Apple today updated its all-in-one iMac line, widely praised as the world’s best desktop computers, with the latest Intel Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors and powerful new graphics. Apple also introduced the new Magic Trackpad — available separately for $69 — which brings the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures of Mac notebook trackpads to the desktop.
New Mac Pro With Up to 12 Processing Cores
Apple’s new Mac Pro line comes with up to 12 processing cores and up to 50 percent greater performance than the previous generation. Featuring the latest quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors, all-new ATI graphics, and the option for up to four 512GB solid state drives (SSD), the new Mac Pro continues to deliver amazing performance and expandability for the most demanding consumers and professionals.
Apple Unveils New 27-inch LED Cinema Display
Apple unveiled a new 27-inch LED Cinema Display with stunning 2560 x 1440 resolution and 60 percent more screen real estate than the 24-inch LED Cinema Display. Featuring a built-in iSight video camera, microphone and speakers, powered USB 2.0 hub, and universal MagSafe connector, the new LED Cinema Display is an ideal companion for any Mac notebook or desktop.
iPhone 4 Arrives in 17 More Countries This Friday
Beginning this Friday, July 30, customers can purchase iPhone 4 in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. iPhone 4 will be available for purchase through Apple’s retail and online stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.
Kickstartup
Craig Mod on his experience using Kickstarter. (I just got my copy of Art Space Tokyo, the book whose printing he funded through Kickstarter, and it’s exquisite.)
★ An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
Back in November, I posted a regex pattern for matching URLs. It seems to have proven quite useful for others, and, even better, based on feedback from those who’ve used it, I’ve since improved it in several ways.
The problem the pattern attempts to solve: identify the URLs in an arbitrary string of text, where by “arbitrary” let’s agree we mean something unstructured such as an email message or a tweet.
So, here’s a pattern that attempts to match any sort of URL, using the extended multiline regex format that disregards literal whitespace and allows for comments, which explain a bit about how the pattern works:
(?xi)
\b
( # Capture 1: entire matched URL
(?:
[a-z][\w-]+: # URL protocol and colon
(?:
/{1,3} # 1-3 slashes
| # or
[a-z0-9%] # Single letter or digit or '%'
# (Trying not to match e.g. "URI::Escape")
)
| # or
www\d{0,3}[.] # "www.", "www1.", "www2." … "www999."
| # or
[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/ # looks like domain name followed by a slash
)
(?: # One or more:
[^\s()<>]+ # Run of non-space, non-()<>
| # or
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
)+
(?: # End with:
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
| # or
[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’] # not a space or one of these punct chars
)
)
Here’s the same pattern in the terse single-line format:
(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:’”.,<>?«»“”‘’]))
(And you thought the multiline version looked crazy, right?)
Here’s the test data I used while sharpening the pattern. Just like the pattern from November, it attempts to be practical, above all else. It makes no attempt to parse URLs according to any official specification. It isn’t limited to predefined URL protocols. It should be clever about things like parentheses and trailing punctuation.
In addition to being liberal about the URLs it matches, the pattern is also liberal about which regex engines it works with. I’ve tested it with Perl, PCRE (which is used in PHP, BBEdit, and many other places), and Oniguruma (which is used in Ruby, TextMate, and many other places). It should also work in all modern JavaScript interpreters. If you find a modern regex engine where the pattern does not work, please let me know.
Some of the advantages of the new pattern, compared to the previous one:
-
It no longer uses the
[:punct:]named character class. I thought this was universally supported in modern regex engines, but apparently it is not. -
It does a better job with URLs containing literal parentheses, correctly matching the following URLs that the previous pattern did not:
http://foo.com/more_(than)_one_(parens) http://foo.com/blah_(wikipedia)#cite-1 http://foo.com/blah_(wikipedia)_blah#cite-1 http://foo.com/unicode_(✪)_in_parens http://foo.com/(something)?after=parens -
It now matches
mailto:URLs. -
It correctly guesses that things like “bit.ly/foo” and “is.gd/foo/” are URLs. Basically: something-dot-something-slash-something.
Included in the parentheses-matching improvements is the ability to match up to two levels of balanced, nested parentheses — parentheses within parentheses. There are fancy ways of using dynamic or recursive regex patterns to match balanced parentheses of any arbitrary depth, but these dynamic/recursive pattern constructs are all specific to individual regex implementations. I.e., there’s one way to do it for PCRE, a different way for Perl — and in most regex engines, no way to do it at all. Hard-coding the pattern to support two levels of nested parenthesis should work everywhere, and, practically speaking, I only received two reports of actual real-life URLs that had a second level of parentheses, and none with more than two.
Lastly, I received several requests for a version of the pattern that only matches web URLs — http, https, and things like “www.example.com”. Here’s an extended format pattern that does this:
(?xi)
\b
( # Capture 1: entire matched URL
(?:
https?:// # http or https protocol
| # or
www\d{0,3}[.] # "www.", "www1.", "www2." … "www999."
| # or
[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/ # looks like domain name followed by a slash
)
(?: # One or more:
[^\s()<>]+ # Run of non-space, non-()<>
| # or
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
)+
(?: # End with:
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
| # or
[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’] # not a space or one of these punct chars
)
)
And here’s the same pattern in single-line format:
(?i)\b((?:https?://|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:’”.,<>?«»“”‘’]))
As before, suggestions and improvements are welcome, including just sending me example input where the current pattern fails.
Adam Lisagor on The Pipeline
Really enjoyed this interview of Adam Lisagor by Dan Benjamin. Funny and very honest.
Mark Huot: ‘A Real Web Design Framework’
Thoughtful response to Jason Santa Maria’s plea yesterday for a new web design app; in particular, how something like Interface Builder — or at least exactly like IB — wouldn’t work for web pages.
