Brad Choate Master Feed

[blog] Introducing Unicons

Brad — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:40:40 -0800

Unicons is a little project I put together today, making it easier to insert some of those little Unicode symbols (like ☃ or ☺ or ✌) into web text fields. You know, the text fields you see on comment forms or Twitter.

The project is hosted at Github and feedback is welcome!

[blog] Apple and their Magic Mouse

Brad — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:47:11 -0800

via apple.com

I picked up an Apple Magic Mouse at the local Apple store Thursday night. It’s pretty nice! It’s amazing to me how Apple brought the mouse to the mass market (well, Dvorak didn’t like it) but have done a poor job in the design, until now.

What I like:

the slim design
even with batteries, this thing is light, but not too light
fewer moving parts, and no scroll wheel to keep clean
most of the top surface area is touch-sensitive
no more red light for the optical sensor!

What I don’t like:

it was a little pricey, but I remember paying $100 for the first Microsoft optic mouse

My other area of complaint can’t be summed up in a bullet. Basically, it’s the gestures. Apple has brought three slightly different sets of multi-touch gestures to the market in three different products: iPhone, the multi-touch trackpad and now the Magic Mouse. I’m going to look at five of these gestures in particular:

clicking (or tapping for iPhone)
content scrolling
content magnification
content rotation
content navigation

iPhone (and iPod touch of course) multi-touch gestures are really, really natural to me, but maybe because I’ve been using them longer than these other devices. Gestures on iPhone for these five interactions are:

clicking: single finger tap
content scrolling: single OR two-finger slide up/down
content magnification: two-finger pinch/spread
content rotation: two-finger rotate
content navigation: single finger slide left/right (as used for photo navigation)

It is interesting that iPhone recognizes both single and two-finger slides for content scrolling. I believe this is done with an eye towards what I am looking for and will elaborate on — a universal set of gestures.

Apple added multi-touch to their trackpads and some gestures to go with them. They differ from those on iPhone, namely because you aren’t interacting directly with a screen, but with an area that is controlling an on-screen cursor. This is a very different model from a multi-touch display which has no cursor to speak of. So, the multi-touch trackpad gestures are:

clicking: single finger click and/or tap (MacBook trackpads can be configured to accept a tap as a click action but they are no configured this way as a factory default)
content scrolling: two-finger slide; omnidirectional
content magnification: two-finger pinch/spread
content rotation: two-finger rotate
content navigation: three-finger swipe left/right (as used to navigate backward/forward in a browser or navigating a photo album in iPhoto)

Now those are mostly the same, with the exception of the content navigation gesture.

So how about this Magic Mouse? Gestures are:

clicking: single finger click (a tap on the surface does nothing)
content scrolling: single OR two-finger slide; omnidirectional
content magnification: none
content rotation: none
content navigation: two-finger swipe left/right (as used to navigate backward/forward in a browser or navigating a photo album in iPhoto)

The Magic Mouse may not support tap-to-click because it has a serviceable button, and having two ways to click would be kind of weird. But the multi-touch trackpads that also have a tactile click for the trackpad itself (including all the new MacBooks, save the MacBook Air which still has a separate button) and can be configured to support a tap to click as well. I personally prefer this configuration since there is less effort to do something that you do all the time.

As for gesture two… well, obviously, a single finger slide on the trackpad is the mouse equivalent of moving the mouse around. So we can’t expect Apple to change the trackpad’s single finger slide gesture to scroll content (unless they add an optical sensor to bottom of their laptops, but who wants to move their laptop around to move the cursor?). The other option is to use two-finger sliding to scroll on the Magic Mouse. Well… actually, that works too — you can use either a one or two-finger slide for scrolling.

What about the gestures for content magnification and rotation? The Magic Mouse is missing these for some reason unknown to me. The hardware should be capable of recognizing such gestures as recognized on iPhone/iPod touch and trackpads.

Content navigation gestures differ in number of fingers across all three: iPhone only needs one finger (granted, the use there is for full-screen pages, like on the Springboard and photo albums; this same gesture can’t be used for navigating forward and backward in Mobile Safari), the Magic Mouse uses two fingers and the trackpad uses three! The trackpad cannot use two fingers because two finger scrolling can scroll horizontally as well as vertically. And while you could conceivably use three fingers on the Magic Mouse (there may be a hardware limitation, but I doubt it), it’s kind of awkward to do so.

