Quantum Forest

Following my Another mac update post I will cover a few small applications that have made a big difference on the way I do things.

DigitalColor Meter: One of the common tasks that I perform when updating my web sites is to change the CSS files. I keep the same templates, but I do play a fair amount with the design; particularly colours. When I was using mostly a PC I would find a nice colour in a page, take a screenshot (with Shift-Print Screen), open the screenshot in The Gimp and use the color picker to get the hexadecimal representation of the colour. Moving to the mac I had the temptation of doing the same, but using Grab (which comes by default under Applications, Utilities, Grab.app) and The Gimp for mac or—a simplified version of it—Seashore. Then I discovered that the mac ships by default with Digital ColorMeter (under Applications, Utilities, DigitalColor Meter.app) a small piece of software that lets you hover above any screen and get the hexadecimal color. One can even modify the aperture size, to change the number of pixels being included in the average colour measurement. Now it is simply ‘Hover with my mouse, Shift-Command-C’ and I get the hexadecimal values.

Dictionary: The other one is simply Dictionary. Yes, I have a problem, I like dictionaries and related books. I do own a copy of ‘Webster’s New World’, ‘Oxford Advanced Learners’, ‘Roget’s International Thesaurus’, ‘Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable’ and ‘Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage’. This is covering English only. I do have a similar set of books in Spanish, starting with ‘Diccionario del Español Actual’ by Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés and Gabino Ramos (4,666 pages), followed by a large number of smaller dictionaries and books on the use of Spanish. I used to go and look for words all the time, but now there is Command-Spacebar Di (in Quicksilver) and the word. That’s it and I love it. I now only need something like that for Spanish.

Still trying on writing tools

Writeroom keeps growing on me, but I need to store all the bits and pieces that I am writing for different reasons. Although I tried Mori (from the same makers as Writeroom), I still do not feel quite comfortable with it. Journler, on the other hand, it is a nice journaling application, although its full screen mode is still a bit clunky.

So, I wrote my first ever piece of Applescript:


tell application "WriteRoom"
set docName to the name of front document
set docContent to the text of front document
end tell
tell application "Journler"
set newEntry to (make new entry with properties {name:docName, plain text:docContent})
end tell


Writeroom assigns automatically the content of the first line as document name. Thus, the script grabs the name and content of a WriteRoom window and creates a new entry in Journler with that title and content.

Yes, I did buy a copy of Copywrite before, but I can not make it fit in my workflow yet. I will keep trying it for a while, and see if it ‘just clicks’ with me in the near future.