Joel Lopes Da Silva on the Web!

CocoaHeads Group in Paris

Guillaume Cerquant is starting a new CocoaHeads group in Paris. So if you are interested in Cocoa development, you should go to the first meeting which will be on Monday, March 23, 2009 19:00 at La Cantine - 12 Galerie Montmartre, 75002 Paris. You will find more information here.

Week links: Qt 4.5, iPhone OS 3.0, Hadopi, and more!

It has been some time since I first thought I should publish links to some of the most interesting news items I found, but I never took the time to actually do it... until today. I can't promise I will be able to do it every week, but I'll do what I can. So here is my selection for this week...

How to configure common CLI tools on Mac OS X

Even if you configured properly the application Terminal on your Mac, you may think using it is difficult, and not intuitive at all. Indeed, with the default configuration for the common command line tools, you won't get syntax highlighting within vim, nor will you have a shell which facilitates your work, and so on. But since I started my journey in Mac universe after spending some time on Linux, I am used to configure some of these tools, and I simply decided to make my shell and my other CLI tools on my mac look like what I previously had in my Linux box.

So, let me tell what I did to have really usable command line tools on my Mac...

Configure Terminal on Mac OS X

Every time someone asks me for help for something geek on a Mac, I often prefer using the Terminal, because I never got used to editing a configuration file under /etc with a graphical text editor. Don't misunderstand me, I am not a Terminal addict, and I often prefer using graphical tools extremely integrated with Mac OS X: for example, I wouldn't code in C++ with something else than Xcode, which turns out to be an incredible IDE. But for some other things, I still launch this Terminal, and there are a few things in its default configuration I never liked, such as the behaviour of the keys page up/page down, home/end, etc.

So, let me tell you how you can configure your Terminal like I did on my mac, running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6.

Draggable Screen Ruler for Web Development

When making some web development work, I used to use Screenshot Plus to measure the width of some elements. While this Mac OS X widget is very handy, it wasn't very appropriate for this job: it required me to load Mac OS X's Dashboard, activate Drag a picture in the widget, drag around what I wanted to measure, and finally drop the screenshot which was just taken. I thought it was a complex way to simply measure things in a web page, but I also thought there should a much better way to do that, which would be far more integrated within the web browser.

Well, I was right, since this Draggable Screen Ruler bookmarklet actually does the job quite efficiently, while also giving some useful information such as absolute position in the window. I wrote it a few days ago, and I actually use it every time I work on web design with CSS. You just have to drag and drop the previous link to your bookmarks bar, and you will be able to measure anything from any website you visit. To deactivate it, simply double click with your mouse, or press any key on your keyboard. Isn't it nice?

The Ting Tings

I recently found out a song I have been looking for since Apple released one of their last ads about iPod+iTunes, a few months ago: Shut Up and Let Me Go. But instead of just discovering a great song, I got to know the great indie pop band who created this song, The Ting Tings, and their fantastic first album: We Started Nothing.

Me and my IMAP accounts

The least I can say is that I like e-mail. I like it so much that I have been accumulating so many different e-mail accounts recently, that reading my mails was becoming horrible. That's why I decided to group all my mails on a single e-mail account, and by the way, begin to use IMAP: indeed, I have been using POP (and SSH+mutt, it's true) until now.

I first thought the best solution was to use Gmail: I like Gmail web interface very much, it gives a lot of storage, allows user defined filters, and I can use it in IMAP with any IMAP client. I could even use a custom e-mail address, since Google Apps for your domain is free of charge. Well, in fact, it's complicated... 

Moodstocks at FedeRez event in 2009

Moodstocks, a French start-up based in the incubator of my school, the École Centrale Paris, is committed to provide great technology to look for things in the web in a visual way. Basically, the idea is that search results in classic search engines are presented in a very classic way, which doesn't take advantage of the power of current browsers, and which doesn't correspond anymore to the expectations of the users.

But words are nothing compared to the user experience they can provide, and you'd better look for yourself the products they are working on:

• Flokoon;
• Pikadeo.

Since the next FedeRez event in 2009 will be about User Experience and Ergonomics in software development, I thought inviting Moodstocks to make a conference at this event could be a great idea. Fortunately, unless a silly planning problem occurred, they should be there to talk about their vision of User Experience in the web.