existing notes database (which, if you haven’t moved it, is at ~/Library/Application Support/Notational Data). We really need [Snow] Leopard testers, but 2.2 has mainly been tested on Lion so far. Which means more opportunities for you, as a beta tester, to find bugs. And report them.

There are still reported bugs that haven’t been fixed. We’re working on getting the release schedule moving a little faster, but be patient. Among the larger bugs we still need to fix are Simplenote escaping and a crasher when importing URLs as Markdown. Fixes coming soon.

While it is in beta, nvALT 2.2 will be on a separate update channel. This means you need to download the beta here. Once installed, you can just “Check for Updates…” within the app and you’ll get the freshest beta. When 2.2 becomes a final release, we’ll return to the official channel. So if you don’t want to beta test, stay on 2.1 and you’ll be able to update to 2.2 when its ready.

Please report bugs here. When you do, in the first line of that report include the following info: OS X version, hardware details about your Mac (ie 2008 2.4 GHz MBP), nvALT version from the About window (ie “Version 2.2b (93)”), AND whether you store your notes as separate files and what format (ie .txt) or as a database, and whether its secure. Also, tag your bug report using the “2.2 beta” tag.

Twitter is REALLY not a good place to do support/bug reporting stuff. Email is better, but could get drowned out. But the GitHub site is the best. Use the Git. If we’re not responding, and you really want/need us to THEN follow up that Git report with an email containing a link to that Git report.

On another note, I just want to express my gratitude for all the encouragement and support Brett and I have received over the last 9 months since merging our NV forks into nvALT 2. Also for patience. I realize its been quite some time since 2.1 was released. Since before Lion, which both introduced bugs and offered up some APIs (like full screen) that were crying out for nvALT support. It’s here now.

Enjoy. Download the nvALT 2.2 beta here.

p.s. one more thing: you can follow nvALT on Twitter now! @nvALTApp

Release Notes:

Requires Leopard & intel procssors now (we had tried previously to support Tiger/PPC, but neither Brett or I have access to either). Also, Leopard is getting increasingly harder to support. If your intel mac runs Leopard, it will run Snow Leopard; and it will run faster on 10.6, and will have more free space. There’s really no reason for you to keep an intel mac on Leopard. So it is likely we’ll move the minimum OS to Snow Leopard at some time in the next year. At which point we’ll stop cutting off support for older OSes so frequently.

If you have custom CSS and/or templates, they need to move to ~/Library/Application Support/nvALT. The blank print issues we’ve been having were caused by a CSS issue, and due to the way nvALT writes the default templates out we wouldn’t be able to update existing user’s files. The new support directory is created automatically when you run nvALT, and you can place custom.css and template.html directly into that folder and override the internal template and stylesheet. We’ll post some example styles soon.

Bug fixes and improvements for 10.5 - 10.7

Added some initial, optional, markdown auto-completion/syntax tricks (see below).

Improved auto-pairing

The “Keep note text width readable” (in Preferences >> “Fonts & Colors”) is significantly improved; much less janky. (still needs to be renamed.)

Hitting cmd-return moves the cursor to the end of your current paragraph, and then inserts a new line (like TextMate).

Hitting cmd-shift-return moves the cursor to the start of your current paragraph.

Re-jiggered the (optional) menu bar icon/menu. clicking on the icon will hide/show nvALT’s window (even if you cmd-w/click on the red stop light to close the window, you can click the menu bar icon to bring back the window). Right-clicking/control-clicking the menu bar icon will drop down a contextual menu of useful commands.

The plus buttons in Prefs>>Notes>>Storage are back

Visual fixes to the location bar

Improved German Localization

Fixed text rendering bug

Added “Use Selection for Find” and “Jump to Selection” to the “Find…” menu (which is in the Edit menu).

Custom CSS and HTML files for the Markdown Preview window should now be stored in ~/Library/Application Support/nvALT/ (which will get created the first time you run 2.2)

MultiMarkdown updated to version 3, peg-multimarkdown. There are some minor changes in the way certain syntax is rendered (such as footnotes and citations), but it’s faster and up to date with the current development of MultiMarkdown.

