While Subversion is undergoing incubation at the ASF, CollabNet will continue to host the project at http://subversion.tigris.org. In addition, third party-certified binaries of the software configuration management system will continue to be available from CollabNet, as well as from other vendors, both during and after the incubation period.

This was brought to my attention by @ArtemR on Twitter. It’s interesting, and certainly important to the project. I think that it can only make things more efficient though. I highly doubt that the ASF is going to cause the sky to fall, or whatever it is everyone’s afraid of.

Apple just announced the In-App purchasing system available for free apps as well. Your thoughts about it?

It’s fantastic. From this point on I think every dev should consider going the free route with an internal paid “activation” mechanism (e.g. trial -> full version). It’s too late for Tweetie 2, but I’m definitely going to consider it for future apps.

A few interesting questions are there, and a few hints at what’s coming for Tweetie. Native API retweets will be coming in the next release of Tweetie 2 for iPhone, and yes, it will eventually sync your position in the timeline with the upcoming Tweetie 2 for Mac.

The comics are generally funny in a geeky sort of way. The subject matter ranges from designers’ pet peeves to Twitter silliness to Apple/Microsoft pokes to swine flu lampooning.

How does this improve loading times? The major bottleneck in the loading of a web page today isn’t download speeds so much as concurrent downloads. A web browser will only download two files at once from a web server. After the HTML is downloaded, the browser has to grab CSS, JavaScripts, and images from your server. You might have a lot of those secondary files, and only two will be loaded at once. If you combine your template’s images into one big file, they all get downloaded at once, instead of two at a time. Also, you may shave off a few kilobytes of file size in some cases, but that’s not as important.

Now how does this trickery work? Let’s use Apple.com as an example. They keep their header navigation in a sprite that looks like this:

As you can see, the buttons are laid out in a row, with their alternate states underneath them. A sprite starts out as something just like that: an image full of little images. The real trick is making it spritely.

Let’s start with the HTML. Here is a simple block of HTML links wrapped in a parent DIV. Each item has an id assigned so we can address it in the stylesheet.

<div id="sprite">
<a id="button-1">Apple</a>
<a id="button-2">Apple</a>
<a id="button-3">Store</a>
<a id="button-4">Mac</a>
</div>

Now the first thing that needs to be done in the stylesheet is to collectively select all of the a elements with a CSS rule. I made them all block-level with the first attribute so they’re each on one line, which will make the output look tidier to better illustrate things.

#sprite a {
display: block;
width: 117px;
overflow:hidden;
height:0px;
padding-top: 38px;
background-image: url('path/to/sprite.png');
margin: 5px;
}

The width and overflow lines in the above CSS snippet define some of the dimensions of the elements. The width is self-explanatory, and the latter ensures that the element doesn’t expand to a different size if the textual contents of the link are too big. Then the height and padding-top lines are used to set the height of the element. Instead of directly setting the height to 38px, the padding trick is used to make the plain text inside the links invisible. Otherwise it would appear over the image background.

The background image is then included. Now things get interesting…

#button-1 {
background-position: 0px 0px;
}
#button-2 {
background-position: 0px -38px;
}
#button-3 {
background-position: -117px 0px
}
#button-4 {
background-position: -234px 0px
}

These CSS rules are simple but powerful. The background-position attributes set which part of the image is displayed. Since we’ve already defined a width and height for the elements, only a small slice of the image can be visible at a time. The background-position lines simply define which slice that is.

The first selector, #button-1, sets the top-left corner of the element’s background image to be at position 0,0 (the top left corner) of the image. For #button-2 we shift it down 38px, #button-3 right by 117px, and so on. It may seem a little odd at first, but you’ll get the hang of it eventually.

You can even do “rollovers” with sprites. Just use the :hover pseudoclass or a JavaScript mouseover trigger and shift the sprite to the desired spot by changing the CSS property on the fly.

It’s still as ad-heavy as before, but that can be expected. At a glance, the navigational header present in the previous incarnation is bigger and more pronounced, and the search box has been moved there to be more prominent.

The classic “We smash you with the information that will make your life easier. Really,” line has  been removed from under the logo. I’m not sure if there is any significance to this other than making things look a little cleaner, but it will be missed.

