I’ve always been a big fan of anything that Piriform has to make.  CCleaner kept my computer running fast though my time at Berea College.   Defraggler came out later and is my default defrag program.  Now there is a new piece of software that will be very handy when I want know more about my computer or someone elses.  It’s called Speccy and it does a great job at putting all of your computer’s information in one place.

So I was looking for some handy iPhone Apps for freelance Web designers when I came across this one.  The name definitely caught my attention.

It looked promising I forked out a couple of bucks and downloaded it.  It’s good stuff!  The author, Jeremy Tuber, is hitting home on several topics that plague us freelancers.  I’m looking forward to becoming more proficient in Verbal Kung Fu!

Learn More:

Verbal Kung Fu for Freelancers: Master the Art of Self Defense against Difficult Clients

So I was thinking of band names for my friends band and being the internet engineer that I am I decided to see if there are any online tools that might assist us.

I introduce to you…   http://BandNameMaker.com!

It’s simple.  Just type a couple of keywords in and see what it generates.  If you don’t see something that you like just refresh the page and you’ll be given more name ideas.

Watch out… it can be a little addictive.  Have fun!

It was bound to happen. Anytime you buy something really nice the gods frown opon you and things begin to happen to put you back in your place. I am a recent and happy owner of the iPhone 3G. My wallet is also a bit lighter because of it but the phone and all of it’s amazing features make up for it.

Today gravity and the hard surface of my drive way almost ended an awesome relationship but luckily I invested in a protective case from Incipio. The case consist of two parts; a soft evelope that wraps it’s self and cushions blows, and a hard plastic brace that give extra support.

This case paid for it’s self today after dropping it on it’s edge onto my driveway. A drop like this would have surely cracked the screen.

The case also comes with a couple screen protectors that keep the screen from getting scatched. When you spend $200 on a phone you want protect your investment!

Let’s say you’re working on a series of Web sites that share similar style sheets but there are slight differences between them and you want to consolidate them into one style sheet. Yeah…

Instead of going line by line or using various Find and Replace methods check out a little know utility that comes as part of Apple’s Developer Tools, called Xcode, in Mac OS X.

It’s called FileMerge and its mission is to compare two files and then merge the differences into one. However, I never trust tools that do such things, so I simply used its amazing file comparison features to make sure I was doing the right things to the right files.

When you launch FileMerge, you’re prompted for the locations of two files which then open in one window with a vertical divider down the middle.

FileMerge highlights the sections that differ in each file, and uses an arrow in the center area to show whether the higlighted item needs to be added to the right or left file in order to make them identical. I used FileMerge to open two style sheets and compare them. I would then copy and paste and make the actual edits in TextMate or Dreamweaver. The visual cues provided by FileMerge were invaluable in helping me understand what I’d done to the code and without its help, I probably still be working on it!

I’m sure there are other tools out there that do the same thing (and perhaps even better, and I could trust the merge function), including UNIX’s diff command. But FileMerge was there, the smooth-scrolling auto-lineup feature has to be seen to be understood (it’s very cool), and it was free …

I became addicted to Apple’s FileMerge tool … even though I never used it for its full intended purpose!