Well, could be I'm the last to know, but I found a really cool program this week for my Mac. It has a handy Pasteboard feature that is useful for me when coding. I'm running it in trial mode, but I've already planned to purchase after only two days of trying it out. It's called You Control by You Software. I've only got the functionality available for Jaguar (yes, I really will upgrade soon ... really!) but there is more I want access to within Panther -- like some extra font control. More reasons to upgrade.

This program allows me to create custom OSX menu items. Everything from accessing my home folder, system prefs and recent items (through one little menu or hot key), to news and stock tickers, weather and Mail. But my two favorites that make it all worthwhile for me are the iTunes controls right on my menu bar and the Pasteboard.

The cool thing about the iTunes control is that I can leave a little start/stop forward/back functionality right in the menu next to my clock. I can click it and see every song in my library grouped by album, artist, genre or playlist. Each time my library switches songs, it shows an indicator with the song/artist/title/rating along with the album cover. OK, so I don't really need to see the album cover, but right now it's cool. And it's customizable if I get sick of it. If I'm not mistaken, those of you with Panther can actually download this functionality free.

My next favorite feature is the Pasteboard. How many times are you using Dreamweaver, or another program, and you need to copy/paste more than one item alternately. There might be a way to do go back and forth between a couple items, but I've never found it. With the Pasteboard, I've got a little icon (you can choose what you like, I use the scissors) and when I copy something, it's stored. If I get interrupted and have to copy something else, then go back to my original job, I can simply use the menu drop down and there are my last 50 items! OK, I'm not storing 50, but you can. And that includes graphics you copy. It tells you where you copied the item from and at what time. When you click it, it inserts it into your document. Though this program has a very high cool factor, the usefulness is what makes it for me.

It seems the more extensions I make for myself, as well as those that I've contracted to make for others, the more often I need to determine if the current document is within a defined site. One client required that the files their extension was to operate on had to be within a site because the operation of the extension used the site name as part of the code being added to document. So I came up with the following function:

function isInSite(){
var dom = dw.getDocumentDOM();
 return (site.getSiteForURL(dom.URL) != ');
}

Basically, this function grabs a DOM object reference for the current document, then uses the URL property of the DOM object, which stores the file URL of the document, and passes it to site.getSiteForURL() which determines the site name that the file belongs to. If it doesn't belong to a site, then an empty string is returned by site.getSiteForURL(). The value returned is then compared to an empty string and the result of that comparison is returned from the isInSite() function back to the calling code. If the file belongs to a site, then true is returned, and if it doesn't, then false is returned.

Today is the last day for tens of millions of Floridians to prepare for Hurricane Frances. I'm one of the 2 1/2 million Floridians who are evacuating their homes. This is my last post at my personal blog before I evacuate to higher ground.