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.