Lion compatibility features and bug fixes

nvALT in full screen mode on Lion

Lion full screen mode

Find… and Replace… features fixed. On Lion, implements the new in line (Safari style) Find bar.

Better compatibility with Lion scrollers. (There’s also a preference setting, in the needs-to-be-renamed Fonts & Colors section, to re-enable nvALT’s old custom scrollers in Lion. Useful if you like always seeing the scrollbar as a measure of the length of a note, and your position within the text).

Elastic scrolling.

Markdown auto-completion/syntax tricks

note: Unless otherwise noted, you have to “Enabled Markdown Completion” in the Preview menu (cmd-shift-m to toggle) for the following to work.

Cmd > adds a “>” to the start of your current paragraph(s) (i.e. increases quote level)

Cmd < removes a “>” from the start of your current paragraph(s) (i.e. decreases quote level)

Cmd + adds a “#” to the start of your current paragraph(s) (i.e. increases header level)

Cmd - removes a “#” from the start of your current paragraph(s) (i.e. decreases header level)

Cmd B Works exactly like bolding/unbolding text, except that it uses strong emphasis instead of BOLDed font. Will wrap/unwrap/rewrap selected text. Will insert **** and put your cursor in the middle if no text is selected.

Cmd I Same as with Cmd B, except uses emphasis instead of strong emphasis

Link syntax completion. A bit harder to describe. Easier to play around with and see. Basically, you can use the tab key to have nvALT autocomplete some of the syntax around Markdown links. It does 3 main things, I’ll explain by telling you 3 things to test out in a note in nvALT somewhere:

Create a new line. Type “[1]” (or just “[1”, if you have auto-pairing turned on). Hit the tab key. nvALT will turn “[1]” into “[1]: http://”, and select “http://”. Hit the tab key again to deselect and move the cursor to the end of the line. Type “google.com”. You should now have a reference-style link of “[1]: http://google.com”

Elsewhere in the same note, add some random text so you have an opportunity to now use the reference link we just created. In that paragraph of random text type “[Google]” (or just “[Google” if you use auto-pairing). Now hit tab. nvALT will insert “[]” and put your cursor in the middle. Now type “1”. You’ve now referenced the link from above.

Move your cursor elsewhere in that same paragraph of random text so you can create an inline-style link. Type “[Googs]” and hit shift-tab. nvALT will add “(http://)” and select “http://”. Hit tab or shift-tab again and nvALT will deselect and move the cursor after the “http://” and before the “)”. Type “google.com”. Now you’ve got an inline link.

Markdown Link Pasting

(Does not require the use of the “Enable Markdown Completion” menu item).

If you have a URL (and only the URL) on your clipboard, you can hit cmd-option-v (or use “Paste Markdown Link” in the Edit menu) to, yes, paste the URL on your clipboard as a markdown link. nvALT can tell if the cursor is on a new paragraph (and assumes you want to use a reference-style link) or an existing paragraph of text (and assumes you want to use an inline-style link).

This feature will also paste “around” selected text, using any text you’ve selected before using the “Paste Markdown Link” command as either the link text (for inline style links) or the reference link name (for reference links). So if you select all the text in a paragraph and Paste Markdown Link, nvALT will use the paragraph as the reference name, wrap it in “[]” and add “: http://the.link.com”. Play around with this. Much easier to see how it works, than explain it.

[davidhalter]

Safari Extensions Fix

An apology and a fix. When OS X updated to 10.7.3 a couple weeks ago, Safari was also updated to 5.1.3. Something about that update caused a small bug with one of my Safari extensions, InstapaperIt, where the toolbar button icons got real small. When I went to fix that bug, I discovered that back when I updated to Lion (haven't worked on the extensions since then) I lost my Safari Developer Certificate; which signs all my extensions, and which Safari requires (as a security measure). Without the certificate, I couldn't update any extensions. 

I did the wrong thing in trying to re-install my certificate, and actually revoked it instead. This caused ALL my Safari extensions to break. And uninstall themselves automatically the next time a user launched Safari. 