All in all, it’s a mixed bag. I can understand the decisions made around making these gestures differ from one context to another, but at the same time, it’s frustrating that they are different. This feels like an area where a real standard should emerge, one that can be used across these devices so consumers don’t have to re-train themselves when they shift from one device to another.

If I had my druthers, I would recommend the following as universal gestures:

clicking: single finger tap and (Mac only) right-click: two-finger tap
content scrolling: two-finger slide (single finger use for iPhone/Magic Mouse)
content magnification: two-finger pinch/spread
content rotation: two-finger rotate
content navigation: three-finger slides

This affects all three multi-touch devices in subtle ways: for the Magic Mouse, Apple would have to support tapping the surface to behave as a click and support both two and three-finger slides for content navigation. They would also have to implement gestures for content magnification and rotation (I suspect they plan to eventually). For iPhone, recognizing three finger slides to navigate content in Safari would be great, as it doesn’t support any gesture for that interaction today. A three-finger slide could also be treated as page turns for other contexts where a single finger slide work now. For multi-touch trackpads, Apple would need to make tap to click a default configuration, so this behavior is supported without having to reconfigure your trackpad to use it.

With these minor adjustments, a single set of gestures can work across all these devices. Optimized versions of these gestures can still be supported — you should still be able to scroll on iPhone and the Magic Mouse with one finger, but the universal gesture would be two fingers.

It’s kind of strange to me that Apple has shifted from a position where they insisted on grounds of usability that a single-button mouse was “The Way” for so long to where we are today: a variety of input devices with rich and complex interaction features that also have varying control schemes. Hopefully some standard will emerge… I’m sure someone at Apple is thinking about this too.

[flickr] Savannah's home-made "Pin the Shirt" game

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:54:53 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[flickr] Limboing lower

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:54:19 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[flickr] Hawaiian pizza for her luau party

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:53:39 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[google reader] Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items

(author unknown) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:36:25 -0700

[flickr] Legos

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:27:56 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[flickr] Ophelia

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:38:51 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

A picture of Ophelia (Jay Allen's ridiculously cute pup) who stopped by the office this week.

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:14:38 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[flickr] Untitled

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:14:31 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[flickr] Untitled

nobody@flickr.com (Brad Choate) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:14:24 -0700

Brad Choate posted a photo:

[google reader] AT&T, Verizon execs: we don't collude on SMS pricing

(author unknown) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:41:38 -0700

Shared by Brad Choate
This stuff is really infuriating. Especially for me and my wife, who have an AT&T Family Plan. We can talk by phone to each other for free and the plan has unlimited data service, but SMS? I pay $5 for 200 messages for myself and $5 for 200 messages for her. AT&T counts each message sent OR received against your quota, so sending a single SMS to my wife eats 2 of our 400 SMS texts per month.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, both Verizon and AT&T denied that either company has colluded to jack up the price of text messages over the last few years. According to testimony, pricing for text messages has actually fallen for "most" customers.

The whole kerfuffle started last fall, when the head of the antitrust subcommitee, Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), sent a letter to the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile asking why text prices for all four companies had doubled from 10¢ to 20¢ shortly after mergers reduced the number of major mobile carriers from six to four. At that price, SMS messages effectively cost over $1,300 per megabyte to send—far more expensive than charges for mobile data.

Click here to read the rest of this article

[google reader] A 'real' Katamari controller

(author unknown) — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:06:53 -0700

Shared by Brad Choate
WANT

In the photo above you'll see Kelly Farrell -- and she's a hell of a lot smarter than us. The twentysomething created, with the help of hacking collective NYC Resistor, a Katamari Damacy controller that uses a real ball. The big silver metal ball uses an optical mouse along with [technical jargon goes here] to make a very cool controller.

Originally, Kelly wanted to use a full-sized yoga ball, but the rubber was too resistant and didn't play well with the other components. Check out her video after the break to get a more detailed explanation of how it all works.

Continue reading A 'real' Katamari controller

[google reader] DIY Laptop Rack Hack Turns Your Monitor into an iMac [DIY]

(author unknown) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:24:07 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
I'm this close to doing this with a white MacBook for my home theater if Apple can't get the new Mac mini out soon.

Lifehacker reader Matt Lumpkin saw our monitor stand from door stoppers post and thought we might like his laptop rack hack as another space-saving desktop solution for laptop-lovers. He was right.

