code posts

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Brett tells us about his favorite new snippet manager.

If you write code, you probably reuse blocks of it. Whether you're working in HTML, CSS, AppleScript, Objective-C ... it's all code, and a really well-written chunk of it deserves to be used again. You can put a few of your most commonly used snippets into TextExpander, sure, but the biggest problem is finding that function you know you wrote last year but haven't used since. This common little conundrum has given rise to some very elegant applications that aim to solve this and other related problems.

There have been a few great options lately for snippet organization. CodeCollector Pro has been my long-running favorite, with Snippet a close second. I like Snippet's sexiness, but miss having a nice, big, multi-pane window to organize with. CodeCollector Pro is a solid workhorse, but actions such as adding new snippets are a little more cumbersome than I'd like. I often just clip things into Evernote when I'm in a hurry ...

Then, along came Snippets (note the 's' that differentiates it from Snippet) to steal my heart. It's got Code Collector's utility, Evernote's searchability, and it's got an extra dash of sexy, ala Snippet. It has the standard sytax-highlighted code viewer, and a sidebar with groups and folders. Snippets are classified by language, which can be set in a dropdown or by just dragging a snippet to a language folder. It functions on a hybrid folder/tag concept, which happens to be the way I do just about everything. Each snippet can have a description, as well as labels (tags) and all full-text indexed for searching. You've also got groups, which are like folders, but a snippet can belong to multiple groups. It has smart folders which, as you know, function like automatic groups with boolean criteria. On top of all that, folders, smart folders and groups can all be gathered hierarchically in nested folders, with parent folders showing all of the contents of their child folders. Whew!

Wade Cosgrove, code ninja over at Panic, has released a freeware Developer Color Picker that helps developers of all stripes pick and paste color declarations for a variety of languages.

Any color picker will let you choose a color from anywhere on your screen, but Developer Color Picker turns that into usable code for your Xcode and web development projects. Developer Color Picker generates code suitable for NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS and HTML declarations.

Depending on what you want, you can copy just the value for the color itself, or an entire declaration including the color. Imagine the time you save not having to type UIColor *aColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.282 green:0.569 blue:0.894 alpha:1.000]; again!

Developer Color Picker is available on Panic's website.

I have now spent a pretty solid week writing applications for the iPhone. And what an exciting week it's been. I've been privileged to view and interact with the iPhone in a way that few other people have had the opportunity to. The iPhone is tight, robust and its SDK--even seen through such imperfect tools as class-dump--is beautiful.