Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! A lot has happened since I last made a blog post. I got laid off at my old job, but I found a much cooler job, and in record time! (Only out of work 2 months! Woot!!!) I now get to build sites for Atom.com, part of Viacom and MTV Networks. They even sent me to Comic-Con this year!  We’re doing lots of cool stuff, and starting to plan even cooler stuff for the coming year, so it should be a whole lot of fun!

I probably would have found this site ages ago if Google-ing for “free fonts” actually brought up sites with free fonts instead of bait-and-switch poser sites. But thanks to a recent post on Ajaxian, I know have an excellent source for open source fonts to use in whatever project I want: Font Squirrel!  I can embed it with sIFR or canvas-text, I can give them to everyone in my Thursday night typography circle, and I can create header images until the cows come home.  No more looking over my shoulder wondering if that assassin from the all-powerful font maker lobby has finally tracked me down.  (I think I lost him in Munich.)

http://www.fontsquirrel.com

Viva la open source!

The new 2.7.1 release of WordPress was just too good to pass up.  I had installed it on another clients site (soon to be launched), and just fell in love with the new interface.  It’s very snazzy, I love the auto-updates, and the layout is fab! But there’s one thing that was still missing… themed login pages.

If you follow the mailing list and the TRAC ticket, you’ll know that they’re looking for a more extensive patch for themed login pages, where as I’ve taken a more minimalist approach.  Both approaches are valid with their own pros and cons, but given my choices between upgrading without a themed login, waiting until I found time to create a “more extensive” patch (I’m an impatient person), and just updating the old patch, I chose the third option.  The blog you see before you is the result!

If you already have a themed login page from the previous patch, all you need to do is update to WordPress 2.7.1 and apply the new patch.  Your existing login.php theme template will work just fine with the new patch.  The new patch is attached to the TRAC ticket linked to above.  Feedback is welcome, as always!

Original Themed Login post

Update – I’ve updated the patch so that you no longer include error messages in the custom login_header() function.  This means they can’t be “forgotten” by the template designer.  Unfortunately, it also means that your existing login.php template won’t work.  Luckily, making it work is as simple as removing all references to login_header_error() in your template.  A new sample login.php has been posted on the TRAC ticket.

Update 2 - For those of you who have difficulty patching, here’s the patched file for 2.7.1.

WordPress Themable Login patched for 2.7.1

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I have joined the legions of iPhone users. This means that I can blog from anywhere! For example, I’m blogging from my iPhone right now as I’m sitting here… at my desk, in front of my computer. Okay, bad example. But this sure is a fun toy! And with projects out there like PhoneGap, there will very likely be a lot less free time in my future!

New and improved!  Albatross Home Media Streaming Server 0.5.1 is released! New features include:

• support for mfs_ftp (this method is more reliable if you need to kill the stream)
• improved stream killing (it actually works in most cases now)
• user interface tweaks and improvements
• detailed program information in HMO mode
• more awesomeness!

Good news from our scientist friends over in France and Switzerland.  The Large Hadron Collider went online today, and our planet did not get sucked into a black hole!  Yay!!!  Unfortunately, this also means that I still have to attend my mid-year review at work.  Ah, well.  C’est la vie!

Big things are happening in the browser world these days. We haven’t seen this much action in browser development since the Netscape 4 / IE4 browser wars of the dot.com bubble, and back then it was only two browsers! Today, we have (arguably) no less than 4 major browsers, each with increasingly good levels of standards compliance. Even Internet Explorer’s latest offering looks to be reasonably standards compliant, and may finally remove that painful thorn called “Internet Explorer Compatibility” from our collective sides. Let’s take a look at what’s coming down the pike:

Firefox 3.0

We’ve got a release date! Mark your calendars for this Tuesday, June 17 to download the final release of Firefox 3.0! This is an important major release for the Mozilla organization that keeps Firefox at the front of the pack for both performance and standards compliance! Check out some of these new features:

• One-click site info
• Better malware protection
• Better and clearer ssl error pages
• Better zooming
• Improved Mac, Windows and Linux (gtk) integration!
• Tab saving!
• Resumable downloads
• Improved SVG and CSS rendering
• Better memory management
• Massive speed boosts in javascript!

And so much more! By the way, did I mention the massive speed boosts in Javascript processing? It’s true! Just run any Javascript-intensive application in FF2 and FF3 to compare. G-Mail, Google Documents, TeamSite, Toyota Dealer Locator, whatever. You’ll be blown away.

Internet Explorer 8.0 beta

IE8 is starting to shape up into a decent offering from Microsoft! With an emphasis on performance and standards compliance (wait, this is a Microsoft browser, right), IE8 is definitely looking to be the most developer-friendly browser from Microsoft to date. We were all worried when it was first announced that standards-compliance would have to be opted-in on a per-page basis. But they’ve since backed off of that after listening to the developer community and the new standards-compliance mode will be the default. In addition to their new-found love of internet standards, IE8 also introduces “WebSlices”; a new widget format for the browser. A new beta version of IE8 is expected in August, but you can check out Beta 1 at the IE8 Developer Preview page.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

Safari

It’s been a pretty big year for Apple’s flagship browser, Safari. Based on the open-source WebKit project, it’s come a long way from it’s humble beginnings as the popular Linux web browser, Konqueror. Now up to 3.1, Safari has been leading the pack in both performance and standards compliance. They released a Windows version (though not without some controversy). Safari was the first browser that users could download (albeit as a nightly beta) that passed the new Acid 3 browser compatibility test, beating Opera to the punch by only a few days. (See the Opera post below for more details.) At the WWDC conference this week, Apple introduced the first developer version of Safari 4.0 which, in addition to Acid 3 compatibility, includes a new and faster Javascript engine named SquirrelFish. That’s right, SquirrelFish. You got a problem with that? I didn’t think so. I haven’t found any direct comparisons on the web yet, but it will be interesting to see how SquirrelFish measures up to SpiderMonkey (the current Javascript engine for Firefox) as well as Tamarin, which is speculated to be the engine for Firefox 4.

