More than once, I’ve been stuck having to use images where a logo and/or some type is flattened onto a white background. The goal is to achieve something similar to the “Multiply” layer blending mode, but be able to save a PNG with a completely transparent background and no nasty, pixelated artifacts. About a year ago, I found a perfect Quartz-based app (or plugin, I forget which) that could remove the solid background from an image while preserving reflections, drop shadows, and the subtle parts of an image that have more complicated opacity. Unfortunately, I never bookmarked the author’s site nor did I write a blog post or a Tweet or anything that would have been useful.

After hours of searching for said app, I stumbled upon Mikeal Simburger’s KillWhite, a Photoshop plugin (and 64-bit PixelBender plugin!) that does the same thing. And what a relief. It works just as well as the mysterious app I first used, and even better is that Mikeal is working on a version that will key out a selected color.

Comparison:

We’ve all been there with a WordPress install: “Can’t Establish a Database Connection”.

I made sure that my connection info was correct, and unlike every other PHP app install, I continued to get the error.

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It finally dawned on me that using one subversion repository for all my projects was silly. If each project has its own repository, there are some benefits:

1. My revision comments make lots of sense and follow a logical path.
2. My revision numbers are more meaningful, and pertain to each project directly.
3. I can easily share access to one project with someone else if I need to, without exposing all of my work or potentially sensitive information.
4. I can join the rest of the world that’s using subversion properly.

So why wasn’t I doing this sooner? I learned to use subversion this way, and it actually helped when I decided to use Beanstalk. Beanstalk is awesome, provides lots of hooks and cool features, and is just lovely. The obstacle in my repository-for-every-project quest was Beanstalk’s limit on repositories. With the $15/month account, I could only have 10 repositories. I could pay more for additional repositories, but I’m cheap and ambitious and there seemed like there had to be a better way. And there was. Here’s how I set up stylish subversion hosting with unlimited repositories for $19.95 a month.

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I complained before that my beloved “Edit in TextMate” input manager wandered off into the woods when I upgraded to Snow Leopard and started using 64-bit apps. I work with lots of sites using ExpressionEngine, and “Edit in TextMate” made life quicker/easier when editing templates. (We can have a lively debate about saving templates as files later.)

Ricky at IF/THEN pointed me to QuickCursor, which is like a more grown-up “Edit in TextMate.” QuickCursor stays calm as I change Safari tabs, and never seems to lose the connection between the browser window’s textarea and the TextMate window. It lets me choose the keyboard shortcut, and you’ll never guess what I made it.

Bonus: you can add various “Edit In…” applications with shortcuts. What’s not to like? Get it for yourself!

I could be late to the party here, but I’ve just discovered IETester, a piece of software that’s been missing from my life for some time now. It’s a single (Windows) application that lets you test a given website in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, and even IE8. It’s in alpha right now, but I’ve tried it and so far I’m thrilled.

Stop reading and just go get it.

I’ve had a chance to check out MacRabbit’s Espresso, and I was really impressed by its autocomplete functionality–specifically with CodeIgniter and ActionScript. Its snippets, project panel, and Safari-like text search are also very attractive, but there are a few yet-to-be-implemented features that make it impossible for me to switch from TextMate.

In order of importance:

1. Project-wide search and replace with support for regular expressions.
2. The ability to duplicate a selection without copy and paste. (Command+D in TextMate)
3. Multi-line selection/edit tool (Alt+click/drag), and the related ‘Edit Each Line in Selection’ feature.

Espresso has been freshly released at version 1.0, and I realize that it needs time to mature. It’ll take a while to build up the enormous feature set that TextMate offers, and it’ll be amazing if it can stay as simple as TextMate at the same time. I’d make the switch in a heartbeat if I wasn’t so dependent on TextMate’s awesomeness.