One line of JavaScript and a few mod_rewrite rules and we have no fuss Automatic Conditional Retina Images.
Shaun Inman posted a solution to automatically load retina images if you are using a retina device. His solution is to set a cookie and then automatically serve the 2x images with a fallback to the normal ones of course. Seems like a nice and easy way.
So far I only added retina images as background images and had no problem thanks to media queries. But this is a nice way for inline images like photographs without serving the big ones to a non-retina device. Sadly it doesn’t work in Firefox at the moment.
Yesterday I went to a concert of die ärzte together with Philipp and two friends of him. It was their last concert of this tour and it was really really great. Felt like twenty again.
If you like my iPhone photos, feel free to follow me on Instagram.
For years I was a heavy user of Coda, the web development IDE by Panic. I did all my HTML, CSS and JavaScript work with it and was very happy.
Then I suffered from performance issues with big CSS files and some other minor things bugged me. I knew that Panic was working on Coda 2, but there was no public release schedule. So I tried Espresso – again. But it couldn’t win me over – again. Then Sublime Text 2 entered my field of view. I tried it for a few weeks I guess and then Coda 2 came out. I liked ST2 but I jumped ship to the new version of my beloved Coda. Until a week or so I used it and liked it – but didn’t love it like I loved Coda years ago. So I once again turned to Sublime Text 2. And here I am – in love with this text editor. So let me tell you why.
After using Coda for so long I noticed that I don’t use most of the features if offers. Especially the new Coda 2. It can be great, but it’s not the right approach for me anymore.
I like simple apps. I like it if they do what they’re supposed to do very well, even if it’s not much. Sublime Text 2 has very basic functionality when you install it. It’s just a text editor, not a complete IDE like Coda or Espresso or Dreamweaver. This is new to me, but it seems to suit me very well.
Like I said, ST2 is very simple. You can create projects which basically are a bunch of folders that you can open at once and it saves the currently open files. That’s basically it. No FTP client, no MySQL client, no git, no SVN, and so on.
What is great about ST2 is, that you can expand it in almost every direction you want to. There are a ton of addons that you can install and somehow build the text editor that suits you best.
At the moment I only installed the package manager, LESS and SCSS Syntax Highlighting and the Soda Theme. With ST2 you are not only able to choose your favorite Syntax Highlighting, you can also install your own UI theme. That’s really great. I have a combo for a light ST2 and one for a dark ST2, between which I switch regularly.
There are basically three things that I love and use the hell out of them every day:
First
You can create tab groups. So you can view several files at once. I mostly use two tab groups besides each other. In the left one I almost always have my main CSS file open and on the right I can edit the corresponding HTML. You can also open one file in both groups, this comes in handy from time to time. If you need more than two tab groups, go ahead, create more. It’s completely up to you.
Second
I love Alfred, the application launcher that can also do so much more. I’m kind of a heavy keyboard user, so I love it to just hit CMD + SPACE and start typing – a name of an app I want to open or switch to, start a goole search or whatever. It’s a workflow I’m used to and which I really love. Sublime Text 2 offers exactly that. Just hit CMD + P and open up a little input field. Just start typing a file name, hit enter and open it. It’s so simple and fast. I just love it. It made me hide the sidebar which normally shows all of your project files. I simply don’t need it anymore and thus gain much more space for my actual coding.
You can also hit CMD + SHIFT + P to open up the command palette which offers you a bunch of commands. (Thanks Captain Obvious!)
Third
The search is very fast and very powerful. It took me a day to getting used to it’s behavior because it’s different from what I knew, but it’s really really great.
I’m sure there are a lot more great features of which I don’t know at the moment and I’m looking forward to discover them in the future.
What was a little bit odd for me at first was that there is no real preference pane. You can adjust some things through the menu bar, but if you really want to set something as a standard, you’ve to do it in a simple JSON file. Now I’m used to it and think it’s great. There are a lot of possible options and a lot of people who share there preferences. It’s fun to look at how others have customized their editor and to get inspired. You can find my current preferences here as a gist. I always update it when I change something.
I’m a little sad that I’ve to turn my back on Coda and Panic, but I think I’ll use their FTP client Transmit a lot more in the future. So that should be fine.
For now I’ve found the perfect text editor for me and it’s Sublime Text 2.
Bartender lets you organize your Menu Bar Apps, by hiding them, moving them to Bartenders Bar, or displaying the full menu bar, set options to have Menu Bar Apps show in the menu bar when they are updating, or have them always visible in Bartenders Bar.
Just bought the Mac app Bartender and my Menu Bar looks nice and clean. The app is really great even it’s still in Beta. This also means you can get it for 50% off until it is available as a 1.0.
SnapRuler is a tool I use every day and don’t want to live without ever again. I wrote about it in the past and they just released an update with a bunch of nice new features. For example, you can now hold down ctrl while making a selection to go into some kind of slow motion mode which makes it a lot easier to measure pixel perfect. Great app which is worth every penny. Get it today on the Mac App Store.
I’m really interested in how other people and companies work. I like reading about their workflows and processes and am always looking to optimize my own workflow. In the last few weeks it became clear to me that what we are doing here at QUOTE.fm is actually building a company from the ground up, we’re not longer just individuals doing their own thing. We are in the position to define how we want to work as a team. That’s a great opportunity and also a great responsibility. It means trying things and always improving them.
I just finished reading a series of articles about how GitHub works. While I found that we here at QUOTE.fm innately are working a lot like the guys from San Francisco, I also got new input how we can improve. So I encourage you to take some time and read the following stories.
