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

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

The red block let's you choose.

I’ve been now using Prologue for quite a very long time – I guess longer than I’ve ever used one WordPress theme before – and I’m highly pleased of it. However, even that Prologue has a built-in iPhone/iPod Touch browser-detection which cuts away the sidebar and only keeps the important news-stream in focus, I haven’t been very satisfied by that. The font is still pretty small, nearly unreadable, the links are therefor pretty hard to hit, et cetera.

However, yesterday then Andi showed me some pretty nice little framework he just found, what actually doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself, but made me think of a very cool idea. The iWebKit-Framework is a small set of CSS and image files that concentrates on building a website in a way so that it looks just like an iPhone or iPod Touch Application. The whole thing’s appearance is pretty sexy, you can take a look at the downloads and get the framework plus some example HTML files for testing.

My optimized front-page.

So, I took a closer look on the iWebKit stuff and did some (again better, a lot of!) PHP WordPress theme hacking. I think I spent the whole night building that thing – but I also think that it was worth it, heh. And I guess, I’ve created a revolutionary and new WordPress theme aimed for the usage on iPhones and iPod Touches – the only problem I had left was: How to I get WordPress to use this theme only on the tiny Safari, but on nothing else? After some more PHP hacking, which included modifying my Prologue theme but not the actual WordPress (what’s the really cool thing within the whole story), I’ve found a way.

When you browse my WordPress now using your iPhone, you should be getting a red message right on top of the site, which tells you that it has detected the tiny Safari and suggests you to use the iPhone optimized theme. If you confirm by clicking the first link, the whole site’s design should get to look just like on the pictures I’ve inserted here.

My contact information - optimized.

I will extend the theme some more, maybe by building in JavaScript effects or other Eye-Candy, to make it fit even better into the iPhones Look & Feel. I was also thinking of some Cover-Flow’ish effect for my Gallery (which at the moment just links to my Picasa-Site, but thanks to the great API provided by Google it shouldn’t be too hard to implement that right into the page).

Maybe, after some more testing I’ll be able to provide it for download, including a whole documentation of how to make it work. Until then, I hope you enjoy browsing my Blog, especially over the iPhone or your iPod Touch. Please feel free to write me your impressions, feedback and also suggestions for improvement by commenting here or writing me an e-mail. So far …

Have fun!

I...

... hate...

... you...

… @andi.
One day, I will send you such pictures.

Now, I’m planning to do some more work on this theme and add some own modifications to it, to make it look even sexier. I have something with flat shapes in mind… but you’ll see when it’s done.

I hope you like the temporary new look – don’t get used to, it will keep on changing by the time passing.

Btw: You might have noticed that I enabled permalinks. I just wanted to test the feature and if it works out, I’ll keep it like that.

Nokia XpressMusic 5610

Okay, so, yesterday I’ve been in STR with my girl, because we actually wanted to go out somewhere, but since it was pretty early when we arrived, we just walked a bit along the Königstraße and did some windowshopping. When we arrived at the E-Plus/BASE shop, I stopped and entered it. My E-Plus contract was going to end in october, so I wanted to take a look at the mobile phones I could get, if I’d extend it. After some talk with the aide in there I decided to spontaneously extend the contract and take that sexy Nokia I already informed myself about some days ago with me. Besides, I did not only extend the contect, but also resized the number of monthly for-free-units. So now, I actually pay three bucks more per month, but I’ve got a brand new and shiny Nokia XpressMusic 5610 (finest, romanian handcraft, heh) and I have more units for which I don’t need to pay extra.

However, the Nokia itself is pretty cool. It has a sexy dark-gray with metallic-red look and very nice lighting effects. The mobile phone is pretty handy and its software is very intuitive to use. I already configured it, added all my contacts and set-up my e-mail account – and all that without once even looking at the handbook. The camera can create pictures with a resolution of 1600×1200 and more and also contains two LED-lights that are being used as flashlights.

The media-player looks very nice and thanks to the horizontal scroller it’s simply possible to change from the media-player view back to the main-screen or to the radio-player view. Also, the soundquality – from the loudspeaker and from the headphones – is very nice. Unfortunatelly, even modern mobile phones still use the headphones as antenna, what makes it impossible to listen to radio without having them connected. An integrated antenna would be nice. Besides music, the Xpress also does video. It plays mp4 in very nice quality, sized as a small window or even fullscreen without any control-elements on the screen left. Too bad it doesn’t automatically switch to fullscreen when the mobile is being rotated.

What I don’t pretty much like, is the quality. Everything looks nice and smooth, unfortunatelly the plastic doesn’t feel pretty stable. I don’t want to know what happens when I accidentally drop it on the floor. Also, the horizontal-scroller and the sliding have already too much play for my taste. I hope it doesn’t get worse. Though, I wouldn’t say it’s bad quality, I just guess that is what modern geegaws look like. No more solid cases, no more works-a-whole-life. There’s just no more need for all these things, when you can get every two years a new mobile nearly for free. It’s just like with all the new cars.