I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

Hi,

I’m having a bit of a trouble while trying to move my CandyBar’s Library from the regular Application Support directory into my Dropbox directory. I did that move on my iMac and everything worked out pretty good. I’m now having the Library running on my Dropbox, so it’s always being synced up to the cloud.

When I open my MacBook now and change the Library path to the Dropbox directory there (since those two Macs are being kept in sync via Dropbox) I can see all libraries contents, but instead of the actual icons or docks, I only see CandyBar-file-icons in the preview. I can even double-click some item from my list to view it in detail, still, no actual icon-image, only the white paper with CandyBar logo on it.

Could you please help me on this/tell me, what’s left to be done so that my sync works? I’m not expecting both CandyBars to work simultaneously, since it would probably break the Library, but at least when I run one after another (what’s the actual use-case here) I expect everything to be in sync.

Thanks in advance,
Marius.
–
Sent from my iMac.

On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:47 AM, candybar@panic.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

It’s currently not possible with Dropbox because whichever protocol Dropbox uses does not support resource forks, which is the part of the icon file where CandyBar stores icon data.

You’ll have to compress the whole library before putting it on Dropbox to make this work.

–
Les
Panic Inc.

Hm…

Update:

On 11/17/2009 97:22AM, devilx@devilx.net wrote:

Hi,

I’m having trouble in using Dropbox in combination with a popular Mac OS X application named “CandyBar” (http://www.panic.com/candybar/). The application itself provides a way to move its existing Library into a custom location, for example right into Dropbox’s folder, unfortunately the sync over two Macs fails. Please read the appended conversation I’ve already had with one of Panic’s support guys for more information.

I would really appreciate if you could provide a bugfix for this issue, to make Dropbox even more usable than it already is.

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Marius.

On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM, support@getdropbox.com wrote:

Hi Marius,

Yup, their support person is correct.

You can work around this problem by making an archive ZIP file of the file(s) and putting the archive in the Dropbox folder. Just right-click on the file (or a whole folder of files) and select “Create Archive.” The resulting .zip file is safe to put into the Dropbox folder. You can double click on the .zip file to open it and recreate the file(s).

Are are working on this. Add your voice:

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/4/mac-resource-fork-support#votebox:0

Best,
Kevin Chu

This means: Vote people! Vote!

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve been using Apple’s newly designed and named Magic Mouse for around a week now and have to say that I’m actually pretty happy to have bought it and replaced my Mighty Mouse with it.

First of all, the new Magic Mouse has no more scroll-ball, what’s probably the biggest change in the whole redesign. Apple finally found a way to remove the always-broken-due-to-dirt scroll-ball by a multi-touch surface that goes across the Mouse’s whole surface. I haven’t had any problems with scrolling yet, except for my habit that lets me always search for the scroll-ball with my fingers, heh.

Besides the new multi-touch surface, the Mouse became way more flat. It really was a weird feeling to work with it in the first few hours, but I got pretty fast used to it and the only thing I’m still missing are the buttons on the Mouse’s side. I had them configured for application-based Exposé and I know that there are some “Middle-Button-Hacks” for the Magic Mouse available which could be used for such features, but still some real buttons would be more comfortable, in my opinion.

However, I really like the new Mouse, especially since it’s a bit heavier and doesn’t feel like a cheap and shaky plastic-puttogether, as the Mighty Mouse did. Regarding the Bluetooth connectivity, I can’t see any differences yet. I didn’t experience problems neither with the Mighty nor with the new Magic Mouse. As soon as I’ll have some information about the power-consumption of the new Mouse, I’ll update this post – yet, I still run the one-time-batteries Apple provides with their devices and it’s still working pretty fine, at a battery-level of 88%. If the discharge-procedure continues straight-line I’d expect the life of those average batteries to end in around three weeks – at least with my more or less heavy usage. Of course, I’ll replace them by re-chargeable batteries, since I’m not really a fan of the one-time-use.

My conclusion on the Magic Mouse is, that it’s indeed a very high priced mouse but also uses the great multi-touch technology to provide best user-experience at the lowest annoyance possible. I think that, if the actual internal hardware is qualitatively good enough, Apple finally did a good and lasting job on this Mouse. And if you’re not one of those fanboys, that really really really need to always have the latest stuff around, you might be sticking to this Mouse for a long time.

Hope this feedback helps some of you at least a bit on deciding whether to get one for yourself or not. Enjoy!

