Focus is a free app for OSX that shows you which application currently has focus by displaying an icon on your desktop. Typically the dock gives you no information about what application is active. You could just look at the menu bar to see, but a large floating icon like the one Focus gives you is a great visual cue.
Are you a serious Digg.com user? The Smart Digg Button Firefox Extenstion is a neat tool that lives in your Firefox status bar notifying you how many Diggs the currently loaded page has. A simple click takes you to the Digg page where you can give the page your own digg!
LuckyOliver is a community of photographers, designers and artists who buy and sell stock photos. They have a collection of great royalty-free stock photos and illustrations for a dollar each. You purchase block of credits then use those credits to purchase your images. Low resolution (good enough for many web projects) cost $1.00 and higer quality images are available for $4.00
Joshua Bryant has a roundup of the Best Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Icon Collections. As I have stated before, I quite like the new ones, but if you prefer sexier icons there are some really nice one out there!
I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer for over two years now. I have always been impressed with the cost effectiveness of their hosting plans, the features they offer (unlimited bandwidth, huge storage, unlimited MySQL databases) and how they listen to their customers by adding the features that we ask and vote for. But their latest announcement that they are now a carbon neutral company has made me even happier with my choice to use their services.
What does carbon neutral mean for a company like Dreamhost? They define it as…
It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.
So how do they become carbon neutral…
Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”. Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!
I personally am not convinced that simply purchasing carbon credits is good enough for long term sustainability of our climate, but it’s definately a start. My hope would be that in combination with carbon credits, they would begin using solar arrays, wind generation, and more power effective servers in their data centres. They have already begun by purchasing servers with lower powered AMD processors, so I beleive they are headed down the right path!
If your looking for a good and environmentally friendly host and want to save a bit of money sign up at Dreamhost and enter the promotion code DMM to save $60 off your first year’s hosting bill.
Bad Smells in Code is a summary from Martin Fowler’s classic book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. We’ve all been through the process of refactoring our code. Whether it’s simply a case of cleaning up messy code, or reorganizing the structure of our application, this summary is a teaser for you to go and buy Martin’s book.
MacFusion is GUI for the open source MacFUSE project that allows you to mount remote (networked) filesystems. I use MacFUSE to mount SSH volumes directly in Finder which removes my need to use an FTP client (my web hosts all support SSH). Another advantage of mounting these remote volumes is that I can live edit pages (I know - it’s dangerous - but I have some small sites that can handle my hacking)! MacFusion can even handle mounting FTP servers, giving read/write FTP in the finder.
Yahoo! likes Joe Hewitt’s Firebug extension for Firefox so much that the YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug. This is great news and hopefully will help Joe make this tool totally kick ass!
If you design web sites and use a Mac, you must check out Sim Daltonism. It’s a small little application that allows you to preview your work as a person with color blindness would see it. The program lets you choose between 8 filters of the four types of color blindness.
APC Magazine has an in-depth interview with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. In the 12 part interview, she speaks out on future of Firefox with the most notable piece being talks about Firefox’s capabilities to run web applications while offline (similar to Adobe’s Apollo platform).
