01.08.08

A week of great tools

Posted in business, shiny, technology at 1:04 pm by coldclimate

In the last week I’ve come across some brilliant tools to make my digital life easier, so I throught I’d better share. The Refresh Newcastle group put me onto some, and Google did the rest as and when I found I needed something.

MAMP
I do most of my development work on a php/mySQL stack, and normally I do it here on coldclimate, which is all very well and good, but it has all the problems of working remotely. Latency, need to be online, slow debugging, the potencial for a rogue piece of sql to drop my comments table etc, so some local development area was needed. My iBook has a local copy of Apache, and PHP installed, but installing mySQL was a ball ache, and upgrading to php5 looked like a nightmare. Step in MAMP, and all in one install which is easy as pie to get going with, but where each item in your tech stack is separate, meaning it’s much much easier to install upgrades, downgrades or even have multiple installs at the same time. Out of the box, it works a treat. (Mac only kids)
CodeIgniter
Following on from discussions about Ajax development kits, I was pointed to CodeIgniter, which is a php framework. MVC based (as all good code is in my book), I was knocking up a blogging site from scratch inside an hour as a play thing. Impressive, and means you can stop rolling all your own libraries. (Cross Platform - php based)
Musorg
Having set about getting my music collection under control I needed a method for batch editing mp3’s ID3 tags. Under Windows I use Tag and Rename, and it’s ok, but slow. On my Mac I’d just use iTunes, except then I’d need to import all my stuff into iTunes etc. ball ache city. Step in Musorg, which lets you pick I directory, and easily edit all your tags in one go, or file by file, quickly and easily. Remember to hit save before moving directory though! Once all the tags are sorted, I can throw the files as the Synology Cube, and forget about them. (Mac only)
jQuery

Another framework, this time proving aJax functionality quickly and fairly easily. I’m yet to really get going with this yet, but I’m hoping to use it and CodeIgniter to get my next project up and running quickly. (Cross platform - browser based)
coComment
Another handy tool born out of dicussions on the Refresh mailing list. I woke up with an idea which I hadn’t the inclination nor talent to write, so posted it up to see if anybody fancied a go at it. Somebody pointed out it existed already (always a good sign). coComment is a Firefox plugin which keeps track of all the comment you post on blogs, so you don’t loose track of where you said something and makes finding peoples replies easier. Now coComment+Google reader +rss = perfection. (webbased)
Sharepoint
Yes, I hate virtually everything about Sharepoint’s ideology and methodology, but once I got down off my high horse and stopped trying to have full control of the code it generated, I was able to get so much more done. Much as I don’t like working in it, if you use it in a completely point and click manner (even abstaining for FrontPage if possible) with some good templates, somebody with no technical experience can have a website with document stores, chat rooms, message posting, blogs and a wiki up and running in a few hours, which is quite incredible really. Yes, the code it generates is vile, portable as a breezeblock, fugly as mutant pug dog and only works on IE with a fixed screen resolution, but in a corporate environment with browser monoculture and fixed machien builds, this doens’t matter. It just works. Scary. Getting off my high horse was like biting off my own tongue though. (Microsoft only)

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