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Things, a task management app that’s still in development, does a great job letting users know about its unimplemented features. If you try to drag a task from a project into the ‘Scheduled’ area, for example, you’ll get this popup:

Every action I’ve performed in Things has either worked as I expected or popped up one of these helpful messages. That’s awesome! It feels good to know that they’re moving in the right direction and makes me more confident in their ability to make a great product.

The new JungleDisk beta is a big improvement over their current version. The backup features have been greatly improved and now that I’ve fixed my issue with Explorer locking up I can use it like almost like normal drive.

I’m still backing up my music and photos to a local NAS box, but I’m very impressed with the direction JungleDisk is going and will probably start to use it more (especially once the command line version is more mature and well documented).

Also, for $1/mo you can get JungleDisk Plus which gives you web access, resumable uploads, and partial file uploads. Very cool!

The JavaScript Tools bundle for TextMate automatically runs JavaScript Lint on your files when saving and shows a little tooltip if there are any errors (like the missing semicolon below).

It’s very easy to enable similar functionality for PHP files. The default TextMate PHP bundle already comes with a ‘Validate Syntax’ command but it’s bound to Ctrl+Shift+V. Here’s what you need to change:

1. Open up the Bundle Editor by hitting Ctrl+Option+Apple+B or opening the Bundles menu and selecting Bundle Editor > Show Bundle Editor.
2. Find the PHP bundle in the list on the left and open it up.
3. Select the ‘Validate Syntax’ command and then change it’s ‘Save’ option to ‘Current File’ in the dropdown on the right.
4. Change the keyboard shortcut to Apple+S (or whatever you use to save) in the lower right. Your settings should now look like this.
5. Close the Bundle Editor (it saves your changes automatically).

Below is an example of what you’ll see when saving. It will even move your cursor to the line with the error!

Update (2008-5-23): You can prevent the tooltip from displaying when there are no syntax errors by changing the command to:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH'] + ‘/lib/textmate’
version = %x{#{ENV['TM_PHP'] || ‘php’} -v}.split[0..2].join(’ ‘)
#puts “Running syntax check with ” + version + “…”
result = `#{ENV['TM_PHP'] || ‘php’} -d display_errors=on -l`
puts result.gsub(’in -’, ”) unless result =~ /No syntax errors/
TextMate.go_to :line => $1 if result =~ /line (\d+)/

Startup Control Panel (StartupCPL) is an awesome tool that lets you control exactly what programs load when you boot up your computer. Unless you just formatted, you probably have a bunch of crap loading that slows down your computer. Almost all of it can be turned off without breaking anything. Try it out and see how much time you can save.

My site is now hosted on a VPS provided by VPSLink.com. It’s nice having the flexibility to run services like Subversion and Cacti as well as manage my own Apache configuration.

Their admin interface is really clean and fast, and they have tons of OSes to choose from. Check them out if you’re in the market for a host.