Print while chop;

Somehow, easter is here again. Time seems to be moving too fast.

So, I just found out I really like jQuery!

For the longest time I’ve stuck with Prototype.js and Scriptaculous, and they have truly been great to me. For me, discovering Prototype was discovering the joy of working with Javascript, as a robust framework like this takes a lot of the really hard work out of it, and lets you direct your mental energy towards creating beautiful and creative web applications instead of having to deal with browser inconsistencies and quirks.

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See, I told you I’d think up a better title some day.

This title fell into my head while I was at the store the other day. “print while chop” one of my favorite perl statements, and I selected this because I’m a perl programmer in my new job and write this stuff all day. (Well, not quite. Some perl code is actually readable and maintainable — believe it or not!)

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So the public beta of Safari 4 is let loose on the world, including a new way of organizing the tabs. Instead of living just above the content area, the new tabs are located in the title bar.

Much has already been said on this subject, and I’m not going to reiterate many of the points already mentioned. The current implementation has its drawbacks, especially with regards to click-through, but still — this represents a paradigm shift in the user interface of Safari, and, I suspect, in Snow Leopard as well.

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So, apparently iPhone Mail sorts messages by date received. Which is kind of awkward if you, say, have to move your mail server to a new machine, and simultaneously decide to switch from mbox to maildir as e-mail storage. This resets the date received, which makes browsing my inbox on my iPhone kind of awkward. It would be nice to have some kind of control over how mail is sorted.

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I shall say no more.

Eeexcept, make absolutely sure you download the cover version of this song by Frost*/Jem Godfrey. It is totally awesome.

So, today is the second annual blue beanie day! Use the (rest of the) day to meditate upon web standards. Send an angry e-mail to a website with poor standards support. Write some CSS, and feel good about it. Look at some old, ugly code. Cringe, and be happy that you won’t ever have to create stuff like that again. Check out HTML5 (which is now supported in W3’s HTML validator!), if you haven’t yet. Eat some ice cream. We are winning the war, you deserve it. Wear your blue beanie with pride. (Note to self: buy a blue beanie.)

(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, buy and read Jeffrey Zeldman’s amazing book Designing with Web Standards immediately.)

Right before we moved in to this apartment, the real estate agent next door claimed one of the rooms. They knocked a hole in the wall and made a new door on their side, and removed the handle from (and, we presumed, boarded up) the door on our side.

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Here’s another foolhardy attempt at increasing the number of posts on my blag above the number of plugins. So far, it seems like a battle I really can win! (That this is an issue at all, however, i think says a lot about me.)

So what am I actually writing about today? Mostly, it’s just to clear my confused head about what to do next.

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So, “Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X” by Aaron Hillegass arrived in my mailbox today. I’ve read the first three chapters and done the exercises, and so far this book is truly amazing. I really do understand the reason this book has the reputation of being the definitive beginner’s guide to Mac programming.

I have previously tried several tutorials on learning Objective C/Cocoa/XCode/Interface Builder, but never really grasped it the way Aaron already has made me do. The book is incredibly well written, focuses on what’s important, and makes me feel really clever when I manage to make something work. “Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X” is heartily recommended for anyone wanting to learn to program “the Mac way”.