Realmac Software release LittleSnapper/QuickSnapper one-two punch!

Realmac Software has just made LittleSnapper official, bringing this very powerful screen and web snapping app out of beta and into the general public. I've been fortunate to be playing with this app for a week or so, putting it and it's integrated web service, QuickSnapper through their paces. This isn't just you normal screen snapping app. It's a lot more than Skitch (which has never left it's apparent state of perpetual beta) and has many advantages over it (with one or two slight disadvantages). And the web service, not unlike ScrnShots is a robust and attractive place to be and get inspiration.

LittleSnapper allows you to treat a collection of screen and web snaps more like a library, and iPhoto Library if you will, allowing you to tag them, rate them, make notes and annotations, view the source code for web snaps. This gives you not just a library of images, but a tool box of thumbnails complete with source code for studying, origins, ways to note what you liked about it, etc... There really isn't many things to compare it to. It is one of those trend setting apps that has more or less made it's own niche. Certainly a web designers must-have app.

And then there is QuickSnapper... While at first glance, it's not all together different from what other similar scree/web shot sites are doing and on it's own it wouldn't be particularly exciting (except that it looks damn sexy). What set's it apart though is that it was built to support the LittleSnapper app, and not built the other way around. That's where these other screen/web snap sharing site have gone wrong in my books. They've built the site and now in order for you to get your stuff up there, they've made a half baked "utility" that will, if you are lucky, let you upload something... sometimes.

QuickSnapper, on the other hand was built with LittleSnapper integration in mind... exclusively. With the click of a button, LittleSnapper loads up a snap to your account. In turn, with the click of a button on QuickSnapper, you can pull down a shared snap into your own LittleSnapper library... click... that's it! A complete, happy snapping, bio circle of screen and web snapping goodness. Does it get any better than this? Me thinks not!

Oh, and BTW, the screen grab of LittleSnapper? Yeah that was taken with LittleSnapper and is hosted on QuickSnapper...

From pixels to paper, we're getting noticed

There is no greater flattery than to be made an example of so when we were asked some time ago if we would consent to being published in DesignMeltdown's, The Web Designer's Idea Book, I was truly honored.

Today, I received my copy in the mail and was thrilled to find these kind words on page 102 along side a screen shot on page 103:

"A great example of a unified design is the seyDesign site. It has an office theme, and everything flows together perfectly. The corkboard background creates a terrific foundation to tie the site together. It essentially gives the office supplies a place to exist."

Of course this isn't how the site looks today, but for this 2007 iteration of seyDesign.com to be forever immortalized in print is a true sense of accomplishment. All in all, RapidWeaver developers as a whole had a good showing in this book with various sites. Adam from Elixir Graphics has already written about his contributions. and I've heard there are more, I just haven't had time to look through each page yet.

To get yourself a copy of this most excellent web design resource, go to Amazon.com.

To be Strict or not to be

I am about to geek out so bad it will make your eyes roll back and have you snoring before you finish the first paragraph. But to be honest, it's not for you that I write this stuff, it's for posterity and so that I can always look it up in the future, if such a thing should ever happen to me again.

I have finally nailed down an obscure little bug in cataLog (and in turn Acumen) that was causing the second level navigation to jump up about 14 or so pixels when the user used the "Tidy" setting in RapidWeaver and when the user used code or content that tripped the "Tidy" setting into converting the document into a Transitional DOCTYPE. The reason the bug remained so illusive is that this set of circumstances was not immediately clear and is not necessarily something the end user is mindful of.

My repeated testing, assuming that there had to be a difference in the content area or navigation area, kept leading me down the wrong path. One assumes, when "Tidy" is at work, that the HTML of the document is somehow being altered or "tidied up" as it were. And this is where I continued to search extensively but came up empty handed every time. Having exhausted nearly all HTML avenues and having run countless DIFF comparisons I finally turned my attention on the one thing in each document that I knew was different; the DOCTYPE. By simply switching the DOCTYPE from Strict to Transitional, regardless of whether the embodied code was in fact one or the other, I could trigger this odd navigational occurrence.

As much as this was a major breakthrough in the tracking of this bug, I now knew that the game had gotten that much more complex. I was no longer dealing with a bug in my code or the theme as a whole. I was now dealing with what was potentially a rendering bug, or interpretational difference in the two DOCTYPE's, meaning that the bug being presented may very well be an issue in the HTML standard itself. Eeek!

Since I knew that the navigation in question uses inline-block as a value on its display property, and since I am well aware of the lack of widespread support that inline-block has among browsers, I knew that this was probably the place to look. I need to look in the CSS of the second level navigation.

Through considerable trial and error I found that an attempt to display the ancestor, or hidden navigation inline was what was causing the trouble. In DOCTYPE Strict, the combination of ul {display: inline;} and ul ul {dispay:inline-block;} caused the initial ul to have height, despite having tried to suppress it with ul {height:0; margin:0; padding:0;} etc... While in DOCTYPE Transitional, the initial ul rendered correctly (which is to say it didn't render at all and had no height), so the latter ul would shift up to takes it's position. The fix was simply this: ul {margin:0; padding:0;} with no attempt at any display value other that what it would naturally inherit (which would be "block").

