Fresh Click Media

I’m an avid reader of Smashing Magazine, and welcome their wide variety of blog posts on all aspects of website design and development. I was pleasantly surprised when they announced Color Steam a couple of days ago. The free app is like a version of Adobe Kuler, allowing you to create colour schemes from scratch or from snaps using your iPhone camera. I found it easy to use, and quite fun too. The only downside is that it requires iOS4, so some older iPhone users will be excluded from the experience.

You can download the Color Steam application from the usual place.

If you’re a web designer or developer, chances are high that you’ve heard of Jeremy Keith‘s HTML5 for Web Designers. If you’re a web designer or developer, chances are fairly high that you’ve ordered it.

According to Jeffrey Zeldman, the book sold 5000 copies during the first 24 hours of pre-sales. All the personnel involved with its production are well-respected members of the design community, and so I didn’t falter in placing an order.

A Book Apart handle the delivery, so it’ll take a while longer than a next day Amazon shipment, but the delay only served to fuel my anticipation for the little book.

I’m only thought the first third of the book, but I’m already finding it incredibly well-written and it feels quite special. The $27 I paid for it is expensive, but the book’s such a great overall little package, that it might just be worth it.

The success of Firefox over recent years can be partly attributed to the extensions that beef up what’s already a great browser into something truly amazing. Firebug’s one of the most popular extensions, and for good reason. I’ve used it for editing CSS, viewing AJAX requests, DOM manipulation and debugging JavaScript. To say it’s been helpful is a large understatement, and it’s why I use Firefox as my main browser for web development.

Packt Publishing’s lengthily titled ‘Firebug 1.5 : Editing, Debugging, and Monitoring Web Pages’ starts the reader off gently with a ‘Getting Started’ chapter, discussing Firebug’s history, installation and Firebug Lite, a JavaScript version for non-Firefox browsers. In cases where a particular problem occurs on Safari, for example, the lite version can be extremely useful. Chapter 2 introduces the various Firebug tabs and gives a good overview of Firebug’s main capabilities. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 expand on the HTML, CSS and DOM functionality, and provide a great, in-depth examination of what’s possible.

Chapter 7 – ‘Performance Tuning Our Web Application’ – looks at the Net panel, and once again, the discussion is thorough and well-written. Not only does it give information about Firebug, but by its very nature, delves into HTTP headers and XMLHttpRequest monitoring.

Chapter 8 – ‘AJAX Development’ explains the console.debug call that I’ve made on several occasions, as well the (new to me) console.assert for for assertions and the useful console.dir(object) for giving a DOM tab style object dump for the supplied object parameter.

Chapter 9 – ‘Tips and Tricks for Firebug’ also had something new for me, console.group() and console.groupEnd(), which are functions that group ouput in the output console. When there are lots of debug statements being fired out to the console window, it can be useful to group them, and I’ve already used this to my benefit since reading the book.

Chapter 10 – ‘Necessary Firebug Extensions’ takes a look at ways of making Firebug even better by using 8 extensions that empower their users to more accurately diagnose and fix performance issues, manage cookies and improve SEO.

Chapter 11 – ‘Extending Firebug’ builds on Chapter 10′s introduced extensions by describing how to build your own. To keep things in proportion, it’s a fairly small chapter, building a small ‘Hello World’ extension, but it does give food for thought.

The book closes with an Appendix detailing Firebug’s API, and a look ahead at Firebug 1.7

Overall, this is a well-written and descriptive book, and although it is probably more suitable for a new to intermediate Firebug user, I found quite a few ‘ooh – I didn’t know that’ moments throughout that make it worthwhile for any reader who designs and develops websites.

I’ve had my first generation iPhone for over almost 3 years, so I felt I was due for an upgrade. When I read some of the speculative blog posts pointing towards a higher resolution camera and a better screen, I felt my upgrade would come with the fourth iteration of the iPhone. When I saw the keynote, I was taken aback. Steve Jobs may be a fine purveyor of hyperbole, but the iPhone4′s design and features were there to champion his cause. I had to get the iPhone4.

I’ve never queued for a product launch before, preferring instead to wait a while; avoid the launch-day craziness with its myriad fanboys and fangirls, and enter a shop at my convenience.

I had to get the iPhone4.

So – I headed into my local town centre, and prepared to queue for a product launch. I was expecting two or three people, but almost had to laugh when I saw some 20 or so standing in line. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be a quick wait, and my laughter belied a realisation that I might not get my hands on my phone due to limited units.

It’s curious, then, that the staff in the shop didn’t inform the awaiting masses if their wait would prove fruitless. They did so only when their stock had reduced to three units, with most of the people leaving after a long wait. I found it to be very inadequate that this wasn’t a consideration for them. People leaving the shop during the waiting period were too happy to speak.

I left the queue with a feeling of inevitability. There was, however, still some hope, though judging by the hush around the Vodafone shop, my hope was probably unfounded. In fact, I’d noticed that the Vodafone shop was quiet for the entire time that I stood outside the O2 shop. I was amazed when I was told that yes, they did have an iPhone, and that I could have it.

I opted not to get a PAC code, not to keep my number. I felt if I delayed, I’d be without what I’d set out to attain. The friendly assistant told me that they’d had only 5 iPhones in stock, and that I’d got the last one. I found this out when somebody further up the O2 queue came in and was told there were none left. Any guilt was tempered by a feeling of jubilation. No. There was no guilt.

Clearly, I’m not the only fan of the latest iteration, but there are already reports of reception problems. I can confirm that I’ve noticed a drop in the number of bars when I’ve actually held the phone. This isn’t acceptable, but I haven’t had any dropped calls so far. Although the problem can be resolved using ‘bumpers’ to isolate the phone from the user’s hand, these are an extra cost. Not an ideal situation, particularly when it’s been reported by so many users.

