To install it on OS X, with Homebrew:

brew install tree

On Ubuntu/Debian, or other Linux distros that use Debian packages:

apt-get install tree

To use it, just navigate to a directory and type tree. It has various options (visible with tree --help), so you can limit how many levels down it will go, exclude items that match a pattern, adjust sorting, etc.. You get a spiffy diagram that looks something like this:

.
├── application.rb
├── boot.rb
├── database.yml
├── environment.rb
├── environments
│   ├── development.rb
│   ├── production.rb
│   └── test.rb
├── initializers
│   ├── backtrace_silencers.rb
│   ├── filter_parameter_logging.rb
│   ├── inflections.rb
│   ├── mime_types.rb
│   ├── secret_token.rb
│   ├── session_store.rb
│   └── wrap_parameters.rb
├── locales
│   └── en.yml
└── routes.rb

Is that cool or what? This should be quite useful for writing tutorials, since a plain-text directory tree is more accessible than a screenshot of a file manager window.

Checking Headers

You can use cURL to see the headers sent in a request. I use this all the time to see if the headers I’m trying to send in a script are working right.

$ curl -I http://www.google.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:45:58 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
(...)

Sending POST Requests

I was working on a project recently that involved receiving POST requests from a client script running on another server. Since there was no convenient HTML form to use to repeatedly test changes made to the API, I ended up using cURL. Sending POST data is a simple matter of passing an argument that looks something like a query string.

curl http://example.org/url-to-recieve-post-request -d "name=Gandalf&type=wizard";

Spoofing User Agents

You can edit the user agent sent along with the request, which is another thing I’ve found useful in testing.

curl http://example.org -d "name=Gandalf&type=wizard" --user-agent "WordPress"

Downloading Files

While my first instinct is usually to use wget to quickly snag a remote file, that particular package isn’t installed on every system. I don’t believe OS X includes it by default (though that’s nothing Homebrew can’t take care of), for example. cURL can also be used to quickly download and save a remote URL to your current directory.

curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

So I made an Alfred extension that will open any supplied path in a new Finder window. No fancy searching, just a direct “open this.” It uses the standard “cd ~/Documents/GitHub” syntax experienced users of the command line will be familiar with. It even escapes spaces automatically.

Installation Instructions

• Download the FinderPath extension
• Unzip the archive and double-click the resulting FinderPath.alfredextension file
• Alfred should do the rest

While I don’t know why it’s happening, exactly, I do have a fix. The wait goes away if you put the local entries on one line.

Instead of having something like this:

#virtual hosts
127.0.0.1 myproject.dev
127.0.0.1 wordpress.dev
127.0.0.1 somesuch.dev

You need to have this:

#virtual hosts
127.0.0.1 myproject.dev wordpress.dev somesuch.dev

Leave the lines that say “localhost” alone, of course. Messing with those could cause all manner of Bad Things.

I can’t believe it took me so long to find it, but there is an extension for Quick Look that adds color coding to source files in most common languages. QLColorCode, as it is called, is compatible with every version of OS X from Leopard to Mountain Lion. You just drop the .qlgenerator file into ~/Library/QuickLook or /Library/QuickLook and enjoy your improved Quick Look functionality.

QLColorCode [Google Code]

The long wait has grated both on our own nerves and those of our awesome users. But while we have kept quiet publicly about what we are working on, it is because privately we have been striving to transform our products into something new and even more awesome: Espresso 2. We are extremely excited to finally be able to show you what we have been working on, as this release will be of interest to both CSSEdit and Espresso users.

An early preview, the “kaboom” release, is already available for testing and upgrade path information has been posted.

