I have posted about NetNewsWire many times on here before. Its been my favourite news reading application for a couple of years now (if not more) but recent development has severally hampered the usability of the software.

It seemed to be when they changed it to support sync to Google Reader – not a bad idea by any means, but releasing the software before it was full tested and working was a huge mistake. Trying to push it to people before it was ready was an even bigger mistake.

Now twitter & fb are full of messages about problems with the Mac OSX and iPhone version, and it really needs to be sorted out. I know its free now, but as I have said before I paid for it a long time ago and it worked, if its a question of money then release it as a paid version. Not too expensive ( VersionsApp – take note ) but working.

Do not recommend it at the moment, which is such a pity as it used to be one of my favourite applications.

I am always forgetting about the stringformatting tag in Django’s templating language. For instance for leading zeros:

This will always put a leading zero.

Wow, Google have announced the release of the Google OS. Although it wasn’t entirely a shock its nice to see that they are promoting something from the ground up.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

Looking forward to trying it out even if I don’t have a netbook.

Just came across an interesting problem with the contenttypes contributed application and the test framework.

If you are using fixtures in the test frame work you might find that the database gets out of date as you are working on it, particularly if you are creating new models all the time.

To get around this you need to regenerate the contenttypes database. If you depend on this, the following steps could give you problems so make sure that you back up your data (dumpdata) beforehand.

So first off drop the database:

If the database has foreign key dependancies on contenttypes you will not be able to reset it like that. Use a database administration tool and drop cascade on the django_content_type table instead.

Then sync the database to create a new contenttypes table:

Now you are ready to dumpdata into a fixture:

So what’s wrong with Adobe’s UI: Well this is a very funny tumbl log of plenty of comments of things that could be done better:

http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

Things that particularly standout are issues with there cross-platform UI. Although praised by many as a good example, it just shows that some of the finer details are missed.

Via UIEye.

This is just great:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/redesigning-a-u.html

A summary of the post that basically Bug Labs has hired IDEO to redesign their hardware user interface for BUGbase and to do it in the open.

Updates on the design process can be sees at: Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.

I use SVN (subversion) quite a bit, even at home to manage my own files, but recently I have been running the beta version for Versions by Sofa and Pico.

It turned into an excellent way of using SVN, being very visual and supporting everything that I needed, but alas the Beta period ran out and they released Versions 1.

Now I was all for buying this application, but the purchase price of 39 Euros totally puts my of. After all this is a nice to have, and only improves my life slightly. It just doesn’t seem worth the price – particularly when most software like this for OS X is about half the price (I would have easily decided to buy it for 20 Euros).

So after deciding whether to hack it, not really an option any more as I like to have all paid for or properly licensed software on my machines, or search for something else I looked back at what I could use.

SVN from the command line. So I started using this again, and I found myself checking in versions of things that are not ready and not having a nice overview of files. It works of course, but it didn’t suit my way of working since using versions – checking in some files, and generally knowing the status of projects that I am working on.

Then I went back to the SVN plugin for Finder. This is ok, but more often than not the rendering of icons showing whether a folder is up to date or not stops working leaving me in the dark.

Then I decided to check out textmate SVN integration. Its ok, but not really good enough, I don’t like the keybindings and the interface is not intuitive enough.

Finally I came across the ProjectPlus plugin for Textmate. After installing just configure it in the preferences to work with what ever source revision system you use (Its supports SVN, Git, Mercurial, Svk & Bazaar), and you can see the state of what you are doing in the system.

So here are my most used OS X applications of the year, in no particular order:

* Spotify. This is just an excellent music application, the speed with which the streams start is simply amazing and I don’t find that I get that many adverts in the way of the vast array of songs on offer.

* Textmate. I probably use this more than any other application on the Mac, for me hands down the best text editor that I have ever used and I find more and more features in it everyday.

* NetNewsWire Pro. Having all my RSS feeds in one place is really just what I need. Must remember to integrate it with FriendFeed.

* Adium. Always there, some times a pain with XMMP but otherwise just awesome.

* Python 2.5. Best scripting language by far, but then I am biased.

All free (I did buy a license for NetNewsWire but you no longer have to) apart from TextMate which is more than worth the price.

This is really really awesome, and you have to really check it out for your self.

Its a little flash application that uses a webcam or other camera attached to your computer to project a little ‘Proto’ guy on top of a printed piece of paper. They have even got some code released for it.

Check it out here with some images and video, but it really works better to try it yourselves:

http://www.boffswana.com/news/

I haven’t seen any good examples recently of workflow diagrams, at least not more technical ones based around software, services and workflow.

Creating a diagram like this its always nice to see other examples of how people have approached the problem but in this scenario I have yet to see anything. Even Edward Tufte came short on this, though the diagrams and illustrations he provides examples for are excellent.

So this is what I came up with to illustrate a workflow with our software in a newsroom environment.