AlternateIdea

Best Practices For Cocoa and CocoaTouch—Invaluable tips from Cocoa developers.

Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter. I’ve put together a small script that parses vote data collected by Govtrack.us and posts to twitter.

Protip: Color grep searches in terminal

alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'

Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.

ActiveRecord Ported To Objective-C brought to us by Ninja Kitten

With the release of Opera’s DragonFly, IE 8’s Developer tools, Safari’s/Webkit’s Web Inspector and Drosera; and the Grand Daddy of them all, Firebug – we’ve now come full circle.

DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary

var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.

A strftime for Prototype

Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

A beautiful, organic animation by Flight404 created using Processing.

Processing in Action

Aaron Patterson shows us how to define ruby methods which can be called from JavaScript using RKelly.

Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.

—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.

IE 8 PAsses the Acid 2 Test for those not keeping tabs on things.

Mislav has written up an excellent overview on upgrading Radiant (which used 1.5) to Prototype 1.6. The article does a great job of showing how 1.6 is superior to 1.5.

According to the New York Times, the Daily Show Archives, with over 7,000 videos are online—free and searchable.

Telemarketer gets owned

—Erik Kastner shows us how it’s done.

Making an iPhone app in about a minute