SmartSleep is one of those “I wish I knew about this earlier” pieces of software that saves me several minutes every day when I put my MacBook Pro to sleep. Intel Mac laptops (and some of the late G4 laptops) have three sleep states: basic sleep, sleep and hibernate, and full-on hibernate. Sleep is the basic low-power mode, and hibernate actually writes the contents of RAM to disk to conserve even more battery power and prevent the contents of RAM from being lost in the event of a power outage. By default, Intel Macs do the latter, and spend 20 to 60 seconds dumping RAM to disk before going to sleep, depending on how much RAM you have installed. If you happen to run your Mac on AC power most of the time, waiting for the disk to spin down can feel like minutes, but SmartSleep lets you safely switch between sleep modes. After setting my MacBook Pro to sleep only, it blinks off and spins down in only a second or two — a huge improvement in sleep time. This “feature” has been bugging me for the last several months, and SmartSleep quickly and effectively adds the system preference that Apple forgot.

One Window is More
Two weeks ago I finally decided to give Panic’s newest Mac OS X offering, Coda, a thorough test to see if will better serve my web development needs. I had known about it since its initial release, hailed by many as the perfect solution to web developers needs, while downplayed by some due to lack of features. Coda is an 80% solution — an application that tries to simplify the average coder’s workflow, unifying the standard multi-program arrangement into one window, with configurable tabs for various purposes. Panic won’t win everyone over with this tactic, but the idea of opening a single, dedicated program to do my work in really appealed to me both as a designer and a programmer. Coda’s icon, a simple green leaf, subtly hints “keep it simple” at every launch. Panic’s developers have taken this approach to heart, crafting a straightforward interface which rivals that of the best Mac applications.

One week ago, I purchased Coda. No, it doesn’t have Subversion support. No, it doesn’t have fullscreen mode. What I did find, though, is a unique application that neatly organizes most of the tools I need to get web development done. A syntax-completing text editor, visual or textual CSS editor, terminal, and live web preview are among my most used tools, any of which can be swapped for another, or split into multiple views. With my preferred syntax coloring set up, Coda’s split tabs make me feel right at home, editing HTML and CSS side by side with a preview of the results just a click away.

Get Back to Work
Coda makes getting back into “the zone” really quite easy with its Sites feature, which keeps track of each project’s tab arrangement, FTP settings, public URL, and more. Double-click a Site to start working right where you left off. As for publishing, Coda leverages Transmit’s FTP engine, which keeps folders in sync between your computer and web host with little effort.

A Few Shortcomings
I often work with MySQL as my data store and use CocoaMySQL as a front-end, but switching applications goes against the one-window flow that Coda tries so hard to bring together, so I installed phpMyAdmin and just use it inside a Preview tab within Coda — couldn’t be simpler. The same goes for online documentation not covered by the built-in PHP and JavaScript references. For Subversion, I’ll just use command-line ’svn’ calls within a Terminal mode, as it’s surprisingly straightforward for a command-line utility.

Only the Beginning
As of this writing, Coda is just at version 1.1, so there’s plenty of room for it to grow (pun intended). At the very least, I hope to see fullscreen mode similar to NetNewsWire’s in the near future, so I can really get into my code and ignore little distractions like menu bar extras, Mail badges, etc. Panic has dropped their biggest application yet on the Mac web developer community, and overall, I’m very satisfied with Coda and am getting so much more done in so fewer windows.

Extra Goodies
Panic engineer Steven Frank posted some little Made with Coda web badges I made on his site. If you enjoy using Coda, share the love.

Iconverter is a simple little utility I discovered which helps you juggle between images, ICNS files, and actual “pasted” icons for Mac files and applications. Often when dealing with icons, I find the need to convert an ICNS file to an editable PNG image with transparency, or go from a PNG back to an ICNS. As much as I like IconBuilder, my needs are not nearly that complex, and Iconverter simply gets the job done. What I enjoy most about the little app is the “Use file contents” checkbox, which will force it to read the data from the file instead of the icon itself — most other icon utilities default to using the system-designated icon of an opened ICNS file (a file with dog-eared corner), not the actual file contents. Iconverter handles this with ease, and is my first choice for getting icons just right.

Amit Singh, author of the excellent book Mac OS X Internals, has published a Mac version of FUSE, a kernel extension that allows various data structures to be “remapped” as a local file system. Even internet-dependent sources like Flickr photo albums, RSS feeds, and remotely-connected SSH sessions can be represented as files in a folder. If you’ve never seen technology like this before, this video demo shows just how cool this stuff is. There’s already a FlickrFS extension that can be implemented with FUSE, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to implement it on the Mac, making Flickr photo managing as easy as drag-and-drop. After backing up my current system (this is unsupported software), I’ll try installing MacFUSE and a handful of plugins.