Just a little update…

I’ve been doing a lot of research and development, or R&D as we call it in the biz, on my new suite of low-cost applications to replace my Dreamweaver Web Development setup. The next post in that series is going to be a “Why, Who and How” post. I’m working on several aspects of it right now. It’s going to cover all of the things that I liked about Dreamweaver, and how to do them better with more specialized applications, as well as setting up OSX for multiple web development workflows. I’ll cover more than just TextMate, too, I promise. Specialty CSS tools, color theory tools, ftp tools and some essential firefox extensions will all be covered. And most importantly, and the brunt of my last couple days of research, is how to integrate them all using shell/applescript and drag and drop to create as seamless an environment as possible. I think you’ll be shocked and awed, maybe not like I just blew a mid-east city into oblivion, but at least mildly surprised.

In what little spare time I’ve had lately, I’ve taken my Wikipedia linking code for TextMate and added WAY too much code to it. I turned it from about 15 lines of code into over 80, with full error checking and drop down lists when there are multiple results returned. It even navigates through “disambiguation” results. The regex needs some work, as I’m still learning my way around it. And I had to add copy a support library from the blogging bundle and put it all in its own bundle for the sake of clarity, so it’s easy to package and share now.