Quicklook 2 pdf is possible!

I have a Word doc. I use Quicklook on it. It generates a visual but you can’t do anything with it. I wanted to print without opening MS Word. Most tips talk about using the File menu in Finder to Print… the selected file, which of course opens the doc. That’s not desirable. I couldn’t find a solution until I searched qlmanage instead of “quick look”.  Well low and behold…

Create PDFs with QuickLook – Stian’s PhD wiki

Word documents are good for editing, and better for converting to Kindle .mobi files, etc. But my academic workflow is built around PDFs, and I like using Skim for marking them up etc. I also hate having to fire up Word every time I just want a quick look at some document. Turns out you can use QuickLook to generate PDFs from any format it knows how to preview (and you can add support for lot’s of extra formats through plugins).

For the latest code:

https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/blob/master/qlmanage-doc2pdf.rb

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/downloads/list

I’ll have to see if I can get this working with Alfredapp. 🙂

edit: a few different takes on it are here:

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/14630

Skim’s reader bar has shortcuts to move it!

I use Skim for reading PDFs whenever I don’t need to do major collaboration with others with Acrobat. I really like it and recommend it whenever someone even remotely mentions issues with reading PDFs on OS X. One neat thing Skim has is a reading bar. It helps to focus when going through code related books, etc. I never knew how to make the most of it until today. I was thinking “it sure would be nice if you could move that reading bar with the keyboard.” I’ve thought that many times. Today I checked the suggested features and sure enough, it’s been requested and fulfilled. But it’s hidden!

SourceForge.net: Tips and Tricks – skim-app

Skim also has a few unlisted shortcuts to make life easier. Some only work in specific tool modes or when a note is selected. These shortcuts only work when the main PDF view has the focus.

space, ⇧space, page down, page up		scroll page down/up
home, end		first/last page
→, ←, ↓, ↑		scroll
⌥⌘→, ⌥⌘←, ⌥⌘↓, ⌥⌘↑		change tool mode
→, ←, ↓, ↑, ⇧→, ⇧←, ⇧↓, ⇧↑		move selected note
return		edit selected note
⌥⌃→, ⌥⌃←, ⌥⌃↓, ⌥⌃↑, ⇧⌃→, ⇧⌃←, ⇧⌃↓, ⇧⌃↑		resize selected note
⌥→, ⌥←, ⌥↓, ⌥↑		move reading bar
⇧⌥↓, ⇧⌥↑		resize reading bar
⌥tab, ⌥⇧tab		rotate through notes and links
⌥escape		deselect active note
t, n, c, b, h, u, s, l, f		change note tool mode (only in note tool mode)

Appcelerator Desktop

I may finally get my hand to try Appcelerator studio with a desktop app. It looks quite interesting. I like the idea of being able to use HTML5/CSS3/JS for the front end and use other scripting languages on the backend. PHP, Python and Ruby are all options but OS X Snow Leopard has trouble with PHP and Python’s setup isn’t as intuitive as Ruby’s setup. It’s a bit odd given Python’s influence in the Appcelerator environment. But Ruby looks fun. Looking forward to trying it out. Including Ruby gems seems straightforward too:

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/78591/packing–adding-ruby-gems-with–to-the-application

And then there is this nice little demo app to show off a bit of Ruby and Titanium:

https://github.com/marshall/quicksnap

Nice. Props to the folks who make this possible!

FlashBuilder, the yellow question marks, the import “foo.bar” could not be found – find touch as a temporary workaround?

I was working on a Flash Pro project, coding in FlashBuilder. The way to go. The nearest I can tell is when running a debug build for some reason the project lost something. The legendary yellow squiggles with the ? marks appeared all over the place. I couldn’t get it to go away. It’s in git so I just checked it out in a new folder without the project files and could keep moving. After another debug build, it happened again. Not sure on that bit. But I found that doing ANY change in the file and saving the imported file would suddenly make the file usable again.

import com.foo.bar.MyClass

Open up MyClass and do anything that allows FlashBuilder to save it. The quickest was space/delete/save. If you have FlexFormatter on make sure auto format isn’t on if you don’t want to reformat 3rd party libraries when doing this. So it seemed that anything you change, so that it saves, brings the file back into FlashBuilder’s list of valid imports. But when you close the project and reopen it, the invalid imports are back.

That got me to thinking… if I just touch the file would that do it? It did. Now we’re in business.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 touch

That did the trick. All the files are back in business. It’ll happen again but at least I have a quick way to get it working so refactoring, finding usages, hiearchy and all that goodness works again.

This is FlashBuilder 4.5.1.

FlashBuilder 4 jump directly to API documentation tip

I was wondering if it is possible to jump directly to the ASDoc of a Flash/Flex component. Seems it is possible.

Oh my. Very nice. Place your cursor in the code of interest and press Shift + F2. And there you go. Previously I used FluidApp to wrap the AS3 reference documentation locally as noted below. But now this is not needed. On my box FluidApp’s search is faster sometimes than the Adobe Help depending on what’s running, but jumping right to the docs in question is very helpful.

Big Spaceship | Labs Blog – AIR App: AS3 Language Reference

I found the scrollbars in the air app to be shoddy, so I downloaded the offline version of the AS3 docs:

http://help.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flash/10/ActionScript3LangRef.zip

and then created a fluid app from my local version.

http://fluidapp.com/

now runs perfect offline and even has a search.

F*CSS is more than just CSS for Flash

I had seen the author’s original writeup on Camouflage and that was already very cool. This goes beyond that and again just beyond CSS properties. The idea that any public property can be set via an external file and it’s not XML, that’s much cleaner. But even the idea of just changing positions, sizes, etc., in such a clean and fast way and with inheritance as well? Merging?! Very nice.

F*CSS |  About

F*CSS is a custom CSS parser for Flash based on the PropteryManagement System in Flash Camouflage. The main class called StyleSheet (found inside of the com.flashartofwar.fcss.stylesheets package), goes well beyond the native StyleSheet class by supporting style inheritance, pseudo selectors, and merging styles on the fly. The goal of the StyleSheet is to make styles something you can apply to any of your classes instead of just TextFields. CSS is a great way to define your class’s properties in an external file and F*CSS helps convert these css styles into property/value pairs you can apply to any Object.