Simon Willison’s Weblog

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10 items tagged “software”

2009

Semantic Versioning. Tom Preston-Werner provides a name, specification and URL describing the relatively widely used Major.Minor.Patch versioning system. This is really useful—by giving something a name and a spec, people can say “this project uses semantic versioning” and skip having to explain their backwards compatibility policy in full. # 15th December 2009, 9:53 pm

2008

A printer driver is a folder with one “.ini” file, and a couple of “.dll”s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.

Kroc Camen # 4th July 2008, 9:03 am

How to sell your software for $20,000 (via) The best article I’ve read on software entrepreneurship in ages. # 28th June 2008, 9:21 am

Camouflage. My other key piece of OS X presenting software—hides all of the icons on the desktop (no need to drag them all in to an “Archive” folder every time I give talk). # 15th June 2008, 6:29 pm

Caffeine. I’ve been using this for several months and I love it: it’s a simple OS X menu bar icon that lets you prevent your Mac from dimming the screen, going to sleep or starting a screen saver. Perfect for giving presentations and watching Flash movies full screen. # 15th June 2008, 6:27 pm

MacHeist Bundle. Everything’s now unlocked, meaning you can pick up TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X (excellent for screencasts) and Pixelmator for $49. # 16th January 2008, 9:44 pm

2007

I don’t even use Firefox and Firebug anymore, the revised Web Inspector in Leopard has been incorporated in Coda and that does everything I need and more.

Jon Hicks # 20th December 2007, 3:09 pm

2006

WriteRoom

I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn’t impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I’m completely sold. It’s a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:

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2005

Do Content Management Systems really work?

Have you considered trying a Wiki? In my experience, the more permissions / workflow / etc you have in a CMS the more likely it is that people won’t use it. Wikis may be a little unconventional but the barrier to entry is fantastically low and they can work extremely well (I like MediaWiki or TaviWiki myself).

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2003

More lightweight software

The other toy I’ve been playing with recently is SQLite. SQLite is an embeddable SQL database engine written in just under 25,000 lines of (heavily commented) C. Don’t let the size fool you—it’s phenomenally powerful and is released under a no-holds-barred public domain license that practically begs you to include it in your applications, commercial or not.

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