So is this in actual fact a bug in the Strict DOCTYPE standard? It's hard to say really. In the making of RapidWeaver themes, we pour a lot of effort and trickery into making things happen the way we want them too. In the case of split navigation we use the same set of code in multiple locations and simply turn on or off the bits we want shown or hidden. This probably is not a typical practice in web design but a necessity in RapidWeaver theme development. Still, why would one DOCTYPE behave differently from another where such a small property in concerned?

seyDoggy is back in the office.

We are back from or little vacay, and back on the horse, if you will, working through a pile of emails and such. On our agenda this week is to address a few bug issues in some of our RapidWeaver themes, namely a footer issue in wideNas, and a couple of mystery bugs that occasionally rear their head in cataLog and Acumen. We should have all of these addressed this week with their respective update installers ready for download.

And as always we are ever moving forward and onward with the theme developments and ideas. We have quite a list of them to get through over the next year or so so you can be sure to see one or two new themes from us every month. Yes that is an ambitious plan, but this is what we do after all, we might very well be the only full time RapidWeaver theme developers now who do nothing else.

And speaking of RapidWeaver, did you notice that RapidWeaver 4.2 has been released? Yes indeed. I have not yet tried it myself, but I have downloaded it and will be getting into it shortly. Learn more about it's release here.

We're off to London!

I'm off to the UK for a bit of a holiday. We take flight at 9:40 pm October 23 (that's today) and will be gone for about 10 days. We'll be back to answer your support questions on the week of November 1st. Remember that if you have any major concerns between now and then you can always try posting them the the Realmac Software forum and I am sure one of the kind and knowledgeable folks there will help straighten you out enough until I get back.

We'll try to keep you posted on our daily outings. That's likely to occur on Twitter so if your inclined to keep tabs on the leisure time of a theme developer geek like myself then you can come follow me.

Anyhow, stay safe and we'll catch in a few days time.

RapidWeaver's %pathto%, TextMate can help

It's no secret that many RapidWeaver developers are quite close and help each other out quite a bit. It's also no secret that in order to develop RapidWeaver themes you need to use some pretty powerful tools. Some of use TextMate, the most powerful one in my opinion. There are so many ways to extend TextMate's features to streamline our workflow, one of the simplest is to edit existing bundles by tweaking their commands or snippets or making a command or snippet of your own.

So back to the RapidWeaver developers... recently, Giuseppe at Bonsai Studio shared a TextMate snippet with the other developers. A snippet that would write a very specific RapidWeaver string that we tend to use quite a bit:

<script rel="stylesheet" type="text/css | text/javascript" src="%pathto(script/filename.file)"%></script>

I jumped all over this because as you may know I am a huge TextMate nut. However, the snippet didn't quite run the way I wanted. So I set about to make it the way that was most useful to me. The main difference being that mine would highlight the file path when activated making it an even faster shortcut for me.

But I didn't stop there. I wanted one that would handle <link> as well. So the result is to snippets that quickly write a <script> string and <link> string that include the %pathto% syntax.

So if you are a heavy TextMate user and happen to develop RapidWeaver themes then you might be interested in these two snippets.

seyDoggy teams up with DEVi8.design

It's always a sign of progress when a company forges new relationships and we are not the exception to that rule. A couple of months ago, seyDoggy and DEVi8.design started talks to bring a vision of DEVi8.design to life. A little over a month ago a deal was inked to turn a concept design of DEVi8.design's Chris Cifonie into a full featured RapidWeaver theme.

Today, the fruits of that collaboration were launched in the form of a seyDesign RapidWeaver theme called DEViANT Pro. Thanks to Chris' vision and our technical know-how we have managed to make a RapidWeaver theme unlike many out there. It's clean, simple and open feeling yet under the hood lies a powerful beast capable of changing to your every whim.

The biggest struggle in making the original vision a reality was making the layout "soft" or flexible, while still maintaining a graphically driven feel. This was done with the use of several transparency tricks and background colors combined to give maximum control with graphic polish. The end result is a theme with width variations, full color control and a handful of other great features that should please the most particular RapidWeaver users. Not content to stop there, we found a great opportunity to take this theme one step further and add 3 tier split navigation to this already awesome theme.

All in all we couldn't have been happier with the outcome of this theme and I must say it was a pleasure to work with Chris Cifonie on this project. His designs are a treat bring to life.

Old Friends on New Horizons

In late 2005 Chris Pavlicek (of Varsis Studio) and I started talking about collaborating on RapidWeaver themes. We both had something to offer the other; Chris with his unmistakable design style and willingness crack any code and me with my promotional skills and desire to make clean organized and effective code. By mid 2006 we were putting out some pretty revolutionary stuff.

After 3 years and many themes later, Chris and I are talking again. This time it's about me taking over his theme library, the one he has (or used to have) at Varsis Studio. Chris is really focusing hard on his RapidWeaver plugins which as any software developer will tell is very demanding on his time. Before the new seyDesign.com was done we were talking about this and working out the small details.

Today we're starting to see the results of all that talking. I was able to release Varsis Studio Fade on seyDesign.com. Fade is a RapidWeaver theme that Chris did up for a pro developer bundle back in January of 2007. I've spent a few weeks on it, gutting from the inside out and filling it full of new features.

The rest will follow over time, interspersed with a few seyDesign originals, and who knows, maybe even another Varsis/seyDoggy collaboration.

Join the March, kill IE6

Designers have talked about it for years, while some big names in the industry have already taken action, even the little guys are taking a stand... the message has never been more clear; it's time to stop supporting IE6.

