Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

I am proud to announce a new version of Metapad: 3.6. This release arrives almost 9 years since the last feature release!

Download Metapad 3.6 here

So, what’s in it?

Metapad 3.6 has: a new high resolution app icon, UI & usability updates, a new feature that remembers folders across sessions, better defaults for general settings, UTF-8 file support and the biggest new feature: portability mode.

What is ‘portability mode’?

Portability mode allows Metapad to properly run and save settings on an external or thumb drive and it will not leave any trace on a friend or family member’s system. This is also very useful when you are setting up an additional computer or migrating to a new one – copy over your Metapad directory and simply pick up where you left off.

Technically portability mode means that all settings, window attributes, menu options, find/replace and recent file histories are stored and loaded in a local text file called metapad.ini (instead of the Windows Registry.) To enter this mode simply ensure that a file named metapad.ini exists where metapad.exe does – or use the one time command line option /m to migrate all your registry settings over.

Cool. So why wait almost 9 years till a new feature update?

About a year ago, after I released the Metapad source code, a fellow named David Millis sent me a code patch with a new feature he wrote for UTF-8 file support. This inspired me to get the code up and running again but I still wasn’t sure that I would get around to releasing a new version.

Then when Windows 7 came out at the end of 2009 and I played around with it I was a little irritated by how shoddy the Metapad icon looked in the task bar (due to the lower resolution scaling up poorly).

That feeling inspired me to refresh the icon which was lots of fun. Once that was done I knew a release was forthcoming so I slowly added the other features in my meagre spare time through 2010.

Why is 3.6 twice the size of 3.5?

Thats entirely due to the updated icon. Metapad’s new icon is almost 100 KB which makes the compressed download about 100 KB instead of about 50 KB. But hey, we’re still talking about kilobytes, here – not megas or gigas.

How did you make the new icon?

I used a neat little app called Opacity for the bulk of the design. I then used the slick tool IcoFX to clean up the pixels on the various size and color palette variations.

Wait, isnt Opacity a Mac app?

Yes and 3.6 was mostly developed on a Mac using Parallels to run a virtual Windows 7 machine.

Weird. Will 3.5 language translations work in 3.6?

For the most part, yes although you won’t see the new UTF-8 menu item and some of the settings dialog usability improvements. You will also get a warning upon startup which you can disable via command line option /s (and you might want to stick that into a shortcut to avoid typing it each time at the command prompt.)

What was the hardest part for development?

First, getting Dev-C++ to generate a small binary or one that used the latest common control visual styles (I eventually gave up). Then getting Visual C++ to generate a binary that actually worked on Windows XP without an additional DLL.

What changes are in the beta releases?

Beta 2 was posted on Feb 26, 2011:

• Fixed “Randal Munroe bug” where Shift+Enter inserted invalid newlines (thanks to Curtis Bright)
• Fixed Metapad 3.6 not loading on Windows 2000 or Windows 98
• Fixed INI mode leading/trailing spaces bug for quote string, find/replace history and quick buffers
• Updated external viewer toolbar icons with numbers for better usability (idea from Gerard Juan)

Beta 3 was posted on Mar 9, 2011:

• Open/save folder is remembered across launches with option to disable (thanks Paolo)

Beta 4 was posted on Mar 12, 2011:

• Fixed bug where “save options menu” wasn’t persisting in settings dialog
• Fixed convert to Title Case bug where apostrophes counted as word boundaries

Beta 5 was posted on Mar 26, 2011:

• Minor visual refresh to the toolbar buttons

How can I provide my feedback?

Please email “metapad-feedback” at this domain, liquidninja.com. Thanks!

Check out the Metapad homepage for more details and the Metapad twitter feed for news.

Git, a powerful version tracker, is easily becoming one of my essential software tools. I now use it on every creative project at home and increasingly at work too.

But you might say “I get versioning automatically with Time Machine or Dropbox”. Sure and that’s nice but when you consciously manage versions yourself you can track simultaneous changes across multiple files and you get comments on each version to help you know what changed when. You might say “I already have decent version tracking at work with Subversion/Perforce/CVS”. Well you can still get a great benefit by running Git locally — think of it as a layer of private versioning on top of the shared, published repository.

Although Git’s known as an SCM, or source code manager, Git is also useful for non-coding projects such as graphic art, music, spreadsheets or word processing — things built using tools that typically have no native version management (other than undo and save as). Initializing a new Git repository takes only a couple seconds (!) and tearing one down is just as quick (“rm -rf .git”).

So, deploying?

Okay, we’ve established that Git is awesome but one of my favorite uses of Git is to utilize its distributed nature to maintain and deploy website files. Before I get into the techie details on setting this up, let me explain the benefits of this technique.

Typically, website files exist on a local machine (e.g., laptop) and on a server (e.g., your hosting provider) and one would edit changes locally and then (testing locally is optional) FTP the files to the server. This process is error prone — for example you might forget to transfer one of the files or, even worse, make emergency changes on the server and never make the change locally and later overwrite those server changes, losing them forever.

By using Git and the technique outlined below, you will still have two copies of the files but the synchronization is much simpler. Primary benefits include:

• You deploy the site by simply typing git push on the local box (or through a visual tool, more on those at the end)
• Edits made on the remote host can be synchronized locally via git pull
• After a bad push, roll back by running git reset –hard ORIG_HEAD on the remote host
• Oh yeah, if they weren’t already, all your website files are now version controlled. Awesome!

How to set your site up with Git

First, if they aren’t already, stick your local website files are in a Git repository.

git init; git add .; git commit -m "Initial import"

(Read a good Git tutorial for more on these commands and how to use Git day-to-day.)

Then, FTP (or scp) the hidden “.git” directory that was created by those commands to the server in the corresponding location in your files (assuming they’re already on the remote host — otherwise send everything over including “.git”).

Next, add the remote host config to the local repository:

git remote add prod ssh://user@example.com/path/to/site

Now, to make a push result in updated files on the remote host (as opposed to only an updated repository record) replace the remote’s .git/hooks/post-update file with a copy of the hook script linked to in this FAQ entry.

Then, to eliminate a warning that Git spits out add the following to the server side .git/config:

[receive]
    denyCurrentBranch = ignore

An optional but recommended step is to set up passwordless SSH to make things super fast and clean. It is also strongly recommended to ensure your server’s .git directory is not allowed to be viewed by anyone browsing your site (see htaccess or the equivalent for your webserver). Also you will want to configure the local repo’s default remote so that you can run “git push” or “git pull” without specifying any other parameters:

[branch "master"]
    remote = prod
    merge = refs/heads/master

Git Tools

If you’re on a Mac and you use TextMate, there is a decent Git bundle that you can add in. (I don’t love the flow but it works.) Also, GitX is a nice graphical UI for Git on OS X. On Windows I’ve enjoyed using Git Extensions. And lastly, here is a nice Git cheat sheet with some more advanced stuff in it.