edit­ing in apple dash­board? hold down the alt key & the cur­sor becomes a cross + & you can select by col­umn rather than line. Also TextMate

So i am told, as i do not use it. I think it installs ok but then when per­form­ing a com­pile it “Barfs” as my infor­mant poet­i­cally puts it about 1/2 way through.

Devel­op­ing wid­get via Dash­code and upgraded from Leop­ard to Snow Leop­ard and noticed some fun­nies in the code. Drop down boxes not work­ing so i upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Xcode for SN and all seems ok now.

So thats two, well three actu­ally as Growl now doesn’t work on SN’s ver­sion of Mail, Growl­Mail. At least this time is gets excluded grace­fully and Mail fires up

Well it broke my copy any­way. i installed mysql-5.1.23-rc-osx10.5-x86_64 ok. Tried to add the mac-ports ver­sion but ran into prob­lems with that sim­ply not want­ing to install.

In the end down­loaded the lat­est sta­ble from MySQL and fol­lowed their instructions

Most apps on the iPhone are ren­dered in Hel­vetica, only, no choice. How­ever in the Safari browser there is a choice for the devel­oper. How­ever it is a lim­ited choice.

Full sets are pro­vided of:

• Arial
• Courier New
• Geor­gia
• Hel­vetica
• Marker Felt
• Times New Roman
• Tre­buchet MS
• Ver­dana
• Zap­info

Par­tial set are:

• Amer­i­can Type­writer (No ital­ics on iPhone)
• Arial Rounded MT Bold (No ital­ics on iPhone)

Spe­cial cases are

• Courier (Will be sub­sti­tuted by Courier New)
• Hel­vetica Neue (Will be sub­sti­tuted by Helvetica)
• Times (Will be sub­sti­tuted by Times New Roma)

Nor­mally in a web app i would put a font-family in the CSS some­thing like this

" font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif;"

This way i cover my bases as to whether the tar­get browser can han­dle the var­i­ous fonts and will fail grace­fully if it is miss­ing some.

How­ever that are only a lim­ited num­ber of fonts on the iphone and pre­sum­ably if you only spec­ify one, say Hel­vetica, the iPhone will always have that font and use it. So i don’t really need a font-family. Do I?

A good rea­son given for at least adding the sans-serif font into the font-family is that Apple may change the iPhone or Safari in the future, so this would have some degree of future proofing.

Need to get data from another site well you can use cURL to get it.
widget.system("/usr/bin/curl http://api.asite.com/rates/rate.php?pair=EUR/CHF", null).outputString;
this will pull the rate as a json string, but as the site needs authen­ti­ca­tion it actu­ally won’t, it will fall over. In php i would set this up with curl_opt but in dash­code i am not able to use php.

How­ever run man curl and scru­ti­nise the options and you see
-u/--user

sub­sti­tute the cor­rect infor­ma­tion and the string looks like this:-
widget.system("/usr/bin/curl --user johnh:aranaio http://api.worldfirst.com/rates/rate.php?pair=EUR/CHF", null).outputString;

and that does the trick.

.…. natures way of pre­vent­ing every­thing hap­pen­ing at once. OK but when i used to com­mute i lis­ten to pod­casts, Mac OS Ken, His­to­ryzine, Skep­toid etc. Now i don’t com­mute i don’t seem to have the time to lis­ten to them. Strange.

A quick overview of script­ing tools, meth­ods and widget/gadget deliv­ery platforms

Google Gad­gets

Devel­op­ment Technologies:

HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript

Devel­op­ment Plat­form / Language:

Any with dif­fer­ent toolkits

Tar­get:

iGoogle plat­form

Com­plex­ity Level:

Var­ied, entry level medium.

Libraries / API / Tools

Com­pre­hen­sive

Deliv­ery Mechanism

On OpenSo­cial con­tain­ers that sup­port gad­gets, such as orkut and the iGoogle sandbox.

In appli­ca­tions that sup­port gad­gets, such as Google Sites.

The Google Con­tent Direc­tory. Sub­mit­ting your gad­get to the con­tent direc­tory makes it avail­able to a wider audience.

Sup­port Groups

Yes

iPhone

Devel­op­ment Technologies:

1) HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript

2) Objec­tive C

Devel­op­ment Plat­form / Language:

Mac – Dash­code (1)

Any Edi­tor (1)

Mac XCode (2)

Tar­get:

Any Webkit based browser (1)

iPhone (2)

Com­plex­ity Level:

Medium (1)

High (2)

Libraries / API / Tools

Com­pre­hen­sive

Deliv­ery Mechanism

Any web site (1)

Mac App­store (2)

Sup­port Groups

Yes

Win­dows Gad­get Platform

Devel­op­ment Technologies:

HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript

Devel­op­ment Plat­form / Lan­guage / Language:

Any edi­tor

Visual Stu­dio

Tar­get:

Win­dows Side­bar Vista, Win­dows 7

Com­plex­ity Level:

Medium

Libraries / API / Tools

Yes

Deliv­ery Mechanism

Does not look like cen­tralised or man­aged dis­tri­b­u­tion but avail­able to indi­vid­ual users to download

Sup­port Groups

Yes

Opera Wid­gets

Devel­op­ment Technologies:

HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript

Devel­op­ment Plat­form / Language:

Any edi­tor

Tar­get:

Opera Browser

Opera Mobile devices

S60 (Sym­bian) Devices

Com­plex­ity Level:

Medium upwards

Libraries / API / Tools

Yes + SDK for spe­cialised areas.

Deliv­ery Mechanism

opera wid­gets web site

Sup­port Groups

yes

Fire­fox Addins / Addons

Devel­op­ment Technologies:

JavaScript, XUL (Zool)

Devel­op­ment Plat­form / Language:

Any Edi­tor

Tar­get:

Fire­fox Browser

Com­plex­ity Level:

Medium to high

Libraries / API / Tools

Yes, lots

Deliv­ery Mechanism

Fire­fox addon store

Sup­port Groups

Yes

Now liv­ing and work­ing back in Not­ting­ham doing web devel­op­ment and Mac wid­gets and iPhone appli­ca­tion development