An Open Letter to the Developers of Colloquy 5
Dear Colloquy Developers,
Today, while chatting away in one of my favorite IRC channels, we came on to the topic of your app, Colloquy. Colloquy, of course, is arguably the predominant IRC client for the Mac, and it, of course, came up in the course of the conversation. It was at this point that I realized under that smooth and shiny exterior, there are many, many, many flaws in the interior; this has prompted me to write this open letter.
First, and perhaps foremost, is the hogging of resources. While users with a great deal of RAM aren’t going to care, those of us without, do. When I used Colloquy, I’d leave it on overnight, only to find my entire system sluggish in the morning. At this point, I was unable to check the messages people left me while I was sleeping because Colloquy would crash out before I could. This was a very bad thing, a very bad experience, and something that has been long-standing. Yet, no fix that I’m aware of has come to solve this.
And speaking of crashing, this seems to be a common occurrence in the world of Colloquy. Connect to a network, join your favorite channel, say something… A bot gives you messages left to you— Bye bye! You just crashed. A little tiny bug in a theme? STOP! It’s crash time. Leave it on over night? Nope, bye. Join too many channels for its liking? See ya later. These are serious issues— some coinciding with every day occurrences— that are in dire need of fixing.
Now, let’s move on to a slightly smaller issue: notices. People who have been on IRC for a while know what notices are, they’re helpful and very useful— but not to Colloquy! No, no, Colloquy hates notices. Sure, you can see them in the console or growl (if you happen to have either open), but when every raw command is going through the console, how feasible is it that you’re going to actually see them? Not very. And even with growl, the occasional notice will get cut off. Not pretty. And this isn’t just a little problem, like just missing a couple personal notices from your friends. No, no. You also miss any notices from chanserv1, nickserv1, memoserv1, and any other bots and services, as well as network-wide notices and wallops. That’s a lot to miss, and honestly, it’s a PITA.
This is sad, sad performance from one of the “best” IRC clients for the Mac, and certainly one of the most popular. It’s not enough to be pretty, this isn’t high school. You guys need to work hard and prove you’re the best.
Sincerely,
Joey Brooks
P.S.: It’s a channel, not a chat room.2
1 These services are server/network dependent, of course, but generic, so I included them in the list. ↑
2 Yes, I know your reasons for using “chat room,” but you haven’t deviated from IRC yet, so why break standard nomenclature? ↑
I Heart Milk Carton Designs 0
I just recently launched a new service to complement Milk Carton Designs, called I Heart Milk Carton Designs. It’s a homebrewed solution for testimonials. You can see it in action at iheart.milkcartondesigns.com or on the front page.
It’s been an interesting process. It started with just an image, then grew into a desktop wallpaper, four t-shirts, and a mention on a Technorati Top 100 blog (#64 at the time of this posting). Pretty cool for a form, some CSS, and a few lines of PHP.
Go check it out and leave a nice note.
A Fine Balance 2
I just finished reading Bryan Veloso’s new entry, and I had some thoughts that I didn’t care to leave in a comment, nor did it seem to really fit the context of the post, so I thought I’d make a post out of it.
So, in his entry, Bryan brought up a point that hit home a bit:
It’s been scaring me lately, that the subject of this blog has slowly begun to straddle the line between design and programmer. I guess that’s not really bad, per se. But it’s like when you give to one talent, you take away from another.
Those that have poked around this site (outside of my blog) know from my resumé and portfolio that I do both design and programming, and those that know me enough personally know that I love doing both. Whether it’s fussing about in Photoshop or mastering the intricacies of the dynamic duo of XHTML and CSS, I love designing, and the same goes with PHP and programming.
While I’m not a well-known designer like Veloso (yet?), and it’s not quite the… identity crisis (for the lack of a better term) it could be for him, I do relate to the issue he’s having in a way. Doing both is a balancing act, especially for services rendered. The two follow different laterals of the mind— one being pure logic, the other being art. So, it’s hard flipping the switch from art to logic. One beats and flows to its own rhythm while the other is structured, organized, precise. In keeping up with one, you risk sacrificing the ability of the other.
I’ve always been a designer first. Milk Carton Designs was not, at first, a service offering web design and development, but just the former. And in being a designer first, I never had any experience with programming until I made a plugin for WordPress (that which became known as Addictions). This led me to realize all the cool things I could do with PHP, which started me down the road of experimeting and learning. I, of course, followed this road until I thwacked into a wall and realized I hadn’t had a single design thought in months (okay, fine, it’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean). I learned a lot, but I had left what was my design savvy out to dry, and it was extremely hard to get back into the groove of things. I have now, and I’m seemingly balancing the two fine, but I was shocked at what I had done to myself and how easy it was to fall out of the groove like that.
So, kids, the lesson learned? Well, I’m not sure. I’m still doing this balancing act, and it’s a bit straining sometimes, but it’s working for me. I’m better skilled, at least. I guess we’ll see how things work out in the long term, I just hope I don’t sacrifice one for the other, because at the heart of things, I love doing both equally, and I’d hate to cut short my own talent.
