Zen Coding speeds up your workaday typing

If you find yourself typing a lot of angle brackets in a text editor as you manually create html, then Zen Coding is a big help. All the details are here.
I have the plugin working on eclipse now and it really speeds things up.
Type div#content and hit tab and the text is replaced with <div id="content"></div>
Obviously a trivial example, but there are many more speedups made possible with this.
There is a handy cheat sheet (well 7 sheets) of hints here.

Looking forward to getting proficient at this so that I can speed up my normal daily editing.

There are plugins for a load of editors besides eclipse. A note for eclipse users: the stated shortcut of ctrl+E does not work out of the box. This is because tab is in its place (handier it is too). I discovered this even after unbinding switch editor (which is also ctrl+E).

Zen coding is just one of the handy hints I got from watching this video from Paul Irish.
http://paulirish.com/2012/talk-tooling-the-webapp-development-stack/
He never disappoints.
Happy coding.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AutoCompleteTextView backed with data from SQLite in Android

Image
This is a handy piece of code. As your database gets bigger you can allow the user to pick the correct value by typing. If the db gets very big, you can always increase the threshold, so that the query does not run until there will be a suitably sized resultset returned. Running it at a threshold of 1 is fine for very small resultsets.  Here is the code you need to back your AutoCompleteTextView with a cursor adapter. @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); text = (AutoCompleteTextView) findViewById(R.id.autoCompleteTextView1); final AdapterHelper h = new AdapterHelper(this); Cursor c = h.getAllResults(); startManagingCursor(c); String[] from = new String[] { "val" }; int[] to = new int[] { android.R.id.text1 }; CursorAdapter adapter = new MyCursorAdapter(this, android.R.layout.simple_dropdown_item_1line, c, from, to); adapter.setFilterQueryProvider(new FilterQueryProvider() { public Cursor runQuery(Cha...
Read more

Exporting drawings from Inkscape using the command line

Inkscape  has a command line that lets you do stuff in batch form. The most obvious use of this for an Android developer is to produce the various image resolutions required to support multiple devices on Android. This code opens inkscape, opens the drawing indicated (I created the $desktop variable to facilitate this) and then exports this drawing as a png file. $ inkscape --file=$desktop/inkscape-work/mystar.svg --export-png=$desktop/myfile.png -D The -D switch makes sure the whole drawing is exported, not just the page, or selected objects (you can select objects from the command line too). Width and height can also be provided, or you can give a resolution for the output. This is where the value will be for me. I will get this bit working next time I need multiple resolution drawings. Some of the command line options can be found here .
Read more

Using Google Analytics in Android

Even though Google Analytics is aimed squarely at web applications, they have written a library for Android which allows you to use their considerable reporting and analysis tools from within an App. It's very simple to use. First get set up as an analytics user. This is free and results in you getting a code a bit like the maps api key. Then download the Android Analytics SDK  and make put the jar in your apps lib dir (add to the build path too of course). Next pick a sample Activity from one of your apps (preferably one you have deployed to the market so that your data is real, not just you poking around) into which you will place the tracking code. There is no point in putting tracking code throughout your app (or apps) until you know what you are doing. There are a number of things you can track, but for now you just need to be sending back a row to the analytics server whenever a user carries out some action - say clicking a button. Get an instance of the tracker (do thi...
Read more