ColorSnapper Review

For many of us, grabbing a single color often mean launching an application, such as Photoshop, selecting the eye dropper tool and then selecting the color, clicking the color tool, and copy and pasting the color HEX value, simply to life a single color value from an image, button, graphic or so forth. Its a cumbersome process, and unnecessary.

Color Snapper is one of those no brainer utilities that should be part of OS X, as an extension of the OS X color selector. By now you’re probably familiar with the OS X color selection’s magnifying glass. In case you’re not, any application that uses the OS X default color selector includes a magnifying glass tool that lets you easily sample any color on screen (not limited to the current application). Its a useful functionality as you can select a color from a image in a web browser or Preview or even icon or menu, not just your current app.

Color Snapper extends this behavior to any circumstance. Simply press command-option-c (this can be changed) and you’re presented with magnifying glass cursor that easily lets you select any color on the screen. The color is then copied to your clip board as a HEX value (or RBG, RGBA, HSB etc if you prefer).

The dropdown menu displays most recent picks

p>A utility as simple as Color Snapper could have stopped without any preferencces and it’d been a very useful tool but it also includes a host options, such as key-command selection, format copied to clipboard, notification center, menu bar icon, launch-at-startup, last three colors and magnification level.

Depending on your brand of color values, its easily configged. As a Front-End Developer, (excuse me), User-Interface Engineer, I live in the world of HEX although I’ve configurred my alternate color value to rbga.

You can easily adjust the magnification level, a nice bonus.

Its hard not to recommend ColorSnapper, at $5, its everything it should be. The only improvement would be allowing area-average color sampling akin to Photoshop’s color sampler.

Color Snapper Website

App Store

From the Color Snapper website

Looking at the Amazon ratings of the PS4, there’s a whole lot of blue lights of death.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

In the tech and design sectors there’s a lot of folks working long hours, like 70+ hours a week. There’s a certain badge-of-honor-martyr-complex-thing that comes along with it. But let’s set the record straight. Here’s what long hours really mean. - wearemammoth.com

Go read the article linked above, but the TL;DR version is that long hours symbolize a poorly managed company that does not respect its employees.

I had a phone interview with a company that prided itself on 60+ hour work weeks, and the CEO boasted over the phone, “We don’t believe in work-life separation, we believe in work life integration”. 

I appreciated the honesty. It was clear that we weren’t compatible.

Even after talking to an engineer interested in recruiting me for his team at Yahoo, I was surprised to hear that most employees work 45+ hour weeks. Its entirely more reasonable but that extra hour is an hour lost going to the gym, taking your dog for a walk, spending time with your significant other, playing with your child, watching a movie,reading book, playing playstation, playing an instrument…. quite simply, being who you are.  I’d gladly take a job where I make $60,000 work 8 hour days than $80,000 and work 45+ hour weeks. It doesn’t mean I’m not passionate about the work I do, and I do enjoy it but I do not derive my entire identity from my job.

Often young employees make the mistake that long hours will be seen as dedication. Its not the case. If you need further proof, read “Fire the workaholics”. In fact, read Rework, which is should be read by every employee and every manager as the business manifesto that we all should aspire to.

So Google is shipping Kitkat without a web browser…

Android 4.4+ KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome or build their own

“According to Android developer and author Maximiliano Firtman, he just got official confirmation that KitKat “… doesn’t ship with any browser, just the WebView. The emulator has it but not real devices. It’s up to each vendor to create a browser app using the WebView (such as Samsung) or to get license to preinstall Chrome.” - unwiredview.com

What the article doesn’t mention is google plans to auto-update the Chromium-powered WebView, by-passing manufactures. This means Google’s apps and app devs can continually run the latest and greatest even if a device is isolated to Android 4.4 hell years later.

The big news for us web devs is the Chromium WebView finally supports remote debugging. 

As a developer, you can count on most manufactures licensing the Google Web suite and your WebView apps will always have access to the latest and greatest.

Its Google’s round-about way to regain some of the control lost on Android and to attack the problem of fragmentation. I’ve been a bigger fan of iOS development strictly from a front end developer’s point-of-view as iOS users are much more likely to update and the Nitro Javascript engine still   triumphs Google’s V8 in speed.

That said, I’ll take an auto-updated webview over speed at this point.

Previously with this blog, its been a post a day format, but in reality 90% of my traffic is dedicated from roughly ten posts.  The takeaway message? Original / Quality posts count more than volume. Instead of trying to make a post day during the weekdays, I’m going to shift the focus to longer, more informative posts.

My readership is still small but growing, to roughly 2200 pageviews a month (amusing considering I created a website at one point garnered, 120,000+ monthly unique visitors for an astounding 1,500,000 pageviews during the same stretch). 