Any thoughts would, as always, be appreciated.
The Addictive Future 12
The future of Addictions is something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a few days now. There have been many feature requests (by email, IM, and comments on the two posts, and I’d like to thank those who took the time to make such requests), all of which have been generally accepted as additions to Addictions 2.0 (yes, I’m jumping to 2.0 rather than 1.5 or some other BS versioning convention).
Addictions’ original intent, though probably not made as clear as I could have made it, was to provide a way to show the readers of a blog the author’s (intentionally singular, I’ll explain in a moment) current interest in fields of entertainment — those being games, books, movies, and music. Addictions 1.0 (which I’m bumping 1.0-RC2 to) fulfilled this intent with ease, and then some. However, the people request more, and I’m curious to see where this goes, so I’m going to continue building on to it until it becomes unnecessary or futile.
Some things you’ll see in Addictions 2.0 will include:
- Archiving of past Addictions;
- The ability to have multiple Addictions in one field of entertainment (for example, your top 5 books);
- A more uniform way of placing images (especially useful for people who use theme switchers); and
- Interaction with Amazon’s Web Service, so the user doesn’t have to manually input links
Now earlier, I said that the original intent of Addictions was for a singular author blog. At the time, I did not anticipate the use of Addictions in a blog where there are multiple authors, simply because I normally work in a single-user system, and therefore think in those terms. However, following a user’s request for such, I have decided to separately launch work on Addictions MA 1.0. Addictions MA will have the same codebase as Addictions 2.0 (though it may have limited support for some features), but will be more geared towards multi-author systems in features and will be easily labeled as to whose addictions are whose.
Features for Addictions MA will include the codebase and features of Addictions 2.0 (but with some limiting of the multiple addictions feature) while offering individualized addictions and distinct labelling of them, using what is now subtitles in Addictions 1.0.
So, that’s the Addictive future, as I see it. This should all take a few weeks, so keep watch here, it’ll be here before you know it. I’m extremely excited about this, not only because it’s going to test my PHP knowledge, but also because of the great features we’ll be able to enjoy from this update.
Addictions: The Release 13
The long-awaited (by… uh… Anthony and me) release of Addictions is finally upon us.
My first foray into PHP and Wordpress Plugins, Addictions is a little plugin meant to record and store on your sidebar your current favorites (”addictions”) in the areas of books, music, games, and movies, a la Jason Santa Maria’s “Current Leisures” and, of course, my “Addictions.” There’s not much to say about it, it’s very simple. After installation, you just plug in the information in the Options panel and you’re done. That’s it, outside of any styling you may want to do, and with classes put on most everything, you can do that with ease as well. That being said, you can get more info by going to the official doc page, and download links are below. Enjoy.
Update
Addictions has been updated to v1.0-RC2. There was a bug reported by a user that the movie titles and, subsequently, amazon links (since these two are intertwined) weren’t working. This was due to a typo on my part and was also found in the game code, and was fixed. I also took advantage of the time being spent fixing the “bug” to add the console section to the game settings, so enjoy that added feature. The download links above are still the ones to be used :) .
Addictions 34
I’d like to point your attention to the sidebar for a moment, and at this time, you should be seeing a “My Addictions” section (psst… people of the future… if you don’t see it, don’t worry about it… Joey-of-the-Future may take it down or change the title for some unknown reason to Joey-of-the-Present). It’s a nice little addition there, I think… let’s you know what I’m doing, what I like, and what not, inspired by the sidebars of Jason Santa Maria and Jon Hicks. There’s more to this, though.
Being the freeloader I am, I wanted something like this and I wanted something pre-made. However, I could find nothing like it for WordPress (automated at least, there’s always the… hand-coded way *shudders* ). I was bummed about this, but this is my last day of school for 2 weeks until summer school, and I wasn’t about to let my want go to waste. Oh, no, quite the contrary. I decided to make the plugin myself. Yes… Yes, me… the one with little to no PHP experience, but the will to learn. So, I put my nose to the grindstone, and got to it, and with the help of cross-checking with the source of Eric Anderson’s wonderful WPDI.
So… I present to you the output of “Addictions,” the plugin. For now, since it’s in an extreme alpha stage and this is my first foray into both PHP and Wordpress plugins, I won’t be releasing it, but I will continue testing, and adding features, and will have a doc page up very soon. So, expect a beta very soon, and that page.
The official documentation and info. page for Addictions has been created, along with a Plugins page as a placeholder for a listing of created-by-me plugins ;P .
Coder’s Insomnia 15
For the sake of adding to my personal list of coding-induced medical disorders, I’d like to talk a little bit about what I like to call Coder’s Insomnia.
Insomnia, as defined at dictionary.com, is the “chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time.”
