Keyboard Adventures

The best utility for making custom keyboard layouts on Mac OS X has long been Ukelele (sic). Sure, Apple came up with an XML format for keyboard layouts, but when you want a variant of an existing keyboard, it’s a lot easier to just copy the existing keyboard in Ukelele and modify the keys you want to change.

A few years ago I took a class on Phonetics and Phonology, and found myself needing to type in IPA quite often. So I fired up Ukelele and made a copy of the standard Dvorak keyboard and got to work. I didn’t…

Mail Aliases

Even though I’m the developer of Webmailer, I mostly use Apple Mail for e-mail these days. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to send e-mails using different identities; for Belkadan Software tech support I’m “Jordy Rose”, but for school-related communication I’d prefer my name to show up as “Jordan Rose” and use my school e-mail address. Mail supports this, but doesn’t actually have a preference for it without creating separate accounts.1 You have to edit the settings file manually.

So I wrote Mail Aliases, a little app that can edit this data for you.

Header Anchors: A Safari Extension

Ever want to link to a specific part of a web page? Well-designed web pages have anchors at the start of each section, which can serve as targets of links.1 You’ve probably seen URLs that end in #something; that fragment identifier, or “frag-id”, refers to a specific anchor on the page.

What’s annoying, though, is that even if an author includes them, they’re hard to discover. Sometimes there’s a table of contents, sometimes not. What I really wanted was a way to just click on the nearest header and grab the link. So I wrote “Header Anchors”.