2nd in a series of wordpress admin Balsamiq patterns. This pattern is for the Wordpress 3.0 Beta admin comment list.

Download the Pattern: Comments List.bmml

For updates, release information and tips about Shane’ & Peters open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow Shane on twitter @justlikeair and visit http://blog.shaneandpeter.com.

DOWNLOAD WORDPRESS POST LIST BALSAMIQ PATTERN

I have been having a great time working with balsamiq to quickly push out wireframes for projects. We have a few large wordpress plugins in the works for customers which will really take advantage of 3.0 custom post types.

Up till now a lot of UI work when designing plugins was a bit of the wild west. With Jane heading up the UI/UX team and Tracy working on a design and ui standards doc, I was inspired to build some patterns which would help our crew build cleaner and easier to use plugins. I wanted to start by being better in line with the wordpress UI. So I am working on a simple Balsamiq pattern for the most modified parts of the wordpress 3.0 admin.

Peldi, the lead over at Balsamiq saw the news of my computers demise and offered out to help (now that’s customer service). I’ll post more as they come up. He might also post them (with my blessing) on mockupstogo.net.

These are not pixel perfect. For that, we would need Peter’s discerning eye, but for the wordpress plugin developer who wants to have a nice wireframe to start from, its a nice tool.

For updates, release information and tips about our open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow me on twitter @justlikeair.

On a related note, Jonathan also interviewed Shane on his podcast, Career Renegades Profiles.

We are delighted to announce the launch of our first complete iPhone app: “Surf“. Working in conjunction with WaveWatch.com, we’ve developed an iPhone app for surfers. The app features the first ever iPhone streaming surf cams, an intuitive user interface for reviewing current conditions as well as 6-day forecasts.  Surf also features:

• Tide
• Swell & Surf
• Wind
• Sunrise, Sunset
• Lunar Phases
• Weather Conditions

For more information or to download the app, visit the tunes store:
http://iphone.wavewatch.com/download

We’d like to thank some folks in particular for helping make this happen:

Aaron Spjut is the man!  He single-handedly wrote this entire app!

Anthony Ghiglia offered his super beautiful loading screen photographs. 

Rafael Patterson, Brand Manager at WaveWatch.com, is the man at WW that made this happen.

Jens Rasmussen, contractor at WaveWatch.com, ensured that all our API needs were handled.

Jeffrey Frederick set us up with the worlds first Cruise Control Continuous Integration system for iphone development, thus allowing us to have constant on builds of the app on hand and ready for testing.

None of this is possible without the friendly giant with eyes all over the world: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Charlie Fox for his support navigating the world of meteorology and wave prediction.

Brandon Jones and Reid Peifer for their design support.

The Santa Cruz Geeks over at NextSpace gave us great marketing guidance to get this app launched.

The thing is, just about anyone can express music to some degree. Anyone can make a picture, or cook a meal. It might not taste very good, but perhaps that’s simply due to a dearth of tricks in the cuisine bag.

Baby Steps

Every day I learn some new tricks and do my best to remember them. Eventually I become competent and even successful at the things that I study.

What I most appreciate about this perspective is that it makes the extraordinary digestible. It is granular. Great artists are great because of the amount of passion they bring to their art. However, the passion is never devoted solely to the finished product. It has to be for the process as well.

It’s like a beaver building and patching the dam. I know that beaver isn’t as excited about being a dam builder as she is excited about doing a good job of patching that hole or placing that log in particular. The beaver is a great dam builder by virtue of loving the process of building a dam.

Or take the example of a parent and a child. We don’t have kids with the intent of making a masterpiece. We have them so that we may enjoy every stage of their growth. The more thoroughly we engage in every day of their lives, the more likely the child is to grow up healthy, wise, and loving.

Cross Platform

What blows my mind is how this can be applied to anything. Just as a true artist is one who brings art to anything she does, the concept of a bag of tricks can be applied to everything.

• Cooking
• Cleaning
• Singing
• Thinking
• Communicating
• Loving
• Etc…

My sister, Sadye, was struggling with an essay for school. We talked about it and worked out an approach to essay writing: learn each part of the process of writing an essay and add it to your bag of tricks. Adopt each essay writing skill as your own, and grow to be comfortable with it. No one becomes an expert over night. But over time Sadye is becoming a fantastic writer.

Your Bag

Everyone has a bag of tricks. In fact, everyone has a bunch of bags of tricks. What’s your bag?

Oh wait, we do have a cap in our contract. So (scratching my head), why am I now working on revision #4,536,136? Oh, that’s right, because this is for the one client that we have for whom we did not prepare a formal contract for.

This brings to light a fundamental concept… Contracts are for people who think they don’t need contracts.

If we deal with someone who is insistent on a contract, you can be assured they are the type of client that likes to know exactly what they are buying and will ask for little more or less than what they pay for.

If, on the other hand, a client shrugs at the concept of a contract, and tells us that it’s not necessary, or even worse, that it’s too formal, then you can bet that we will be working 10x harder than what we had agreed to.

In fact, even having a formal contract may not be good enough if the contract is not very specific. Regardless, one thing’s for sure, not having a contract at all is a certain recipe for disaster.

What happened to my colors???

I tried messing with my Color Settings, the Document Color Settings, and even my monitor settings and yet when I went to save for web, the colors always shifted.

