Code Sorcery Workshop

Just a note that I'll be attending Apple's Leopard Tech Talk in NYC on January 24th. If there are any Cocoa developers out there reading now, I hope to see you there! I'll be making a trip up from DC for part of the week. Are there any other good Apple-related things going on around then that I should seek out?

If you use NetNewsWire, you may be accustomed to the keystroke ⇧⌘P to send a link to Pukka. Alert reader and Pukka user Ben Jackson sent me an AppleScript which can replicate this behavior in Safari using a bit of Quicksilver magic.

I've mentioned Quicksilver before. It's a handy utility that lets you operate many functions on your Mac using the keyboard and shortcuts. Ben's script basically emulates the Pukka bookmarklet functionality (available in Pukka->Install Bookmarklet...). But, unlike using the bookmarklet in Safari, calling the AppleScript from Quicksilver lets you bind a specific key combination.

Ben writes:

I assigned it a trigger in Quicksilver bound to ⇧⌘P to match NetNewsWire's 'post to weblog' shortcut and restricted the scope to Safari.

Thanks for the tip, Ben! Getting beyond Safari's basic bookmark shortcuts is a big help to keeping the workflow moving along quickly.

Update: Ugh, I can't believe I didn't attach the original script. You can get it here. Thanks, Wess!

Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame mentions a holiday sale going on right now for his and NewsGator's other products. If you don't have NetNewsWire or MarsEdit, go check them out!

Pukka has had NetNewsWire integration from the start and Brent was kind enough to add support for Pukka way back when.

Apps working together in harmony... it's enough to warm the cockles of your heart.

I just wanted to say thanks to all of the folks who purchased Pukka yesterday to support Child's Play Day. I definitely saw a boost in sales and I've passed on the proceeds to the charity. I can't wait to see the grand total from all of the developers!

I'm happy to announce that tomorrow, Code Sorcery Workshop will be participating in a charity day for Child's Play. The short version is that all (yes, that's 100%) of the proceeds that I gather from Pukka for tomorrow, December 7, will go towards Child's Play. If you've been thinking about registering, now is a great time to do so!

Child's Play is a Seattle-based charity that provides games for kids in children's hospitals over the holidays. Here's a quote from The Seattle Times:

"Child’s Play is putting the media’s negative portrayals of video games to shame, and showing the world that gamers are good people, too."

For me, gaming was a big part of my childhood that influences me to this day. Problem solving, teamwork, and just general escapism (in moderation) are great things, and I think that it's wonderful that I can put my programming skills to use towards helping brighten the days of children who are hospital-bound over the holidays.

So again, if you are on the verge of registering Pukka, what are you waiting for? And while you're at it, check out the other great software developers who are participating as well. Thanks to Mike Zornek of Clickable Bliss for coming up with and organizing the idea.

Just wanted to post a note that I went to Steve Wozniak's local iWoz book signing tonight here in DC. It was mentioned as the first time a book has sold out in advance of the author arriving. Congrats Woz! While it was a little too crowded to 'meet' him in any meaningful way, I hope I left a mark when he signed my MacBook Pro! He was generous enough to also sign my copy of iWoz.

I'd also like to note that though I've been a little quiet lately, work is happening behind the scenes. I've recently moved to freelancing and have freed up some more time to work on Pukka and other forthcoming projects. I'll try to live by the adage of "under promise, over deliver" so that's all I'll say about that for now ;-)

Keep the feedback coming in and I look forward to releasing some new goodies in the near future!

By the way, I wanted to give a shout out (and I've added a new blog category called "Shout Out") to Potion Factory for their new beta application, Tangerine. Sadly, while I have a penchant for delicious-looking applications, I don't work out with an iPod. However, my wife is already saying how much this will help her with her workout planning. So, congrats to Potion Factory and keep up the good work! It's great to see new, innovative applications for the Mac from lots of developers -- everybody wins!

If you are a fellow Mac developer, I hope to see you this weekend at C4 in Chicago. It's my first true Mac developer conference (sadly, I could not make WWDC this year). I'm looking forward to seeing some of you again (from the DC area) as well as meeting many more new folks.

In particular, I'm most interested in Brent Simmons' talk on the hybridization of the desktop and web services, Gus Mueller's about Lua scripting, and Brian Fitzpatrick as he talks about the future of one of my favorite tools, Subversion.

I'm also excited about the mix of relative newcomers like myself and old hands -- the hacking should be most excellent.

See you in The Windy City!

P.S. Hanging out in Chicago during the day Friday? Ping me if you want to meet up someplace with good coffee and strong wifi -- or vice-versa.

Sorry for the radio silence here, but we're happy to announce that our Chief Gnome Wrangler got married early this month and was on honeymoon for a couple of weeks. Expect more news and updates soon now that we're back.

Also, we'd like to give a shout out to Billable by Clickable Bliss. We got a chance to meet Mike at the somewhat recent CocoaDevHouseWashington when he showed Billable in its near-final stages and we wanted to post our congrats! We wish you much luck, Mike!

From splee.blog:

The following AppleScript takes the current page in safari and uses Pukka to send the link to del.icio.us. If there is any text selected it gets added as the description, as does the referrer. The slight twist is that it uses some javascript to ask what tags to assign to the page. [...] That is as near as it gets to Safari integration with del.icio.us from what I can find.

Thanks for the work on this, Lee. I was hoping someone would figure out how to get it to ask for tags. ;-)