Enjoy viewing!

Facepalm

For the past months now already I’m searching for a new desktop table, since my actual one is now already eleven years old and getting more and more ramshackly by each day passing. I’ve been at several furniture stores around me, including (of course) IKEA, Möbel Gamerdinger, Heyne Büromarkt, any some more. Also, I’ve been searching for tables on the internet at several different online-stores and even found quite a few tables that really fit my needs. The only thing that didn’t fit on any of the desks I liked was their pricing – and I really can’t understand how this could be.

What’s a desk typically contained of? Well, mostly, one big plate – in my case some rectangle one with for example 180cm x 80cm and legs, usually four in number. And actually this is essentially everything I want and need. If you would now stumble through the different (online-)stores and search for exactly such a table, you would probably be shockingly disturbed by the prices furniture stores charge for one piece of wood with four legs. Let’s take IKEA as example: They charge 179,00€ for a Galant Desktop-Table (160cm x 80cm), which is essentially only four table-legs, mounted beneath a frame which holds a plate made of pressboard – sold as a mass-production article, where the costs for fabrication probably are way under a quarter of the price they charge. Besides, at least the demonstration desks within the IKEA store were so shaky, because of their cheap built-up, that I wouldn’t want to have my iMac placed onto one of those, until I’d like to buy new hard drives every few weeks. And at last but not least: The way the table looks can hardly be called “design”.

Next store, same issue. Poorly designed desks made of cheap materials, ugly fabrication but prices within the range from two-hundred to five-hundred or even more Euros. And all I was thinking was “What’s the point?!” – there is no relation between the quality of those mass-produced tables and their prices. Don’t get me wrong, of course a lot of costs for crafting, producing, transportation and more come together – and I might not even bitch that loud if at least the materials they would use would have been real wood plates and solid steel-frames and -legs – but especially in those days I can’t see any relation between the price and the quality of those products. In my opinion, furniture stores achieved a status where they can just pull out the customer’s money off their pockets with nobody complaining about it. When some hardware producer prices its products at extremely exaggerated values you hear blogs and news-sites complaining about it. Why don’t they do so with furnitures? Are furniture-stores/-producers now already on the same level with car manufacturers and the music industry? For me, it seems so.

However, since I’m a person which works at his desk a very large amount of time and wants to feel comfortable while doing so, I’ve decided to not buy any of those mass-production-crap-desks for myself. Instead, I’m looking forward at desktops like Sublevel’s iDesk or Holmris’ Milk. Both of those tables are made of qualitatively high materials to assure stability and both look just gorgeous. Of course, those desktops are priced at a totally different level, although there’s one difference that should be kept clearly in mind: Those are no mass-products. Those desktops are custom design work, containing innovative and practical features.

I’ve already received the price listings for the different version of Milk and will yet keep looking around for a bit more, until I’ve found the table I really really really want.

Update: Yesterday I finally got a desktop table, although it was more like a spontaneous buy. I purchased the Galant table I was talking about, with the A-legs and, instead of a crappy wooden-plate, a gorgeous black glass one. For the whole table I paid around two-hundred bucks in total, what now really is a good price. Why I’m thinking so? Well, instead of the cheap and ugly want-to-be-real-wood plate I got a piece of glass which usually costs nearly two-hundred bucks itself, plus a half-way-solid frame with chrome legs that fit together pretty good. I’ve mounted the desk and yet, as I’ve expected, I’m experiencing “shocks” thru vibrations of the objects lying on the table (lamp, iMac, etc), but I’ve already found a way to screw the table’s frame to the wall behind, in an unobvious and clean way, to reduce the vibrations on the table itself. So, as I’ve said before, the table’s frame was not worth one penny, unfortunately there was no other way for me to get the glass-plate lifted to 70cm (or more) – besides building myself an own frame.

Also Still, I hope the furniture stores/industry to suffer from the depression just like the automobile industry has (and will continue to), so maybe the thinking there will change in a way to provide the people prices that fit the actual product’s quality/value someday.

An annoyed and disappointed goodbye for now.

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations.

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

However, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the current iWebKit version and patch the framework to have the sliding-animations working again, even on the latest version. Now, that it seems to be working here and also it seems to be working for Christian, maybe others can also benefit from this.

If you would like to use the sliding-animations (no warranty! :-)) on your iWebKit-based design, just download the Framework package attached to this post and apply it to your iWebKit installation. It should be working pretty much out of the box.

