Well, you’ll be glad to hear that I’m feeling a lot better than I was this time last week. No thanks to that damned nemesis of the male race, the man-flu!
The iMac replacement came on Tuesday, much to my excitement. I was briefly the owner of two 24″ iMacs while I waited for the old one to be picked up, but unfortunately that didn’t last too long. I’m happy to announce that the new one doesn’t have any dead pixels! I can finally proceed to melt my eyes trying to take in the giant-ness of this screen. YAY!
I’m going to end the introduction there as we have had a rather large amount of news this week and the post is already turning into an essay. Assume the position everyone as we jump into the events of the past seven days…
This week’s news
FaceBook hit 100 million users this week. That is an astonishing amount of people, considering much of FaceBook’s early days were tied up in the educational area rather than being fully open like MySpace. With the new design and solid plans for the future, I’m really excited about what FaceBook has to offer over the coming years. MySpace just doesn’t excite me in any way what-so-ever, probably because of it’s tarnished reputation with unsavoury characters and the appalling code!
Google Gears Beta has finally been released for the Safari web browser. At last! I’ve been waiting on this for a very long time and it’s been the only thing keeping me from using Gears on a regular basis. It has been strongly advised in the Google Groups post about the beta that it’s in an unstable state and should be used with extreme caution – it could break Safari basically! That being said, it’s a massive step in the right direction. Rock on Google.
Mozilla are on a roll with new releases, this time coming out with Ubiquity: An experiment into connecting the web with language. If you’ve ever used Quicksilver on the Mac (or Launchy on Windows) then you’ll be used to the idea of using words (language) to achieve tasks quickly and from wherever you currently are, be it your desktop, inside your email program, whatever. Ubiquity is looking to use a similar concept, but in the browser and using web services instead. One example given with the prototype is the ability to quickly add a map of a location to an email by selecting some text (eg. Starbucks, Acme Town), invoking the dashboard, and typing the word “map”. Once you do this it enters what they call “interactive mode”, basically where your location is shown on a Google Map and you can zoom in or move the map as you see fit. When you are happy with the map you click a simple link that then embeds an image of your map directly into the email. Simple as that! I think this is an amazing development at Mozilla and I can’t wait to see how they progress with it.
My favourite code editor-slash-do-everything application Coda received a significant update this week. The new version is 1.5 and it brings with it features such as built-in Subversion version control (hooray!) amongst other great additions such as the ability to add custom reference books. Overall this update brings everything I’ve been wanting Coda to do, more than justifying it’s place at the top of my favourite web development apps on OS X.
Is supporting IE 6 sucking up precious time and getting on your nerves? Then you might want to take part in the IE Death March. With the likes of Carsonified supporting the movement amongst other big name studios and designers, it finally looks like the web industry is making a stand on the OAP of the browser world. Good-bye Mr. Internet Explorer 6!
Amazon just purchased the online bookshelf web app Shelfari. There isn’t too much to say about this although I’m definitely interested in the direction Amazon are going to take it, and what sort of integration they’ll inevitably come up with.
It might be called Really Simple Syndication, but you’ve always needed a fair amount of computer literacy to use RSS properly. Google has noticed this problem and is implementing some new features in Blogger aimed at making RSS mainstream. By integrating a slimmed down version of Google Reader into the user’s Blogger dashboard and naming the feed links “Follow This Blog”, RSS for the average user will become trivial. It’s such a simple solution, but half the problem is that using the official name for something isn’t always the best option if you want to appeal to the masses, like RSS or RFID (ArrEff-what-now?!).
Last.fm and Flickr sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee! Flickr has released some new functionality that let’s it read the machine tags from last.fm that users have been adding to photos for the past year. What this means is that by using a special tag (eg. lastfm:event=34640) you can link your photos to a music event that is on last.fm. You’ll even get a funky icon underneath your photo with the name of the event and a link to other photos from this event. Cool!
On Friday we saw the new design for the jQuery site, sporting a rather retro rockstar on the banner. The new website looked great, very polished, but the rockstar illustration really didn’t go down well and the community certainly let their feelings be known in the blog comments. By Friday evening the rock star was gone, he didn’t even last 24 hours! I can’t say I was too bothered, but I’m liking the layout in it’s current state – it’s really bringing jQuery up into the serious and grown-up framework territory.
