Posts filed under "internet"
Wordpress users get treated to a whole new administration panel…again. How long has it been since Happy Cog’s redesign (wasn’t that in March)? The design definitely has a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’ feel to it - hardly what I’d call elegant.
Web without words is an interesting experimental site. Block out all content form a site, so you can see what the layout looks like as a design exercise. So far it’s done CNN and Yahoo.
Fancy Zoom for jquery - will probably use this for the projects pages when I get a chance to complete them.
Cappuccino Web Framework - Interesting web based framework for developing applications online, one to a look out for in the future.
I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I was even remotely excited about a new application. Chrome definitely fit that bill. For some reason or another I really wanted to test this little application out. I wanted to see if Google had done anything worthy of their name.
I use Google for searching, I use Google as my RSS reader, to store my story online within Google Docs, and obviously I use Gmail and have done for many years now. These things I use on a nearly daily basis (except for Docs). So playing around with a browser from them obviously was somthing I had to try out. If you look around the blogosphere and the net, everyone’s got a friggin opinion about it. Some have decided to take extreme views on the subject, while others are all playing the waiting game to see what the deal actually was with the browser once they had it in their hands. Others still are pretty optimistic about the whole affair.
I’m not new to this new browser game. When Flock was announced a few years ago I was pretty excited about that…until they dropped the ball, added more cruft and shite to the actual browser and well to be honest made it ugly rather than this extremely slick entity that it could have been. With the exception of Safari usage every once in a while, Firefox has been my default browser for years. I used it originally because it was soo ahead of the game when compared to the available products on the market at the time, probably IE6.
So does Chrome give me that same leap? No, of course it doesn’t. It couldn’t because the idea behind Firefox revolutionised the net in many ways. The truth about Chrome is that it does what it says on the tin and it does it well.
The tabs - I thought these would be the biggest annoyance, having them at the top. Truth be told, after 5 minutes, I love them there. They sit perfectly and work great, because there is nothing above them. Effectively the browser uses all the screen real estate wisely. That is something that I really have to applaud Google on. They seem to have achieved this by actually making the rest of the browser minimal as well.
OS integration - Yeah, ok it’s not OS integrated properly, but seriously for once I don’t care. The additional stuff associated with the browser as soo small and unobtrusive that you don’t really care that it doesn’t have the Vista shite (I’m on holiday in Athens, thus using whatever is available, and this case it’s shitty Vista). I can imagine that when the Mac version comes out, it’ll be very nicely integrated with Leopard. Hell the icons are practically from Leaopard, but decidedly different at the same time so that it keeps it’s own identity, that is if they keep these icons and give me the proper grey.
Front Page Tab - Love this. I didn’t realise that this was a good idea, until it came as a default. In the same way for FF3 I didn’t know what a great idea the star and you’ve bookmarked a site is (in the navigation bar) in the same way I didn’t realise that this actually saves me a lot of time, by displaying the latest sites I’ve visited and the latest sites I’ve bookmarked.
Speed - Yes it’s fast. Scrap that, it’s FUCKING fast. I mean, seriously that’s the fastest browser I’ve ever opened. Hell IE7 on Vista isn’t this fast. There’s got to be something going on here. Is everyone else seeing the same lightning speed at opening up that I’ve noticed?
Task Manager - Now that’s a good idea. Much in the same vein as OSX, which allows you to kill any application that is giving you grief, so too does Chrome allow you to shut off any tab from the task manager. The task manager also allows you to have a look and see what amount of memory is being consumed by which application. Case in point Facebook is a power hungry bitch.
Looking forward, what do I want? Of course not everything is rosy and I want some things to be sorted out in future revisions of the software.
I want this on OSX. So it’s really a matter of time I guess. Make sure it’s got the same speed as the Windows version and make sure it’s got the proper OS colours as opposed to this light blue. It’s ok for Windows, it’s not OK for OSX.
I want this to be open to plugins and extensions. This is the power of Firefox, that no other browser has ever had the chance of coming close to. You can find nice things you like about other browsers, but ultimately Firefox has got it all and then some. So unlike Safari which is a real pain in the ass to develop stuff for, and even then it’s not a proper system, Google really should learn from that and have people develop extensions because that is what will make people take the leap.