WordPress has gone from strength to strength since it was released in 2003, and much of its success is due to the open source community’s commitment to plugin development. Take a look at the WordPress Plugin Directory, and you’ll see thousands of plugins that extend the WordPress core to do almost anything you can imagine.

Packt Publishing‘s WordPress Plugin Development is written by Vladimir Prelovac, a WordPress expert and developer of WordPress plug-ins such as Smart YouTube and Plugin Central. Part of Packt’s Beginners Guide series, the book focuses more on experimentation and learning by doing, and develops 6 real-world plugins throughout its 270 or so pages.

Chapter Overview

1. Preparing for WordPress Development
2. Social Bookmarking
3. Live Blogroll
4. The Wall
5. Snazzy Archives
6. Insights for WordPress
7. Post Types
8. Development Goodies

Aimed at developers who are familiar with PHP, the book wastes little time getting straight into coding. Chapter 1 gives an overview of plugin development, and details the six plugins that are developed throughout the course of the book.

1. Digg This

   The first plugin simply shows a Digg button in blog posts. It’s a good first plugin, since it shows the reader the fundamental Plugin concepts such as the WordPress API, filters and actions.

2. Live Blogrool

   This plugin works at making the basic Blogroll a little bit more exciting. I enjoyed this chapter since it talked about integrating jQuery and AJAX into plugins.

3. The Wall

   The Wall is a plugin that creates a shoutbox on your blog’s sidebar, where users can leave comments and shouts. This chapter introduces widgets and the WordPress database.

4. Snazzy Archives

   This plugin beautifies blog archives, and hooks into posts and the administration panel.

5. Insights

   The insights plugin increases blog post writing productivity by offering quick access to common information in the Write Post screen.

6. Post Types

   This plugin works closely with the WordPress back-end, and extends the platform’s CMS capabilities. Despite WordPress 3.0′s core functionality being extended in this area, it’s still a useful chapter.

As fantastic as WordPress is, a real sense of power can be gained from extending it. I particularly enjoyed this book, since it got straight ‘down to business’ and focused on the core concepts and practices that enable developers to create reliable, useful plugins.

Almost ten years ago, I started work at a small software company developing web based software for WAP-enabled phones. It was an exciting time, and when the technical director asked me to design and develop a website to support the company’s mobile content catalogue and delivery network, I wasn’t particularly enthused. It didn’t take long, however, to relish my new task, and really love my job. I’d always liked server-side stuff, but here I was, caring about the organisation and presentation of information.

Unfortunately, the company suffered financial problems, and I left in 2004, shortly before the site was taken down. The internet archive’s wayback machine has allowed me to go down memory lane and see the site that I made all those years ago.

The wayback machine has archived over 150 billion pages, dating back to 1996, so there’s a good chance there will be an old version of a site of your choosing. Simply type in the URL in the input and click ‘Take me Back’.

Incidentally, the site used tables for layout, some CSS for typography, colours and element widths, Flash and the Windows Media Player plaugin for previewing polyphonic ringtones. Funny to think how far both websites and mobile phone technology has progressed in the last few years. Technically, the site served ASP pages, with content generated largely from a custom content management system using XML and COM objects.

So, iPhone OS 4 was revealed by Steve Jobs yesterday, with arguably the biggest announcement being multi-tasking support. There’s lots more too; one thing I’m quite excited about is the ability to organise icons into folders. Tech website engadget installed the developer preview of the new OS version onto an iPhone. They give an overview of some of the new features in the video below.

Being an owner of a first generation iPhone excludes me from the update, but I’ll be looking to get my hands on the new hardware that’s rumoured to be released in June of 2010. Speculation mounts of new iteration’s features, and there continues to be growing momentum around a higher resolution screen, better spec camera (perhaps with flash?), and a front-mounted camera. I’m pretty excited about the next version, and think it’ll complement the new OS perfectly.

Using screenr, I’ve just recorded a new sub-five minute screencast detailing a web scraping example using YQL, jQuery and JSONP.

In the video, I quickly introduce YQL‘s web scraping capability by returning a the contents of an HTML element on the JustGiving website. The data is obtained using jQuery’s getJSON method via JSONP for a cross-domain request. It’s short, but simple, and aims to give a brief example of what’s possible using YQL and jQuery.

Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.7 Cookbook has been out for while now, but I still thought I’d pick up a copy and give it the once-over. Rather than being a reference guide, Jean-Baptiste Jung‘s book is very much like his very own WpRecipes.com website.

The book is organised into 11 Chapters:

1. Getting Ready to Cook with WordPress
2. Finding and Installing Themes
3. Get the most out of your WordPress Theme
4. Doing anything with Plugins and Widgets
5. Displaying Posts
6. Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs
7. Securing your WordPress Blog
8. SEO Tips and Tricks to Get More Visits
9. Making Money with WordPress
10. Enhancing User Experience
11. Make your Blog stand out

Some of the recipes include integrating twitter on your theme using the Twitter Tools plugin, accessing post data outside the WordPress loop and securing your plugins directory. The recipes are generally between 1 and 4 pages in length, and there is lots of useful information in the book’s 280 or so pages of content, but it’s just the sort of thing that’s freely available on the WpRecipes.com website and other popular sites such as Smashing Magazine.

If you are after a large collection of recipes in a single package, this is the book for you, but if you’re happy reading WordPress blogs about WordPress such as WpRecipes.com website, you may feel a little short-changed.

I first heard about Logorama when I visited David Airey’s great logo site, Logo Design Love. Lucky enough to watch a the entire film (see below), I was blown away by the animation and sheer number of logos, integrated into the story in an inventive and creative way.

I was happy to hear this morning that the film has won the Best Animated Short Film award at the 2010 Academy Awards!