To round the week off, the super-cool open-source eCommerce engine Magento turned 1 on Saturday. I absolutely love what the guys over there are doing with the bland and ageing area of eCommerce software. Magento is a breath of fresh air and the possibilities are endless with it. Keep up the good work!
An urban store selling loads of funky products. I really like the way they’ve tied the striking Flash banners into the rest of the site. Overall a detailed and pretty damn awesome layout.
Lesson of the week
Installing PHP extensions on IIS is pretty annoying
I’m ill! Yes you heard right, the boy wonder web design extraordinaire has come down with something positively horrible (headaches and tiredness). It’s probably just a bout of the incredibly life altering man-flu, but I’m sure I’ll be back and bouncing soon!
My new iMac should be here by next Tuesday. I’m a bit worried about turning the new one on for the first time incase it doesn’t work or has even more dead pixels than this one – that would truly suck. The good news is that it’s a bank holiday weekend here in England so I don’t have any work before my new baby arrives. Hooray!
I haven’t mentioned this much previously, but I’ve been applying for University this year. I actually found out many months ago that I was accepted onto the course at Bournemouth Univeristy, but it was only yesterday that my student loan was confirmed and the reality of starting University life set in. This is the beginning of an amazing chapter in my life as I managed to slightly screw up Uni last time by going on a course that didn’t suit me. This time will be better I’m sure as I’ve picked Interactive Media Production; something which is right up my street!
So what does this mean for Rawkes? Well I’ll be covering this more as the time approaches, but the plan is to keep Rawkes running throughout my time at Uni, albeit in a slightly smaller state. The blog won’t be affected in any negative way, in fact I’m sure the things I learn at Uni will show up on here in one way or another! The freelance and work aspect of Rawkes will be cut down slightly, but only in the sense that I won’t be able to take on as many clients at one time. I will be updating the main Rawkes pages nearer to the time as I decide exactly how to approach the matter. All in all nothing negative is going to happen, although you might not see much of me during the first couple of weeks at Uni while I recover!
I’m feeling it’s going to be a rather long post this week, making up for the ’short’ one last week. Let’s assume the regular position, cuppa tea in one hand and mouse in the other as we enter the latest Rawkes Weekly. Enjoy!
This week’s news
On Monday I discovered the new Metropolitan Police mapping service which let’s inhabitants of London and the surrounding area to check crime levels on Google Maps. I’m not too sure on the accuracy of the statistics, but this is a really cool use of the Google Maps API and it’s been implemented really well.
iPhone GTD app Things hit version 1.1 early this week, with the addition of syncing to the desktop version. Things is one of my favourite GTD apps simply because it’s so simple and beautifuly designed - it makes getting things done fun!
I like the way that if you take your mouse off the slideshow for a period of time then the controls and Flickr branding disappears. I think this is a nice touch as it’s always an issue for larger companies to use services and tools like Flickr if there is branding and logos plastered everywhere – Vimeo does much the same with their video player.
On Thursday Mozilla announced the winners of the extend Firefox 3 contest. There are some amazing extensions on there, but my favourite out of them all is definitely Pencil: a GUI prototyping tool. The basic premise of Pencil is to let you quickly knock together GUI interfaces and website layouts without worrying too much about the finer details. I’m yet to use this in production, but that doesn’t stop it being an excellent example of what can be achieved with FireFox.
Towards the end of the week we found out that IE 8 is going to get a privacy mode. Cue thousands of teenagers screaming in joy all around the world! Apart from turning IE into a major pr0n browser, the new privacy mode will prove incredibly useful for public computers and for people who want to surf the web secure in the knowledge that anything they do won’t be found out by a someone using the computer after them. A prime example of this would be someone researching about an illness they might have that they don’t want to announce to their family. It may be a little extreme, but the option of privacy should be in all browsers without a question.
A shock announcement brought this working week to a close with the news that Ma.gnolia is going open-source! The social bookmarking web app has proven popular in recent years with it’s differences to the leader Delicious. The main draws of Magnolia are it’s groups which allow like-minded individuals come together to share bookmarks and discuss a particular topic. Magnolia also boasts a more visual approach on it’s service, rather than the utilitarianised (hooray for new words!) Delicious.
The open-source version is going to be called Magnolia 2, or M2 for short. The project website already has a variety of ways to follow the project and also hosts their project charter which outlines the plans of the project. I can’t wait to download the first public release in September!
An oldie, but I absolutely love the playfulness of this layout – it’s such a happy design.
Crowd Science
Simple, but the colours are so bright and refreshing. It has a nice gridded layout as well.
