Thanks to http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/ for the plugin, and about 20 minutes of tweaking the styles, things look pretty nice now.  It wasn’t bad before, but it required a zoom in on every refresh/page change, so I really didn’t like the functionality of it.

Its missing a few features…notably Categories and Recent Posts, but I will add those as I get a little free time.

It’s not great by the standards of the designers I work with, but its good enough for me, and it puts content up front, with minimal design behind it…so I like it.

The last time I had to fit a theme into wordpress, It was a non CSS theme, before I was fully comfortable with CSS based layouts.  Trying to fit a table layout into wordpress is just a pain to the extreme, but putting this theme into wordpress took me all of an hour, and was quite simple…  My opinion of WP has gone up a  little bit…

After reading a story on DIGG about how Nintendo really isn’t intentionally limiting supply of the Wiis, it reminded me that I might want to check Amazon for them.

By random chance, they had some. So I got one. A few minutes later (literally, like 5 minutes) they were sold out again. So I got one, at the real price, and don’t have to give some asshole twice the cost for it…life is good.

Phone Home

So what changed? The iPhone. I tried to resist it, but a combination of being ready to leave Verizon, breaking my current phone twice in a row (although one was my fault, phones aren’t meant to be dropped into toilets), and the idea of having a nice handheld web browser for when I’m downstairs away from the computer was too good a deal to pass up. The lack of 3rd party software support was a hang-up for me, but I ended up picking one up, and hoping that they change their policy. That said though, the point that most people seem to really miss is that, even with its limitations, the iPhone is still the head of it’s class. I think what we have is a case of too much hype, and too many rumors beforehand generating all kinds of hope that just couldn’t realistically be matched.

I’m not going to talk too much about the iPhone; it’s been beaten to death at this point. The effect the iPhone has had on me, or rather, the series of thought processes it has spawned, are what I’m really talking about. Before the iPhone, the only apple product I owned was an iPod shuffle (the first gen one). I was neither impressed or disappointed with it. It worked as it was supposed to, even though I still don’t think the concept is a great one, so nothing to complain about. It didn’t really do anything to surprise me either, its kind of like getting a B in school. Not great, but not bad either. The iPhone though, has surprised me. The interface, the usability, the visual appeal, everything. I thought I would like it on the grounds that I’m just a gadget geek, but I really find myself liking it more than I ever thought I would. Frankly, if apple was that smart with the interface of the iPhone, then maybe I really am missing out on something in OSX.

You want me to work with that?

Short of jumping on a coworker’s computer and testing some sites in safari, I haven’t ever found myself willingly sitting in front of a Mac. Given the limited seat time, I found the interface “clunky”. I didn’t like that the application windows didn’t have their own menu, but the shared one up top. I certainly didn’t like safari, but that’s because it seemed to always give nothing but problems with either javascript or flash content, thankfully though, safari 3 appears to have fixed a majority of these problems. On top of that, I just couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t figure out where applications were if they weren’t on the dock, couldn’t figure out how to open a network drive, and frankly, just couldn’t figure a lot out at all.

History lesson

Before I continue, lets cover a little bit of history for a few moments. I’ve pretty much been a windows guy for a while now. I was a beta tester for win 95, 98, and ME (lets not talk too much about that little jewel). I ran 2k after 98, then XP, and now vista. I like windows. It has its faults like all of the others, but its strong points are very strong, and industry support is strongest, and that’s not something you can just ignore. Vista is their best try yet…though it seems they broke as much as they fixed…but its still very usable. Aside from that, in the last year or so, I guess you could say I jumped on the Ubuntu train. As a matter of fact, aside from playing a single game that I can’t get to run in Linux, (and now, syncing the iPhone) I haven’t really booted into windows for well over 6 months now, at home that is. I’m still in XP at work. I like Linux because it just ‘feels’ better than windows. The idea of community developed free (speech, not beer) software gives you a nice warm and fuzzy feeling. Add that to a nearly DRM free environment, and viola, you got yourself a winner. I’ve convinced friends to give it a try, some stuck with it, others didn’t. My mom was even able to use it, which says a lot to tear down the “only for geeks and sysadmins” image of Linux.

Let’s be friends!

Back to the present. Last night I decided to stop by the Apple store and check out the new iMacs. I really just wanted to play in OSX for a little while. So I sat there for an hour or so just messing with things. Learning the user flow, asking a few questions to the guys in there (though, I have to say, most of the employees in the Apple store fall into the aforementioned extreme zealotry category, which makes them a bit annoying. After having someone who had never used Linux try to counter my points for it, I grew weary of them.), I started to understand a lot more about the OS. Add to that the fact that the new Mac Pros are rather customizable with multiple choices for just about every component, and apple even seems to be slipping away from just a hard-locked view on hardware.

When it comes time for a new computer, I might be looking to Apple, especially if I decide on a laptop. My current laptop is an HP desktop replacement, that weighs about as much as a diesel engine, and runs even hotter. I’m more likely to go with a desktop though, and since working on a single monitor drives me crazy, it will have to be a Mac Pro.

In the end, I have to admit that the thing holding me back from Apple was fanboyism, or more specifically, anti-fanboyism. The godlike worship for SJ that so many Apple fans have blinded me to the fact that there is, actually, a decent product under all of it. Frankly, it’s unfair to judge a system, be it Apple, Windows, or Linux until you’ve used it in the long run. All of them seems to have something to offer, and it’s up to the individual to decide which points are more important, and go with the OS that favors those points.

Fin.

Aside from the obvious accessibility issues, they are just a pain to deal with.

Here’s a simple solution. I came up with this after saying to myself “ok, captchas suck, what can you do instead…” and in 5 minutes, i had it.

<div style="display: none;">
	<label for="email">Leave this field blank:</label>
	<input type="text" name="email">
</div>

That simple. Now, just check that its blank on the back-end, and you will be good to go. I used “email” because 1) I try to avoid using such obvious names for form fields…it helps some of the spam right there… and 2) it makes it irresistible to bots. Obviously, don’t name it “email” if you have one named email, but make it something that sounds obvious. A lot of bots wont fill out all of the fields, just ones they “think” are important.

Is it bulletproof? No. Some bots might still get through. But I think its a great compromise between stopping bots, and keeping a friendly experience for your users.

This bundle is more useful for us developers/designers since it contains formatting, links and lists (depending on which choose), all accessible through the tab shortcut ( “dummy[TAB]” ).

Enjoy, maybe it will save you 20 seconds somewhere…

Download Here

The problem is, though the core of most of my sites are OOP oriented, most of the functionality is procedural still. All of the supporting functions, for example, are just functions, and really have no place, or rather, would gain very little by making objects from them.

But I was thinking the other day, as I was going through the entire codebase of a site to find/replace a function name, about how nice it was to have namespaces in other languages. The problem in this instance was our redirect() function. We tied the whole site and punBB together, but punBB has a function called redirect() as well, and though similar in function, it did a little more than just redirection, so we didn’t want to just use it.

(more…)

*name is in flux, of course.

Basically, this will be not much more than punBB (the reason I love punBB in the first place is its simplicity). What it will do though, is make the process of installing and creating mods much easier. This will be done primarily through the ability to attach functions to the core functions.

It should basically meet these qualities: (in this order)

• Remain Lightweight
• Become much easier for end-users to install mods
• Become easier for developers to develop mods
• Retain Mod/Plugin Compatibility with current punBB

I’ll be kicking this off sometime this week, and will have an actual page up soon with more information.

Tabinta, short for “Tab In TextArea”, allows the use of the TAB key in textareas, which is lovely for those of us who cringe at the thought of unformatted code, but still love to hang out in development forums and such.