Helium Foot Software

defaultapp

In this tweet yesterday, John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame asked:

Anyone have a shell or AppleScript command that tells you what the current default web browser is?

I had written code to do this for my upcoming app, so i spent a few minutes packaging it up as a command line tool. I present to you defaultapp. Download it here. The zip file contains the now public domain source (not too pretty) and the "defaultapp" executable. To use it, give it a -n, -b, -p or -a and a document extension. The options (in order) yield the app's name, bundle id, path or all three. Thus:

$ ./defaultapp -n html
Safari.app
$ ./defaultapp -b html
com.apple.Safari
$ ./defaultapp -p html
/Applications/Safari.app
$ ./defaultapp -a html
Safari.app
/Applications/Safari.app
com.apple.Safari

The tool uses LaunchServices to determine url of default app for the given document extension and then LaunchServices again to find the application name. The bundle id is determined via the carbon CFBundleCopyInfoDictionaryInDirectory call. You can probably do this with Cocoa, but i found the carbon call to be more reliable. YMMV.

Hacking the Press

My good friend Kevin Hoctor of No Thirst Software recently asked me on Twitter how i "wrangled" so much press for the recent MercuryMover v2.0 launch.

The 140 character limit on Twitter didn't leave me enough room even for a token response. Here's what i said:

@kevinhoctor I've been working on my press hacking skills. In <70 chars: Listen for mentions. email everyone. give press free lice ...

I would like to take this opportunity to state once and for all that i do NOT advocate giving lice to members of the press. On this blog, we truncate where i say to truncate, so there's a little more room to describe how i engineered some very decent coverage for the MercuryMover 2.0 launch and how you might get some of that press goodness for your product. The term "press hacking" and in fact the very ethos thereof is derived from an evolving talk that Adam Engst of TidBITS fame has been giving for a number of years. I saw a video of his talk from C4[1] and it really shaped these thoughts of how to work with the press. I can't overstate how grateful i am to Adam for really opening my eyes on this topic.

So how do you hack the press? Here's my four step program:

Continue reading "Hacking the Press"

Second Time Around

After the recent C4 conference i felt really inspired to get to work on a new product. I've put a lot of work into MercuryMover, but i'm not going to be able to retire on it. My plan has always been to develop a broad stable of apps upon which to build the company. I had had this particular idea for a long time, and i knew that i could build something very useful relatively quickly. I present to you: Highbrow. If you can't commit to either Safari or Firefox, then Highbrow is for you. If you dabble in Opera and appreciate Camino, then Highbrow is your friend. If you love Omniweb, but are curious about iCab, you guessed it, you want Highbrow. Highbrow manages your system wide default web browser so that you're never surprised by what app comes up when you click on a link in Mail, iChat or anywhere else. Highbrow displays the icon of the current default browser in the menubar and from it's menu you can select your preferred web browser. You can also select one of the following modes:

• Always use my preferred web browser
• Use the most recently used web browser
• Use the most recently launched web browser
• Ask me which web browser to use (A terrific suggestion from my good friend Scott Morrison)

After making that selection, Highbrow does the rest. I like to set it to "use the most recently used web browser". This lets me switch back and forth between Safari and Firefox, but only keep one of them open at a time. Whichever one i'm using automagically becomes the system wide default. This way, when my wife sends me a link while i'm working in Firefox, i won't have to wait for Safari to launch when i click on it (this happens with startling frequency).

Something i learned when developing MercuryMover is not to treat your in-progress application like a state secret. I had been using builds of MercuryMover for almost two years before i released it to the public. Having learned from this mistake, i'm releasing a development build of Highbrow today. It's not fully polished, nor are all of the features implemented. The temporary icon is not that pretty and probably infringes on multiple copyrights. Despite all of this, Highbrow is useful today, and i'd like for people to get some benefit out of it and to hear what does and doesn't work.

Here is some of what's missing:

• "Ask me which browser to use" is unimplemented
• nicer interface for automatic updates
• The icon is temporary
• Highbrow needs to be restarted in order to recognize new browsers on the system
• There is no first-run window

So...what are you waiting for. Try it out, already.