Lesson(s) of the week
Getting ill sucks
Putting off chasing things up only results in bad things
Track of the week
“Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Soulwax Remix)” - by The Chemical Brothers. I love both of these artists, but this remix could be bottled and sold as pure awesome!
I swear we missed out a few days this week. No? Maybe it’s just me then. Either way, this week has flown by! Work is picking up again with more and more clients asking for work and deadlines piling on like nobody’s business. Time to crack out “Getting Things Done” again me thinks.
In other earth-shattering news: my iMac is being replaced after just a few days! I know, know, shocking isn’t it? Apple can’t do any wrong can they? Well, this time they did by shipping me an iMac equipped with a lovely bright green stuck pixel in the middle of the screen. It’s one of those things that don’t bother you until you notice it, but as soon as you notice it then you are always drawn to it. Luckily Apple was uber friendly on the phone and are going to send me a replacement unit and pick up the old one free of charge. Balance has now officially been restored in my love for the fruity company.
I must apologise before we start as this week’s post isn’t going to be as rich as normal. It’s been a rather hectic week sorting out University, iMac replacements, and that little thing on the side called work, so I didn’t have much time to compile content. I promise I’ll be back with a vengeance soon, bringing a whole variety of new funky stuff to the blog!
Let’s crack on with a roundup of events over the past 168 hours.
This week’s news
Gmail went down on Monday evening with only the following as an explanation of the problem:
We’re sorry, but your Google Mail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
It caused an uproar on Twitter and really shows how much we rely on Google for important, business critical services. Luckily the situation was sorted out within a few hours so a good job from Google for keeping the downtime short. On a slightly related note, has anyone noticed how stable Twitter has been of late?
PHP 4 bit the bullet recently with the release of 4.4.9 – farewell my ageing friend! This actually happened last Thursday, but I missed it and think it’s an important development in the programming world. We need to learn to let go of outdated technology and stop prolonging things by our insistence to carry on supporting them for no viable reason other than that people “don’t know how to upgrade” (IE6, I’m looking at you!).
Yahoo’s new location based platform, Fire Eagle opened up to the public on Tuesday. I applied to the beta of this a while back, but it’s great to see it out in the public’s hands. I have to admit I was a little dubious about how useful Fire Eagle would be as it doesn’t do much on it’s own, it’s basically an API that developers can use to store and retrieve location based information. After using it with a few of my iPhone applications I’m officially converted and I reckon this’ll really push the new wave of location based applications we’ll be seeing over the coming years.
Another one from the Yahoo camp this week was the preview release of the user interface library: YUI 3.0. I’m going to put my hand’s up right now and admit that I haven’t spent much time working with YUI, but from what I’ve seen and heard I’m really impressed. I’m even more impressed that Yahoo are happily giving this out for free! Maybe 3.0 will help tear myself away from jQuery and try something new.
Towards the end of this week the internet was victim to a manga revolution, most noticable on Twitter. Avatar creating software from Face Your Manga spread like wildfire across the social network, resulting in profile pictures all over the world being manga-ised.
As you can see, I joined in on the fun. I’d heartily recommend everyone creating a manga version of them-self – let’s take over the world!
Links of the week
Naming variables – Choosing the name for programming variables is always a tricky one. This post hopes outlines the case for more verbose naming of variables
Top 10 CSS table designs – Smashing Magazine are back with an article outlining a variety of ways to display tables with CSS
Use the best available ampersands – It’s no secret that Dan Cederholm loves ampersands. This post lists all the coolest ampersands that come installed as default on most systems
Sexy gradients and a lovely attention to detail. Plus he’s a Mac user so that’s instant kudos with me!
Lessons of the week
I was feeling greedy so learnt two things this week:
Don’t take people’s opinions so personally
Not allowing yourself to make mistakes is one of the worst things you can do if you want to become better at something
I think the second one is most important to me as I always find myself trying to make things perfect before I even start them. All this does is prolongs my realisation that “perfect” doesn’t exist and that I’ll have to go with what I’ve got. Doing something to a decent standard is much better than doing nothing to a perfect standard.
Track of the week
“Assassin” by Muse. I’ve always been a big fan of the Devon boys, but after neglecting them for so long I decided it was about time I hit my catalogue of Muse tracks with a vengeance. Roll on the new album!
Towards the end of this week the internet was victim to a manga revolution, most noticable on Twitter. Avatar creating software from 