What a cluster-f$@#k.

Anyhow. I apologize for any confusion, annoyance, and the general screw up. Will try to avoid such pitfalls in the future.

I have installed a Safari Developer Certificate. I have recompiled my extensions. They should work. I also fixed the toolbar icon for InstapaperIt. You can download them below.

One quick caveat. Safari extensions have a built in auto-update mechanism. In a world where I didn't revoke my certificate I could just release the updated extension and Safari would help you update it. Since I revoked the certificate, Safari probably uninstalled the extension, so there's nothing to update. If somehow that didn't happen, Safari might auto-update the extension. It might not. Uncharted waters. If you have any of my extensions still installed and can't seem to update them, uninstall them and use the download links below.

InstapaperIt

Instapaper Article Tools

Instapaper Greystyled

nvIt

p.s. If you're just learning about my extensions now, you can read about the Instapaper related extensions here, and nvIt here.

[davidhalter]

CS5+Launchpad=special

[davidhalter]

It's coming...

[davidhalter]

Mobile Safari+Instapaper tip

If you've ever been reading a page in Mobile Safari and wished you were reading it in Instapaper instead, this is the quickest way to back that happen: Install the javascript below as a bookmarklet in Safari. Whenever you want to add an article to Instapaper and switch to instapaper all you have to do is hit that bookmarklet up.

javascript:function%20ipNOW(){var%20d='i'+document.location;document.location=d;}ipNOW();void(0)

How does it work? A while back Instapaper added a url scheme "ihttp://...". So that any url you open on your iOS device instantly switches you to Instapaper and adds that url (minus the 'i', of course) to your articles. This bookmarklet just takes the url of the webpage you're at, prepends an 'i', and opens that link.

As with all bookmarklets and Mobile Safari, the clunkiest part is the install. Here's one way to do it:

1. If you're not reading this post in Mobile Safari, switch over to your iOS device and come back. Here's a link back here, if that helps.

2. Bookmark this page on Mobile Safari. Go through all the steps to actually bookmark this page, only you can rename to bookmark to what you'd like your bookmarklet to be called, lets call it "ipNOW" as an example.

3. Scroll up to the javascript above, select it and copy it.

4. Go back to your bookmarks, tap the "Edit" button, and select the bookmark you created in Step 2. Tap the url field for that bookmark to edit it. Tap and hold and select all of the old tumblr url. Delete. Tap and hold and paste in the javascript.

done.

UPDATE: if you tried that javascript and it got scrambled on copy/paste in mobile safari, that was because i didn't use the <code>tag</code> .  I fixed it. Try again. SHOULD work this time.

[davidhalter]

nvIt -- Chrome and Safari extensions for nvALT

Brett and I just released nvALT 2.1 with a lot of bug fixes, UI improvements, and some new features. Some of my favorite additions:

- TextMate style auto-pairing of matched characters like parenthesis, brackets, and double quotes.

- Shortcut (CMD-Shift-L) for Inserting [[Links]]

Read more about it here.  Full release notes here. You can use the in-app update mechanism or download it here.

But I also just finished up developing Safari and Chrome extensions to extend nvALT's notational velocity (or something ;) into the browser. 

They let you create a new note in Safari 4 different ways:

Click the toolbar button to have nvALT download the current page you're on as a new note

Right-click on a link, and select the appropriate option from the contextual menu,  to have nvALT download the linked page as a new note.

Right-click away from either a link or a selection, and select the appropriate option from the contextual menu, to have nvALT download the current page you're on as a new note.

Right-click on selected text, and select the appropriate option from the contextual menu, to have nvALT create a new note with the selected text as well as a link to the current page you're on.

There's an preference setting to have nvALT use Instapaper's Mobilizer when downloading pages into new notes, so that those notes are more readable. This is not turned on by default. To turn it on go to the extension's preference page.

Since these extensions require OS X and nvALT 2.1, I don't have any plans to release them on their respective Browser's extensions page. Check back here or follow me on Twitter @elasticthreads for updates to the extensions.