Feel free to report bugs if you should find any regarding the sliding. Enjoy!

Download iWebKit_4.6.2_Framework-likability-patch

And yet another, brand-new Bluebird Theme: Plain.

It’s simple.

It’s light.

It’s Plain!

Download plain.bbtheme

UPDATE: Plain v2!
… just as requested.

Plain v2

Download: plain-v2.bbtheme

Indie Bluebird Theme

Indie-Compact Bluebird Theme

Indie-Mini Bluebird Theme

Three brand-new Themes for Bluebird: Indie, Indie-Compact & Indie-Mini.

Themes were inspired by the Indie Labs.

Download the Indie-Collection!

Simplifique

Yay! Yet another excitingly fresh Theme for the best, free Twitter-Client available for Mac OS X: Bluebird.

“Simplifique” is a very aquaish theme that makes use of WebKit’s features to draw CSS gradients and reflections. Also, Simplifique includes the JavaScript-library written by Na Wong, to convert TwitPic and YouTube URLs to thumbnails.

I hope you like this brand-new theme for Bluebird!

Enjoy.

Download simplifique.bbtheme.zip

Sleek Bluebird Theme

Yay! Yet another cool, new theme for one of best Twitter-clients available on the OS X platform: Bluebird. This time, the theme called Sleek is inspired by 2Smoke’s Silent Night Theme for Bowtie, what’s one of the best Bowtie themes available out there btw.

The theme itself is 100% CSS without any pictures besides the background-image. That one’s the same I’ve also already used within my HUD and HUD-Mini themes. I call this environmental-friendly recycling.

I made use of the cool features Safari already implements, like for example round corners or gradients. It’s just nice to see how much can be done using these features – at this point, the CSS hacks replaced any kind of image plus the whole work needed to make gradient-images in HTML/CSS scalable. A very cool time- and work-saver!

However, I hope you enjoy this new Bluebird theme!

Download sleek.bbtheme

HUD-Mini Bluebird Theme

As requested, I’ve just “scaled down” my “HUD” Bluebird Theme to make it more minimal and small-sized. The theme now is less padded and doesn’t eat-up that much space within your Bluebird as before.

I hope you like HUD-Mini.

Enjoy!

Download hud-mini.bbtheme

HUD Theme for Bluebird

Some weeks passed since I’ve released my last Bluebird Theme called “Refresh”, mostly because of the lack of time to think of other cool and new designs, but “luckily” today it was a pretty crappy-weather-sunday, therefor I can now just announce a new Theme called “HUD” for the great Bluebird Twitter-client!

The Theme itself is based on and made with Pixelmator ( / Pixelmator’s HUD user-interface) and additionally inspired by Delta909′s Summer Wallpaper. Of course, as usual you can replace the background if you should not like it by opening the bbtheme’s package-content, navigating to /img/ and replace the background.png.

I hope you enjoy my new Bluebird theme!

Download hud.bbtheme

//comment: I’ve just updated the theme to use text-shadows. Enjoy!

Silence. For no reason.

Enjoy!

Refresh Bluebird Theme

A fresh theme a day. My latest creation for the Bluebird Twitter-client is called “Refresh” – a refreshingly new theme!

This time it’s no modification or port of another app’s theme to Bluebird. Instead, it’s a new theme from scratch. The theme is held in a dark mood combined with orange and sky-blue colorized elements. For the background picture I made use of zygat3r’s Dark Wood wallpaper, which I’ve modified a bit in order to still look good if the window would ever get too big and the image’s borders would be visible.

The icons for the individual tweets are the very same icons from Mark Jardine’s “Mars Metallic” theme, with the difference that I’ve inverted their colors to make them fit better into my theme.

The tweets use rounded corners and all kind of transition effects provided by the WebKit CSS-properties. I actually also inserted a property for making the avatar images have rounded corners, but as it seems either Bluebird or WebKit itself doesn’t honor this at that point.

However, the theme is written using Bluebird’s new theme-definitions and should be compatible with Bluebird 1.0 Beta 1.1 and (hopefully) later.

Enjoy!

Download refresh.bbtheme

Minimalistic Tickets Bluebird Theme

Yet, another Bluebird theme.

“Minimalistic Tickets”, like the name already says, is a minimal theme where each tweet is being displayed as a “ticket”. The idea came me, when stumbling through the currently existing themes and noticing that each one has something in common: They all go from the top to the bottom. There was none, where the tweets are right next to each other, side by side.

