When your client’s tools don’t work for you…

One of the ongoing struggles that I have with clients is the lack of consistency in tools that they use to facilitate productivity for themselves. Now the erratic nature of client work for me leads to me jumping not just from coding context to coding context, but also to the switching and trying to keep track of the those tools of the ‘others’. I have tools that work for me on personal projects and I do work to tune those in ways that work for me. However, constantly having to `dip a toe` into the processes of others can be a frustrating experience. I find as I get older my ability to smoothly navigate this becomes worse and worse.

I am sure in these organizations these tools acquire a cultural expectation of how to interact with them, but it is getting harder and harder for me to keep these in my head. Of course often there is no visible consistency in how these tools are used, or the person that I am interacting with tries to change how they _normally_ work with the tools to work with me, the occasional tourist, in ways that become inconsistent with their own processes and it becomes a rats nest of competing instincts. Then productivity becomes a battle.

I am unsure how to fix this moving forward, when the tools to help work are the biggest roadblock to progress and that very work and cause increasing stress and frustration on both sides of the fence there has to be a bridge to get work done…

GitHub – chuckhoupt/jekyll-apple-help: Easily create Apple Help-Books for your Mac OS X app using this Jekyll template and build system.

GitHub – chuckhoupt/jekyll-apple-help: Easily create Apple Help-Books for your Mac OS X app using this Jekyll template and build system.:

So I had been playing with Jekyll as a way to build some documentation sites for online projects, seemed like a nice way to build out some rich sites that had deep ties to Github projects. Then in a project I was building for a client I needed to build out the Help Book quickly and in a way that the client could participate in the final product. I’m not sure if you have ever tried to build Apple Help books but it is not simple or straight forward, the documentation is really old and is not really easily consumable. This, however, worked for me essentially right out of the box and has been a joy to work with.

Jekyll-Apple-Help is a Jekyll template and Xcode build system that makes it easy to author and build Mac OS X Help Books. Add Help to your Mac app, and start authoring in Markdown within minutes. The resulting Help has the same look & feel as Apple’s Yosemite apps.

HTTP Tools Roundup | LornaJane

HTTP Tools Roundup | LornaJane:

At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I’d collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested – all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that’s everyone!).

Some great tools listed here. I have gotten really fond of [Paw](https://paw.cloud/client) for working with and building REST clients and apps. Also one not mentioned here is [Charles](https://www.charlesproxy.com) which is a great tool for http/https debugging and seeing what is actually going on in the pipe.

Yoink: drag and drop mind blown

Screenshot 6 30 17 2 21 PMThere are some Applications that you never know you needed, that scratch the itch that you have always had and didn’t know about, Yoink is that app for me today. The amazing Bill Bumgarner bbum @bbum directed me at this, it gives you a way to actually drag and drop from Photos.app this has been an ongoing frustration and friction point with me and the new version of Photos. If that was all it did, I would still gladly hand over the purchase price, but it does oh so much more. Take the time to check it out.