So that's when I come across IE Death March, a site calling for action against the support of Internet Explorer 6, a 7 year old browser. In this post, site creator, M. Dave Auayan urges web designers and developers to cease support for IE6 by March 2009.

In that time, we will be taking a long hard look at browser stats to see if the numbers support this action. The last thing we want to do is alienate a large section of people, but we also don't want to be continually held back in our design visions simply because a nearly decade old browser can't keep up. I know one thing for sure, IE6 support will become a billed-for feature.

My top 5 web development tools

As a small web design outfit in Kitchener I have to be particular about my development workflow and the tools I use. I can't afford to continually invest in new wonder apps that do a bit of this and a bit of that, and do this thing well but not that thing, but this other app does that thing but not... well, you get the point. So I have to really focus on what makes me money and will continue to make me money going forward. So I have compiled a list of apps that make web design and development on the Mac possible for me.

1. TextMate

   There is text editors and then there is TextMate. Renowned for it's unparalleled abilities to handle a seemingly limitless set of languages, TextMate makes writing ANY code fast and painless. I use TextMate for every bit of text editing that I do, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, SQL and javascript, just to name a few. It's not free but you will agree that there is no other text editor that comes close to TextMate.

2. MAMP

   If you are already a pro web designer you are already aware of the need for a live server environment to test out whatever systems you happen to be developing at the time. You also no that uploading to a remote location is time consuming and working SFTP, SSH or WEBDAV can be unstable. You best bet is to have a local server, but if that is not within your means (or know-how) then you need to look at MAMP. MAMP is a nicely bundled package of MySQL, Apache and PHP that allows you to run a web server safely on your own computer. Though Apache and PHP are already included on you Mac, they tend not be as current as those found in MAMP. MAMP also allows you to quickly change your servers from one project to another to keep your perceived root URL common across all your local web work. The best part is, the only version of MAMP you really need to get this done is free.

3. Safari

   Don't hate for this. I don't mind FireFox and I think FireBug is great but to be honest I never use either one on a regular basis. Safari, on the other hand, in an indispensable tool for me. By enabling the developer features of Safari I am able to peer into the DOM for those tricky to view javascript behaviors and see what is really happening on the client side. Safari, of course, is include with your Mac operating system.

4. PhotoShop

   What is web design without the design? There are a ton of free options out there, but lets be honest, there is no substitute for the real thing when it comes to mocking up proposed web layouts. I agree PhotoShop is outrageously priced but in the grand scheme of things, if you are getting paid for your work then the cost of this app is nothing more than a tax write-off at the end of the year.

5. Parallels

   You can dispute me on this choice because I honestly have no experience with anything else. The work involved in getting 3 valid VM's working for the purpose of testing 3 related and equally crappy browsers, IE6, IE7 and IE8, leaves me with no interesting in going through anything remotely similar in the near future. But my point is this, you need to have a way of testing Microsoft's Internet Explorer, version 6, 7 and 8 and whether you do this via Parallels or VMware is of little consequence to me. It needs to get done all the same. The cost of each is comparable to the other.

If the above list is all you ever invest in for your web design and development career then you are in excellent shape.

The beauty of RapidWeaver meets the power of TextMate

As a web designer and fairly huge Mac geek I am one of those guys who gets rather passionate about certain apps and workflows, etc... Those of you who have read one or more entries on nutMac.com, a Mac workflow blog I write for on occasion, you'll know that I am a big fan of Path Finder, Quicksilver and TextMate, three apps that rule my world. Recently, suspecting I wasn't tapping into TextMates full potential, I purchased TextMate - Power Editing for the Mac by James Edward Gray II. Well I was correct in my suspicions, since by chapter 3 I had already learned so many more tricks that I couldn't wait to get back into coding just to put what I had learned to the test.

One trick I had always been vaguely aware of, and apparently by name only, was the "Edit in TextMate" feature. I had looked at activating this at one time but had decided it was terribly complex for something I could just set of a Quicksilver trigger for (which I did, or so I thought). Having just skimmed over what this "Edit in TextMate" feature was, I figured this was just some short hand trick for forcing various files types and folders to open in TextMate as opposed to their default application. In fact, this is a power user feature that allows TextMate to hijack the editing fields of other apps (the search field in Google home page, or in this case, the blog post field of Blogger, my Fluid SSB app).

Here is where the little light bulb went off in my head... Could this be used in RapidWeaver? Now let me start by saying I LOVE RapidWeaver, I really do, but when it comes to HTML code editing, which I do on a continual basis, I can't stand not having my TextMate features and functions handy. I have always found myself writing code in a dummy TextMate file, then copying and pasting it into RapidWeaver. And when I would have to make a change I would copy the code into the dummy TextMate file and so on until I was satisfied with the results.

So to make a long story short, after years of using TextMate, I finally enabled the "Edit in TextMate" feature and tried to invoke it in a RapidWeaver project and POOF! It works like a charm! Now I can place my caret in any RapidWeaver field (main content, sidebar, titles, custom fields, etc...) in RapidWeaver and type ctrl-cmd-E and edit the contents of that field with the power of TextMate.

Can't do nuttin' for ya man!

