Grant Skinner

At the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist

I agree, you do. Let me elaborate why.

I think it’s a stretch to say that Jobs is "deciding what content people can view on the iPhone and iPad."

If you choose to interpret it literally, then it's more than a stretch -- it's unfeasible. On the other hand, I believe Robert Wright didn't really mean it so literally. You've probably heard about Steve's (in)famous line about "freedom from porn". Please don't tell me you believe that Steve Jobs has nothing to do with decisions Apple has been making about what their users can or cannot view on their "iDevices". Sure, a lot of the stuff -- like that political cartoonist example -- can be attributed to incompetence and chaos of a typical bureaucracy, but even the most chaotic bureaucracy has someone or something to give a general direction. Implying that Steve Jobs isn't providing that direction to Apple is, well, a stretch.

You can do almost anything you’d like on the iPhone or iPad, provided you’re willing to use the browser as your main portal.

Except run Flash, for example. Or, for that matter, even know why you can't see the content of a site that serves Flash, unless you're web-savvy:

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/return_of_the_b.html

If you’re bothered by Apple’s decision to rely on the web and curated applications to provide content to its users, then don’t use an i-Device.

Yeah, I've heard that one before. It's a standard non-argument used by apologists…

Interesting concept. As with all regex related online tools, it is important to test exhaustively before trusting it.

Real-time character-by-character output would be important. If you are working on a long regex expression real-time output can help you think like the FSA and see how it behaves.

Here's an example of this tool failing:

<a.*?>([^<]*)<\/a>

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/?339m7

or

http://rubular.com/r/pCXZs0DnSS

take your pick, same results.

If you remove the "?" from the regex you'll get different results.

One version selects all anchor tags individually and make a selection group of their contents and the other version ends-up selecting everything between the first opening anchor tag and the last closing anchor tag into the selection group except for "<" characters.

The graph in Regexper does not show any difference between the two expressions even when any one of these forms is used:

#<a.*>([^<]*)</a>#msi

#<a.*>([^<]*)</a>#gsi

/<a.*>([^<]*)<\/a>/msi

/<a.*>([^<]*)</a>/gsi

It looks like the flags are not being processed.

Also, please change the textbox to a fixed width font.

In addition to that, regex authoring tools, ultimately, are only useful if you can also enter some input text and see the result, preferably in real-time.

Other than that, it's an interesting concept.

Most of the applications I use have already been mentioned, so I'm just going to list the ones that haven't yet been mentioned.

I do primarily Django/Python related work and use Eclipse with the Pydev (http://pydev.org/) and Aptana plugins (http://aptana.com/products/studio3). For an interactive python shell, I prefer ipython (http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/). For installing python packages, setuptools (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools) is very handy.

If you happen to have multiple gmail accounts, Mailplane (http://mailplaneapp.com/) is great.

For doing work with regular expressions, Regexr comes in handy (http://gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop/)

For MySQL DB management, Sequel Pro (http://www.sequelpro.com/).

I love these types of things. Kudos to the author.

This one in particular reminds me of a tool I've always found useful.
It's an interactive Regex builder just like the one linked in the OP. I would say it's got some additional compelling features: like mouse-over breakdowns of each expression as you build it, a handy reference list as well, but also a community concept and saved expressions. Really, I've never found anything better. My only complaint is that it's flash-based, but it's an amazing tool, so can't really complain too much.

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

You can export sprite sheets from animations created in the Adobe Flash authoring tool. There are a number of free third party tools that enable this:

SWFSheet
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2939

Zoe
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2011/02/zoe-export-swf-animation-as-easeljs-spritesheets.html

This feature is also being built into the next version of Flash Professional (the authoring tool), with support for export to various JavaScript libraries (such as Easel.JS) for controlling the animation.

It doesn't seem to simplify regex, just make it more verbose.
That might be fine, except the people who need to understand how to use it, must already understand the concepts of regexes.

And if you can use this library without understanding regex, you might be better of not using regex at all.

Regex looks complex at first glance, but with a good cheatsheet and tool you should have no problem.

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ is a great tool for building and testing regexes.