#appsilove

I'm surprised I haven't already written about Acorn under my Apps I Love tag.

Acorn long ago freed me from having to install Photoshop on my Mac. Thank goodness.

I'm not a graphics professional. Acorn does way more than I need it to do. But those "extra" abilities never get in my way. And when I do need to do something a little beyond my common tasks, Acorn has always delivered.

(via Cult of Mac) Quickly switch between weekly and monthly totals. Add custom expenses with only one tap.Configure pre-set expense buttons for quick usage (we challange you to find a faster app!). Customize amount and icon for each button.See and track your most frequent expenses. Monthly stats that show you how you spent all that money.

My thinking was fuzzy in regards to what's wrong with git submodules. So I finally opened up an editor window and started typing how I think an Ideal Submodule System should work. I wound up with this:

The subproject is copied into the super-project's repo. At least a snapshot of it, if not the entire history. It's a fact of life external resources have a habit of disappearing -- this helps makes your project resilient.

git clone foo is enough. None of this git clone --recursive foo or git submodule init && git submodule update business.

Can easily pull subproject updates.

Can easily push subproject updates.

Can easily handle super-project branching.

Super-project's commits don't wind up in subproject's history.

Subproject's commits don't wind up in super-project's history.

Armed with clearer thinking, I reexamined my options and have settled on Avery Pennarun's git-subtree.

Unfortunately its CLI UX is lacking (you have to specify the subproject's entire remote repo URL each time you pull or push) and Avery hasn't accepted pull requests or budged the project for a year. Fortunately Helmo forked Avery's repo, added .gittrees support and push-all and pull-all subcommands, and generally seems to be keeping on top of pull requests and moving the project forward.

I just started using git-subtree, but so far it's making my life better than before.

P.S. Here's a short primer on using git-subtree.

Update: Hmm, I discovered and turned to Helmo's fork after I got tired of reentering my remote repo URL each time I wanted to push or pull a subtree. Turns out Helmo's fork is currently unstable -- the tests don't pass and there's a definite bug in it when adding a repo as a subtree that doesn't show up until you attempt push it back. So I recommend using Avery's original repo until it's fixed.

Update 2: I fixed the bug and tests are passing in my git-subtree fork. git subtree push-all away!

DTerm is a free app that uses the Accessibility API to figure out the current document you're looking at. When you hit a hotkey (mine is bound to command-shift-return), it pops up a window with a shell command line with the working directory already set to the frontmost document's folder.

DTerm works awesomely with Finder, BBEdit, TextMate, Xcode, GitX and a bunch of other Mac apps.

I accidentally stumbled across my notes for what would become C4, and I realized I've been using Yojimbo for a very long while.

Yojimbo is such a great app, it hard for me to think of the time before I used to use it.

I use Yojimbo as a digital junk drawer, storing programming snippets, shell invocations, SQL nuggets, notes on different projects & processions and archives of web pages that I fear will vanish (most of which have).

It does a little bit too much for me, but it's easy to ignore the things I don't used it for (like storing serial numbers).

If you use VNC much at all, you need JollysFastVNC:

Here's how it's better than Apple's Remote Desktop, which I struggled along with for too many years:

Much faster to connect

Smarter keyboarding (cmd-tab switches apps in the remote process (though ARD may have caught up here))

"Paste as keystrokes" command

Auto clipboard syncing

Built-in ssh tunneling

Centralized list of servers

Bonjour that works

... but auto-cleans its server list

Wealth of knowledge in tooltips

Windows just close when connection is severed, instead ARD's huge annoying "Connecting..." spinner

The only thing bad about it JollysFastVNC is... its name.