Using Firefox as Flash playing Safari fallback

If you want to go Flashless on Mac and Safari, it's possible to use Firefox as a fallback, too, not just Chrome. While Firefox does load Plugins from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and /Library/Internet Plug-Ins, it looks in other places too. I just tested and it seems to work fine from /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<profile name>/plugins and I suspect /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins would work too.

So you can copy Flash Player.plugin, NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave and flashplayer.xpt to one of the Firefox specific folders and launch Firefox from Safari's Developer menu. Chrome starts up faster, though.

xibgraph: Interface Builder overviews

When putting together user interfaces with Interface Builder, you connect things together with bindings, actions and outlets and it's good. Understanding the result later on is a completely different matter. It can be time consuming and difficult to browse the objects inside one by one, trying to comprehend the whole. Even more so if you're trying to read someone else's work.

Out of that frustration came xibgraph. It takes a XIB file and outputs the connections contained inside:

Example xibgraph output

At the moment it supports bindings and actions. Outlets are next.

xibgraph supports a couple of different output formats. JSON is supported out of the box and if you install pydot, you get DOT, the format understood by Graphviz and OmniGraffle too.

It hasn't been tested on a particularly wide variety of XIBs, so it's very plausible it will produce wonky results or just outright refuse to work with your files. If so, patches and bug reports are welcome.

xibgraph is MIT licensed and written in Python. It requires PyObjC (it seemed like the easiest way to get XPath support on OS X) and probably Python 2.6. Everything but the DOT support should work without additional requirements on OS X 10.6.

hg-status-sections

I usually use Murky, dvc or some other shell for Mercurial. Not always though, for various reasons, and when running hg status I'm always frustrated when copy and pasting file names. bzr provides neat, non-cluttered lines that can be copied whole to get a file name without a hassle, but hg takes the traditional one-character prefix approach to status display and as a result makes you manually select a part of a line instead of just grabbing a whole line.

So I wrote a small extension to help. Meet hg-status-sections.

© Juri Pakaste 2024