It turns out that the solution is buried under a simple, ambiguous, poorly labeled button in the Save For Web panel:

Caveat: I’m not sure if changing this will have negative effects on cross platform compatibility…. Do you know?

Yup. After after 20 years of insane loyalty to the PC, I’m switching. Which is somewhat crazy because I was the guy with the green monochrome screen who played zork on his DOS based IBM before anyone had ever heard of a mouse. I’ve mocked Mac users as technically handicapped (designers exempt) since I was old enough to type. So why switch now, after all this history?

There is no one answer. Part logic, part emotion. Dell made me mad; that was the start of it. Most of our business team is on Mac and the convenience of congruency is a strong call. Vista was decent but didn’t have some of the key features I was hoping my OS would offer. More than anything, Parallels is amazing & I can QA both environments as a result. As a developer, fewer virus concerns mean a lot to me. OSX is a damn good operating system (the first true chink in my armor of PC loyalty). More vibrant colors on my screen & the Mac book pro is kind of pretty. Better integration with the iPhone I’m about to buy. And about 15 other minor reasons. Individually, none of them would have even made me think about it, but, each month, another good reason appeared. It was a million pebbles, which together, caused the landslide.

So the switch: The steps. The art. The frustration.

The Transfer

Here was the tasklist we put together for the cross over:

Import Email
Import Calendar
Import Bookmarks
Set up IM
BBEdit & Transmit … check out Coda
Quicksilver
Parallels -> XP
CS3
Firefox + ext (see blog entry)
Adium
Witango
Quickbooks
Create a copy of the Terminal in my dock
Open office -> perhaps MS Office 2008 when it comes
SVN

What I love about my new Mac

Search: Mac search rocks. I get my stuff instantaneously. This ain’t your mama’s windows XP 5 minute get a sandwich search. My house cleaning might just suffer. I love how it organizes things, too, into categories that help me quickly go through a lot of results.

Spaces: Hooray for Leopard. Ok, now I can’t tell you for whom we did it, but we built a “spaces” (I called them views) prototype not all that long ago. We’ve been talking about this for years and I was desperate for it. I just wanted my desktop to represent my mind. If I have my husband cap on, I want family things in front of me. When Boeing calls, I want all their contact and project info in front on me. If I’m not thinking about them, I don’t want to be distracted by irrelevant content. So it’s a workflow dream come true!

Genie Affect: This menu bar effect fills me with a simple kind of joy. I can fill my menu bar with a ton of things and just by focusing my attention, it pulls what I am looking at into the forefront of my eyes. Big kudos on good UI.

PDF is Native: Now, personally, I love Adobe. They have phenomenal tools & I own stock in them because I see a great future. That said, I truly appreciate not having to think about installing another set of apps. One less thing to think about.

Parallels: This is about 90% of the reason I could consider switching over. Now I have both operating systems from one machine. With Parallels 3, enough transparency has been achieved that my windows applications show up individually in my doc and open in their own windows.

Quicksilver: An intuitive search program that I have been drooling over since the day I saw it on Peter’s box.

What I miss most about my PC

Right Click: Apple, this is silly, just add the darn thing. You’re just being stubborn at this point. Even the Apple users I know bemoan its loss.

Mouse Pad Sensitivity: Now this just might be me. The sensitivity level of the touch pad is horrid. You can increase the speed of the mouse movement, but 30% of the time I move my finger and nothing happens. Thing is, no one else seems to complain about that. Maybe decades of PC use have given me the wrong electromagnetic charge.

Wifi Sensitivity: If you stick an antenna in the middle of a faraday cage you are bound to be disappointed by its reception range. The macbook pro metal case is great for looks and durability but to surround your wifi antenna in it – well, questionable engineering I’d like to see them circumvent. Admittedly, I don’t know much about hardware design, so the problem could be something else entirely. Point being, my PC picks up wifi signals much better than my new mac.

I am sure I’ll be adding ot this list as well.

A Whole New Era

It’s kind of like dating. I’m not preaching the Mac party line yet but Pewter (thats her new name) has a lot going for her. I’ll probably update this post over time as I settle into it. Have a great night folks.

What it means: This message is an error from the javascript interpreter that probably would have crashed the browser in versions prior to 5.5.x . It is usually caused by javascript running near infinity (too much recursion possibly). The comment tag which lingers might be truncated code (if the browser stops execution, it seems strange things happen).

What caused it: It turns out our error was caused by having the following code both in the header and inline in the body:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”tipster.js” mce_src=”tipster.js”></script>

As soon as we noticed the inline version and killed it, the issue stopped.

Microsoft has a page explaining the most common cause:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;816362

Some people had some luck suppressing the issue with this hack; though, I always think it is better to figure out the source than to place a bandaid:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[
self.onerror = function() { return true; }
//]]></script>

oh, and a quick shout out to twin helix, who build some incredibly useful scripts like tipster.

Here’s a really easy way to set keyboard focus on your flex or flash embeded code. Basically, just paste the code below into the bottom of your html. After the page loads, this code gets called and sets the focus on your embeded swf.

FLEX Note: You’ll want to apply this code to your “html-template/index.template.html”.
FLASH Note: If you are using this code outside of flex then you will want to replace ${application} with the ID of your swf.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.onload = document.getElementById('${application}').focus();
-->
</script>
</body>
</html>

-p

note: not sure this works in IE. will test soon.