Over at Instructables, Matt's posted a detailed guide to how he mounts his laptop on the back of his monitor for an iMac-like all-in-one PC. Obviously this isn't limited to Macs, but if you want to save some space, declutter your desk, and create a nice, clean monitor-only look, the results speak for themselves. The idea and setup is incredibly simple.

Matt's taken a mesh-wire file rack and screwed it onto the back of his monitor. Clearly you'd need to be very careful setting this up (a screw through the front of your monitor would be awfully distracting), but if your monitor can support the weight of your laptop, it's a pretty cool way to get the clean simplicity of an all-in-one monitor and PC.

MacBook/iMac Rack Hack [Instructables]

[google reader] Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality Over Quantity

Gina Trapani — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:48:53 -0800

This succinct set of workday guidelines is a nice blueprint for getting productive on the important stuff and ruthless about cutting the crap. Written on a ~~unknown~~ “major corp” whiteboard pictured here, they read:

QUALITY vs quantity, UX process.
Check email ONLY:

10AM

1PM

4PM

Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.

FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki

MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking

OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~

These common productivity edicts are worth repeating; recently I advised Harvard Business readers to use a daily three-item task list myself. I’ve been practicing this technique every weekday without fail for the last six weeks, and it’s served me well (though I’ve gotten cocky and the list has started inching up to five or six items). On top of sleeping, showering, eating, working out, commuting, cooking, and communicating, the reality is that three things DONE is a bigger set of accomplishments than it seems. As for the rest of these–well, I’m working on them. Hat tip to Caterina.

[google reader] CSS Animation

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:00:13 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
Please, please, please tell me this sort of thing can be disabled as a browser preference (or on a domain-by-domain basis). (And good grief, this is already supported on iPhone!)

WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS.

[google reader] Why a simple product line is integral to Apple’s success | Edible Apple

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:57:42 -0800

[google reader] I'm An Idiot

(author unknown) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:57:46 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
osascript -e "set volume output volume 100"

[google reader] Hangman in Perl 6

(author unknown) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:22:37 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
The more real-world code I see of Perl 6, the less I like it being called "Perl". Can we just keep calling it "Rakudo" instead?

Create a file named 'wordlist' and list only one word: mississipi. Then you can play hangman in Perl 6.

use v6; class Hangman { has $.wordlist; has $!word is rw; has $!finished is rw; has @!man is rw; has @!bodyparts is rw; has $!num_misses is rw = 0; has @!guess is rw; has %!missed_letters is rw; has $!state is rw; subset Letter of Str where { $_ =~ /^ <[a..z]> $/ }; method init() { my @words = =open($.wordlist); my $attempts = 0; repeat until self!valid_word or $attempts > 100 { $attempts++; $!word = @words.pick; } if $attempts > 100 { die "Quit trying to find valid word in ($.wordlist) after 100 tries"; } @!man = ( [ < + - - - - - + > ], [ '|', ' ' xx 5, '|' ], [ '|', ' ' xx 5, '|' ], [ '|', ' ' xx 5, '|' ], [ < + - - - - - + > ], ); @!bodyparts = ( [ 2, 3, '|' ], # torso self!shuffle( [ 2, 2, '-' ], # left arm [ 2, 4, '-' ], # right arm [ 3, 2, '/' ], # left leg [ 3, 4, '\\' ], # right leg ' ), [ 1, 3, 'o' ], ); @!guess = '_' xx $!word.chars; $!state = join("\n", self!render_man, self!render_guess) ~ "\n"; } # Letter $letter is broken method guess_letter ($letter) { say "You guessed '$letter'"; if %!missed_letters.exists($letter) { warn "You've already guessed '$letter'\n"; return; } if $!finished { warn $!state; return; } my @found; my @letters = $!word.split(''); my $ord = $letter.ord; for 0..(@letters.elems - 1) -> $i { if @letters[$i].ord == $ord { @found.push($i); } } #if not $!word ~~ /$letter/ { if not @found.elems { %!missed_letters{$letter} = 1; self!handle_bad_guess; return; } else { self!handle_good_guess($letter, @found); return 1; } } my method handle_bad_guess { my $part = @!bodyparts.shift; @!man[ $part[0] ][ $part[1] ] = $part[2]; if not @!bodyparts.elems { $!state = "You've been hanged! The word was '$!word'\n" ~ self!build_state; $!finished = 1; } else { $!state = "Wrong!\n" ~ self!build_state; } } my method build_state { return sprintf "%s\n%s\nMissed: %s\n", self!render_man, self!render_guess, join( ' ', %!missed_letters.keys.sort ); } my method handle_good_guess ($letter, @found) { @!guess[@found] = $letter xx @found.elems; if not grep { $_ eq '_' }, @!guess { $!state = "You won! The word was '$!word'\n" ~ self!build_state; $!finished = 1; } else { $!state = "Right!\n" ~ self!build_state; } } my method render_guess () { return @!guess.join(' '); } my method render_man () { my $man; for @!man -> $array { $man ~= $array.join('') ~ "\n"; } return $man; } # XXX File bug report on slurpy copy #my method shuffle (*@items is copy) { my method shuffle (*@items) { # Fisher-Yates shuffle my $i = @items.elems; while ($i) { my $j = $i.rand.int; $i--; @items[ $i, $j ] = @items[ $j, $i ]; } return @items; } my method valid_word () { return $!word ~~ /^ <[a..z]> ** 6..* $/; } method get_word () { return $!word; } method is_hung () { return not @!bodyparts.elems; } method to_string () { return $!state; } } my $man = Hangman.new( wordlist => './wordlist' ); $man.init(); for <m a b c d e i s p> -> $letter { $man.guess_letter($letter); say $man.to_string; }

