justin hileman dot info

Prying

2013-04-15T19:17:20Z

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Mark Twain, via Futility Closet.

Every browser is a poser

2013-03-25T23:43:12Z

Every browser pretends to be something it’s not… Even yours.

And it looks like Internet Explorer 11 is keeping up the tradition by pretending to be both Netscape and Firefox, but not Internet Explorer.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

I'm not the one

2013-02-20T20:57:13Z

I’m not the one.

I know how to up, and down, and double down.

I’m not the one. And I’m not from this planet.

If you guessed “things crazy people in San Francisco shout at nobody in particular” then you win!

An unsolicited proposal

2013-02-09T18:05:02Z

my name is Mr john Kennedy a citizen of American work as mechanical engineer at cruise ship in London, Actually I am single father with one child, moreover dear after I come across your name then I decided to contact you if we can know each other and then get marriage, I really interested to know you. In other hence even if you have marriage we can still be a good friend, I really like you.
Please I am waiting for your reply
Nice to hear from you
Mr John Kennedy.

sic erat scriptum

My year in cities, 2012

2013-01-08T11:27:30Z

I spent one or more nights in each of these places in 2012. It was a great year:

Arusha, Tanzania
Austin, Texas
Charlottesville, Virginia
Deboche, Nepal
Dingboche, Nepal
Gorak Shep, Nepal
Groveland, California
Karatu, Tanzania
Kathmandu, Nepal
Lobuche, Nepal
London, England
Los Angeles, California
Monterey, California
Mountain View, California
Mt. Kilimanjaro National Park, Tanzania
Mt. Shasta, California
Namche Bazaar, Nepal
New York, New York
Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania
Phakding, Nepal
Portland, Oregon
San Francisco, California
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania
Tarangire National Park, Tanzania
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Where did you go?

Conversations with Siri

2012-10-27T21:43:58Z

“Siri, how do I get to Athleta?”

“Finding directions to Atlanta, GA.”

“ATHLETA.”

“You’ll be there in 31½ hours.”

“But, I don’t want to go to Atlanta.”

“If you don’t, you don’t.”

On having a boring technology stack

2012-10-08T16:28:44Z

Don’t be the biggest user of any technology.

Marco Arment, at Brooklyn Beta 2010, on having a boring technology stack.

I’m bummed to be missing Brooklyn Beta this year. It’s a great conference.

Teller, on magic

2012-09-19T02:20:52Z

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

Teller, from The Honor System, via Quotes on Design.

The iPhone "Icon Ceiling" has been broken: is this the beginning of the end?

2012-09-13T15:33:47Z

cc:by The Pug Father

Since its inception, the iPhone has had a hard icon limit: At most, 20 apps are allowed on the home screen. As you can see from the boxes above, these boundaries have been pushed: the default iPhone home screen has become more crowded with each new generation. But—until yesterday—this limit put in place under Steve Jobs has never been broken.

Default iPhone home screen icon count

While Jobs still held the company reins, this “Icon Ceiling” was strictly enforced: the iPhone home screen had a hard and fast limit of 20 icons. Careful readers will note that the default home screen icon count hit that limit twice—once with the iPhone 3GS, and again with the iPhone 4S.

In the former case, the crisis was averted when Apple developed an innovative new UI paradigm to handle the added capacity: in iOS 4.1, Apple added folders, allowing them to drop back down to a safe home screen icon count.

But when disaster reared its head again, and the iPhone 4S shipped with a home screen chock full of default apps, the team was unable to deliver that good old Apple magic. Without Apple co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs at the helm, the visionless Apple saw no way forward but to break the time-honored Icon Ceiling.

A taste of things to come?

For a year now, Apple has been chugging along on intertia and their war chest full of past profits, but will that be enough to last? Yesterday’s iPhone 5 announcement was a sign of the weakening resolve in the post-Jobs iPhone team. The iPhone 5 ships with 21 home screen icons.

Is it any coincidence that the “Icon Ceiling” was respected until this, the very first post-Jobs iPhone?

Twenty. One. Icons.

Sure, yesterday’s hardware refresh has given Apple a lifeline for another year or so. There are three empty slots at the bottom of the oversized new display, but how long will they last? What does this alarming trend say about the future of this once-great corporation?

Is this phone an harbinger of Apple’s impending doom?

Analysts’ projections are grave

Apple can’t hope to keep home screen icon escalation up indefinitely. Now that they’ve demonstrated their willingness to throw caution to the wind, will they ever stop?

Analysts estimate that at the current rate of growth, there will be over 45 icons on the home screen within two major hardware generations.

