Filed under: Reviews

I'm writing this at the Minneapolis airport, waiting to board a plane to head for Atlanta. You see, back in 2009 we got a call from Big Nerd Ranch asking if we could send a blogger for a week, have him take part in the computer programming classes they offer there and report back on the 'developer boot camp' experience for our readers.

I couldn't pass up the opportunity -- I'm headed for the iPhone programming course now -- but I want to let our readers know up front that this week is on Big Nerd Ranch's dime. When TUAW receives a review unit or license, we return it or give it away to the readers after the review is finished. I can't return this one, though, and I can't give it away, as much as I'd love to.

There will be a standard disclaimer on the posts to follow that will reiterate the facts. On a personal level, however, I'd like to let you know that in the interest of as much objectivity as possible under the circumstances, I'll be letting the ranch speak for itself. I'll be doing interviews, shooting video and writing posts that focus on the content and the experience, rather than the quality of the courses or the advantages/drawbacks of the BNR approach versus other iPhone development training options. We report, you decide, right?

I'll be sitting down for interviews with Aaron Hillegass (Cocoa instructor, CEO of BNR and author of Cocoa Programming for OS X), as well as other instructors, staff members and hopefully some classmates. You'll get a look inside (and outside) the facility, and a peek at what goes on behind the scenes. I'm looking forward to the experience, and I hope you all can benefit by coming along for the ride.

For more detail on TUAW's policies with regard to disclosure and conflict of interest, please see here.

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Brett tells us about his favorite new snippet manager.

If you write code, you probably reuse blocks of it. Whether you're working in HTML, CSS, AppleScript, Objective-C ... it's all code, and a really well-written chunk of it deserves to be used again. You can put a few of your most commonly used snippets into TextExpander, sure, but the biggest problem is finding that function you know you wrote last year but haven't used since. This common little conundrum has given rise to some very elegant applications that aim to solve this and other related problems.

There have been a few great options lately for snippet organization. CodeCollector Pro has been my long-running favorite, with Snippet a close second. I like Snippet's sexiness, but miss having a nice, big, multi-pane window to organize with. CodeCollector Pro is a solid workhorse, but actions such as adding new snippets are a little more cumbersome than I'd like. I often just clip things into Evernote when I'm in a hurry ...

Then, along came Snippets (note the 's' that differentiates it from Snippet) to steal my heart. It's got Code Collector's utility, Evernote's searchability, and it's got an extra dash of sexy, ala Snippet. It has the standard sytax-highlighted code viewer, and a sidebar with groups and folders. Snippets are classified by language, which can be set in a dropdown or by just dragging a snippet to a language folder. It functions on a hybrid folder/tag concept, which happens to be the way I do just about everything. Each snippet can have a description, as well as labels (tags) and all full-text indexed for searching. You've also got groups, which are like folders, but a snippet can belong to multiple groups. It has smart folders which, as you know, function like automatic groups with boolean criteria. On top of all that, folders, smart folders and groups can all be gathered hierarchically in nested folders, with parent folders showing all of the contents of their child folders. Whew!

Just wanted to clarify the 'friction and gravity' thing. It is accurate. Nothing screws into the iMac stand. There are two clips that you adjust in width and then tighten onto the BackPack shelf. The shelf and clips then hold onto the iMac stand with gravity - because the stand is trapezoidal (smaller at the top - larger at the bottom). It simply slides down to the width you have set. That's also what makes it adjustable - you just change the width. Hope this helps.