Please email any bug reports to elasticthreads att gmail.com  with "nvIt bug report" in the subject

Downloads:

Safari Extension

Chrome Extension

p.s. I'll post the source for these on GitHub soon, but if you are willing and able to develop a Firefox version please email me. 

[davidhalter]

InstapaperIt Safari extension users: if you updated to Safari 5.1 you need to re-enter Instapaper credentials in Preferences

If you updated to Safari 5.1 InstapaperIt might have stop working correctly for you.

When Safari updated to 5.1 it lost some of your extension settings. This includes your Instapaper login credentials you have to enter into InstapaperIt's preferences.

To fix:

Go to Safari's Preferences

Click on the Extensions tab,

Click on the InstapaperIt extension.

Re-enter your username/password.

Reload any pages currently open in Safari (so they reload the extension)

[thresholdapp-blog]

[davidhalter]

thresholdapp:

... a partial list of improvements to come:

New and improved Twitter support (including autocompleting @mentions and inline url shortening)

Improved google voice support

Turn contexts off (or back on) to hide them from the UI if you don’t use them

The default context now launches apps, does math, and runs web searches along with the standard filesystem path navigation. Just type what you want to do and Threshold will figure it out. “~/Desktop” opens the desktop folder, “9*9” will show you “81”, “puppies” will open a web search in your default browser for puppies, and “Safari” will launch Safari. As soon as you start typing Threshold will tell you what it thinks you want to do (including searching thru apps to launch), just hit enter if that’s what you want. So really “Sa” would launch Safari.

The shortcuts plist (that you can edit in preferences»shortcuts) which lets you specify autocompletions in the default context (how “d/” expands to “~/Desktop/”) can now also be edited to include application and url shortcuts. Just hit the plus button, type “app:Mail” in the right column, and “ml” in the left column. Close preferences and type “ml” into the default context and Threshold will offer to launch Mail for you. For urls use “url:nytimes.com” instead of “app:….”

Improved email context now support Sparrow as well as Mail and (in Prefs»Options) you can choose to have Threshold compose your emails directly in gmail (opens a web page set to a gmail compose email page with address/sub/body filled in with whatever you typed in Threshold).

The context field hides when you’re in the default context. Just hit tab or a keyboard shortcut (for a context) to bring it back.

And more.

[davidhalter]

nvALT 2.0: two forks, merged...

NVForked updated and is now nvALT, a merger of two forks.

Big update. Huge. Back in January, Scrod released an update the NV that added a host of great features… and broke compatibility with my fork. Since then I’ve been working on updating my fork to add in his changes in the official NV:

Option for horizontal layout with multi-line previews in notes list

Words between [[double-brackets]] will become links to other notes

Tags can be synced to Dropbox and searched by Spotlight, via OpenMeta

Tags are auto-completed while typing in the tag-entry field

TaskPaper-compatible strikethrough formatting using the “@done” tag

Fully plain-text-based automatic list-bullet formatting

Note-titles inside double-brackets are (optionally) auto-completed

“Show in Finder” command for revealing selected note-files on disk

Highlighting of search terms can be disabled

Dragging the divider to the top or left of the window will hide search field

and more

I kept the new, official implementation of a horizontal layout, which uses a single column to display note title + metadata (dates and tags). Looks beautiful.

All the features from my fork are still there:

Fullscreen mode (cmd-shift-f)

Optional menubar icon/drop down menu

Optional no dock icon (menu bar icon only) mode.

The ability to add/edit tags for multiple notes at once (which now auto-completes the tags for you).

Multiple color schemes you can easily switch between:

Black/White

Low Contrast (light gray background, dark gray text)

User Customizable

Easily collapse/expand the notes list and search field (cmd-shift-c)

An option to improve the readability of notes by using margins to limit the width of the text (in preferences>>Fonts&Colors)

Other eye candy (check the scrollbars out).