Sort out that loading bar which is at the bottom of the page. Rubbish idea. Safari does it correctly by loading in the navigation bar. Use that idea instead, it’s much more intuative; in the same way the tabs at the top of the page is a great idea.
Edit 1 - Seems they are serious about bringing in more developers to help out and extend Chrome, there is also the Chromium project which has been set up for this purpose. It’s going to be pretty interesting to see where this browser will be in a year’s time, damn interesting.
So Google is going to be releasing a browser later on today, called Google Chrome. You can also have a look at the comic book that Scott Mcloud did for them, that introduces the browser. And finally you can have a quick look at the first screenshot of the browser. The proof I guess will be in the pudding. Will it load quickly, will it look good on a mac, will it be extensible, will developers actually support it, will it be worth the effort of moving over? Will it, won’t it, guess we’ll find out part of that question in a couple of hours when it’s officially released.
The Slip by NIN. Even better than the Coldplay gesture from last week, NIN release the whole album under a creative commons license. Good days. (via binary bonsai)
Apparently it’s RSS Day. For all those people who don’t know what RSS is, it’s the internet’s best kept secret (still amazes me how many people don’t know about this). Go the site and change your internet habits forever.
Frakking toasters by Jeanette Atwood is in many ways the best commentary on Battlestar Galactica I’ve ever read (the fact it’s a comic is just icing on the cake for me). Shame there is no RSS link. C’mon Jeanette, sort it out.
Interesting 9rules case study. My favourite part is ‘And as good bloggers do, they blogged on why they left 9rules.’
Nothing new to add to the general conversation of redesigned website to be honest just that this is what has been going on with my thought process lately (ok from yesterday). I’ve been sitting on a redesign for the ‘Kode for many months now. It’s been going on for so long that it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about. So much so that I kept flitting back and forth between designs last year in an attempt to get my act together.
However what I’ve gone and done now is gone back to the design I’m most proud of, from both a functional point of view but also from a code base. It’s a solid and relatively light code base which I’m pretty happy with. There are somethings that I know I can do better with however I don’t have the energy to start from scratch and don’t want to dive into someone else’s code really, especially as I want to be able to tweak this to suit my own needs completely.
So I’m going to be tweaking and adding something new to this site every day. Some of the tweaks may be pretty drastic to be honest, while others will be less than obvious. I’ll bring the copy in my static pages up to speed. I’ll sort out some links that are dead. I’ll start to sort out my categories properly and generally bring the design in an evolutionary method to where I want it to be.
I’m through with these drastic redesigns, maybe a slow burn approach will present me with something that I find more enjoyable to use, as my enthusiasm for writing is directly linked to the look of my site. So if you’re reading this on your feed reader, you might want to check the site from time to time to try and spot the differences.
It’s not a question of getting everything right the first time out, it’s a question of slowly evolving and adding and tweaking in a methodical and periodic fashion.
Elsewhere.brokenkode.com (powered by Asaph) is a an images dumping ground for things that inspire me and has been up and running for a week or so. I’ll hopefully get around to skinning this as well, but I’ve got to say that Dominic really did a good job on this little application and can’t wait to see future iterations.
To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.
This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.
It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.
Late last year I made the move to a mac and while there was a bit of getting used to certain things I’ve been really very happy with everything that it’s offered me in terms of getting on with computing in general. However the thing that I’ve missed the most is Firefox with all of it’s plugins and general speed and open source goodness. I tried Camino and i’ve got to say it’s good in some respects but trying to get any of the blasted plugins to work was a mission in and of itself. It just seemed to me like it wasn’t really there in terms of both backing and development as Firefox, which is just as well. So for the last couple of months I’ve been using Safari, and while I like a lot of stuff in Safari, I think there is room for improvement.
Enter Firefox 3 Beta 4 which was released earlier this week. DAMN that’s MUCH better.
I’ve installed GRApple Yummy theme, which is basically a correct integration of the theme into Leopard and I’m away. Firefox 3 is faster than Safari at loading up, it’s slowly starting to get all the various plugins updated as well and crucially it now also looks the part as well. I’ve not really played around with the browser much yet but one of the more welcome additions is the fact that now I can look for plugins and themes from within Firefox itself rather than going to the mozilla website and searching. It’s inspired me so much so that I installed ScribeFire straight away and I’m writing this from within there which I’ve never done before, just because I can.