Cabel of Panic (the authors of Coda & Transmit). As expected, entertaining and funny. 

You want this, you just don’t know it yet

Codekit, slayer of dragons?

Introduction

Reviews are a funny thing when it comes to full production utilities for coding, they aren’t common and usually exist in the blogosphere. There’s plenty of reasons why, knowledge, scope-of-testing, time and so forth. So to contribute my part, I’ve written a review of Codekit, which I’ve been using as part of my work flow for two+ weeks.

With the rapid development of LESS/SCSS and Front End Developers, User-Interface Designers/User-Interface Engineers, Web Designers, the like are suddenly have yet-another-technology-to-master. LESS and SASS for the uninitiated are pre-processing languages for CSS. Simply put, these are languages that extend the functionality of CSS with variables, mixins, imports, inheritance, operators and other goodies. I’m not here to profess all the features of these languages, but if you’re new to these, I suggest you take a look as for large projects, it can bring sanity. That said, both LESS and SASS need to be compiled to CSS before it can be interpreted by a browser. LESS has the ability to use a JS plugin to compile LESS into CSS in a browser which has alleviated but it isn’t a sure-fire fix. SASS requires compiling through a utility.

Javascript can become even more heady, even the chore of minification can be a headache, let alone uglification and other space saving techniques. To help with some of the issues, JSHint and JSlint have worked wonders to find that one bad comma or random char. It becomes a struggle to do all these while developing.

So without doing chores manually, we’ve seen the the evolution of utilities like Grunt.Js. Grunt.js uses Node.js (which starts to get out-of-scope) to create rules for combining multiple types of actions: preprocessor compiling, minification, JShint/JsLint and all the aforementioned. Grunt can even watch files and recompile when it detects a file change. That said, it requires setting up, which can be sometimes cumbersome and its inefficient. Compiling can take more than just mere seconds on large projects. While working on a telecom-mega-corp’s website, I found myself waiting roughly 20-30 seconds to to compile (On Core i7 2012 Retina MacBook Pro), to make matters worse, it’d routinely error out which then meant having to command line grunt every time I wanted to recompile to see my SCSS changes as CSS.

You probably guessed it by now: The savior

For those familiar with Grunt.js, it does most everything grunt.js does, and then some, for the rest of you, it does everything I just wrote about, but faster and without a command terminal but that isn’t even the best part. Codekit will reload your active tab in Google Chrome or Safari if it detects a change to an HTML/PHP/whatever in your active directory, much akin to LiveReload. That is isn’t even the best part. CSS/SASS changes are injected live, there’s no wait for a page reload, and the changes are animated.

Also as a bonus, Codekit does lossless image optimization, much akin to ImageOptim. However its image optimization, while fast, doesn’t seem to be nearly as effective as ImageOptim. Worse while working on large banking website, I ran the image optimization. None of the assets appeared to have changed as Tower (my Git GUI) didn’t detect the changes. When I ran the Image Optim, one-by-one Tower detected the modified files.

I’ll be interested to see if this is a reoccurring issue with the utility.

Codekit actively monitors multiple projects

The GUI allows you to ignore files, and set destinations of files, install Compass or Bourbon. The GUI is straightforward, and doesn’t have a lot of depth, that said it doesn’t need it.  Most of the time when using Codekit, you’ll be running it in the background. In fact, most of the time, you won’t even be looking at Codekit. Occasionally on a bad compile, Codekit will leap to the front of the screen.

Codekit leaps to the front on bad complies with error messaging

I’ve used it for several projects ranging from a Wordpress site with a theme styled with LESS, a groundwork SCSS built site with PHP to illustrate behavior of user interface, to currently, building out a style guide for a soon to be phonegap built Android app.  I’ve used it with both Coda and Sublime Text. 

With a little finanggling, I’ve gotten to CodeKit to work with most projects. Codekit is quicker than grunt.js and more reliable, and best of all works with Grunt.js projects.

I can’t say too much negative, I was able to get Codekit to work with a stubborn compass SCSS project, despite it compiling fine with grunt. I’ve hit the brick wall limit of watched files, which is an OS X limitation. Strange, unchecking watched projects doesn’t truly stop watching, meaning I have to manually remove the project from CodeKit.

Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off autocomplete in your browser.

Its a fun test, seriously, go to the test URL.

The Autocomplete feature is a known risk but still often used, worse is the Chrome’s Insane Password Security Strategy. Basically, any time you have a browser store your information, especially Chrome, its a risk. 

OS X’s keychain presents a risk but at least the user has to have access to the computer’s admin password to root around in the keychain stored passwords.

