Say “Hello” to SCPlugin — At long last, there’s a Mac equivalent for TortoiseSVN: a free, open-source Subversion client for Mac OS X that integrates with the Finder to display the status of your version-controlled files in the Finder without the need for a separate application.
While dedicated Subversion clients can be useful at times, for most day-to-day work it’s much easier to check in or out via a context menu command without having to fire up a different program (though Versions is definitely one to watch).
Like in TortoiseSVN or Tortoise CVS, icon overlays badges show at a glance the Subversion status of each file in a window.
[via tuaw & lifehacker ]
A new version of the Aptana Web IDE is now available with PHP support that includes Code Assist on PHP functions and parameters, improved PHP syntax colorization, and a PHP outliner. The JavaScript outliner and Ajax libraries have also been updated.
Details on changes are available in the Release Notes.
Tom Armitage of Infovore has built a CSS Redundancy Checker that will scan a CSS file for selectors that are not used by any HTML files in a specified directory or URI.
The tool can come in handy when you’re maintaining legacy sites with countless selectors whose purpose is long forgotten.
The Ruby source files are hosted at Google Code and Mike Malone has put together an online version based on Tom’s code so you can run the tool without installing it locally.
Fans of John Gruber’s Markdown will appreciate HumaneText.service, a system-wide Mac OS X service that translates between markdown and XHTML with quick key-commands: Shift+Apple+{ and Shift+Apple+}. Simply beautiful!
If you haven’t heard of markdown, it’s a simple and elegant means of writing plain text that is highly readable “as is”, yet easily converted to HTML. As the author says:
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
Leximation and Silicon Publishing have announced the release of DITA-FMx, a new plugin for Adobe FrameMaker that provides extended DITA support and corrects a number of bugs in the Application Pack for DITA.
DITA-FMx is a plugin and set of structure applications that let you create and edit DITA XML files in FrameMaker. The version currently available supports DITA 1.0 and is only available for FrameMaker 7.2. A version that supports DITA 1.1 for FrameMaker 7.2 and 8.0 is under development.
If you’re already using FrameMaker 7.2 with the Application Pack for DITA, this new plugin will not provide new functionality, but does fix/update a number of features available in Beta 2 of the app pack.
Version 1.4 of the DITA Open Toolkit is now available for download from SourceForge, including processing support for the new elements in DITA 1.1 such as bookmaps, index-see and index-see-also entries.
The announcement contains the full list of improvements and bug fixes.
The DITA Technical Committee at OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has announced the approval of DITA version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard.
Version 1.1 of DITA provides enhanced print publishing capabilities with new DITA Bookmap specialization, including extended book metadata. The standard offers more indexing capabilities with new elements for “see” and “see-also” references. It features new elements for defining structured metadata as well as the ability to add new metadata attributes through specialization.
It’s not often mainstream media carries a story like this: Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards.
If enough people in upper management read this article and begin to understand the importance of interoperability and separating content from presentation, it might make designers’ lives much easier.
As the “King” himself says:
It might even help designers who aren’t named Jeffrey Zeldman as they struggle to explain the benefits of web standards to their bosses or clients. At the least, its publication in Business Week will command some business people’s attention, and perhaps their respect.
Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing has published her first impressions of FrameMaker 8, including a charming and mildly disturbing delineation of the significance of the new icon. 
The review also includes a link to her FrameMaker Developer Center article on the new complex conditional processing features, an extremely helpful explanation of how to use the new Boolean logic with conditional text and combinations of attribute values in structured FrameMaker to support what she calls “extreme versioning.”
If you’ve ever struggled with the volume of bits that require your attention every day, a recent book by Mark Hurst of Good Experience may help.
Titled Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, the book offers simple common-sense suggestions for dealing with information overload.
Many of the suggestions are so basic that you may already be using similar strategies to deal with your daily workload, but the book is well worth reading nonetheless, as it makes a strong case for a comprehensive and simple approach any normal user can implement.
In fact, as you read the book, you may be reminded of countless friends and associates that fit the Busy Man description with striking accuracy, or others you know who would benefit from exposure to these ideas.
Note to self: Great Christmas present for clients & colleagues!