This is about as dorky as I'll ever get... erm... well anyway, back in the day when I was about 15 or so (19 years ago *sigh*) and heavy into the budding gangsta rap scene, I went to a club in Waterloo, Ontario called The Twist (now Revolution night club) to see this guy, Chuck D and Public Enemy. Though it's all a part of my past now I still like to break out the odd P.E. track and get down wit' mu bad self (as bad as a 34 year old white guy from Kitchener, Ontario is going to get I guess).

To this day me and an OLD buddy of mine will, without reason, randomly email each other once or twice a year with snippets or full course lyrics to P.E. tracks we listened to in the days gone by. Today a Flavor Flav track came up in my iTunes, Can't do nuttin' for ya man, and I set out to get the lyrics and send them off to my buddy. That's when I discovered on the front page of the Public Enemy website, Chuck D using a mac!

Erm... yeah... there is really no connection I am trying to make here... just that he was my hero growing up... I use a Mac... he uses a Mac... OK, shut up already, I KNOW I'm a dork. You don't HAVE to rub it in! :)

cataLog, RapidWeaver and good timing

Wow! I am blown away by the response to our latest theme cataLog Pro. In what I think is both a case of timing and luck, cataLog Pro for RapidWeaver 4.0 has surpassed any other theme in our library for initial launch numbers. Timing being a factor for a few reasons:

• RapidWeaver 4.0 is fresh in peoples minds
• There is a lot of new activity and 3rd party development surrounding RapidWeaver
• There are a great deal of new users
• RapidWeaver is fast approaching critical mass

And as always, luck can always play a big part in these things. Some themes I've made in the past have been the right idea at the wrong time and have picked up more and more as time went on. cataLog Pro seems to be a case of the right idea at the right time. This, apparently, was a theme that fit the bill for so many people with a need for it at that moment. I've received countess emails to that effect, "This is exactly what I needed for a project I was starting."

With RapidWeaver really taking off as it has off late, I really ought to do another talk at WatRMUG (Waterloo Regional Mac Users Group) and reintroduce the Kitchener-Waterloo users to website building, the RapidWeaver way.

seyDesign 2008 made the cut

With all the commotion as of late it must have totally passed me by that seyDesign.com got a permanent listing on DesignSnack (probably a few weeks back now). It's always an honor to appear on sites like these, especially this one, because it helps you gauge your designs and see if you are really making the grade. Go ahead and give it a vote if you like seyDesign 2008.

I think it was more than a year ago now when the 2007 version of seyDesign got listed on this site so it's nice to see that my designs are still on track and hopefully improving in the public eye. And speaking of seyDesign 2007, that site is actually appearing in Design Meltdown's The Web Designers Idea Book, due out in October, which is just about the biggest honor any web designer can have bestowed upon him. Hopefully the site appears in a good light and not as an example of what not to do, lol. So if you are a seyDoggy or seyDesign fan, or just a fan of great web design, head over to the Design Meltdown store and pre-order your copy.

Enter The Web

I took a support call from a customer one time and it came up in conversation that he uses WYSIWYG web editors such as RapidWeaver or DreamWeaver to visualize what he is doing with his web designs. He then asked me what I use... "Nothing," I replied, "not until I am done, pretty much."

Baffled, he asked how I could possibly grasp what was going on without seeing it in from of me. I proceeded to compare it to a musician reading sheet music. The musician doesn't need to here the music to know what it will sound like when performed off the sheet. That analogy did nothing form him.

I then drew the comparison to The Matrix, "You know when there are watching all those characters fall on the screen, but to them it paints a picture of what's going on in there? It's the same thing for me (and most web designers I imagine)."

"Wow!" he says, "So you can just see it in your head?"

"Yup."

"Cool," he says, contemplatively, "can you fly too?"

Sadly no.

seyDoggy and RapidWeaver, a new approach

What am I up to right now? Doing what I love doing best; creating new works of wonder for a platform... erm... designing themes for RapidWeaver.

I know I am only speaking to 5-8% of the general population when I say this, but if you are one of the lucky ones who owns a mac, then you owe it to yourself to at least check out RapidWeaver. It's a great, do-it-yourself web authoring app that is insanely extensible by virtue of its proud and dedicated 3rd party development community (of which I am a long standing member).

I have been developing RapidWeaver themes on a professional level for nearly three years. In that time themes have gotten more and more advanced with each new version of the platform. Cric from Rapid-Ideas was the first theme developer to really take themes to that new level of versatility years back when he introduced the first theme boasting some 500,000 variations. Pretty soon we all followed suit.

Before long though (myself included), we all had products that would take a month or more to complete, nearly as long to update, would upload dozens of css files, a multitude of images and scripts, complex themes mean more support... themes and the site they make were getting slow and fat! The mental taxation on the end user swimming in a sea of variation to make a site that only uses 10% of a themes ability is immeasurable. And it goes without saying that this method of theme development is getting costly, especially if a new theme is a dud.

For the last few years I have been looking at ways and approaches to trim the fat. #1 priority was to eliminate support. While developing themes for THEME WEAVER I really looked at streamlining their approach so that support would be nearly non existent. I found that fewer options in a RapidWeaver theme were the key. This was hard to adopt in my own, already established theme library, so I looked at ways of simplifying the user experience.

To do this I started to employ javascript to do some of the dirty work for the end user; rounding corners, adding drop shadows, etc... But with this came compatibility issues with other 3rd party RapidWeaver products, namely plugins that used javascript as well. Though things were getting easier for the end user, for me? not so much. For the last year I have been enjoying great success with very little support; a stellar combination, but on the back of an aging library of themes. I needed new products, ones that I think are hot, designed the way I want them, easy to use, require little support, lightweight, cost effective to make...

