David Alison's Blog

One of my favorite–yet least mentioned–free utilities is Growl , a universal notification service for Mac that lets applications notify you of events. Now instead of each application deciding on how they want to present notifications for things like new mail, incoming tweets, etc. you can control it in a single place, assuming the application supports Growl or an extension has been written for it. Such is the case with Mail.app. Though Mail.app is not written to support Growl the developers for Growl have created an "extra" that can provide that functionality. I've been using this setup for a while now and have been quite pleased with it. After upgrading to Safari 4 I suddenly found that Mail.app was crashing on me as soon as a new e-mail came in. Here is the error message I was getting: Which was followed by: Reset and relaunch had no effect - Mail.app just crashed again. It turns out that an error has been introduced into Growl after upgrading to Safari 4 that creates t...

I've now been using Ruby on Rails for a little over a year and have found it to be a fantastic environment to build web based applications. The last year has not been without some serious pain and learning curves and while I hardly consider myself a master of the environment I've found a number of resources that may help you if you are considering using RoR as a development platform. Sure, you can access nearly everything you need to learn RoR online but I am personally still addicted to the dead-tree model of learning. If you are like me and prefer buying books then read on. In the last year I've bought 10 books on various Ruby/Rails topics and what follows are the ones I've gotten the most use out of. NOTE: Ruby on Rails is a constantly evolving environment and the information below is really relevant for early June 2009. Things can change in the Rails world relatively quickly. It's a good idea to stay up on Rails developments by following the Ruby on Rails blog...

When I blog about applications that I've found I generally wrap up my posts with an open invitation to readers: Got any you like? Many folks have been generous and shared links and applications that I've used to expand my virtual toolbox and make my Mac experience more fun and productive. This time I turned that process around a bit and used Twitter up front. I put out this question: Looking for cool little Mac utilities that nobody knows about... I promptly received replies from a number of people with some cool applications that I had never heard of or tried using. After culling through the list I've pulled out 10 that I felt looked pretty cool. I've included the Twitter name for the person that made the suggestion in case you want to start following them. EasyEnvelopes Need to quickly print out an envelope for someone in your address book? EasyEnvelopes from Ambrosia Software has a free Dashboard widget that does just that. When you want to print out an envelope yo...

The best part about writing a blog where I talk about Macs? People give me some great tips in the comments and yesterday's post on apps for making users more productive was no exception. While I love the shortcuts available on my Mac I often overlook many of them because I don't know what they are and they aren't always obvious. Fortunately DCBrit stopped by and mentioned KeyCue , an application that can quickly display all of the keyboard shortcuts for the application you are currently running. You simply hold down the activation key (defaults to Command) for a few seconds and up pops a dynamically built list of all the shortcuts for that application. Here's what it looks like for TextEdit: It really is a simple application but can quickly help you learn those key combinations, making you much more productive on your Mac. It's normally $26.99 but MacZOT is running a special on it right now for $14.99 through May 3, 2009 . If you want to learn all of the keystroke...

Many people are obsessed with speed and I happily include myself in that category, at least with respect to the performance I get from my computer. Whether it's a faster processor, more memory, a quicker graphics card or a new high-speed hard drive, upgrading to the latest and greatest translates into getting things done more quickly. It's not enough to just throw hardware at a problem, sometimes you have to optimize yourself. Of course I can do this by inhaling a rather large quantity of coffee first thing in the morning but what I'm talking about is finding applications that can improve how you use your computer. Though Macs have incredibly high usability right out of the box, over the last year I've found 4 applications that have really helped me improve my efficiency on my Mac. I've tried quite a few but these are the applications I've stuck with and found most valuable to me. 1Password Like many people I spend a lot of time in a web browser (actually both ...

I've become quite attached to Twitter lately, as several of my blog posts will attest. I use it for a wide range of things; a source of news (technical and non-technical), to chat with friends and share things I find of interest, to ask and answer questions on Macs, Ruby on Rails, etc. and finally to banter about my favorite sports teams (Redskins and Caps, thank you very much). Given this wide range of uses I tend to be accessing my Twitter feeds throughout the day and the web interface simply doesn't handle things the way I need it to. As a result I use a custom client to access Twitter. A custom client presents Tweets in their own interface, accessing the data through the Twitter API. You drop in your Twitter username and password and the custom client takes over from there, presenting you with a view of your Tweets and the ability to create them as well. Over the last few months I've tried a number of different Twitter clients for my Mac. First it was TweetDeck , an Ad...

Last night I was doing some research and went to pull up the Ruby On Rails site . Unfortunately when I did I could not connect. My DNS server wasn't resolving it properly. Assuming it was Verizon's problem I embarked on a long and ultimately fruitless attempt to find out why rubyonrails.org was not resolving. While doing this I tweeted about it and suddenly got responses from people explaining that there were some problems with that domain name . It wasn't the Verizon DNS server after all. So Twitter helped me out, but that wasn't the end of the assistance. Chad Hohner (@hohner) told me about using OpenDNS , something that will help improve network performance (at least as it relates to name resolution). I figured it was worth a try and changed the DNS on my Mac Pro to using OpenDNS's servers. The performance improvement for me was dramatic, so much so that I changed back to the Verizon servers, flushed my DNS cache and started testing different sites. I then swi...