Now one of the biggest changes in the redesign is the front page. Smashing Mag’s posts aren’t the only ones displayed there now. “What?” you may ask. Let the folks at Smashing explain it for you:

If you’ve already had a look at the new front page, you would have found some changes there, too: not just recent Smashing Magazine posts, but contributions from other design magazines. That’s because we’ve teamed up with 18 other magazines to house a productive and comprehensive meeting place for designers and developers, showcasing truly the best content around. Among those joining the game are Webdesigner Depot, Noupe, SixRevisions, UX Booth, Hongkiat, ThinkVitamin, Web Designer Wall, Designm.ag, Boagworld and Speckyboy. We call it the Smashing Network.

Two posts are shown in traditional blog-format, followed by a grid showing 18 posts aggregated from the network. Clicking on the headline takes you to the originating site.

Network sites also get their own author profile pages that show all of the syndicated posts as well as Twitter postings from the sites’ accounts.

It seems like a good idea to me. It brings more great content into one place for easy access. It’s like–dare I say it?–a web portal. I’m sure some of you are worrying about the RSS feed; don’t worry, the network content goes into a separate feed from the main Smashing one.

Another neat addition is the “Tag Explorer.” It’s certainly a better way to display tags than in a tag cloud.

Go and check it all out for yourself: SmashingMagazine.com.

I always though it was an interesting idea, and one that could really work in some cases. Independent game developer 2D Boy is one of those cases…

2D Boy makes World of Goo, an interesting and fun physics game that retails for $20. It’s also one of the most-pirated games on the internet, with a whopping 90% piracy rate. This is a game that’s rated very highly by most sources. (It’s also one of the few games that works cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.)

So what did 2D Boy do? They ran a Radiohead-style special for a few weeks, letting you pay what you want to download the game. The results?

Out of more than 57,000 sales, about 68% of the downloaders paid $2 or less. And 16,852 buyers only paid one cent. 7,347 were in the $5.00-$5.99 range though.

The GameRiot blog has something to say about that:

$2!!! That is a tenth of the regular retail price!  That is like two tacos at Taco Bell compared to hours of enjoyment with an awesome game from a studio that deserves your money.  I guess it just really disgusts me that so few people paid next to nothing.  I realize the deal was there but how can you consciously pay a penny for any game that you would want to pay.  Almost 30% of the people were completely pathetic and paid a mere penny.

As cheap and “pathetic” as it may be, I’ll certainly agree that it’s not very nice to pay a single cent, it certainly is better than the big fat zero from someone downloading from BitTorrent.

Because the payments were processed through PayPal, 2D Boy didn’t even get those one-penny payments.

For all purchases of around 30 cents and under, we actually saw no money, PayPal took it all, but they probably ended up losing money on most of those transactions ($0.01) as well, they’re not the bad guy.

You can see the full post of results over at 2dboy.com.

So, does this “pay what you want” thing work? I would say yes, but not in every scenario. There are times when you can make some good money, and times where you won’t. People love it, because they can get a great product for a price they can afford, or a price they feel is reasonable. Some will put the minimum amount, yes, but that doesn’t mean everyone will. There are generally enough nice people to make up for some of the cheapskates.

Git seems like a powerful tool, and one I’d definitely like to look into in the future. It seems like it can do a bit more than SVN, as WhyGitIsBetterThanX.com happily points out, and may even be easier once you get used to it.

Git is a open-source code managemen tool; it was created by Linus Torvalds when he was building the Linux kernel. Because of those roots, it needed to be really fast; that it is, and easy to get the hang of as well. Git allows you to work on your code with the peace of mind that everything you do is reversible. It makes it easy to experiment with new ideas in a project and not worry about breaking anything.

Version control systems are great for anybody doing serious coding work, or design even. You could keep your blog’s theme in a repository, for example, so when you make changes to it you can roll them back if things break or you just want to revert back. You would be able to store the files remotely on a Git server, work on them locally (in your WAMP/MAMP server), and when you want to make you changes live you could just checkout the files to your production server.

Now that doesn’t matter so much.

A new feature (currently in beta) has been added to the plugin repository. There’s now a “Compatibility” box with a dropdown selection box. Pick your WP version, and it will show aggregated data from people pushing the “Works” and “Broken” buttons.

A neat idea, providing people don’t try to skew the results by voting “Broken” because they have some sort of vendetta against a developer… I might be worrying too much, but I think it’s a good idea other than that possibility.