Output:

You guessed 'm' Right! +-----+ | | | | | | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: You guessed 'a' Wrong! +-----+ | | | | | | | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: a You guessed 'b' Wrong! +-----+ | | | -| | | | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: a b You guessed 'c' Wrong! +-----+ | | | -|- | | | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: a b c You guessed 'd' Wrong! +-----+ | | | -|- | | \ | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: a b c d You guessed 'e' Wrong! +-----+ | | | -|- | | / \ | +-----+ m _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Missed: a b c d e You guessed 'i' Right! +-----+ | | | -|- | | / \ | +-----+ m i _ _ i _ _ i _ i Missed: a b c d e You guessed 's' Right! +-----+ | | | -|- | | / \ | +-----+ m i s s i s s i _ i Missed: a b c d e You guessed 'p' You won! The word was 'mississipi' +-----+ | | | -|- | | / \ | +-----+ m i s s i s s i p i Missed: a b c d e

Code suggestions welcome! Many of the strange things you see are due to limitations in either the current revision of Rakudo (r34706) or in my knowledge.

[google reader] The Laws of Motion

Anil Dash — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:18:07 -0800

About a week ago, we launched a beta test of a new application for Movable Type called Motion. It's a powerful new social application that combines the insights we've learned from the smartest social sites across the web with unique new open technologies we've invented here at SIx Apart. We've gotten a great response from the community about Motion, and it's on track for release in early 2009 as a free application for any user of Movable Type Pro.

If you want to check out Motion here are a few easy ways to get started:

Read all about Motion and find out what it's good for and what features it includes.
Sign up for a hosted demo of the platform, and we'll walk you through Motion and the thinking that's inspired it.
Test out a live Motion site where dozens of community members have already registered and tried out the Motion experience for themselves.

(Note: Content on the demonstration site can be reset or deleted at any time, and we regularly take the site offline as new updates to the Motion application are installed.)

The Web is in Motion

Just as important to us as the technologies we've developed are the ideas behind Motion. These philosophical underpinnings are explained in our blog post introducing Motion. We believe that the right strategy for connecting your blog or site to the world of social networking is not to select one particular social network to hold all the cards, but to connect to all of the powerful and vibrant social networks across the web.

In our internal conversations we've referred to these principles (with tongue firmly in cheek) as The Laws of Motion, and given our company name, there are naturally six of them. Here's what Motion is meant to demonstrate:

The biggest online social network is the internet itself.
Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media.
Reveal the community you already have.
Your social network belongs under your control.
Your community should start with half a billion members.
The web is in Motion.

We've explained each of these principles at length in the Motion announcement on our blog, but the most exciting news is that unlike even a year ago when the number of companies that believed in these principals could be counted largely on one hand, today our partners and peers all over the World and across the web agree with these ideas and have begun the work of connecting all of our sites together.

