Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products

Acid Search: free plugin to expand searches in Safari

by Kevin Dangoor

Probably the #1 reason that I’ve been using Firefox instead of Safari has been the lack of “type ahead find” aka “find as you type” aka “that thing where you start typing and it searches the page without having to pop up a window, so it’s like really convenient and you can just press enter to follow a link so it’s good for navigation too”. Acid Search brings that feature to Safari and adds the ability to really expand Safari’s search box. It’s worth noting that Saft, the uber-Safari plugin, adds type ahead find as well.

Another Safari tip that I just learned that will make life so much nicer is that pressing the option/alt key while tabbing through form fields allows you to get to every control, including buttons and combo boxes. It’s always been really annoying to have to reach for the mouse when I hit the “State” field on a form.

Ian Bicking on Ruby On rails

by Kevin Dangoor

Ian Bicking has posted more thoughts on Ruby on Rails. For those of you not familiar with Ian, he’s had his hands in object-relational mapping, web frameworks and even template tools.

Ian’s perspective in this latest article is from short experimentation with Rails, but I agree with the things that he has said that he likes and dislikes. Ian has described Paste in terms that make it sound like a piece of middleware for web framework developers to use in sharing code. While that’s all fine and dandy, I do hope that we’ll start to see some fully-fleshed out packages that provide a good quick start for apps.

If nothing else, Rails has brought to light the fact that starting each new project with a completely blank slate is a real drag.

Why specs matter

by Kevin Dangoor

Being an XP type, I don’t go in for specs for everything. Where interoperability counts, specs are key… and Mark Pilgrim nails the personalities in Why specs matter.

“Angels” read specs closely, write code, and then thoroughly test it against the accompanying test suite before shipping their product. Angels do not actually exist, but they are a useful fiction to make spec writers to feel better about themselves.