AND added some new features:

“Open in Text Editor” (Under the note menu, or Cmd-Shift-O) to will open the current note in the application of your choice (use WriteRoom if you prefer its fullscreen mode). This requires that you store your notes as separate files. The default app is the system wide default for whatever file type (.txt,.rtf,.html) you’re using. Probably Text Edit. But you can pick your preferred application in “Preferences>>Editing”

Show Word Count (Under the View menu, or Cmd-Shift-K). Heavily requested. Adds a live word count of your note to the search field. Hold down the option key to temporarily see the word count.

Working Localization for French, German, and Portuguese. (Although some of the newer features show up in English. If you know French, German, or Portuguese and want to translate anything you see in English please email me or Brett).

Along the way, Brett Terpstra, the developer of another NV fork, nvALT, and I decided to “branch off and merge our forks”…. whatever that means. Well, it means that my fork and nvALT are now combined into a single release:nvALT, version 2. So this adds the features of nvALT 1.0.7 into the mix as well:

(Multi)Markdown/Textile Preview (in the Preview menu, or hit Cmd-Control-P). Also highly requested. Brought to you mainly by Christian Tietze and Brett Terpstra. Thanks! I’ve added one thing to their implementation: Hold down the control key to temporarily see the preview window.

HTML source code tab in the Preview window for fast copy/paste to blogs, etc.

Customizable HTML and CSS files for the Preview window

Custom HTML/CSS templates can be included in saved output from the Preview

Social note sharing via Peggd

Convert imported URLs to Markdown, and optionally strip excess content with Readability

And some other bug fixes and improvements. (Most noticeable: the search field is embedded in the window’s titlebar as in the official release, which I originally took out for going fullscreen, but got working again).

nvALT has its own auto-update channel. So it will only update to future nvALTs, and never to Scrod’s NV.

nvALT will create it own set of preferences from NV. This means that the first time you run nvALT it won’t have any prefs you’ve set in my old fork, the first version of nvALT, or the official NV. If you moved your notes to a custom location (like Dropbox) they won’t show up the first time you run nvALT; you just need to go back into preferences>>Notes and set the “read notes from folder” to the right place. Apologies for the chance, it is a pain in the ass, but separating nvALT from NV means you can use both apps, store notes for each in a separate folder, and have fewer compatibility issues.

Note: Apparently our build is not particularly PowerPC compatible. Since neither Brett nor I have PPC machines its pretty hard to test/debug/build for them. We'll do our best, but in the meantime its probably best for PPC users to hold off or use this experimentally only. Apologies.

Download nvALT, version 2 here.

The official project page for nvALT is on Brett’s site. Or you can check my old NV site.

Source code will be available (soon) here.

Follow my tumblr and/or Brett’s blog for news and updates about nvALT.

I’ll post a roadmap soon, after Brett and I have a little more time to agree on the next steps. In the meantime, enjoy the new release!

Big thanks to Scrod (aka Zachary Schneirov), Christian Tietze , and others whose work is a part of the fork.

[davidhalter]

The new world vs old world of OS X UI. It's a wild west of stop lights.

[davidhalter]

Put Your Mac's Caps Lock Key to Better Use

After reading about Google's Cr-48 ChromeOS prototype netbook, I had two immediate reactions: 1. My Mac runs Chrome + 1000s of other applications. Why would I want to reduce that to just Chrome? 2. The Cr-48 has no Caps Lock key. Instead it has a web search key. Slap your left pinky against that key and instead of SCREwiNG with what you're writing, you get a quick web search box. Awesome. Where can I get me one of these?

Well. It took a while (mostly because I forgot about it). But I figured it out. Read on to find out how to disable your Caps Lock key, and then how to set it to activate Threshold, Quicksilver, Launchbar, or Alfred (all of which can quickly run a web search).

Setting this up is a bit convoluted, and I'll explain why, but afterwards: it works like a charm.

Part of the convolutedness requires that you use either option-space or command-space to activate Quicksilver (or other app). Ok, you can use other combinations, but it is even more tricky to set that up, and I can explain how to do it, but I'll do so in another post (if enough people request it).

