MacNative

This is my favourite of the Mac goodies. There are a few ways to capture screen on Mac.

Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png

You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen.

Simply select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png

And finally you can capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the cross hair, press the space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-spot. Click on it and the window will be captured.

And again, the file will be safely placed on your desktop as … good guess, Photo 1.png

However, if you’d like to capture the screen (or part of it) to the clipboard rather than to desktop, simply hold the Control key down while capturing, i.e. Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4.

This is very handy when you need to paste it straight into an email or any other document.

Original Post on silvermac.com

I have been increasingly impressed, over the last couple of years, of the overall utility that Wordpress provides for website developers.

When I first started to use it, I only accessed the basic layer of usefulness, and used it as a backend for my blog. But it has proven itself to be robust enough to be easily used as a CMS for individuals and Small/Medium Businesses that want an interactive website but don’t have the time/budget to get something completely custom created for them.

On the other side of the spectrum, as a developer Wordpress can also make my job much easier by giving me a framework that already handles all of the basics for a website, and then provides me with the hooks necessary to extend the basic platform and provide specific functionality for my clients.

Along with that extensibility wordpress has a large plugin database where others share their custom creations for anything from publishing a podcast to keeping your visitors up with your tweets. Many of these plugins provide the functionality that my clients are looking for with only a few minor changes to match the clients specifications.

Additionally the power to hook into the wordpress backend and pull out relevent information can help you produce or utilize some existing themes that will make your wordpress install become and amazing dynamic website, not merely a blog.

All that being said, Wordpress has become a staple in most of my website development projects. and can greatly enhance your development process, if you are willing to let it.

There are a ton of tools out there that web developers can use to create dynamic and engaging websites. Every once and a while one tool will stand out above the others in it’s usefulness and design.

Fancy Upload is one of those tools. Providing a slick interface and some dynamic classes, Fancy Upload leverages the abilities of the Mootools Javascript library and ties that with some flash integration to create a great solution with an infinate number of uses. Go check it out.

http://digitarald.de/project/fancyupload/

Developers of all kinds that are hunting for a quick and easy way to look up documentation for their coding projects can now be appeased. I just ran across a Development Resource which seems to be a pretty good solution for hunting for development documentation or resources. Go Check it out.

http://www.quickref.org

Just read about this on The Apple Blog.

Pretty useful information especially for someone in the IT field. Here is the POST

To reset your OS X password without an OS X CD you need to enter terminal and create a new admin account:

1. Reboot
2. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
3. When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):
   • mount -uw /
   • rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
   • shutdown -h now
4. After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you’re good to go again!

Apples WWDC 2008 kicked off this week in San Francisco with a bang. Unveiling their new 3G iPhone with an upgraded look and a few new features was pretty cool. But not nearly as cool as the new SDK for the iPhone. The new SDK promises to provide a rich development interface for rapid development on the iPhone. Personally after watching the Keynote I cannot wait to dive in and see what can be created using this new development platform.

Check out the New iPhone

Check out the iPhone SDK

When working with Dynamic Site Development, it is often necessary to give the client some kind of message to inform them that their action has been either successful or not successful or not so good or…you get the picture. I have used several different methods of dealing with this over the years. but I just found this tutorial that has a quick lightweight nice solution to attractively solve this problem.

Check it out

Css Message Boxes

I recently came across an article online, that talked about and showed many examples of using the space in your web pages footer more effectively. Wow talk about insighteful, and the examples on the site give you a great feel for what some other web developers/designers are using there footers for.

Elements of Design

I have worked with many different e-commerce platforms over the years, From very basic to extremely complex. I have recently come across a relatively new e-commerce platform that has got me hooked.

FoxyCart has created a great set of e-commerce tools that allow you to easily set up a fully functional online store/shopping cart with very minimal effort.
Foxycart offers support for either Paypal payments pro (for credit card payments only at the moment) or some of the more popular payment gateways. as well as support for live shipping rates from Fedex, UPS, etc.
All in all, foxycart packs a nice sales punch. And is my shopping cart solution of choice.

www.foxycart.com

Foxycart Demo Store

I have been working on a project with a couple of partners, to hopefully create a little additional security for individuals. The problem that we analyzed is that when people get Insurance, or create a family trust, they are told to document all of their assets. Take photos or video of the items in their home and then store them. Usually the only time that that documentation is used is in the event of a disaster, ie: The Wild Fires in California, or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. If that documentation (pictures/video) are stored like most people store them they will either be a molten pile of goop, or float away with the flood, etc. Even those that store their information in a fireproof safe may still find it a pile of goop if the fire is hot enough. Have I painted a vivid enough picture for you?

People every day find themselves without the ability to easily produce that documentation, and may not get their assets replaced by their insurance company, because they cannot prove the exact assets that they owned.

Treasurebox is built to provide a safe secure online storage location for that documentation, very accessible, and easy to use. The MooTools framework and extentions to it are used extensively to increase the usability of the product.

The initial release is currently in public beta. I would love any readers to sign up (No Credit Card or billing information required) and leave some comments here about your thoughts.

Treasurebox
Twenty Cent Productions, LLC