Facebook Connect? Google Friend Connect? Why Choose‽

The most visionary social networking sites on the web are naturally the first ones to embrace this idea of interconnectedness. For example, the newly-announced Facebook Connect plugin directory features the brand-new, open source Facebook Connect plugin for Movable Type which we first previewed here on this blog earlier this year.

This plugin is a free download that works with any Movable Type 4.2 installation, but what's better is that this functionality is built right in to Motion, along with support for authentication through Google, Yahoo, AOL/AIM, and any other popular OpenID provider. There's never been an application like this, which supports the half a billion individual accounts across these services, allowing almost anyone on the web to comment on or favorite your content without having to register to create an account.

And while the technology we're talking about is pretty cool, at this time of year, we know everyone's mind is on the coming new year and what it will hold. Though this geeky stuff can pale in significance to the personal and global issues that rightly come first, at Six Apart we do care deeply about the web and the conversations it makes possible. So as we gear up for 2009, we can't help but see it as a hopeful sign that an ambitious and fairly idealistic vision for the future of the social web has gotten such a positive early response.

We can't wait to see how the open web evolves, continue working to help it evolve faster, and we're even more excited to see what our community does with these new abilities in the coming year.

[google reader] Bugs & Fixes: The iPhone ‘dead strip’

(author unknown) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:51:27 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
I also had a 2G iPhone with a dead strip; I added my Apple store experience in the comments:

http://forums.macworld.com/message/685629#685629

A strip of Ted Landau’s iPhone became unresponsive to finger touches. Does that mean a costly repair? Also, Ted revisits the issues Microsoft Office has with Leopard’s Space feature, with an explanation from Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit.

[google reader] 11th Grade

(author unknown) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:36:19 -0800

Shared by Brad Choate
True.

[google reader] The Web is in Motion via Movable Type Pro

Anil Dash — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:20:16 -0800

Today, we're launching a new application for Movable Type Pro, called Motion. If you're just looking for the headline to put on your blog, you can think of it this way:

Microblogging like Pownce or Tumblr or Twitter plus
Activity streams like FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse plus
Really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect

And Motion is free with your license for Movable Type Pro. (MT Pro is free for bloggers, and very affordable for businesses.)

That's the short version. But the vision of Motion is something we've been working on for a long time, well before we acquired Pownce or before the tech blogosphere started talking about Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect. So, we'd like to outline some of the guiding principles that informed our creation of Motion, as a starting point to the conversation about where social applications in general are headed.

The biggest social network is the Internet itself.

Outside of the tech geek bubble, regular people wonder if they should choose Facebook or MySpace to promote their companies, or if they should use Flickr or SmugMug to share their photos. The way people talk about these services, average users think they have to choose between different services when they want to connect with other people on the web. We think that's broken, like choosing between NBC and ABC and CBS. Why not pick and choose the best of each different network?

Open standards will win; Old timers will remember when we could only email other people using the same service, like AOL or CompuServe. Then open standards for email came along, and suddenly we could email anybody we wanted to.

We have had to choose between social networks because there weren't open standards to connect them. So at Six Apart, we invented OpenID and Action Streams. Motion's core abilities are built around these open standards.

Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.

We have huge respect for the giant social networks like Facebook and MySpace and even the platforms of Google and Yahoo! and AOL. That's why we're proud to call them partners. But we've learned from working with the biggest mainstream media companies in the world that the best thing for the medium is if independent bloggers and publishers are around to collaborate, curate and, yes, compete with the giant networks.

Just as thousands of independent publishers have sprung up to complement the mainstream media networks, thousands of independent social networks will spring up to complement mainstream social networks. Motion lets you run your own network on your own site under your own control, granting you independence in the same way that blogging gave us a measure of independence from traditional media.

Reveal the community you already have.

No matter how small your brand is, or how unique your hobby is, there's a community for it on the web. But right now, it's spread out across dozens of different websites. Maybe some people who share your passion are sharing links about it on Delicious, and others are posting photos about it on Flickr.

Every tag can be a community. We've built Motion to let you aggregate actions from your choice of dozens of supported social networking and sharing services.

Your social network belongs under your control.

Motion is built on Movable Type, which means you run it on your own web server, under your own control. We provide professional support for the platform, and many partners are lining up to provide services like design and development and deployment for your Motion site. But ultimately, by running your social network on your own site, you keep ownership of your data and you can control the branding and presentation of your community. If you're a publisher, you can even have your own advertising on your Motion site, and our Six Apart Media team can help you make money with your community.

