More or less on a whim I put together a full screen text editor. Sometimes it's nice to take up the whole screen and blot out most distractions. Once I figured out how to do exactly what I wanted to do, the app was literally less than 30 lines of code. It would have been even less if I used the standard methods of doing full screen, but I dare to be a little different. Really, besides that the only thing different about it is the fact that it doesn't have documents. Instead, it's saved as you edit. So there's no save command, much like the old Note Pad desk accessory. Today I added in the ability to send the text as email, much like printing or faxing. I had been meaning to build the foundation for this for a while, but only got around to it today. That code is a hundred lines, but solid. Soon I intend to do it system-wide, so that you can send the current document as email from any application. So if you're in Word or Nisus Writer, the text gets sent, if you're in Photoshop an image gets sent as an attachment. Nisus used to have a product that did something like this, and it wasn't a bad idea. Now that we have a system-wide Address Book, it's an even better idea. Some of the Address Book stuff is a pain to work with, but it's better than nothing. Oddly enough, I got PGP encryption of the sent mail for free. Using the Message.framework, I send the mail using NSMailDelivery. PGP 9 encrypts the outgoing mail without any user interaction. Nifty, but probably not the desired behavior for some people. [ 4/07/2005 03:16:00 AM ] [ ]
Monday, April 04, 2005
Squid on Mac OS X
More or less on a whim I set up Squid on my Macs using [SquidMan]. Not only does SquidMan make it very easy to run Squid on MacOS X, but it makes it easy to configure. I noticed a significant performance increase on the Powerbook and G5 with Squid running - pages came in much faster, even with a small Squid cache size. Squid just does a much better job than the caching mechanism the browser itself uses. I confess, I have a bad habit of typing URLs without "www" or ".com". If you type in "ebay", most modern browsers will see that "http://ebay" will not resolve, then try "www.ebay.com". With Squid active, that would lead to me getting a Squid error page. Needless to say, that got pretty annoying. If you're like me, put this in your Squid configuration file: append_domain .com Which will put ".com" on the end of any domain you give squid that has no periods in it. Simple, and doesn't require a lot of work. [ 4/04/2005 04:10:45 PM ] [ ]