The theme is pretty much just a demonstration of how new themes could look like. “Breaking the ice”. Trying out something new.

Whatever. I hope you enjoy!

Download minimalistictickets.bbtheme

Sicker Style Bluebird Theme

And yet again, a new theme for the Bluebird Twitter-Client. This time I didn’t just modify an existing one – I took two themes and mashed them up, heh. I took the Bubbling Citrus Bluebird Theme by Sarah Tan and Laurent Baumann and took the Adium Message-Style “Sticker Style” by “bobjr” and threw both in a mixer, heh.

This is one of my first tries to create a bubble-style Bluebird theme. The theme as you can see it on the screenshots uses the DIN Medium font, which is a commercial font. The font is not included in this theme, but it uses alternatives as a replacement, if the font can’t be found on the system.

However, I hope you like the theme. Enjoy!

Download stickerstyle.bbtheme

Modification of Flarup's "Glow"

Today I’ve just played around a bit with Bluebird and its theme-ability to make it fit more into my actual desktop. First of all, I took a look at what theme I could use best for my first tries. I decided to choose Michael Flarup‘s “Glow”-theme. The theme itself looks very neat and tidy and provides cool effects like avatar-reflections and a menu for each tweet.

First of all, I took some new picks on the colors of each tweet (regular tweet, reply, direct message, own tweet) and turned the gradient around, so that it doesn’t “pop-out” but looks more like “punched-in”. Then, I’ve changed the fonts used by the theme. The CSS definition for the fonts now look this way:


...
font: 12px/16px "Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk BE", "Lucida Grande", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-Serif;
...
font: 13px "DIN Medium", "Verdana", "Helvetica Neue", "Arial", Sans-serif;
...


Unfortunately the first fonts to be used (Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and DIN Medium) are commercial fonts which I can’t just pack-in and distribute. Though, it doesn’t look that bad using the Lucida Grande/Verdana fonts.

However, after that I’ve fixed a bug the theme had at least on my Mac (Safari 4), where the background-height was too small so that a small white line always remained at its list’s bottom.

If you like the theme, feel free to download it here and comment on it.

Enjoy!

WebKit Development Tools

In the past few weeks, I was involved into heavy JavaScript web-development at work and had to work with tools that allow me to debug dynamic web-content in an effortless way. Most people would now say “Use Firefox with FireBug addition!” and I would even agree with them, if I would be using some Windows operating-system instead of my lovely Mac. Everyone who has ever used Firefox on a Linux or a Mac OS X will know, that it’s a pain in the arse. Due to the way Mozilla-developers have taken to make Firefox available on multiple platforms, it lacks of any speed and integration within most implementations.

So what to do on a Mac, where Firefox trying to render a full-blown AJAX-site needs more space and CPU-power than a VMware or Parallels instance of Windows XP, running the IE? Most people don’t really know, that the Mac’s integrated browser already provides a very good toolset for web-development which just got even better with the version 4 (yet, still Beta) of Safari.

The toolset is hidden, on a regular OS X, but it can be unlocked pretty easy. The only thing you gotta do, is quit your Safari, open a Terminal and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true


It should quit without any output. After that, you can quit the Terminal and re-start Safari. You might not see any difference to Safari’s appearance before spawning the command, but now just try to do a right-click / command-click within a web-site. You will see, that your popup-menu has just been extended by one new item at its bottom, called “Inspect Element“. By clicking this entrie, Safari either opens a new window or separates your current one with an additional view, depending on what Safari version you’re using. This command works on 3 and 4.

Within that window, you will see a lot of useful information about the page. You can see time and size measurements, script-warnings and -errors and many many more. This extensions to Safari’s WebKit provides you nearly everything you might know from FireFox Add-Ons like FireBug. And besides of that, it allows you to profile your page in a sleek and easy, graphical way.

I’m now working quite some time with those tools, exactly because of all the problems I had with Firefox on my Mac, and I must say that I love them. I love the integration and the way it allows me to debug my sites. The only thing I liked more in FireBug was the precision of its GET/POST/PUT/…-output, but most of the time I don’t need that anyway.

Enjoy!