• iOS 5 overhauls notifications, messaging while cutting the USB cord [Ars]
• The Big WWDC 2011 Keynote Roundup [Macstories]
• Apple iOS 5 iPhone / iPad 2 hands-on! [Boy Genius Report]
• 10 New Features to Get Stoked About in iOS 5 [AppStorm]
• Apple iOS 5 hands-on preview [Engadget]
• Apple Has Finally Stuck A Dagger Into SMS. I Love It. [TechCrunch]
• Apple iCloud announced for free, replaces MobileMe [Boy Genius Report]
• MobileMe stays live through June 30, 2012 [TUAW]
• Apple Introduces iCloud: Contact, Cal, Docs, Photos, and Music Syncing Free of Charge [TUAW]
• Mac OS X Lion to arrive in July via Mac App Store for $29 [Ars]
• Lion Server will be an extra $50 via the Mac App Store [Ars]
• Lion requirements: 64-bit CPU, 2 GB of RAM [TUAW]
• iBookstore Finally Comes To iTunes [Macstories]
• Find My iPhone 1.2 Released, Supports Notifications for Offline Devices [Macstories]
• App Store Now Lets You Download Not-Available Apps, Like Tweetie 1 [Macstories]
• WWDC 2011 Keynote Available for Streaming [Macstories]

CUPERTINO, California—May 31, 2011—Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

It is speculated that this press release, specifying exactly what will be covered at the keynote, is a stab at preventing the usual stock drop from disappointed speculators hoping for new hardware. (That will probably be in September.)

We already had a sneak preview of Lion last year, but this should be a look at the final product—as well as a release date. The big news will likely be iOS 5 though, with its rumored widgets and notification overhaul. iCloud is the big mystery—I’m thinking it will be some sort of storage and syncing API, integrated with iOS and Lion, for app developers to leverage.

Oh, and the iPad versions of the iWork apps are now available on the iPhone.

After much waiting, the developer has finally released a beta of the application.

It’s very fast, taking only a couple seconds to launch. The interface is slick, particularly the pane that displays the current feed item. Caffeinated does a very good job at formatting the text and resizing images to fit cleanly into the content.

Of course, Reeder is also being beta tested now. Since news of Caffeinated started circulating around the internet, some competitors have shown up. Reeder, in particular, stands out. It will be interesting to see which app comes out of beta first, and how users react.

Caffeinated RSS Reader for Mac Finally Out As Beta [Macstories]

There it is. The Mac App Store has launched with a good selection of applications, and their prices range from free to reasonably priced to, on occasion, absolutely bizarre. There are plenty of wonderful free apps, such as Evernote, TextWrangler, Caffeine, StuffIt Expander, and Twitter. There are hit games like Angry Birds and Bejeweled 3.

Here’s the strange thing: LEGO Harry Potter the Videogame (from the same folks who made the fun LEGO Star Wars games) is available in the App Store for a whopping $49.99. Meanwhile, you can get it for Windows XP for about $20 on a disc. They’re charging about twice as much for a fully digital version. I don’t quite follow that logic.

How do you get the Mac App Store in the first place? Just hit the Software Update item in your Apple menu and update to Mac OS X 10.6.6. After the reboot, you should see a new App Store icon in your dock. After dragging it to a more comfortable placement in the dock (Firefox is supposed to be the first item, Apple, don’t change it on me!) you’re ready to go.

Browsing the store is much like downloading iOS apps in iTunes, only the App Store application is so much lighter and more responsive. iTunes takes forever to switch pages, as it’s basically loading full-size web pages from Apple’s servers for every request. I don’t know what they’re doing for the Mac App Store, but it works a lot better.

Downloading an application is every bit as easy as with the iOS App Store. Using Twitter for Mac as an example…

Screenshots are displayed prominently,  with some assorted information off to the site. Reviews, of course, are placed down below the screenshots and description.

When you click on the price button and enter your Apple login details, the application’s icon appears in your dock with a progress bar, much like in iOS.

Once it downloads, you can launch it straight away. I don’t know if there is an easy way to migrate older applications to being managed by the App Store or not. It would be handy, since a lot of the free ones I use (TextWrangler and Evernote, for instance) are now available in the App Store. Paid software would be more of a challenge.

Now…about Twitter for Mac. Longtime Tweetie users may be shocked by the visual changes. The functionality is the same, but the UI closer resembles the iPhone and iPad editions than the previous Mac version. Once you get over that, you will welcome the new features: namely native retweet support, list support, tweet deletion, and streaming API support for the main timeline. (This means you will see tweets pretty much as soon as they are posted, rather than every ten minutes or so when the app polls the server.)

You can read more about Twitter for Mac over at MacStories. Federico Viticci wrote up a lengthy post about it.