11/06/2007
Leopard: I have a feeling this will be a very significant OSX release. I’m looking forward to it in October.
Games: I admin, I’ve secretly been wanting to play C&C 3. Not that it’s much of an issue with Bootcamp and the new 3D acceleration in Parallels and VMware, but it’s still nice to see a native Mac app.
Safari 3 on Windows: I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it so far, mainly due to the non-Windows style UI. I tend to agree, and I can’t see Safari replacing Firefox on my Windows PCs anytime soon. I don’t think it really matters if it gains any marketshare on Windows though; what’s really important is that web developers can finally test sites in Safari, even if they don’t own a Mac.
The Safari 3 OSX beta, on the other hand, is great. Lots of neat new UI features, and the new WebKit is much faster, even on my aging PowerBook.
iPhone Web Apps: A little disappointing to Cocoa developers, but I guess at least it’s something. Web apps will be able to tie into the phone’s dialing and email features, so it should give potential developers basic capabilities.
I’ve heard some speculation that this is really a stopgap measure until Apple has the time to develop a set of stable iPhone APIs, create a working development environment and emulator, and take care of any hardware and software bugs in the rev A model. I tend to agree; you can’t assume anything about Apple’s long term plans for a device that’s not even in stores yet.
24/05/2007
You’ve all seen CAPTCHAs before, where a form requires additional input from the user to protect itself from automated spam. Here’s a new project from Carnegie Mellon, made by Ben Maurer:
You might notice that reCAPTCHA has two words. Why? reCAPTCHA is more than a CAPTCHA, it also helps to digitize old books. One of the words in reCAPTCHA is a word that the computer knows what it is, much like a normal CAPTCHA. However, the other word is a word that the computer can’t read. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, we not only check that you are a human, but use the result on the other word to help read the book!
This is a great idea in my opinion; it finds a use for what would otherwise be wasted effort, and turns it into something useful. Accessibility (which has always been a big problem for CAPTCHAs) seems to be taken into account here as well.
Another good one is on the ridiculous fish blog, which uses a homemade CAPTCHA to calculate pi.
15/01/2007
Reuben Yau tells us how to make Google Analytics report the full URL for dynamic referrers. In other words, the referrer will show up as /forums/showthread.php?t=1234 instead of /forums/showthread.php (which is more or less useless). This is a good trick if you use Google Analytics; lack of dynamic URL reporting was a major reason why I switched to Mint last year.
18/10/2006
I haven’t used Internet Explorer for years, but as a part time web designer I’m glad IE7 is finally out (and soon to be included in Windows Update). When I write HTML or CSS I try to keep everything neat, simple and standards compliant, but there always seems to be something that didn’t work quite right on IE6.
Not that it matters too much; having a Mac centric website means around 57% of my users are browsing with Safari, 26% with FireFox, and IE coming in at a low 8%.
18/10/2006
For a lot of programmers, no matter what language or technology you’re working with the hardest part of developing an application isn’t just writing code, but making the end result look nice as well. Those of us who prefer an IDE to Photoshop are pretty much reliant on what we can find on the internet, and a lot of what’s out there is only available for a fee, or includes restrictive licenses. Good design work is worth paying for, but for those independent developers without any real budgets, there are a few free alternatives. Here are a few I’ve used in the past.
FAMFAMFAM Icons
Over 1,000 very nice looking 16×16 px icons. They work great for websites, but are just as good for menu and toolbar icons in .NET programs. Cocoa applications use 32×32 px toolbar icons (or even higher, with resolution independence on its way), but you can still use them to spruce up a boring NSTableView.
Squidfingers Patterns
Dozens of simple, elegant looking patterns that make a great backgrounds for any website or application. I’ve noticed one or two other OSX software websites using them in the past.
Matt Ball’s Royalty Free Icons
I don’t know much about this designer, other than the fact that he posted some really nice 32×32 px OSX-ish toolbar icons on CocoaDev last year. The icon set includes many generic icons common to OSX applications, so you can quickly prototype a nice looking UI without resorting to stealing from someone else’s Contents/Resources directory.