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

So, the GNOME Shell is actually a more lickable and not-so-crappy version of what we can remember from old Windows 98/2k times, usually called something like Talisman Desktop or similar. Those applications were replacements for the actual explorer.exe binary, which hooked into the system logon and tried to build a better looking and feeling, theme-able interface for the end-user. Though, these applications never really found a market niche, last but not least because of the mostly exorbitant pricing policy. A few time later these add-ons were pushed away by Windows XP’s own theming abilities.

However, as it seems the GNOME community now starting writing a similar add-on for the GNOME desktop, using features provided by modern soft- and especially hardware. The whole Shell is hardware accelerated and seems to be working pretty fluent – not only because it’s exceptionally not written in Python or any other sick scripting language. Instead, it makes use of native C code, combined with Clutter and hooks for JavaScript plug-ins.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not that bad and finally seems to really be an add-on that integrates into the desktop, instead of being just another application which I need to bound somehow into my GNOME desktop. My colleague just quickly compiled and ran it and at least on his nVidia accelerated hardware it worked out pretty smooth and at least while testing it didn’t crash once.

It could become a pretty cool and promising project, if the people running it will find somebody concerned about UI-Design/-Usability and maybe some graphical artists, too and maybe make it look more “stable”. At the moment, the whole ‘shell’ still looks pretty half-cooked, but of course, they’re just at their beginning. So let’s wait and see – or better even contribute and change!

The biggest news is only visible if you pinged devilx.net before and re-ping it now: You would see, that its IP has changed. After my web-space’s performance at Strato got more and more terrible (download rates of 6kb/s), I decided to move my blog to a provider I’m more familiar with, where I pay less for even more: HostEurope.

The actual transition was pretty much squabbling, since the WordPress installation I was running at Strato was some never-changed-just-upgraded-from-1.x installation, where WordPress used a latin1-database. This caused me some trouble when moving to the new host, but I solved it by writing myself a conversion script that removes all “random” characters from the database-dumps and converted the databases to UTF-8. As front-end, I’m now running the latest WordPress-release available.

After I’ve finished the transition I looked at the Prologue-theme I was using and thought that an exchange (YES WE CAN!) could bring some freshness to my journal. Though, I had to keep in mind the work I hacked into my Prologue-theme (like for example the iPhone detection bundled with the theme-changer, and so on), since I didn’t want to lose these things. I’ve found a nice theme, downloaded and installed it and started extending it. The main problem with my actual Hemingway-theme is, that it doesn’t make use of standard WordPress widgets. Instead it uses its own widget-concept, what pretty much made me write every widget I wanted to use on my journal from scratch – and so I did. For some, I took existing WordPress widgets and transformed them to work with my current Hemingway, others, I hacked in from ground up. I will still need to extend the widgets a bit more, for example to make use of some caching, so that the widgets won’t reload each tweet or gallery picture every time a user opens a new link on my journal. Correction: Done. I’ve now implemented caching, even before going live, just to avoid data-transfer/connection troubles.

Altogether I hope that the browsing experience will be more enjoyable now. At the moment, the site’s speed seems to be pretty good, but I’ll keep an eye on it when the heavy usage starts. Feel free to write me some feedback regarding the site’s new layout and the site’s speed.

Enjoy!

However, so I thought, that either there just haven’t been many themes released since I’ve last checked (afair over a year ago) or there just haven’t been any good themes that were submitted and accepted at AGO. To verify that, I’ve taken a look at the gnome-look.org themes-section and proved my assumption true: I browsed through the first few pages of the GTK 2.x section and my eyes began to hurt. Then, I sorted the section to start with the highest-rated themes and my eyes hurt even more. One theme was – in the matter of quality and usability – worse than the other. Everywhere you looked only rough-cut pixmaps thrown together, added some really-not-looking-good background images to the menus and the window elements themselves and finished it all up with a foreground-color that either provided an exaggerated or an awfully low value of contrast. Meh.

The bummer is, that the majority of all themes look like that and only a few ones, mostly created by known artists like roberTO, Jakub and others really look tasteful and qualitatively good. In my opinion, this was and still is a major problem of the whole OpenSource community. OpenSource gives you the power to choose, modify and re-distribute, but I guess that exactly this power is being used in a wrong way – not only in the matter of control themes!

In general, especially within the Linux area, there are nearly no standards. Spoken from the designers’ view, there are not enough definitions like the GNOME UI-Design Guideline or the Tango Project, which try to convince and help the developers and/or designers to draw qualitatively better themes while still keeping up the freedom to choose and create. Of course, this won’t stop misbehaving designers to submit themes to un- or sloppy-moderated sites like gnome-look.org, but still it would provide the GNOME folks a “pressurizing medium” to say “You make it the good way, your theme might make it into our official project releases or at least on the cover of the official sites!“.

