July 01, 2005

CPAN vs. dot-underscore

I was so keen on the idea of pushing a module to CPAN that I almost didn't catch a fatal flaw in my scheme. Mac OS X (motto: It Just Works) was doing something odd to my tarball as it was created: it was adding a whole host of files that weren't there originally. Not just the .DS_Store files we all know and love (and learn to remove), but odd shadow files like ._foo.txt for foo.txt and ._Makefile.PL for Makefile.PL.

Yep. Now you might see the problem.

Continue reading "CPAN vs. dot-underscore"

June 29, 2005

Gee! (your app smells terrific)

The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That's why I love Gee!, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.

Gee (I'm going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail's Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders' addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that's not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can choose to ignore it until something newer comes in.

That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I've had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.