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If you are anything like me you have probably amassed an iTunes library that would take a nice holiday to wade through. With your iTunes on shuffle you might even run into some tracks you downloaded eons ago, after reading rave reviews on some weird blog, that on second thought sound pretty damn lame. I have always been bothered with iTunes’s lack of a quick way to ‘kill’ tracks. When you are in your library and the track you are listening to is selected you need to hit a key combo and click an ok button just to get rid of it. And when listening to a playlist the delete option is completely missing. So i set out to fix that.

What i came up with is a simple applescript that you can assign to a keyboard shortcut so killing that track is always just a keystroke away. Think that’s neat? Please follow along…

step 1

Download and unzip the Kill Track Applescript file.

step 2

Enable the script menu with the Applescript utility located in the Applescript folder in the Applications folder.

step 3

Copy the script to your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder. (create the Scripts folder if it does not yet exist).

step 4

Open System Preferences and go to the Keyboard & Mouse preferences panel. Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and add the Kill Track menu option for iTunes and pick a shortcut.

step 5

That’s it! The next time you’ll open iTunes you’ll see the little scripting menu icon in the top and it’ll have the Kill Track option there together with the keyboard shortcut. Next time you feel like hatin’ a track; hit the shortcut and kill it. I promise you’ll feel better afterwards.

The script automatically removes the track from your library and removes the file from disk.

Disclaimer: this script comes with no warranty whatsoever, use at your own risk. Your computer might turn green and go poof if you use it.

Actiontastic developer Jon Crosby just announced on his development blog he will be releasing Actiontastic 1.0 as an open source project. That is great news for the community and for Jon as it takes his app from “one of the best” productivity tools out there to “the best” in a single swoop.

Actiontastic will most likely thrive and the optional web app companion tool Actionatr will instantly gain a user base that he can monetize.

[NEW] PHP bundle: Option-escape will provide completion candidates for the current (partially typed) function name and option-F1 will show a tool-tip with short documentation and call syntax for the current function (press ctrl-H to go to the manual page). All standard functions have been added to the normal completion on escape, allowing you to cycle through them. (Ciarán Walsh)

from the latest Textmate release notes (2007-03-04: REVISION 1368). thank you Ciarán!

Douglas Crockford will be hosting The Browser Wars next wednesday. Should be rather interesting, not that i will be anywhere near the US next wedensday though.

For some reason the Safari team declined to come, which is a bloody shame really. I still think Safari is the best, and certainly the fastest, browser on a Mac if it weren’t for extensions.

The Apple iPhone has only just been announced but the, also very anticipated, spanning sync software will run on it too as announced today. So not only will you be able to seamlessly sync your Google and iCal calendars, you’ll be able to sync them to your phone too. Sweet!

Spanning Sync Blog: Spanning Sync v1.0 to Support Apple iPhone

If you were still wondering why the new release of Windows is taking so long to get to market you might want to read this chilling tale from a member of the ’start button’ program group. Yes there is such a group, and it counts eight, who worked on a single button for a year… go figure.

This is the holy grail of Mac calendering. Apple has got a whole lotta work to do with .Mac to just keep up let alone justify their price tag for the thing.

At RoomWareDevHouse we intend to investigate possible applications, host discussion and do some hacking while enjoying a tasty beverage. The event is free and anyone interested can attend as long as you intend to participate.

Loosely styled after SuperHappyDevHouse we hope to talk about and even build some of the applications that we will display at a later RoomWare event. Furthermore we intend to start development on an open source RoomWare platform that anyone can build on to provide RoomWare applications at their own event or location.

The event is on Upcoming too…

update: meer op BlueAce en Katie’s vlog.

Does anybody know of an extension that takes the Mac OS X location settings (proxy settings) and changes the FireFox settings on the fly? I hate having to set them in FireFox seperatly. Theoretically this should be possible right?

update: QuickProxy is not exactly what i want but at least it makes the process a one-click affair.

Firefox is now at 13% adoption worldwide according to OneStat with as much as 38% for Germany. The Netherlands still hovers around the 12% but that is already up much from a few months back. Safari only seems to gain traction in the US with a respectable 3.2%.