My MacOS X

If you are a web designer or do any work matching colors with photos, you are in luck. Mac OS X comes with a cool little program to help you get the digital value of any pixel on the screen. It’s called Digital Color Meter.

Here is how to do it:
Step 1: From the ‘Finder’ menu, choose ‘GO->Utilities’ or click Shift + Command + U

Step 2: Next, open the app, ‘Digital Color Meter’

Now, you can change the aperture size to smaller (left) or larger (right). Also, you can use the drop down menu to choose what format you want it represented in. For HTML coding, use RGB As Hex Value, 8-bit.
To copy the displayed color value to the clipboard, hover the mouse cursor over the color you want to measure and press Shift+Command+C. Your needs may be different, and it gives you several options to choose from.

digitalcolor meter keyboard shortcuts:

• Lock Position (Command+L)
• Lock X (Command+X)
• Lock Y (Command+Y)
• Copy Image (Command+C)
• Save as TIFF (Command+S)
• Hold Color (Shift+Command+H)
• Copy Color As Text (Shift+Command+C)
• Copy Color As Image (Option+Command+C)

More about DigitalColor Meter on Wikipedia

tags: 10.5, Development, HTML, programming, Snow Leopard, Web

About Coda

Apple Design Awards 2007 winner! So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we declared. “And much cooler.”

Coda is a unique web development environment that offers a complete file browser (both locally and remotely), publishing, full-featured text editor, WebKit-based preview, CSS editor with visual tools, full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more. Coda is the Mac’s first one-window Web development application that integrates numerous modules into   one cohesive user experience.

All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including:
CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text.

I do web development pretty much every day and have never been a real fan of the all inclusive, live editing types of tools. Honestly tools like Dreamweaver really makes me cringe. So like many others I normally have a separate application for text editing, FTP, shell, and of course a few browsers open. I have to tell you, I’ve taken the red pill now and doing away with all of these separate tools actually seems possible with Coda.

The software is $99 but you do have a trial period to test it out and see if you like it. The staff at Panic appear to be interested in ideas to improve the software further so if you have any suggestions its worth dropping them an email.

System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or later (include Snow Leopard). Official website to download it panic.com
See the Coda text editor in actions:

tags: HTML, PHP, programming, Text Editor