Projected iPhone home screen icon count

The Mac apologists, and Grubers, and Macalopes may try to spin these facts, but we all know they’ve been wrong before. And in this case, we’ve got numbers, and numbers don’t lie. The situation looks grave.

Early prototypes don’t provide much hope

I’ve been given exclusive access to a leaked early prototype of the not-even-announced-yet “iPhone 7”. The very model which analysts warn might spell the death of the iPhone family. And I’ve gotta say, it doesn’t look very promising. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t see anyone buying this so-called “iPhone 7”:

Coda 2 modes, scopes, and you

2012-09-05T20:44:47Z

Hidden in the massive list of awesome that Panic shipped with Coda 2 was an entirely new way to highlight files: color themes, or Syntax Style Sheets. And they are awesome.

Essentially, they separated syntax parsing (syntax .mode bundles) from highlighting (the new syntax stylesheets). Unfortunately, to make any progress, you’ve gotta break a few things. In this case, Coda 1 syntax modes don’t quite work with the new color themes.

So what’s all this about scopes?

The difference between syntax modes for Coda 1 and Coda 2 largely boils down to an attribute called scope. These scope attributes are how Coda 2 decides which bits are what colors.

This isn’t the perfect analogy, but bear with me

If you think about a syntax mode and a color theme as XML and CSS, it makes a lot of sense.

The syntax mode is a set of rules for parsing a file and generating a document. Let’s pretend it’s generating an XML document. So this:

<?php
    echo "foo";
?>

Might look something like this in our imaginary XML representation:

<delimiter>&lt;?php</delimiter> 
    <keyword>echo</keyword> <string>"foo"</string>;
<delimiter>?&gt;</delimiter>

Now to make this pretty, you’d use CSS like this:

delimiter { color: grey; } 
keyword   { color: blue; } 
string    { color: red;  }

Make sense?

Now, if we wanted our imaginary XML output to be more specific, we could add classes:

<string class="double-quote">"foo"</string> .
<string class="single-quote">'bar'</string>;

Now we can style it like this:

string.double-quote { color: red;    } 
string.single-quote { color: orange; }

By using a more specific selector, we can have a general color as a base style, or a more specific color when needed. Note that the examples above aren’t actually what the default syntax modes use, they’re simplified so they’re easier to grok.

Like I said, this isn’t the perfect analogy, but it’s close enough to get the idea.

When you have a “state” or a “keyword” in your syntax mode, you can assign it a “scope” which is something like a CSS class. This scope is then used by color themes to actually make your mode be colors.

Because color themes (and the preferences dialog) style generic versions of things, you want to use the same basic scope names as the default themes. For example:

constant                  // general case for any constant 
constant.numeric          // like an int or a float 
constant.numeric.keyword  // this might be True or False or Nil or something 

keyword                   // general keyword 
keyword.control           // depends on the language 
keyword.type              // typehints, typecasting, etc

Your actual scopes can be more specific than this. You could use scope="keyword.type.cast.java" as the scope for typecasting in a Java syntax mode, for example, and it would be highlighted using the most specific style available, in this case keyword.type.

To see all of the generic scopes available

Open Coda 2 preferences and export your current color scheme. Edit it (don’t double click, or it will import) and check out all the style rules.

By using generic scopes (markup.comment, language.variable, etc) Panic made it so any color scheme could work with any syntax mode, provided the syntax mode uses the same basic scope names. This is 100% awesomer than before. If you want to see the difference, download any color scheme from this page and look at the source of the old-school .seestyle vs the new .sss of the exact same color scheme.

With the old way, any time a any new syntax mode came along, we would have to update the theme and add a couple hundred lines of XML to color things correctly. That’s the equivalent to using <font> tags to style text all over your website. It doesn’t scale, and it’s not future-proof. So Panic replaced it with a syntax style sheet (at least that’s what I assume .sss stands for).

The new way is a ton better, eh?

Cool story, bro.

But how do I update a Coda 1 syntax mode to work with Coda 2?

Simple: add scopes.

You can see the update applied to Mustache.mode here. You’ll need to do something similar to your syntax mode.

It’s probably easiest to open one of the default syntax modes and work from that. For each of the states and keywords in your syntax mode, find an analogous state from the default mode. Choose the same scope, or make up one that has the same base but is more “specific”.

It’s important to pick scopes based on semantic meaning, rather than desired color. This maintains consistency between languages: If you pick blue as your language.variable color, it’ll be blue in language.variable.php, language.variable.less or language.variable.string.here-doc.perl.