Coffee, Code, Language and Giant Spiders - By Mitchell Cohen
Count the problems in this picture: I count eight, not including my crying-out-for-a-lightning-cable battery life and the one-bar reception on Rogers. 1 Eight of the top ten “Free” iPhone apps aren’t free at all. They contain in-app purchases. Apple even spells it out for us—in size 8-pt. Helvetica Neue, in text a shade darker than the white background, underneath big blue buttons that scream FREE…
On Wednesday night I went to bed pretty pleased with myself. My article abut the OS X command line had captured the attention of a few hundred visitors that evening. I’d even received a bit of feedback. Not bad for a week-old personal blog, eh? I was in for one hell of a surprise. When I woke up on Thursday morning—my 25th birthday—the number of pageviews had reached 30,000. By Friday evening,…
The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you’re migrating from Linux, you’ll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren’t aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about these Mac-only programs can make you more productive on the command line and…
In Part 1 , we set up our environment and tested it out with a little HTML code. More importantly, we built a basic coding workflow. Having and practicing a good workflow is important—not just for the sake of productivity, but because every project is different. A new employer might mean having to learn a new CMS, for instance, or even a new programming language. That’s why it’s important not to…
All code, no matter the language, is written in plain text. Plain text documents are those that don’t allow for any formatting, such as applying fonts, colours, and sizes. Documents that permit formatting are called rich text. Rich text is what you produce in Microsoft Word or the visual editor in your CMS. Another name for it is WYSIWYG . But plain text is the only format web browsers truly…
Learn to code , they say. It’s advice that most of us have heard at school or in a newsroom, but that few of us ever really act upon. And no, it’s not because we aren’t wired that way . We’re smart, adaptable people. The trouble with coding is that it’s so detached from what we know and what we’re good at. We’re writers, researchers, and reporters. That’s our trade. We don’t have the time or…