You'll need to install two preference panes, both from the same developer. PCKeyboard Hack and KeyRemap4MacBook (regardless of the name, this should work with any Mac). PCKeyboard Hack lets you remap your Caps Lock key to any other key. KeyRemap4MacBook lets you do all kinds of crazy remapping of your keyboard (but it CAN'T remap your Caps Lock key for some reason). In this case we want to remap your Caps Lock key to whatever keyboard combination you've got set to activate Quicksilver (or whatever your launcher/web searcher of choice happens to be). Now the challenge, and the reason we need both preference panes is that you can't reasonably use a single key to activate Quicksilver. Otherwise every time you hit the command key (for example), Quicksilver would pop up. And for some reason, PCKeyboard Hack only lets you remap your Caps Lock key to a single key (not a combination like control-space). So the trick is to (use PCKeyboard Hack) to remap your Caps Lock key to another key that you almost certainly never use (because its not on your keyboard), and then (use KeyRemap4MacBook) remap that key to either option-space or command-space (to activate Quicksilver).

Ok. Convoluted explaination of a convoluted process? Check. Now onto the details:

1. First you'll need to download and install PCKeyboard Hack and KeyRemap4Macbook.

2. Next we'll remap your Caps Lock key. Go to System Preferences and click on PCKeyboard Hack.

In the first row you'll see "Change Caps Lock", double click in that row under "keycode" and enter 110. 110 is the keycode for the PC Application key.

Apparently, its this key on a Windows keyboard.

I'm guessing you don't have a Windows keyboard (since this is a Mac only trick). Even if you do, I don't think that key does anything in OS X. So we've now remapped your Caps Lock key to a key that doesn't do anything in OS X. First, do no harm.

3. Now we'll remap the "PC Application Key" to a keyboard combination that activates Quicksilver. Go back into System Preferences and click on the KeyRemap4Macbook icon. There's a huge list of options that shows up. (and many interesting tricks you can use to ease your keyboard-life). You can literally get lost in this list trying out different remaps. For this post we just need one. Rather than have you scan down the list looking for it, click on the search field and type "Change PC Application Key". This should narrow the list considerably. What you want is either the "Application Key to Option_L+Space" or "Application Key to Command_L+Space" (depending on if you want to use Command-Space or Option-Space to activate Quicksilver).

Check the appropriate box.

4. If you've already got the appropriate keyboard combo set up to activate Quicksilver (or Threshold, Launchbar, Alfred, etc.) then you're good to go. Hit the Caps Lock key and enjoy. Otherwise you'll need to go into that application's preferences and set that up (comment below if you need info on how to do that). Some of those apps have ways of setting a specific trigger to activate ready to web search (instead of just activating). Comment below and I'll post some info on how to do that.

UPDATE: 5. My original post forgot one last step. It turns out that OS X limits how fast it responds to the Caps Lock key. Its an attempt to cut down on accidental Caps Locking. Which is great. But for our uses, the limiting is annoying because it slows down how responsive our new web search key is. To fix this go into System Preferences>>Keyboard>>Keyboard tab and click on the "Modifiers..." button in the Lower right corner. 

In the dropdown menu next to the Caps Lock key, select "No Action". Now the Caps Lock key should be as responsive as any other key. Which means our new web search key is too. Enjoy!

[davidhalter]

Reeder OS X Tip: Set the ESC key to close browser

When you follow an article's link to its full content, or use Instapaper Mobilizer, or follow a link when reading something in Reeder the application hides its feed list on the left and opens a browser in the right column (where the feed's article content usually is).

There's a couple ways to close the browser and return to Reeder's default view of feed list on the left and article on the right:

Click the close button (an "x" in a dark circle) in the upper left corner of the browser column.

Use the mouse to select a different feed item in the left column.

Hit the "j" or "k" key to select a different feed item

Select "Close Browser" from the file menu or hit cmd-shift-w for its keyboard shortcut.

I find myself trying to close the browser quite a lot (because I use Instapaper Mobilizer a ton) and wanted to set the escape key to do all this, since that seems much more in line with standard OS X behavior (and so is what my hands' muscle memory wants to do).

