Chris K Designs

One of the most common things I get asked about when talking about developing WordPress plugins is my tools and development environment. Now, developers have all kind of tools and setups that they feel is the ‘Best’ way to do things. It’s all a matter of opinion really. It all boils down to needing a few things though, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that you are comfortable with, an LAMP, MAMP, WAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP), SVN, and a download of WordPress. I’ll go through these 1 by 1 and show you how to get setup.

First off, a good book on development with your desired platform is NEVER a bad thing to have. I recommend Professional WordPress Plugin Development. They just released a new version of it and it’s a fantastic resource.
Continue reading “How to Setup a Basic WordPress Development Environment” »

I love using Twitter. That being said, I’m SICK of the redundancy! Raise your hand if you are with me in saying that you are a bit tired of seeing the same tweets between all your devices. I’ve got UberTwitter on my Blackberry, the Web Interface, Tweetie for my Mac…I just want to TWEET! I don’t care what others are doing, I just want to get my thoughts out! Finally there is an AMAZING way to do this, using Quicksilver. Check out what codahale (blog.codahale.com) has done with Applescript. Drop his script into your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ folder, re-start Quicksilver, and you are in action.

Tweeting from Quicksilver is fun!

You can get the whole story and the easy installation instructions over at blog.codahale.com.

All you have to do is engage Quicksilver, hit ‘.’ to enter the text mode, then type your tweet, hit tab, then select ‘Tweet’ as the action. It’s easy, quick, and you don’t have to be constantly bothered by what other people are doing at the moment, which helps you get more work done

While I am quite the fanboy of Apple and I fully support freelance program development, there are few things I wish Apple would admit would make their products better. In the past they have done this with things like Cover Flow and iTunes so I know that they would at least consider it.

1. Integrate a method of “Letterbox View” in Mail.app
I’m sick of having to add a plugin to Mail in order to have a simple “letterbox” view of my mail. Ever sense the popularity of widescreen monitors, the real-estate for programs like Mail has increased so much potential for the availability of more information without scrolling. Even worse is the fact that Outlook has this as a setting you can simply just enable.

Download LetterBox for Mail from harnly.net

2. Add an auto-rate system for iTunes
I love my music, and this in turn means that I love using my iPod Touch and iTunes. Something I do is base my playlists to sync with my iPod off of the ratings, play counts, and last played meta data. Something that has made my music listening more explorative and interesting is using an auto-rating program which rates based off of previous rates, play counts, and play frequency to rate songs for my play lists. This can’t be that hard, and I think could be pretty intuitive to include with the addition of Genius now. But alas, I still have to use AutoRate.

Download Auto-Rate from Tzi Software

3. The ability to unarchive .rar files
This one I just do not get. I can work with .zip files, but I’d have to go to command-line to mess with a .rar? This doesn’t make sense at all. For this I can only offer one thing, UnrarX.

Download UnrarX from Sourceforge.net

So there are a few things I think would be simple to add into OS X that Apple shouldn’t have a problem including. For the mean time, enjoy those downloads and I hope they help you out with using your Mac a little more efficiently.