• April 17th, 2008
• • Apple
  • Rants
  • Web Development

I have a confession to make.

SQL Server 2000 by MICRO$OFT is the best SQL application I have ever used.

Select query text -> run (ctrl+enter) -> results. nothing out there does this simple behavior.

For everything I love about OSX I do miss a couple of apps since I jumped ship in June of ‘06. A decent SQL application is right up there at the top.

The Candidates

Navicat

 I use Navicat on a daily basis but it drives me IN SANE. All I want is a simple application for running queries that’s easy to navigate and has plenty of hotkeys baked in so I can bounce around with ease and speed. Navicat fails miserably at this. I end up with 5 windows open just to do simple stuff, there’s not enough distinction between the behavior of browsing tables or writing queries. It’s a painful, verbose, hassle. Today I was so pumped I found a couple hotkeys that would save me a lot of time only to find out they were useless because they didn’t put focus on a textarea that would be painfully obvious to anyone actually using the program. Multiple queries require multiple windows and it all ends up being a CF in the end. I’m looking to replace Navicat pronto.

Query Browser

Query Browser could be awesome, but it comes up short. Again a lack of hot keys and cursor focus make using it a pain. Frequent crashes don’t help (it crashed on me twice while writing this). My biggest peeve by far is how Query Browser deals with errors. You end up getting this tiny sliver of an area dedicated to errors. If you get a couple in a row they all stack and become unreadable and you can’t even resize the errors window space OR clear them out. I do like how Query Browser makes use of tabs for multiple queries instead of creating a new window each time (take note Navicat).

phpMyAdmin

I know other mac users who just use phpMyAdmin for all their SQL needs. I hate the lag of a web interface for something that is screaming for an application interface. Again, phpMyAdmin is sans hotkeys. That’s a deal breaker.

Dismay

If anyone can enlightened me please speak up. I’ve looked near and far and this is the only list of apps I have found and I assume it’s pretty comprehensive. I tried a couple of these applications out and found that I was already using the best available out there.

I’m very close to just retreating back to the basics.

Popularity: 12% [?]

• April 9th, 2008
• • Blog
  • Shameless Promotion

This blog is powered by WordPress. Wordpress is a solid blogging platform, but it has its flaws. Blogging with Wordpress is a time, consuming, process.

I wish I blogged more often but it’s hard to find the time to do it. The bottleneck for me was creating and editing posts via WordPress’ backend. Loading, refreshing, uploading pictures, and double-checking the blog post to make sure everything was lined up correctly, etc. The time I would spend writing a post was compounded by the back and forth between the front and backend until I found MarsEdit.

MarsEdit to the Rescue

Simply put MarsEdit is an OSX application that interfaces with the Wordpress backend of the blog via XML-RPC. MarsEdit allows me to edit/post/upload images with ease. If I wrote for multiple blogs (I don’t yet), then I could do it all from within MarsEdit and life would be that much easier. Now I can post/edit/upload much faster. The next step to making things REALLY fly is my use of Markdown.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). daringfireball

Essentially Markdown is shorthand HTML that makes it faster bang out blog posts.

If you’re blogging or thinking about blogging I highly recommend adding these tools to your repertoire.

You’ll notice since I implemented these tools back in the beginning of March there has been a serious uptick in the frequency of posting here at somedirection. A large part of that is leveraging MarsEdit+Markdown in this blog. There’s also another factor and I’ll be writing about it shortly.

Resources

• MarsEdit
• I use the WordPress Markdown Plugin to format the pseudo markup.
• Markdown CheatSheet PDF

This post was written in Markdown, you can view the syntax here.

Popularity: 11% [?]