That's when the lightbulb went off. I want to make themes for me, a designer... I want to make designer themes! And so a new line was born at seyDesign.com; Designer themes, a new line of RapidWeaver themes that are just good looking and nothing else. Not ground breaking, not revolutionary, not stuffed with feature over feature... just hot themes!

Yesterday saw the release of the first RapidWeaver theme born of my new approach; Tagg.

iPhone 3G, Apple App Store and FlipSide5

With the launch of both the new iPhone 3G and the new Apple App Store, things around seyDoggy have been a little harried trying to cross all our t's and dot all of our i's in preparation for the big day. Everything went smooth without so much as a hiccup. I had to pull a couple of all nighters but all for the good of the site.

So it would appear that both FlipSide5 and Michael Sanford are leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Revered in many articles as the man and company to watch simply for the passion they pour into their products, one thing is clear, the level of commitment is unparalleled (and I speak from experience).

Since everything went fairly smooth, I thought I would take a moment to breeze past my local Rogers store on Ottawa and Fischer-Hallman in Kitchener and scope out the iPhone lines. If the crowds were gone I would have stopped in to grab a 3G. No such luck as the crowd was camped out in lawn chairs and been since the store opened hours before.

It's the whole package that counts.

Sometimes it's not the big things that make all the difference in how a company is perceived as either professional or amateur. Sometimes it's the littlest, nearly overlooked details. A perfect example of this is how a DMG is put together, or how an installer is skinned. This is how I came to find myself killing a few hours today by rebuilding all of the most recent update installers for seyDesign theme updates.

Some time ago, seyDesign.com became the first RapidWeaver theme developer to use update installers to deliver their theme updates in the form of an application that installs only the changed components as opposed to distributing the entire patched theme to end users. seyDesign.com recognized that many users, having had made many modifications to their themes, or having added bits and bobs to their themes innards, did not appreciate all of the work involved in returning their theme to their custom state. Update installers avoids many of these troubles, most of the time.

Being an early pioneer of these practices I hadn't taken a whole lot of time to learn how to make this process my own, instead, treating it as a utility, not another opportunity to spread corporate identity. Since the seyDesign 2008 relaunch, however, I knew that the time was now to make things pretty, to follow suit with the look of the site.

Next up I'll be rebuilding all of the theme DMG's to look just as good.

We finally launched seyDesign 2008

Did you hear that? That was the sigh of relief heard around the world. Why? Because I just launched the biggest site porting I have ever done in my career with nothing more than a few typo's to sully to good name of seyDoggy. In case you've missed the buzz, I am talking about the LONG awaited seyDesign 2008 relaunch, a rather large on-line store and resource that sells RapidWeaver themes.

On the surface it doesn't look like such a big deal right? But underneath it all is a site that consists of more than 280 pages which include product write-ups, downloads, support areas, contact forms and store pages. Nearly all of this was rebuilt from the ground up; new copy, new graphics, new style, new typography... a ton of work! But the most challenging in any site relaunch is not have any broken or orphaned links, files or downloads. So far I have only managed one broken download link. Not bad out of 280+ pages.

Now that I have this monster behind me, it's time to celebrate the Canada Day long weekend the best I know how... CAMPING! I will catch you all again on July 2. w00t!

Digg this! | Vote for it!

SproutCore; open source meets Apple and web apps

When Apple assimilates... er... I mean hires developers, you often wonder what will come of it. Will a shinning star be snuffed out, buried, forgotten or stymied? Or will great things happen, pushing the envelope that contains the Apple-sphere, making the hardware giant showcase a new facet of the... erm... once narrow minded, acutely focussed business model.

One could wonder such things when Apple hired Charles Jolley, Sproutit founder and Mailroom developer, to re-architect their .Mac side of things. We have seen new things pop up in .Mac that were surely the influence of a Charles Jolley way of thinking; the photo gallery and what-not. And then comes MobileMe, a very rich internet application that defies all that we have known about web apps; they don't have to suck. Surely this is the work of Charles Jolley. So what is to become of this seemingly fresh way of doing RIA's?

That's when Apple (and a few friends) drop SproutCore on us, an open standard platform for building web apps that look and feel like desktop apps... seriously... they do. But let me restate the cool part, open standard platform. That's right, this is not Flash or SilverLight or even Java, this is open web standards such as HTML, CSS and Javascript with a bit of Cocoa inspiration.

Finally a javascript framework that I can get behind and one that I can sit down and take a crack at, knowing that a) it's open and b) it has the support of a few heavy hitters behind it.

seyDesign 2008 is nearly complete

It has been months in the making and may be a week or two longer, but seyDesign 2008 is definitely nearing completion. All that's left to do is tie up some of the loose ends, do some browser testing, write a press release or two...

So in working on seyDesign 2008, I have been able to take a retrospective look at seyDesign, seyDoggy and where things have gone with both branches in the past 3 years. One thing has really struck me; Kitchener-Waterloo is well known for it's tech-sector (thanks in part to R.I.M and our incredible universities), Kitchener-Waterloo has a lot of web designers and web developers and Kitchener-Waterloo has a reasonably good Mac to PC ratio (enough to support both an independent reseller and a Best Buy Apple store)... So why is it then, that I remain the only RapidWeaver theme developer in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and only one of three in all of Canada?