When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing. - Ibrahim Diallo, idiallo.com

I have to agree, part of Apple locking down upgrades is insurance on future Mac sales. My 2008 Mac Pro is 5 years old, making it by far the longest I’ve owned a computer. Previously, my upgrade cycle was 2-3 years… then…. the Mac Pro happened. 

There’s some significant advances that’s happened since my computer’s release: 802.11 ac, USB 3.0, Bluetooth 4.0, Thunderbolt, SSD’s wider adoption and the expected round of CPU updates for smaller/lower power/more powerful chipsets. Only one of these cannot be added to my Mac Pro… Thunderbolt.

Still, while the current class of desktop i7s can best my Mac Pro, there aren’t many laptops playing in the same league as it. My AMD Radeon 6870 is only bested in the mobile sphere by the GeForce GTX 780m, and it still lacks the clock speeds of my graphics card.

There are compelling reasons to upgrade around the corner, with high density displays soon to become to the norm, 4k video already widely adopted for videography, 36 bit color slowly marching into displays, the every increasing megapixel count on digital cameras, faster SSD with PCIe connections, richer internet experiences, a new generation of videogames focusing on the next generation consoles which will set a new standard, and that is bound to usher in march of upgrades as these will require faster CPUs/GPUs to fully realize. 

Tablets are interesting but they’re limited by their capacity to present information and their form factors. This may not always be the case but for the foreseeable future if you’re in the game of not simply consuming media but participating in its creation / alteration, a Mac or PC will be your first choice.

 

By single column, I mean that the primary flow of the content is downward rather than both downward and side-by-side. Side-by-side content usually requires reflowing to fit on a smaller screen. In contrast, a linear downward flow means content simply scales horizontally to fit the available space. Voila, one layout for any screen size! - blog.fogcreek.com

Yup, the spoiler is to just width=“100%” your columns. Its simple and sensible, I like it. There’s no reason for the headache.

Bloomberg Business’s magazine inspires more of AppleInsider’s brain-farting

Apple Insider recently published a multi-page article after Bloomberg Business opted to use the infamous Apple beachball over the Windows hourglass. Its a sign of the times, right?

The fact is Apple has had a very long history of product placement, often for free.

Hollywood’s love affair with Apple is only an extension of the creative class’s large affinity for the Macintosh platform. In the early 90s, often product photography of monitors featured desktop images of Mac OS over Windows, a subtle jab from graphic designers, photoshopping their platform of choice onto ads. The significance of Bloomberg’s usage of the icongraphy with a beach ball isn’t indicative of a larger cultural shift to Apple, but the nature of computing itself. Once upon a time, blue screens of death and error type -11 haunted computer users. Today, freezes mostly come from single applications, from the oodles of advances in OSes, such as protected memory, process management the later.

Adobe recently leaked millions of passwords and which has lead Ars Technica to speculate that it’s a massive aid to crackers.

There’s a pretty nifty tool to quickly check to see if your password was leaked. A quick check showed that my old adobe account was compromised… fortunately it was through an old employer so its in their hands. 

So again go to the URL below. Simply punch in your e-mail address in question and it’ll either return a yes or no.

http://adobe.cynic.al/

Also to make light of something that probably affected most of my colleges, I present the following meme:

What is TogetherJS?

We’d like to introduce TogetherJS, a real-time collaboration tool out of Mozilla Labs.

TogetherJS is a service you add to an existing website to add real-time collaboration features. Using the tool two or more visitors on a website or web application can see each other’s mouse/cursor position, clicks, track each other’s browsing, edit forms together, watch videos together, and chat via audio and WebRTC.

Serious JS wizardy here, it only takes about 50 lines of code to make a very simple shared drawing app. That said, I’m betting the server overhead is considerable.

Mozilla Labs has cooked up interesting stuff before, but I think everyone is waiting on PDF.js

First check out the demo.

Its nifty, but not new, OS X (and Windows) has featured responsive icons for years now (try resizing your icons in OS X).  At higher resolutions folder icons are open and 3D, at the small sizes they’re lat and closed.  One might argue even the original Mac OS had “responsive” icons based on list views and icon views.

Responsive icons were bound to happen on the web, this is simply an extreme version. There’s been some great discussions about responsive mobile images and different cropping based on screen size.  The treatment of responsive has extended in iOS 7 to text, with Textkit. Responsive is a philosophy has been extended to all aspects of design: photo, font, vector image, information hierarchy, structure and even data design.

This demo seems extreme and such drastic icon changes would lead to potentially confusing user-experiences, simply by rotating a tablet and having all the icons change. Also, with the advent of high density displays, less is lost in the mix. I’m not against this, but the demo illustrates a cool-yet-impractical example. I’d love to see an icon set with an OS-like treatment, where the variations of the icons: A little more reservation. 

Onward we go :)