Well, I think you can draw your own conclusions about me and this “disorder” considering the time of this post, and the relevance therein. What keeps us designers, developers, scripters, coders, geeks, and what-have-you, up all night is one of a few things:
- Caffeine
- The need to code, whether to keep deadlines (more often the case), or trying to put into code that idea we’ve had for a while
- Fixing a bug (stupid bugs…)
- Interrupting our own sleep with the thought of new ideas we either forget by morning or have to hurriedly find paper and pencil and scribble down the idea (I keep paper by my bed =\ )
It’s fun, but it’s tiring. Quite. And it’s happening to us all, I think. Blake Ross has had a post asking what helps others keep themselves awake through the night to complete coding, and more recently about pulling some all-nighters. But more importantly, I myself have fallen prey to this. This isn’t just the caffeine (as some of you know, I’m quite the … lover of it), but … the code. The inability to sleep at night because I’d rather be coding, flinging my creative juices at the screen and putting them online for the world to see. It’s not just code, it’s my … creativity, my contribution to this world, as little or insignificant as that contribution may be, considering the big picture. To me, and to many others, I think that’s worth the sacrifice. Worth pulling all-nighters, filling our bodies with caffeine, smashing our heads on our respective desks. It’s worth it because it’s what we do and who we are and what we live for. And I think, if it gives us this “Coder’s Insomnia” — which it does, no doubt — then so be it, because it’s worth it to say I know I did something with my life.
Rant V - IE7 11
Microsoft is finally going to get in gear. Chris Wilson, one of the developers of Internet Explorer 7, posted on the IE Blog that they will finally properly support CSS and PNG alpha channels.
My response: it’s about time. Mr. Wilson says they’re listening to web developers, but where was that a year ago? Two years? Three? Seven? The latest major release they had was Internet Explorer 5, with version 6 being a security and bug fix, if that. That’s seven years of having the number one browser in the market stagnant. Seven years of misery as Web Developers have to hack their own code just to get it to look right in Internet Explorer 5 and 6. Some may say better late than never, but that doesn’t hold true in this instance.
I say Long Live Firefox, Long Live Safari, and Long Live Opera.
Viva la Revolución!
Typography, Web Design, and sIFR 12
The Problem
Us web designers have a truly limited range of choice when it comes to what font we use on our sites. We have to take in consideration that some fonts aren’t cross-platform. We have to take in consideration that some fonts that are cross-platform show up radically differently in different platforms (eg.: Georgia). So what it boils down to in terms of what web designers can actually use is Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Times New Roman, and a few others. That’s not much choice, especially when fonts can make all the difference in the appearance of the site.
I can hear you saying, “So? Deal with it,” in the background. When designing my site, and I start looking at what fonts I want to use, and I see Font-X looks twenty times better as header type than Font-Y does, but I’m forced to use Font-Y because Font-X is Mac specific, I get a bit mad. I don’t want to just “deal with it” anymore. It’s annoying. So, like many, I turn and see a solution: sIFR.
sIFR
So I’ve done my research– like a good boy– and the only solution that I think is worth noting is scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), currently maintained by Mike Davidson and based on the original IFR from Shaun Inman. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement uses Flash and Javascript to change normal text to any font the designer wants. This is, seemingly, and on paper, the perfect solution. However, I wouldn’t be writing this if sIFR was the perfect solution. It’s a solution, but not the solution. It has its problems.
Let’s start out with Javascript and Flash, the foundation of sIFR. Flash is extremely popular, and only some odd percentage of people (something around 3%) don’t have it. Javascript has been around for ages and is still a key scripting language in the industry. However, those 3% of people who don’t have Flash, and those odd number of people who turn off Javascript support in their browsers, well, they don’t see the effects of sIFR. Instead, they’ll see the font that the designer specifies for when sIFR fails, which will ultimately be one of select few fonts that the designer would have used anyways, defeating the point of sIFR.
The next problem is a biggie: loading speed. Half the world is still on dialup, and load speeds when rendering sIFR are slow, for the lack of a better word. I’ve personally seen sIFR take up to a minute to load on a 56k. That’s horribly slow just to see the title of a blog post.
The last problem I’ll mention is that sIFR is mainly for use on headers. It still doesn’t solve the problem of use for body text. For some, it’s not only about the headers, but also the main text. What’s the point in having nice looking headers when the text underneath still looks horrible?
sIFR is a good solution, but it’s not the solution, and we need the solution. I’ve heard tell that CSS3 will support typography in the way sIFR does, but CSS3 is a long way off. I hope, in the future, I won’t have to see sites default to Times New Roman because an aspiring designer that doesn’t know about typography issues, or just doesn’t think about it, uses a font that’s not on my system. I hope that solution comes along soon, for the sake of myself and the web design industry as a whole.
We <3 IBM 5
And IBM seems to <3 us too. Not only are they backing PHP, but maybe they’ll finally get rid of that nuisance that likes to call itself the SCO Group (though the article has nothing to do with the lawsuit). Also in the article, they state that IBM is about to release some thirty-odd number of open-source projects on SourceForge.net, which is good news as well. Read the article. Have fun.