RapidWeaver is no flash in the pan; it's here to stay. The same is true of Macs. I would welcome the some local camaraderie in this world of RapidWeaver theme development and maybe some day it will happen. If you are a web designer, a Mac user, have heard of RapidWeaver and hail from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, why not drop me a line. There is so much to talk about

FlipSide5 at WWDC '08

Well the reports abound from friends and colleagues who were fortunate enough to be at Apples WWDC this year; FlipSide5 games, graphics and references can be seen everywhere! This is a pretty big honor for seyDoggy, a little web and graphic design based in Kitchener-Waterloo, to have their work meandering through the largest Apple conference in history, seen in demonstrations, talked about amongst developer elite, given nods to by VERY important people, and seen in the top row of the Graphics State of the Union when presenters started in about the web app success!

Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to take any thunder from Michael Sanford and FlipSide5, where all due credit lies for the vision and ambition of the company. I am just glad that I was able to play a part in shaping the face of a company that is set to really take off. It just really gives me warm fuzzies inside.

FlipSide5 got Slurped

I hate to keep going on about FlipSide5, but when I have a winner I just keep quiet about it. One of the biggest honors for me as a small town Kitchener web designer is to see my work in the showcase sites. So far, FlipSide5 has appeared in DesignSnack, CSS Mania, Most Inspired, and now, my favorite showcase of all, The Daily Slurp.

What I like best about The Daily Slurp is that designers have little say in what gets listed there. You can submit a site for review (which I've never done) but from all accounts it does little good. The Daily Slurp just happens to sites for whatever reason. The good ones just get found.

FlipSide5 awarded place in DesignSnack

What an honor this morning to find that our submission of the FlipSide5 website to DesignSnacks website showcase, has received enough positive feedback to earn a spot in the permanent showcase. Currently you can find the FlipSide5 site on the front page of DesignSnack or you can have a look at the FlipSide5 submission permalink.

FlipSide5 games smash Apple charts!

Just barely cooled off from the initial site launch a little over 24 hours ago, I am greeted this morning by the news from Michael Sanford of FlipSide5, Inc. that Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch, two games I designed all of the artwork for, have just hit the top of the charts over at Apple.

These two games not only take the #1 and #2 spots in the web apps games category (*update), but Tic-Tac-Touch is the one and only featured game! In addition, Tic-Tac-Touch again is #1 across all web app categories. But the insanity doesn't stop there; this is the only time I have ever seen an app (Tic-Tac-Touch in this case) ever sit in the featured position in "Most Recent", "Most Popular", "Alphabetical", and "Staff Picks"!

Batten down the hatches maties! Thar be a rogue wave coming!

*UPDATE:

As of May 29th, Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch have taken the #1 and #2 spots as Top Web Apps (tab on right hand side). For a screen shot of this, go to my flickr page.

FlipSide5, Inc. to Deliver World-Class iPhone Games

Popular games, Tic-Tac-Touch, 4InARow touch, to go from web apps to iPhone apps.

I am so stoked to finally be telling you about a site, client and product that I have poured my heart and soul into for the last little while; FlipSide5!

FlipSide5, Inc., makers of the popular web editions of Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch are now launching versions to download and install, allowing players to own these games on their iPhone and iPod Touch. Both these products, Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch, are designed to be amazingly "simple, fun and wow", refreshing these ageless classics for today's generation.

Back in November 2007, Michael Sanford, President of the newly formed FlipSide5, Inc. created the now popular iPhone web apps, Tic-Tac-Touch Web Edition and 4InARow touch Web Edition. There have been over 1,500,000 games played so far and FlipSide5 has received thousands of emails from their users requesting native versions of these games, available to download and install on the iPhone and iPod touch.

“Why not take something ordinary and make it into something extraordinary,” says Sanford. “Everyone plays these classic games already, so popularity is guaranteed.”

“Great for iPhone. One player or two." said one 4InARow toualmost every weekend. This is a great way to pass the time.”

FlipSide5, Inc. was founded with one thing in mind; world-class quality. That mission carries through to their work with Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch for the iPhone and iPod Touch, using compelling technologies like multi-touch, accelerometer support and sound. Play against opponents online via EDGE, WiFi or 3G, taunting or encouraging their efforts with instant messages. Also, using the built-in iPhone location technology, see the country where your online opponent is located. Instant messages are translated automatically to your opponent's native language (supported languages only). Many more features are listed on FlipSide5's website.

About FlipSide5, Inc.

In 1997, Michael Sanford co-founded a Java development tools company, InLine Software. After selling his share in 2001, Michael was on the lookout for projects he could pour his heart and soul into. Six years later in November 2007, Sanford founded FlipSide5, Inc. in Reston, Virginia. The goal is to bring "simple, fun and wow" software to iPhone/iPod touch users.

“My 6 year old son would say ʻDad, Iʼm boredʼ, so I developed Tic-Tac-Touch for him. Millions of web hits later, FlipSide5 was born,” says Sanford, FlipSide5, Inc. Founder and President. “We are very excited about our first two offerings, Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch, through the iTunes App Store. We are even more excited about what we have in our pipeline”.