I’ve got a question which I was hoping somebody would help me with. I love Google Reader, I really do, loads of great things about this little application to like, in the same way that I like Gmail as well. My only problem with it right now is one function that is not present and I was wondering if others are having the same problem as well, and if there is any easy way to rectify this (like a greasemonkey script or something similar. Basically the way I read my feeds doesn’t allow me to read EVERYTHING in one go. Which is fine, no problem. Those items i’ve not read remain unread. The problem is that when i get back to reading things the newer feeds get placed at the top (which is fine and dandy) but all of the read items are mixed in with the unread ones. So what happens then is that I have to spend a long time scrolling down to the previous items.
Obviously sometimes (read: most times) i can’t be fucked and so i just ‘mark all as read’, which really defeats the object doesn’t it. Anyone have any ideas how to get around this, or is knows whether or not google might be looking to sort this out, or where I can send my email towards?
Firefox 2 is slow as donkeys on a Mac. It’s true. Even with my 2Gs of RAM I can still notice the strain, that and it’s constantly crashing for some reason (usually whenever I use Gmail. Alas I’m eagerly waiting for Firefox3 to be released which is looking a lot better for everyone. In the meantime here are a couple of plugins I’ve found for Safari that I think are really useful: (I’ve updated it with a slew more cool little plugins, based on the comments)
And of course we shouldn’t forget Pimpmysafari
Anyone got any other ones I should look at?
You Sucjk at Photoshop. You do, you’re awful, and that’s why you’re here. Absolutely brilliantly funny series of photoshop ‘tutorials’ from Donnie. There are 4 tutorials at the moment. Hopefully he’ll continue these because they are pretty good.
Fake Steve Jobs accepts one of those crunchie awards. Absoultely awesome video. The guy’s just as funny (probably more funny) in person than as a blogger to be honest, although I do read his stuff occasionally. And while he’s doing that thing he does so well, he also raises some really valid points as well.
A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.
Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they’ve got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt’s own addmission, it’s only 10-20% complete, which is why they’ve decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they’re not there yet.
Now obviously i’ve got a slight bit of interest in what’s going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn’t speak for) gave a year’s worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn’t like it, which is why it never got included into the core.
So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I’m not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I’m not sure.
Obviously they’ve decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.
For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It’s past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it’s completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people….but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting…oh wait we’re already doing that.
It’s been a while since i’ve done something like this, but I can’t help myself, i’ve been sitting on this for months now.
Freakangles by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. Freakangel is a long form weekly comic (seems like 5 pages a week) that’s going to debut in February 2008. At some point I’m sure it’ll come out in print. This is pretty old news, but I only just noticed how good that bastard kid Paul Duffield. I know age shouldn’t matter much, but at 23 the little runt is far too good for his age. Go have a look at his stuff. The good news is that it seems that Paul will be doing some cover work for Ellis’s usually visually sub-par work published by Avatar (and also the reason I’ve only ever brought one Avatar book by Warren). It’s not that I think the art that’s published by Avatar is bad as such, it’s all technically adequate I guess, however it lacks a certain amount of finesse and class that Paul is bringing to the table, especially with his cover work for the new Ellis series, Anna Mercury.
Comics are just as much a visual medium as they are a written one; if the creators forget that, and see the art as something any monkey can contribute towards, they’ve missed the point COMPLETELY. It’s something I’ve noticed recently. When was the last time comic artwork truly inspired the reader? From my point of view, there are few artists that do that currently. Joshua Middleton is definitely one of them, as is James Jean, Tony Harris is always incredible to look at, Tomer Hanuka is another up and comer.
Wakerupper is a new internet service that you can schedule when to have a wake up call sent to a landline or your mobile. Traditionally I don’t get a good night’s sleep when I’ve got a really important the next morning, partly because I worry about missing it. Not available in the UK yet, but hopefully it will catch on and they’ll extend the service worldwide.
So today is a very special day for the Kode. Over the last four years (more or less) of it’s life, the site has amassed over 4000 comments. Obviously this is something that I’m extremely proud of and wanted to thank everyone for their wonderful contributions over the years in making this places less of a place for me to talk to myself. Comments are part of way make a weblog different to other websites, in that they encourage communication between people around the world. They definitely make running this site a whole lot more fun. So once again I’d like to thank everyone for their contributions.