26/09/2006
I purchased Mint a week or two ago, and I have to say that for $30 it’s a steal. I’ve used a few other statistical packages over the years, and the only things they seem to be good at are the tools I don’t need. I know there are people out there who care, maybe even get excited about terms like “Visitor Segment Performance” and “Goals & Funnel Process”, but my business is software design. I have under a dozen total pages on my website at the moment, and all I want to know is how many people are looking at them, and what they’re saying about my products. Most statistics packages can’t even get that right; they snip the end off of dynamic URLs when reporting the referrer, making blog and forum URLs (perhaps the most important sources of information) useless to me.
Mint gets it all right. It’s an easy to use package that seems like it’s tailored for people like me. Everything it comes with by default is actually useful to me, and the tools it didn’t have were easy to add via its plugin system. On top of this, it manages to be beautifully designed as well. How many other website admin tools do you know that have their own official Dashboard Widget?
20/09/2006
And so after a solid week of coding and futzing around in Photoshop, I finally put the new Downtown Software House design up. I still might end up changing one or two things, but it works, and what’s important is that it looks much, much better than the old website. Good visual design is more important in OSX software than any other platform, and hopefully my website represents that a little better now.
If you’ve been here before, you might notice a new addition to my products page; Runner’s Log. I’ll be posting about it over the upcoming months, but I’m very excited about it. I’ve been using it myself for a few months now, and although it still has some rough spots, it’s starting to shape into the type of application that I myself would buy. Hopefully now that the site design is wrapped up, I’ll have some time to actually spend coding it!
20/09/2006
Continuing my first post on the subject, here are a few more useful web design resources:
PHP5 has been around for a while, but since I was never able to get it working on my old host I’m just now beginning to use it. These articles cover some of the big changes going from PHP4 to PHP5.
Despite the somewhat rabid enthusiasm in the web programming community for Ruby on Rails (and other esoteric languages), I’m still a fan of PHP, especially now that I can start using the PHP5 object oriented model. It has its quirks, but it always seems to work well for me.
19/09/2006
Short answer: you can’t. In my experience it’s easier to just use 8bit PNGs when you absolutely need transparency (a nav menu for instance, where the background color changes depending on the context), and fake alpha transparency by layering the image over the background in photoshop. Of course, this can have plenty of problems by itself depending on the complexity of your design, but at least it’s clean and you can be sure it will work on any platform.
If you really need alpha transparency, and don’t mind marking up your code a bit, give this article a try.
18/09/2006
I’ve been very busy the past week working on a complete redesign of the Downtown Software House website. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and since I recently switched to a new hosting provider (as well as noticed some ugly bugs with IE I didn’t know about before!) I decided it was finally time.
The new site is an overhaul of just about everything from the CSS to the database design. This means I’ve been doing a lot of reading, refreshing my memory and learning about what’s new in web design in the past couple of years. I figured I’d share some of the articles that were good enough to earn a place in my bookmarks. It’s by no means a complete list on how to build a website, but they’re all important subjects, and worth the read.
- CSS Design: Taming Lists
It makes sense to begin designing lists and navigation elements like tabs with an old-fashioned unordered list. This article helped refresh my knowledge of CSS tricks.
- Web Safe Fonts Preview
For someone who doesn’t know or care much about fonts, this page is anything and everything you’ll ever need.
- ext/mysqli Overview
It seems like the old mySQL PHP methods I learned way back in PHP4 are outdated and being replaced by mysqli. This article is a good primer. Don’t ignore the part about prepared statements; even though mysqli can be used like the old mysql functions, prepared statements are much better from a security standpoint.
- URLS! URLS! URLS!
Just about everyone is using Apache’s mod-rewrite these days. This guide shows you how to create URLs that represent content, rather than the underlying technology.
- How to Succeed With URLs
Another good look into mod-rewrite, but don’t post the PHP code from this article verbatim… I found a few problems, to say the least. It is a good starting point, though.
Continued at part two.