This is our second show in the “Workflows” series. Our guest is programmer, writer, and podcaster Dan Benjamin.
Links of note
Dan’s Sites
Applications
Missing Drawer TextMate Plug-in
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Great episode guys! Keep up the great work!
The discussion about TextMate as Dan’s primary development tool has me wondering. I (grudgingly) use Eclipse day-to-day for my PHP development work because of its ability to SFTP a file or a folder with a single keystroke once I set it up correctly. This lets me do development work on my Mac but then sync to our “official” development environment that is a bit different from my local development environment. There are also cases where I have to do all my development in that environment, which means constantly syncing the files. Eclipse makes it handy, but I don’t really like it for many other reasons.
I would love to use TextMate as my primary development tool. I use it for text-based things and for one-off development that doesn’t get integrated into our other environments at my workplace.
But how can I accomplish syncing the files from within — even from outside — TextMate? It doesn’t have to be on-demand syncing like I’m doing in Eclipse. Actually, I’d really love to have something watch the folder and automagically sync things to the development server for me.
Any ideas? I have been using a Mac at home since 2005, but as my main development platform, I have only had a Mac for the last 6 months. I’m really trying to streamline my workflow to prove to management that Macs really can help our productivity in our web development department. I’m the guinea pig right now, but if I can prove it, there might be others that will be able to ditch Windows and get a Mac here at work.
Thanks again for the great podcast, and specifically for this workflow series. I’m always interested to hear how other folks are doing things.
– phil –
I agree with Dan, google reader’s GUI is rough. The keyboard navigation is nice, but other than that, it’s weak.
One thing that truly bothered me (and creeped me out) about it was the recommendations (strange I know, but hear me out). I subscribed only to Ruby blogs, about 6 of them. I have a gmail account, but I’ve never emailed about work topics on it. So why did reader recommend Lotus Domino blogs to me? I rejected 26 Domino suggestions (I’m persistent) and yet 4/5 of the recommendations were still Domino related. I came to the realization that google is tracking my google searches and basing the recommendations on that (I am a Domino developer by day, and thus it is something I search for on occasion). Apart from it being really annoying, I’m really not fond of the idea that everything I’ve searched for is being tracked by google. I guess it’s the price of free searching. I’ve since stopped using google reader, modified my settings to be as private as can be, and have stopped using google for anything I don’t want to be publicly known. You guys called it in the mail episode, google seems to use anything you give it for… well whatever they want.
I use Espresso and skEdit for coding (hobby) and I will give TextMate a try again. Very interesting thoughts!
Concerning Pages/Word:
I also have to disagree (just a little bit) concerning Word’s UI: I think, Microsoft has to deliver to those guys, who use the Microsoft Office for Windows. They know the app, they know where to find whatever they are looking for. It will be very interesting to see Office 2011. They seem to embrace both worlds: more Mac UI and more Windows UI at the same time. I don’t know, how to say it properly… Microsoft is on a difficult mission with Office for Mac – preaching to two different user groups…
I would love to use Pages on a day to day basis. But I can’t. I live in a Windows environment at work and we have very sophisticated Word documents. There is no way to use Pages in this situation. Pages messes up when importing or exporting complicated documents. Believe me, I tried it not only once!
If I was exclusively on a Mac, I would definitely prefer Pages, though. But I am not…
Concerning RSS feeds:
Interesting discussion about reading RSS feeds in a RSS reader vs. reading them on the actual website! As a reader I prefer reading them in my RSS reader (I use Gruml on my Mac and Reeder on my iPhone). But as a webmaster, I have to be honest: I want the readers to visit the website. Once, I was working on a project that had 10 million page views per month. There was much traffic involved and the server did cost us real money. Our RSS feed did only contain the title and about 300 words from the actual article. The readers had to visit the website for the full “package”. We did that because we needed the money (ads) in order to be able to run the website.
Keep up the great work! I am looking forward to every new episode!
Not really a workflow episode since DB confessed early on “I don’t really have a workflow”. And that kind of showed in the episode. Nonetheless, it was fun to hear about his latest projects and digita life.
@Phil
Check the textmate user forums. They’ll get you going
About google reader:
I use it as a place to store my feeds on the cloud. I can click on rss feed on a website and quickly have it added to my google reader. But for the actual reading part, Reeder, the iphone app suggested by MM in his episode, is a gem of design and a pleasure to use.
@phil check out Panic’s Transmit 4. Otherwise you might be able to set up some kind of auto-syncing via Automator?
@phil This is a shell script that I use all the time for auto syncing a remote server. It runs in the background and watches your local dev files. Every time a file changes locally, it automatically uploads it (well, 90% of the time – if it doesn’t work first time, just keep hitting cmd-s til it does)
I run it in a small semi-transparent always-on-top terminal so I can keep a check on the uploads
cd /local/dev/dir
# rsync to get local files in sync with remote
rsync -Cavrz user@remote.server.com:/remote/dev/dir/ /local/dev/dir
# now watch local dev files
touch last;
while true;
do
timestamp=`eval date +%T`
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*/..*' \) -type f -newer last -exec echo $timestamp '{}' \;
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*/..*' \) -type f -newer last -exec scp '{}' user@remote.server.com:/remote/dev/dir/'{}' \;;
touch last;
sleep 3;
done;
I’m a new mac switcher (And crazy-lovin’ it). I just discovered the podcast today and after listening to the latest two episode, I think I learned more than I did in the last two weeks that I’ve been fiddling with my new mac.
Thanks guys and keep up the good work. Next time, I’ll try to leave an actually useful comment