After seeing so many projects shift over to GitHub, I decided to give it a quick try recently, and it really feels like the simplest way to get started with a hosted git repository. The setup workflow is pretty smooth, the code browsing/diff tools are decent, and they even have a pretty awesome 404 page! I'm really hoping that they add some form of code search.

While racking my brain as to what to actually host, I figured I would learn a bit more about Chrome extensions. Surprisingly, the whole process, from experimenting to publishing, was pretty seamless. I ended up creating a small extension that just copies all the current tab’s addresses to the clipboard (which I often find myself doing as an oldschool way of keep track of links).

In general, the Chrome extension API seems pretty powerful allowing you to manage many aspects of the browser from history to tabs and windows. I really like the simplicity of the structure of an extension package, but the docs can use a little more organization, and the edit->save->reload workflow a bit more automation.

If you’re bored, check out the extension at the Web Store, and at GitHub.

Using the free micro EC2 instance (first year only) and S3 at a cost of:

April – $0.05
May – $0.08
June – $0.07
July – $0.07
August – $0.07
September – $0.08
October – $0.19

Have I mentioned how awesome Amazon's web services are?

Just playing a little bit with jQuery animations and CSS transforms — Jim Jarmusch's quote below is one of my favourites.

It's magical when the universe conspires to put great people in places of influence, and in that position, Steve Jobs delivered in spades. From his leadership at Apple, Next and Pixar, great things grew, and without question, the world is a better place because of him and those he has inspired.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

One thing that still annoys me on occasion is when websites throw up popups, especially those that come up behind the main browser window. In particular, on OSX you have to either Command-tilde, Command-W to get to the window to close it, or pop up Expose/Mission Control or right click the Dock icon to hunt down the window. (Window 7's taskbar peek feature is actually pretty useful in this instance without forcing you to switch contexts.)

Since my browser window is not usually full screen, a much more simple solution for me would be for Chrome to line them up in a way that you can close them quickly if they are likely to be unwanted (as most background popups are).

Here is a quick animation to help visualize the problem. When you click on the window on the left, you see that popups are often occluded, where as in the other case, you can just close the windows one at a time without having to change context as much.



Of course, the ideal solution would be to prevent unwanted popups from showing at all. :)
In other news, welcome to the new Labs-in-posts!

Edit: On second thought, an even simpler interim solution might even be to add a context menu item on the tab such that when you right click, you can "Close all spawned windows" from the current page. This would solve the issue for full screen windows and is less intrusive and more context specific than the possibilities using the generic system window manager.

I'm not sure if this was turned on by default in previous versions of OSX, but if you are looking to get screen zooming using Ctrl+Scroll Wheel back, you can re-enable it by doing the following:


It is super handy when you need to quickly check an image or color.