I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

Unlike most of the other screenshot apps or widgets available out in the interwebs, Paparazzi! takes screenshots of websites. The cool thing is that it will take a single screenshot of the entirety of the web pages contents. That’s right, wether the webpage is 600 pixels long or 50,000 pixels long, it will take a picture of the whole page.

Now I know what your thinking, you could have probably used that on a previous web development/design project, or maybe when you were researching a topic. Then you can put the full contents and layout/design in your archive for future reference. What a liberating thought.

Additionally you can choose a minimum size for the screenshot to be, an optional crop size for the screenshot, a delay to wait before taking the screenshot (in case you want some interactive content to do something before taking the shot).

Additionally you can access your Safari and Firefox favorites/bookmarks, interact with a page (insert content, press buttons, etc…) before taking the screenshot.

You can also process urls or files as a batch, to take care of lists you want to archive without maning the keyboard and mouse.

All in all, this is one slick little utility.

Developers Site

Download Paparazzi!

Deeper has been around since OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and has seen a new version released along with each new version of the OS since then through Lion 10.7.

With Deeper you can change the general look/feel/actions of the basic system interface, Different options that area available in the finders menu, the look and feel of the dock, how Quicktime handles the playback of movies, add information to your login screen, etc… you get the picture, and the list goes on.

The point is, with all this little app allows you to do, and because of its price point (FREE), it seems silly to avoid loading it on your mac and playing with your own user experience.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate – Lion)

Onyx has been around and free since way back in the good ole days of OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and has released a new version of the software specifically to address certain issues with each of these different releases from Apple. It will clean out your old caches, trim your library files, rebuild your fonts cache, perform routine maintenance on your hard disks, and resetting basic parameters. In the world of mac users, Onyx is like a dog, that is because it is a mac users best friend. 

Many simple errors that users experience can be handled/thwarted with the use of this simple tool. Now honestly does it do any magic? The answer there is NO, it just does all the silly little things that you could do yourself to keep your mac running properly. But the fact is that you don’t do most of those things, and those that you do do, you don’t do regularly. So Onyx provides that nice simple interface that ensures you get the fixes made, and reminds you of some of the things that you forgot to do yourself.

So check it out, it’s FREE, and the worst case scenario is that you will actually have a slightly more efficient mac.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate)

Depending on the age of your mac there are two different ways to accomplish this:

Leopard and Above (OSX 10.5 and higher) :

dscacheutil – flushcache

Tiger and Below (OSX 10.4 and lower) :

lookupd -flushcache

With either command your DNS cache is completely cleared so that your next DNS query will be forced to be requested from your upstream DNS provider.

I hope this helps someone out there to save some time, effort, and energy,as it did for me.

Originally read at:

Hongkiat.com: Hongkiat – How to Clear DNS Cache In Mac OSX Leopard

Here is a short list of protocols that it supports:

• FTP
• SFTP
• WebDav
• Cloudfiles
• Google Docs
• Amazon s3

to name a few.

It’s interface is sleek and simple, providing for a seamless user experience. With support for such features as “quicklook”, “Growl”, “Spotlight”, and “Bonjour” it finds ways to fit into virtually any situation.

I have been using this app for years and it is a very effective, well rounded tool. I suggest that you never leave home without it. So without further adieu click on the link below to check out the developers website, download the app, and when you are satisfied that it is everything you ever dreamed it could be, send the developer a donation, he’s done some hard work to make sure that our lives are better and easier.

Cyberduck FTP Client Homepage

For those who are fortunate enough to find themselves doing development on the mac platform, there is an alternative, which although it may not be the newest game on the block, it is one of the best all around. Sissy FauxVelopers need not apply to use this app. It has no build your app with one click buttons. It is designed to take the development experience to the next level for those who like to get their “fingers” dirty and actually do some major textual manipulations.

From the first launch it’s basic simplicity and power are immediately perceptible. It is feature packed enough to quell the pining soul of the most advanced developer, but simple enough to handle basic text document edits. From customizable coloring of the interface (I prefer the “All Hallow’s Eve” scheme) to the elegant line numbering and code folding features in the applications “trough”, this bad boy was built to move mountains and work minor miracles.

With built in support for dozens of predominant document formats, it provides out of the box streamlining of your developer workflow while also allowing you to add your own file format specifications should you happen to be crafty enough to have come up with your own file formats and specifications.

Additionally you can create functions to validate your files layout and formatting right into your file specification. Giving you on the fly access to all the features you want when you are developing.

This great product has seen me through many development projects, and has greatly increased my development capacity through it’s simplistic yet powerful functions.Although this product isn’t free, it is well worth the €39 purchase price, and it comes with a 30 day trial for all parties that may be interested, but not yet committed to the purchase.

Go give it a test spin. All you have to loose is pain and frustration.

Download Demo

Homepage

The interface is very simple and unobtrusive, but very powerful. Anxiety takes advantage of the iCal backend that is already available in OSX to track and manage the tasks. The upshot of which is that the assigned tasks are also available in iCal, so that you can reference them when planning your Day/Week/Month.

Anxiety has an amazing ability of getting out of your hair so that you can do your work. But when you want to add a task or check off a completed task, it is available from a simple click of the icon on the task bar.

Anxiety is an amazing little app that solves many of the age old questions that a lot of us have had in dealing with streamlining our task oriented workflow. I have thoroughly enjoyed using the application and highly recommend it. The fact that it’s price tag is listed as FREE isn’t to bad either.

Click here to Learn More

Click here to Download Now

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

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