Though, for a real GNU/FSF-guy this way might sound like to much of “controlling” and “regulating” and by that lead to an operating system like for example Mac OS X (no, not Windows, there you have an even bigger problem regarding applications that look totally different than others) is. Still, most of these guys forget, that without at least a little bit of guide-lining, regulating and separating the wheat from the chaff especially the Linux Desktop will never make it into a higher market-share. There definitely is a reason, why companies like Novell and Red Hat keep up the hard and cost-intense work on their own UI-designs and improvements. If you want the users to be convinced about using a clean and stable operating system, you cannot simply stick with a UI on which the users’ thoughts are “Uh.” from the first click they’re doing. And of course, tastes are different and each user has a different one, but in one point all users will share the same opinion: An UI needs to be tidy and neat. No pixels. No exaggerated anti-aliasing (which should be better called “blur” in 90% of the existing GTK themes). Just a sleek and intuitive interface with clean structures and without distracting or even deranging elements (… like black backgrounds, white foregrounds and pixmaps that remind you of some white-noise-graph).

On software techniques the GNOME community seems to finally has understood what KDE is doing for years now already. There has to be a clean infrastructure (or backbone or whatever you’d like to call it) for solving problems and providing features. GNOME has started the move to GStreamer some years ago and now finally also moved to a backend (PulseAudio) which provides such an infrastructure. Also, introducing D-BUS and the HAL was a big step for the whole Desktop-Project, and the Gnome VFS seems to be trying to really compete with KDE’s now. So, as it seems, developers have finally recognized, that (especially in enterprise use) a desktop with no integration and where each application works different and uses a different infrastructure for providing audio, video or whatever else will never succeed against “the big ones”.

Unfortunately, in the matter of UI design, it still seems to take a while until contributors understand that it’s worthless drawing themes that look like Vista’s interface printed on a dot-matrix printer. By that, users of other desktop systems will always keep looking and thinking of Linux to be an unstable and totally not-integrative desktop-system, hacked together by some crazy, long-bearded freaks. Because for low-brown users, the UI is an essential element that helps them deciding whether a system looks usable to them or not. With an interface where each application looks the same, acts the same and allows the user to get this work done in an undisturbing way – and maybe adds a little bit of pleasure with smooth and clean looking effects (and by that I don’t think of wobbly windows!) – even someone that’s new to the matter will be able to get in touch with it quite fast.

I’m still waiting for the day on which especially GNOME’s interface-nazis finally make the move and decline all applications that do not strictly follow clearly defined designing guidelines for a clean and usable UI – even if it would throw out half of the applications shipped with a regular GNOME desktop (like Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, and so on…). Until then, I guess that Linux itself can be as solid as a rock, as fast as a lightening and free as free beer – it won’t be able to increase its popularity and climb the higher market-shares. Just because of the “look and feel”, which sometimes is just more important then pure functionality. Else, we would still be working on the CLI, wouldn’t we?

// btw: This is my 500th post I’ve been writing within over four years now already. Heh.

Since I’ve already posted a quite descriptive post regarding the theme itself, I won’t beat around the bush now. For those who haven’t read the initial story, here you can review it. You can download the theme by clicking the link at the bottom of this page. Note, that the theme needs the theme-switcher-reloaded Plugin for WordPress to be up and running to work properly. Additional to that, you will need to make some changes to your actual theme, which allows the user to actually switch to the iPhone theme. These changes depend on what theme you are using, but in general you need to modify your theme’s header.php and include a code like this one:

<?php
if(empty($_COOKIE["iphonetheme" . COOKIEHASH]))
{
if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPhone'))
{
echo "<div style=\"background-color: #F66; color: #fff; padding: 8px;\">";
echo "You seem to be browsing this site from your iPhone or iPod Touch.";
echo "Would you like to <a href=\"?wptheme=iphone\" title=\"\">change to the optimized site</a>?";
echo "</div>";
}
}
?>


The iPhone Theme itself already contains a button which provides you to switch back to the regular theme.

However, feel free to download, distribute, modify and have fun with my WordPress iPhone Theme – it’s released under GNU GPLv2!

Download: WordPress iPhone 0.1