HeySage

One of the problems with long url’s is that, when you paste them into an email message, the url can be broken by a line break. There are two solutions to this problems. The first is using the edit link feature in apple mail. To use this method highlight any text within the body of your email message, right click (⌃click), and choose edit link from the contextual menu. In the edit link dialog box paste the obtrusively long URL. The text will appear to the recipient as a hyperlink (assuming they accept HTML formatted email).

The second answer to this problem is tiny urls. You can take any long and complex url and enter into the tiny url conversion tool at tinlyurl.com. The site will output a url that looks something like http://tinyurl.com/2t6wrs. The only problem with this approach is that it is inconvenient. In comes tinyURL.service from RiverDark Studios. When you download and install tinyURL.service three menu items will appear in the services menu.

1. Shrink URL
2. Shrink URL and copy to clipboard
3. Shrink URL to clipboard

You can highlight any url and choose Shrink URL to clipboard from the services menu and paste it anywhere you would like. Take it a step further, you can add a keyboard shortcut to Shrink URL to clipboard. In doing so you can copy, convert, and paste with two keyboard shortcuts and a pear tree.

Technorati Tags: TinyURL.service, TinyURL, Edit Link, Apple Mail, Long URLs

IMAP-IDLE is a plugin for Apple Mail developed by Michael Rothwell.

But what does this gem do you ask? Well, IMAP-IDLE provides IDLE support for IMAP accounts in Mail.app. But what does that mean? A simplified way of explaining it is that any new mail received by the mail server will be immediately delivered to your inbox, rather than waiting for your email client to ping the server every X number of minutes.

You might find yourself asking, why would I want this? Well, you might not. If you find yourself continually distracted by email, RSS feeds, and the thingamablob, this may not be a good idea for you. The Sage started using this plugin when testing a PHP mail script on one of his many websites. With this plugin mail will simply arrive in your inbox rather than you having to press ⌘⇧N to check for new mail.

Anyways, The Sage has been using this plugin for almost six months now and he has not had a single problem. This current build appears to work flawlessly. The only drawback (if there are any) is that this plugin will not work if your mail server does not support the IDLE command. Also there is no UI at this time but the README file clearly explains how to install via the command line.

In the end, if you feel that you need your email immediately download IMAP-IDLE. Now!

Technorati Tags: IMAP-IDLE, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Plugin

In the past, The Sage had always written his blog postings in HTML and in a plain text editor (e.g. TextEdit or TextMate). With time The Sage moved on, and began to write his blog postings in PHP Markdown (for ease of use and appearance reasons). The Sage had always heard how great Mars Edit was, so he finally decided to give it a try.

Initial Impressions:

• The UI is very clean and straightforward.
• You can format your posts in Markdown, Textile, SmartyPants, plain text, HTML, or choose to insert line breaks.
• Uploading and posting images is seamless. You simply select “insert image or file” from the HTML dropdown menu and select the weblog, your desired path, and alignment. From there all that is left to do is Click Upload and Insert.
• Control over comments, categories and trackbacks is simple. They can be controlled using the options fly-out panel in the editing window.

The only thing that MarsEdit lacks that The Sage would like to see is contextual support for Markdown. Currently you must write all of your markdown by hand (no big deal) or use an external editor like TextMate or BBEdit.

All in all The Sage is quite impressed with this little app that can. When you consider its power and ease of use you quickly realize that it is more than worth the $25.

Technorati Tags: MarsEdit, Blogging

Anybody who spends time doing typesetting work, including web design, understands the value of placeholder text. Lorem Ipsum text is exactly that, placeholder text. As the Sage has been preparing his blog he needed place holder text in the body. Thus the previous posting (Trial Post) which contains two paragraphs of dummy text.

Lorem Ipsum text can trace its origins to a popular Latin text published in 45 B.C. There are a number of ways to obtain Lorem text. Dreamweaver and many other applications have plugins, either built in or provided by a third party, for generating lorem ipsum text. Another resource is lipson.com. The website gives a tidy little current event on Lorem Ipsum text (Who?, What?, Where?, When? and Why?). More importantly, the site has a lorem ipsum generator which you can use to generate text based on x number of:

• Paragraphs
• Words
• Bytes and
• Lists

The power comes when combining lorem text with an application like TextExpander. To put the lorem text in the previous post, all the Sage did was type 6 keys (l-o-r-e-m-2). In order to place lorem text easily all you need to do is make a snippet with TextExpander. The steps for creating a Lorem snippet in TextExpander are as follows:

1. Use the Lorem Ipsum generator at lipsum.com to generate 2 paragraphs of Lorem text.
2. Copy and Paste the text into the content portion of the TextExpander Preferences Pane.
3. Decide on an abreviation for the snippet and enter it into the abrbreviations pane (e.g. lorem2)
4. enter your abbreviation whenever and wherever you need some lorem text

You can take this a bit futher if you would like and generate abbreviations for 1, 2, 3, etc. paragraphs of Lorem Text (The Sage actually has snippets for 1-5 paragraphs of Lorem text).

It is worth mentioning that this trick can also be used with Typinator or TypeIt4Me. Both applications work similarly to TextExpander though the Sage uses Textexpander. Any of these applications are worth their weight in gold for anybody. Not only do they provide a system wide autocorrect feature, but they can save you hours of time. TexpExpander, Typinator, and TypeIt4Me all offer a free 30-day trial period.

Technorati Tags: TextExpander, Typinator, TypeIt4Me, Lorem Ipsum