Useful Firefox Plugins

Google Chrome is definitely my favorite web browser. It has OSX Lion fullscreen support… it’s fast and lightweight, and Google itself is in charge of pushing it forward. But sometimes it just falls short… you just can’t find a suitable plugin for whatever you need to do. That’s the only reason i have firefox installed in my mac. Even the latest version of FF, release 11, doesn’t support OSX fullscreen feature.

So… let’s stop pointing out weak spots of this browser… and let’s go to the point!. The following plugins make my life easier. Really… so… i suggest you check them out.

  1. Firebug
    Yes… it’s also available for Chrome. But this version has far more functionality than the google counterpart. It’s really useful when you’re developing websites…!
  2. Video DownloadHelper
    Suppose you wanna download FLV files from whatever site you’re visiting. This is your friend!… it allows you to capture videos from a huge list of different websites.

I hope you find this helpful!

UITableView: Make room for a new cell, and insert it!

Suppose you wanna insert a new row at the bottom of a table. The first thing you need to do is to calculate the content offset. Suppose you already know the height of the new cell, and it’s stored into the variable ‘newCellsHeight’. Then…

[cc lang=”objc”]
CGPoint contentOffset = CGPointZero;

contentOffset.y = _tableView.contentSize.height
+ newCellsHeight
– _tableView.frame.size.height
+ _tableView.contentInset.bottom;

Once you’ve calculated the contentOffset (considering the current contentInsets)… you should make sure it’s a non-negative value, to prevent quirks:

// Do we need to scroll down?
if(contentOffset.y > 0.0f)
{
[_tableView setContentOffset:contentOffset animated:YES];
}
[/cc]

The last step would be to actually insert the rows. Please, consider that a delay should be applied, so the insert rows animations won’t break the scroll animation!

Xcode: Number of lines

I’ve been unable to figure out how to do this, actually, within Xcode. But this can also be accomplished by means of this short script:

[cc lang=”bash”]find . “(” -name “*.m” -or -name “*.mm” -or -name “*.cpp” “)” -print | xargs wc -l[/cc]

Google Chrome Plugins

Google Chrome’s time has come. I love this browser because… it’s the fastest thing out there. It had a lot of glitches when it was first released. I remember Facebook wouldn’t work fine on it… and of course, i had to fix the HTML of many of the websites i maintain.

But i stil love it. It gets updated in background… and you hardly get to notice it!. As almost everything out there… it’s better when tweaked… right?. So i’d like to recommend three different plugins, available in the Chrome Web Store:

  1. AdBlock
    As weird as it may sound… popups are still annoying these days. Furthermore, websites with ads are the worst thing that could happen to you. At least while you’re surfing the web. Well, adBlock takes care of that. It just locks out popups, and disable the download of annoying banners. Try it!.
  2. Google Docs
    Wouldn’t it be great to access your google docs, without actually having to hit ‘docs.google.com’ ?. Well, Google Docs plugin allows you to access them right from a shortcut placed by the location bar.
  3. Firebug Lite
    Although it’s not a full version… it’s a lite… FireBug is one of the best plugins out there. It allows you to play, realtime, with the DOM. Just click few buttons, and you can tweak almost anything. Sorry to say this, but Firefox version of this plugin is sooo much better…

I hope this helps!

Free Mac RSS Reader

I’m not really the kind of person that recommends things. Good things stand out by themselves, and if it’s true that they’re good, they actually don’t need sponsorship.

But i feel like this app totally deserves a review. I’ve been using Google Reader for years. Somehow, i got used to its rusty interface. It’s true. A RSS reader doesn’t need to be fancy.. it should just work. But why not make it pretty?

That’s where Capuccino app comes in. It can be found in the Mac Appstore here. It’s free. The UI looks like Mail App for Lion. You get your feeds on the left column… a small column just to its right, and the actual post content to the right. Nice… right?.

Well.. hang in there. The best part of this RSS reader is that it sync’s with Google Reader. So, if you mark something as read in your macbook, it’ll get automatically reflected in your Reader account.

Why i think that this app is way better than NetNewsWire ?. Because it’s simple. It just gets to the point. Enter your credentials and read. Clean UI. Definitely Apple’s style.

Go get it!

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