July 2010
5 posts
Keep track of your character limits with...
With Twitter being all the rage these days, you may find yourself wanting a visual indicator on text boxes so that users can keep track of how much they’re typing.
I’ve developed WriteLimit to do just that.
It’s a very simple jQuery plugin that does the following:
Tracks character count or word count in a text field or text area
Updates a counter element, either...
Taming phpThumb URLs with mod_rewrite
I recently started using the popular phpThumb library to handle resizing and caching of images. It’s a great, dirt-simple way to auto-generate images at different sizes without having to manage an army of image files. However, I found the default convention for thumbnail urls to be a bit unwieldly:
http://mysite.com/images/phpthumb.php?/path/to/image.jpg&w=100
Frankly, I didn’t...
“In the end, simplicity for its own sake should not be the goal. Balancing the...”
– The Dirtiest Word in UX: Complexity, UX Magazine
I often find myself at either end of this extreme, either developing a complex UI with little to no thought put into experience, or propping up a feature-starved interface for the sake of keeping things ‘simple’. This article reflects my...
AP Gets Cranky Over Double Standard →
Probably the most obvious sign of wrong-headedness in the ongoing old vs. new media dramatic arc is how large media companies think that they can’t be held to their own standards. And their indignation that anyone would even think to expect fair play.
Also, they still don’t get that when they send stupid, angry emails to people, those people will publish them for everyone to see.
No more troll trolls
From the ‘what-do-I-care?’ department comes news that Blizzard will now be forcing users on their official forum to use their real life names when they post. The World of Warcraft forums have long been a cesspit of petty arguments, flame wars, and personal attacks. Obviously, reaction to this news is mixed.
It’s a pretty minor footnote, especially compared with the privacy...
June 2010
1 post
If I Ran the Windows App Store →
Miguel de Icaza shares his thoughts on how Microsoft can compete directly with Apple in terms of user experience by adopting a sandboxed execution model through an App store.
It’s really intriguing because it sounds exactly what Windows has needed for years. Of course, I reserve skepiticism of this ever happening, but an app store cum package manager would take a lot of the pain out of...
May 2010
5 posts
Apple Should Acquire Dropbox →
I think Apple should stay the hell away from Dropbox. Apple’s previous attempts at cloud-based or networked applications have been less than impressve. I don’t want them messing up a good thing.
Also, I’m a happy purchaser of Apple’s hardware, but I would have serious second thoughts about letting them manage my personal data.
“[…] saying there’s only going to be one way to do this. But the...”
– Gabe Newell on Dan Benjamin’s The Conversation
This interview with the founder of Valve paints a picture of the future where companies that embrace exclusion and tightly controller platforms will fail. Newell’s view seem almost the antithesis to the strategy Apple is adapting with the...
Really? My Top 10 PC Games
PC Gamer recently released their list of top PC games of all time. I was quite a bit disappointed to see what made it into the Top 10. Modern Warfare 2? Oblivion? Great games in their own right, but this is a list of all time, not of the past 8 years.
So I said ‘Feh!’ to that list, and made my own. My criteria is of course, not objective, but rather based on the total number of hours...
3 tags
Getting Started With Doctrine 2, Part 2
In Part Two of my Doctrine 2 tutorial, I’m going to spend some time talking about the general ideas behind Doctrine 2, and how it lets you manage database persistence using Plain Old PHP Objects (POPO).
What Doctrine is Not
But first, a few words about why Doctrine might not be like any other ORM you’ve used. Doctrine is not ActiveRecord. If you’ve been working with Rails,...
April 2010
8 posts
2 tags
PHP Late Static Binding: Practical Example
When PHP 5.3 announced that it supported late static binding, I read a few blog posts about it, and moved on. It sounded interesting, but I couldn’t think of any immediate use I would have for it.
Well, today I did. And here’s a real-life practical example of how it came in handy.
Say I’ve got a series of business objects with a dozen or so properties on them. I’d...
3 tags
Getting Started With Doctrine 2, Part 1
I’ve been developing with version 2 of the Doctrine ORM for a few months now, and am really excited about the upcoming beta release. Not only does Doctrine 2 improve upon the first version of the framework, it is gearing up to be the de-facto ORM for modern PHP development.
What follows will be the first part in an ongoing series of articles about getting up and running with Doctrine 2. In...
Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art →
Calm down and breathe, fellow gamers. Ebert’s essay exposes not complete disdain for video games (although, I suspect he doesn’t think much of them), but rather an impossibly high standard for art that can only be viewed through a prism of abstract definitions that bends and fractures when then lights hits it differently.
I’m not saying that Ebert is full of shit, because...
“Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website. This appears on...”
– @APStylebook.
Thank god. When I used to work at a company with an editorial department, they always wrote it as ‘Web site.’ It always struck me as a tragically un-hip.
The New CS5 Branding →
I thought the whole ‘periodic table’ motif was a creative way to simul-brand all of Adobe’s products. However, I was less than thrilled with the black-on-gradient treatment that they gave it in CS4. This is an improvement, certainly, but I still miss the old Photoshop splash screens.
Stack Overflow 2.0 →
This couldn’t be more exciting. Joel and Jeff have built a first class product, and am excited to see it’s potential not go to waste.
March 2010
3 posts
What Is Dependency Injection? →
Wonderfully simple explanation of dependency injection as it relates to PHP. I had to wade through too many poorly written descriptions before I really understood the concept.
We Don't Need You To Design Anymore →
This post misses the mark slightly. Designers don’t score lucrative contracts by convincing the client of the merits of good design. It’s their job to convince the client they provide services worth paying money for.
Assume Your Users Are Goats
“Our users are goats.”
We’ve all heard these words before (maybe not that specific phrase, but something similar). It’s a phrase uttered often in design and development meetings, and presents the idea that there is some concrete and absolute fact about how users will be expected to behave on a website.
“Users don’t like to scroll.”
“That type of...