Pricing and Availability

Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch will be available when the iTunes App Store is available; summer 2008. Tic-Tac-Touch is priced at a very low price of $0.99 USD. 4InARow touch is priced at only $4.99 USD. Free Web Editions are available immediately for both Tic-Tac-Touch and 4InARow touch from the website:

Tic-Tac-Touch FREE Web Edition and Screenshots
www.flipside5.com/products/tictactouch

4InARow touch FREE Web Edition and Screenshots
www.flipside5.com/products/fourinarowtouch

Welcome to seyDoggy 2008

Well I have great news and almost great news. As you can see, seyDoggy 2008 is alive and kicking (that's the great news)! It's been totally rebuilt from the ground up, as you can see, and has been streamlined somewhat, to reflect the usage patters that I saw come across the site over the last few years. I've cut away a lot of the cruft and trimmed it down to the stuff you seem to care about most; the blog and the portfolio.

Here's the almost great news; I was hoping to tell you about a great new site we made for a great new client of ours who makes great products for the iPhone, but... erm... that nasty old NDA got in the way. This time it was Apple vs. my client and not me (phew!) but just the same the site launch has been put on hold until the legal bit and bobs can be sorted out with Apple. It is great news none the less because I am just so please with it's out come that I just can't wait for you to see it. Hopefully the coming week will shine some new hope on a release date.

So let me know what you think of the new seyDoggy.com!

I'm gonna pull some Dog-FU on yo a$$!

seyDoggy is about to undergo a metamorphosis, a coming of age if you will. I am tired of making great websites for everybody, and not having a great one of my own.

In the next day or so you will witness the new seyDoggy.com in all it's glory, accompanied by the news of a great new site that that we made for a client who is very involved in iPhone applications. It will be pretty big news and you won't want to miss it.

Whoa back! Change of plans.

Yeah, yeah, you've been waiting patiently for seyDesign 2008 to be launched and I have told you a few times that real clients keep getting in the way (surely I jest). Well a rather important client has been consuming all my time for the last month or so and in lieu of the results of this clients website we've decided that seyDoggy.com was LONG overdue for a slight tweaking.

So please hang tight for a bit while we get ready to unveil the all new seyDoggy.com. And have no fear, seyDesign 2008 will surely follow... soon... I hope.

Sneak peek #5

So what the FRIG is the hold up? I am a cow to the paying gigs, that's what! It's sad to say but I rarely get time to continue with this side project. It's good to be busy I guess. It means I am doing my job right.

So this sneak peek is a dead giveaway to what the project actually is (not that there was much wonder anyhow). I have six more pages to get through, more or less, and I am done! Let's cross our fingers for a summer roll out?

Center... float... IE... they don't mix!

I am about to drop a metric butt-load of geekiness on you right now. I have had a LONG standing issue with certain types of navigation menus that float list items (still block elements) in order to apply graphics and dimension to anchors that are made block level (which is inline by default)... the problem lies in positioning the list itself. Because the list items have been floated the entire list itself wants to float that way and no amount of dickering with the code can convince it otherwise.

What I would really like to do is center that list and for years this has baffled me. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of styles of navigation that can be centered, but this very specific one, one which allows for all sorts of graphical hover states, active states, etc... I have spent hours trying to solve this puzzle.

Out of nothing more than absolute desperation I thought to try applying inline-block to the <ul>. inline-block, however is so poorly supported that it has made it a nearly useless function of CSS 2.1, so applying it here would have done little more than satisfy my curiosity. And what would you know... it worked... In Safari!

Well I am that much closer but there are two more issues now; Firefox has nothing more than wet dreams about supporting inline-block and IE only supports inline-block on inline elements (which a list is not). The fix for Firefox is not all that tough since they have a proprietary display state, display: -moz-inline-box; that works... sometimes. IE, on the other hand, had me stumped. That's when I found this website who credits the genius of this guy for coming up with a brilliant solution.

I won't get into the full course meal here (you can read that for yourself) but what it came down to for me was this;

• overcome IE's has-layout bug which can be done with either height: 1%; or the proprietary zoom: 1; (I had to use the latter since the former defeated the layout I needed in this instance)
• Next I needed to tell IE that the block element that I turned into inline-block was actually inline... confusing? Anyhow, not wanting anyone else to see this I have to precede it with a star, like this *display:inline;
• so the end result was this:
  

  ul#myList {
   display: -moz-inline-box; /* for Mozilla*/
   display: inline-block; /* for real browsers */
   zoom:1; /* fix for IE has-layout bug */
   *display:inline; /* IE thinks a block is inline */
  }

So what does this mean for me? Well I have a few themes out there that will get an update soon to take advantage of my new centering ability and a few that I have been holding off making because of the former limitation. And one theme that is about to be released... :)

Here lies the empty shell of a blog post that once was

This was the place where I happily showed you a website for a big company that I was contracted to write code for on behalf of another company. One company (which one, I don't know) failed to notify me of any NDA's or otherwise useful contract agreements that may have made light of the fact that I may not promote myself as a "provider" of the bigger of the two companies (for which I feel I did not do).

There are two things at play here:

1. Uh... yes I can. In Canada we live through intolerable copyright laws that do nothing to protect the original author or creator of creative works and instead, protect he/she who commissions that work. However, there is a nifty little piece of the copyright law that covers the moral rights to said works that, under most normal circumstances, entitles the author or creator of said work to be associated with their work if they so choose:

   from Kerr and Nadeau; Barristors and Solicitors, Patent and Trademark agents:
   
   "Moral rights are closely related to copyright, and are also protected under Canadian law. These provide the author of a work with the right to the integrity of the work, and the right, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with the work as its author by name or pseudonym, as well as the right to remain anonymous. Moral rights may be waived by the author, but such waiver must be express. It is important to remember that an assignment of copyright does not, in and of itself, waive moral rights."

