Earlier this week, the Chromium Blog announced an official extension API for Chrome’s omnibox (search bar). I’ve always loved keyboard driven interfaces — the command line, [Quicksilver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)), Alfred, etc — so, I immediately started thinking about what I could build with it. My first idea was a documentation browser for Apple’s Mac and iOS libraries. I’m always googling for class…
Every holiday, between the food and family, I always seem to find time for a quick project. Last year I built the first version of Nottingham over the Thanksgiving break. This year was no exception, and I found myself putting the final touches on Sosumi for Mac after an eighteen hour coding streak this weekend. Sosumi for Mac builds on…
Back in June I wrote a detailed post describing how I backup my data. One of the key components of my backup strategy was using Backblaze for continuous, offsite recovery in the event of a disaster. Well, disaster struck. Last week, the hard drive in my father’s MacBook died. In the past, I’d setup a networked Time Machine drive to…
I’m totally obsessed with web site performance. It’s one of those nerd niches that really appeal to me. I’ve blogged a few times previously on the topic. Two years ago, (has it really been that long?) I talked about my experiences rebuilding this site following the best practices of YSlow. A few days later I went into detail about how…
I’ve noticed a resurgence on the web of people talking about OmniFocus and how they use the app to manage their task lists. Despite being a user for nearly three years — since the first public beta — for some reason I’ve never gotten around to writing about why I find it so useful and how it fits into my…
For an upcoming project, I needed a quick PHP function that would generate strong passwords. It’s an easy problem on the surface, but it has some quirky nuances that appear if you spend any length of time thinking about it. For example, it’s not enough to merely pick characters at random — you have to include at least one character…
Four years ago, on another blog, I wrote about my file backup strategy — everything I use to keep my data safe. A lot has changed since then. CD’s and DVD’s have fallen by the wayside, raw hard disk space has gotten insanely cheap, and online storage has finally taken off in a big way. At the prompting of a…
On this lazy Sunday afternoon I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention a few open source projects I’ve recently updated. GitHub makes sharing code so ridiculously easy, it’s a shame not to call attention to it occasionally in case other people might find something useful. Sosumi 2.0 First up is Sosumi 2.0. Last year, when Apple launched the Find…
A year and a half ago I wrote about OpenFeedback, an open source Cocoa framework for gathering feedback from your users. Initially, it was a sister project to Appcaster, my indie dashboard web app. Since then, Appcaster has grown up and morphed into Shine, but OpenFeedback remained unchanged. Tonight, though, I took a few hours off from Highwire and rewrote…
I’ve been wanting to switch my online store away from PayPal for quite a while now. Although there are a bunch of PayPal horror stories floating around the web (here’s a recent one), my main reason is to make my life simpler. As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to offer quantity discounts, coupon codes,…