It'll Never Fly

Love it. Just wish I conformed to some ideal body type. Then I might have some to give away.

If I’m around family and friends, I pronounce it with a soft G. If I’m around uptight twats that shit their pants every time I say something the way they don’t like, I pronounce it with a soft G.

(Via Dan Frakes)

While on the subject, I wanted to link to this video of a prototype method of text editing on iOS by Daniel Hooper. Pythonista has a variant of this, and having played with it the last couple days I gotta say its a real pleasure, especially for the finicky editing required when coding.

The video is from last year and made a big splash, but nothing really came of it except for the odd app here and there. Of course, for it to be system-wide you’d need Apple to implement it, or jail break your device.

Tried out a new app this weekend called Pythonista which basically let’s you write and execute Python scripts on your iOS device. It obviously only contains a subset of the standard library, but also has some extra extensions specifically geared towards a touch device and touch gestures.

So what? Well the real power of it comes into play once you start automating repetitive tasks and leveraging custom URL schemes to get apps talking to one another.

For instance, here’s a script I can call from Safari if I find an interesting text passage that I feel worth quoting. I’ve updated this blog to be able to display and comment on links in the same manner as Daring Fireball. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the last time I redesigned the blog, I aped Gruber’s style, albeit with my own spin.

import webbrowser
import urllib
import clipboard
import re
 
title = urllib.quote(sys.argv[1], safe='')
link = urllib.quote(sys.argv[2], safe='')
bq = '> '
quote = clipboard.get().encode('utf-8')
 
if len(quote) > 0:
    quote = bq + quote
    quote = re.sub(r'(\r\n|\n|\r)', r'\1' + bq, quote)
    quote = urllib.quote(quote, safe='')
 
base = 'posterapp:///create?title=' + title + '&text=' + quote + '&customfield_linked_list_url=' + link
 
webbrowser.open(base)

I call the script like so:

javascript:window.location='pythonista://BlogQuote?action=run&argv='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&argv='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href);

What this script does, is take the two arguments passed to it (page title and URL), as well as the contents of the clipboard (block quoted in Markdown format) and send the whole shebang to Poster for further editing where it can then be posted to this blog.

Federico Viticci has a much more in-depth article on MacStories.net which I urge you to read if any of this stuff at all excites you.

For a long time I’ve been working on lowering the barrier to entry of this blog. Hopefully this is another step in the right direction.

It’s not a hoverboard, but it’s close (not really, but it’s the only thing I can think of that has anything to do with hovering).

In honour of the football championship game that Americans like to play then call themselves “World Champions”, I’ve moved all my domain names from GoDaddy to Hover.com. Who knows, in ten years maybe I’ll switch to someone else.