Safari is also one of the first browsers to begin supporting HTML 5, which, among other things, includes <video> and <audio> tags for inline media. Also on Safari’s slate is CSS special effects. All those cool effects that you get from Javascript libraries like Script.aculo.us, jQuery UI, dojo and others are supported in the browser using css and styles. This makes for some smooth effects that even the fastest rendering engine can’t beat.

And lest we forget, Apple’s Safari is the default browser in the iPhone and iPod touch! Apple has raised the mobile browsing bar so high that most “mobile browsers” can’t even be considered web browsers any more.

While security is pretty tight with Safari and Apple is usually pretty quick to patch things up, Safari is not without it’s problems. The so-called “carpet-bomb” attack allows a malicious web site push potentially thousands of unwanted files to the desktop. While the user still needs to execute files that have been pushed, it can still be a hassle to have to clean up the mess, and some experts have speculated that a dual-pronged attack against Windows Safari users could have Safari downloading files and IE executing them, all without user interaction beyond visiting a web site. While scary, this hasn’t yet been seen in the wild and definitely shouldn’t overshadow the other accomplishments that Apple has achieved with Safari.

Opera

Last but certainly not least, we have Opera which released version 9.5 today. Opera has been a long-time flag-bearer for the web standards cause. They’ve also been a huge player in the mobile browsing market, bringing “real” web browsing to mobile devices long before the iPhone stole the thunder with Mobile Safari. (I personally use Opera Mini 4.1 on my BlackJack smartphone.) Opera was also the first browser to pass the previously mentioned Acid 3 test. WebKit followed a few days later, but Opera’s version wasn’t available for public download. The new 9.5 release achieves an 83/100 on Acid 3, the best score to date for a final release browser. Opera 9.5 includes the following new features:

• Really fast rendering of HTML, CSS and Javascript (hmmm… I see a pattern forming here)
• Improved malware and phishing detection and prevention tools
• Improved bookmarking tools
• Skinnable interface

Opera has also released Dragonfly, a debugging and development tool for Opera. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s great to see other browsers starting to include development tools on par with Firefox’s FireBug and Developer Tools extensions, which still set the bar for in-browser developer tools.

And let’s not forget that it was Opera that pioneered tabbed web browsing, which forever changed the way we (or at least I) surf the web!

*Whew*! That’s a lot of browsing! And we have to support them all! Luckily, with a trend towards standards compliance and performance, browser makers are making things a little easier on us Rich Media Technologists.

We all know just how much “fun” it can be to test for all the different versions of Internet Explorer.  Multiple-IE kind of works, but the best solution so far is still using Virtual Machines.  Developer Jean-Fabrice Rabaute, the author of DebugBar for IE, has developed a new solution which allows you to compare web sites in different versions of IE side by side.  The software is still in alpha, so there are still some issues.  Most notably, Flash does not work under IE6; that can be something of a show-stopper for most of our sites.  IE6 may still be the anchor that drags our cool applications down into the abyss of compatibility nightmares, but when this tool is ready for prime-time it could really help make IE testing slightly less painful.

link: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Original Ajaxian article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/testing-ie-versions-just-got-a-little-easier 

Hello.  My name is David, and I’m a FireBug addict.

Hi, David!

It all started innocently enough.  I was introduced to FireBug about a year and a half ago.  ”Hey, try this Firefox plugin.  It’ll make your web development experience incredible!  And the download is free!”  Being a modern-day developer, I was willing to try new things.  I can always uninstall it later; I’m in control.  Or so  I thought.

At first, I just added some console logs to my code.  It was great!  It didn’t interrupt my “groove” the way that alerts did.  That led to color-coding: console.log, console.debug, console.error, nesting messages.  I was using more, but it made me more productive.  Then I started “inspecting” everything.  It was amazing!  Every detail, every attribute, every nested div!  And the styles became clear, too!  I knew exactly which style sheet was causing making that green background blue.  It was all sunshine and puppies until FireFox 3 came into the picture.

Sure, FireFox 3 was fast.  Blazing fast.  But in order to ride that train, I had to leave my beloved FireBug behind because it wasn’t “compatible”.  At first, I thought I could live without it.  I developed web sites for 7 years before FireBug came along, I don’t need to use it!  I found myself absently clicking on the space where the FireBug icon used to rest at the bottom of the browser window.  I even found myself booting up FireFox 2 just so I could get a console!  I was out of control.

Then, FireBug 1.2 went into beta.  And it was compatible with FireFox 3!  I could inspect all my elements!  Write to the console at blazing speeds!  Sure, I had to turn on the debugger for every domain, but with all the load time I’m saving, I barely noticed the inconvenience.

So in the end, I haven’t kicked my addiction, but I’ve learned to live with it; thanks to FireBug 1.2.

Get FireBug 1.2B1 at http://www.getfirebug.com/blog/2008/05/22/firebug-12b1/.

After a very short-lived jQuery 1.2.4 (it was up for less than a day before being marked as a “bad build“), jQuery 1.2.5 has been released into the wild!  It contains the usual flurry of patches, optimizations and fixes which are all spelled out in the Release Notes.

Of course, what you really want to know is whether or not this release is compatible with the $.string plugin, and the answer is yes!  (Really, I’m sure that’s what was on your mind.)