It's not terribly difficult to do, but does require a plist editor such as Property List Editor (which is one of the Developer tools you can install from your OS X install DVD) or PListEditPro. There are a lot of steps, and it might seem hacky (because we're manually editing a plist), but it works fine. Here's how to do it:

Quit Reeder if its open.

Open System Preferences

Click the Keyboard icon

Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab

Select "Application Shortcuts" in the left column

Click the plus-sign button below the right column

Select Reeder from the drop down list (or navigate to it by selecting "other...")

Type "Close Browser" (case sensitive) into the Menu Title field

Select the field next to Keyboard Shortcut and hit cmd-shift-escape

Close Preferences.

Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/ folder and find "com.reederapp.mac.Reeder.plist"

Open that with a plist editor.

Look for the NSUserKeyEquivalents, which should have a drop-down arrow next it and click that.

You should see the Close Browser key on the left and something like "@⎋" on the right.

Double click the field on the right and delete the "@" so its just the escape key icon.

Save and close the plist.

Open Reeder and try it out (or check by clicking the File menu and looking at the keyboard shortcut listed next to Close Browser")

[davidhalter]

Thoughts on Reeder for Mac

Reeder for Mac draft 1 was released last night, and I've been testing it out. You can download it here. You can read more about it here. The UI is beautiful and interesting, and Reeder shows a lot of promise. As a long-time NetNewsWire user/fan I have to say this is the first Mac RSS client that has me considering switching in years. That said there are some annoyances with the UI I thought I'd write up in the hope it might spark a conversation about Reeder's usability (particularly its keyboard based navigation) and could inform its talented developer, Silvio Rizzi. Since this is one of the first applications I can think of that has moved from iOS to OS X, its definitely interesting to see how the developer considers keyboard and mouse based interaction. There are elements in Reeder that feel like they ought to be touched (not clicked) and many (seemingly) obvious keyboard-based navigation actions that (to my mind) are missing. 

All that said, I'm very excited about Reeder and hope it sparks some renewed competition among desktop RSS clients. While much has been written about RSS clients being dead or moved to the browser, I (for one) am a huge fan of having an application that does one thing well: aggregate and read the news.

Here's some of what seems off/missing to me:

Love the way reading an article hides the feed list, but I wish there was a keyboard-based way to navigate back to the feed list and out of the article (the escape key sounds right).

Article content should (reasonably) reflow to stay visible when a window/column is too small. Currently you have to use the mouse to resize the window. 

I wish some of the great toolbar items could have keyboard shortcuts. Instapaper Mobilizer, Instapaper, opening an article in the browser are all key.

Wish you could send an article to the browser in the background.

I'm not sure the logic/reasoning behind having some items in the toolbar at the top of the window and some (the refresh button, the mark as read button) at the button.

Better overall keyboard navigation. Left-Right Arrow keys (and the tab key) should move focus between feed list, feed items, and article views. It would also be nice if the focused view was hightlighted in some way.

A proper "River of News" view, combining a list of feed items and all/a large chunk of the feed's article into one column.

[davidhalter]

Chrome tip: utilize the "search engines" list to add quick omnibar access to favorite sites, chrome pages (downloads,extensions, bookmarks), and more search engines.

Yubnub as the default is key (for me at least), learn a few quick prefixes and the whole web is immediately accessible and searchable. Sure, "g searchphrase" searches google through yubnub, but yubnub does take that extra second to redirect, so I add my most used yubnub prefixes as keyword searches to chrome, so "g searchphrase" goes direct to google. Yes, I have two entries for Google Maps. I sometimes add an "s" to "gmap", and rather than try and fix my own habit, I just added another entry.

For those who love the Google Instant feature (in about:flags), it still works with non-google searches. 

Some of the URLs I use:

wikipedia  :  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=%s

google maps : http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s

google images : http://images.google.com/images?q=%s

yubnub : http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=%s

amazon : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?mode=blended&keyword=%s

downloads : chrome://downloads/

extensions : chrome://extensions/

bookmarks : chrome://bookmarks/