2. And that brings me to my second point. Never take on work without a written contract. I took down this blog post for the good of the business relationship, but I didn't have to. I didn't have a contract, nor was I informed of inclusion in a contract between company A and company B, that waived any such rights so my own moral rights are still intact.

What is the lesson? Never chew gum while eating rice; it does nothing for the flavour.

Sneak peek #4 and more

So the bulk of all of the boring work is done on this project. Now I am getting into the super sexy stuff, the money making stuff... I must say that even the boring stuff looks goooood though.

And also...

So I have another project due out this Tuesday. I can't give any details but it's for a heavy hitting client of PUMP Communications. It should have been a fairly simple one but there were a few hang-ups in the beginning (design by committee sort of hang-ups) and in the end I don't think anyone was taking me seriously when I said the French translation might take up to a week or more (which it did).

Anyhow, with a few days to spare I managed to get the project up and fine tuned ready for release this coming Tuesday. Look for more on it then.

But wait...

Some time ago I worked for a lab in the automative industry and to shorten the story some, they recently needed a website, a place to download some of their docs. So in record time (less than a day) I pumped out this site. I mean it's not ground breaking but it's better than a kick in the ass for a day's worth of coding.

Sneak peek #3

I just wrote a new php function today that looks at the directory of the current page, extracts each folder name and then parse that information into a functioning breadcrumb trail. It's not as truncated as I would like it to be, but I just can't wrap my head around the problem enough to make the script smaller than it is.

So far everything but the header images on this new project is served up dynamically depending on the page you are on. But the really sexy part of this whole project is the skin! This thing is put together like... WOW! I can't wait to show you more.

Sneak peek #2

Oh it's coming along so nice. Did I say Easter? Well, yeah, I guess that's probably a realistic goal, but I just feel at times that it could be so much sooner. If it weren't for all these paying gigs getting in the way... hehe.

So I'm stoked about ExpanDrive, have you heard of it?Man, this little app is a gem! I am going to get more in depth on NutMac but I can tell you this much; developing php and mysql on a local machine is all fine and good, but there comes a time when you just have to move it live. ExpanDrive is making continued live development a dream, like it's still local, but with the power of the web server behind it.

Did I say Easter?

Sneak peek #1

I have an ever so slight break in my schedule where I find I have an hour or two of free time on hand and as the saying goes, idle hands make great websites... er... or something like that.

Anyhow, I have got something completely awesome in the works, a little some-some for me, a little self love. So I thought I would start a little easter egg hunt (since that's probably around the time I'll finish, LOL), and give you a little piece of the puzzle every week or so, depending on what I get done in that time.

So here is the first little nugget for you. It's not much yet, but let me tell it's part of a bigger, cooler whole.

I'm still alive

It’s been a while hasn’t it? I’ve just come off from making a run of RapidWeaver themes for THEME WEAVER; THEME 007, THEME 008, THEME 009 and THEME 010, all of which I am extremely proud of (but THEME 010 is my favourite). I’ve also been busy updating my own edGy, viEw and 2hadow (not quite ready yet).

So what’s kept me busy in my… erm… off time? I have a few things on the go. Namely RapidWeaved.com which has turned out well. It’s the RapidWeaver showcase site that lets anyone with a RapidWeaver site to show off their stuff. It’s kind of a throwback to the old RapidWeaver showcase that was once on their site but in recent time, have opted to hand select only the very finest examples (in their opinion) to post instead.

And it’s that very project that has really spun the old cogs in my noodle. That site is a database right? Why then am I treating it like a blog when it should be handled by some sort of content management system with a database and some back-end programing to control it all? Well… because I don’t know a lick of SQL and can only struggle through enough PHP to parse a few RSS feeds. So I figured enough is enough, I’ve been wanting to learn some back-end web programming and I have now set off to do it. I am currently making my through the SitePoint book Build You Own Database Driven Website using PHP and MySQL by Kevin Yank. I am riveted. No really, I love this sort of reading.

So what about Objective-C then? You might recall that I wanted to give Chris a hand in the whole RapidWeaver plugin market and I did read the book, Programming in Objective-C, but then I saw the support involved through Chris’s eyes. Honestly, it’s not the sort of thing that a guy with a full fledged theme store like mine should get into. Don’t get me wrong, I want to some day. And Chris has definitely shown my that it’s a worth while endeavor, but it’s the sort of thing where I would have to sell my theme store before I got knee deep into plugins. I am not ready for that.

Who knows though, if all goes well with the PHP and MySQL, there are certainly a lot of things I could see making for RapidWeaver that have been missing for some time.

Running web apps closer to home

What do these seven little sexy icons have to do with each other? I made each and every one of them. I have a new obsession called "turning your web apps in native apps" made possible by Fluid, a nifty little app by my fav developer, Todd Ditchendorf (who also makes BlogMate and is my hero because of it, as well as iZoom, to name a few).

So I won't get into too much detail about it but Fluid basically takes your favorite web services and makes a native app out of them. I countless reasons for wanting to do this which I am sure you'll see me get into on nutMac.com.