Your community should start with half a billion members.

It's not enough to drive people to your community. One of the biggest obstacles to participating in a social networking site can be getting users to register. In Motion, anyone can sign in to comment or vote on a post using their existing OpenID login or account from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and many more providers.

Membership still has its privileges: Full rights to post with the slick new microblogging interface are reserved for registered members of your Motion site. We think this strikes a nice balance between letting anyone on the web participate in your site while providing a compelling benefit to motivate people to sign up.

There are lots of other applications out there with great features for building a social network. But with those tools, you're starting from scratch with an empty community with no members and no content, trying to turn a ghost town into a metropolis.

With Motion, Action Streams make sure your new community is pre-populated with content, and OpenID makes sure nobody has to fill out a registration form just to vote for an item that they like.

The web is in Motion.

Finally, Motion is an effort that's designed to incorporate our partners and peers around the web. We've provided documentation so that anybody who runs a web service or social networking site can make sure there's an Action Stream to get connected to Motion. And we'll be launching with the support of a broad range of partners offering their services to anyone who wants to get started with Motion.

There is a lot more to come, but you can get started by checking out the Motion page, or by signing up for a free demo.

This is the vision we've laid out for Motion, but it's obviously a new idea and significantly different from what the has come before: Did we get it right? Let us know what you think.

[google reader] TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!

David Recordon — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:07:43 -0800

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
New commenting capabilities
TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

[google reader] Making it easier to debug and test your templates

Byrne Reese — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:36:41 -0700

Sometimes there can be nothing more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot publishing performance. Often users must resort to the brute force method of debugging, such as:

embedding print STDERR statements in Movable Type's source code - but how many people know how to do that?
blocking out huge swaths of code using the <mt:ignore> tag to hone in on the root cause - a cumbersome and time consuming process.
turning on performance logging - a feature whose output was intended for machines and as a result is sometimes too verbose or difficult to read by mere mortals.

To help our users find a more elegant and efficient way to debug their templates and optimize their system, we have developed a simple tool that can more quickly and effectively help users hone in on those aspects of their templates that are the bottlenecks in their publishing system. The tool is a simple command line tool that outputs four very useful things:

the output from the template itself - very the accuracy of the template's output yourself.
a table of all the template tags invoked by the template - this table not only shows the template tag name, but also the average time it took to process each one.
total build time and total number of queries executed - when trying to find the template at the root of your performance problem, this will help you to quickly identify the outlier.
a table of all the SQL statements made during the publishing process - an effective way to find the actual query that is problematic.

Check out this sample output:

<template output omitted>
Template Tag Utilization:
.----------+----------------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------.
| Time | Tag | Calls | Avg | SQL | Hits | Miss |
+----------+----------------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------+
| 0.083 | entryassets | 20 | 0.004 | 40 | 20 | 20 |
| 0.040 | entries | 8 | 0.005 | 12 | 16 | 4 |
| 0.027 | assetproperty | 16 | 0.002 | 16 | 0 | 0 |
| 0.020 | include | 6 | 0.003 | 7 | 3 | 3 |
| 0.019 | categories | 4 | 0.005 | 5 | 20 | 5 |
| 0.014 | assetthumbnaillink | 4 | 0.003 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| 0.010 | keyvalues | 4 | 0.002 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0.006 | collatesetfield | 32 | 0.000 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0.004 | setvarblock | 28 | 0.000 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0.004 | gridcell | 8 | 0.000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -- snip--
'----------+----------------------+--------+---------+--------+--------+-------' Total Queries: 86 Total Build Time: 0.261901
.------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------.
| Query | Number |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+
| RAMCACHE_GET ? | 63 |
| RAMCACHE_ADD ? | 32 |
| SELECT asset_id FROM mt_asset, mt_objectasset WHERE (objectasse- | 20 |
| t_object_ds = ?) AND (objectasset_asset_id = asset_id) AND (obj- | |
| ectasset_object_id = ?) | |
| SELECT asset_id, asset_blog_id, asset_class, asset_created_by, - | 20 |
| asset_created_on, asset_description, asset_file_ext, asset_file- | |
| _name, asset_file_path, asset_label, asset_mime_type, asset_mod- | |
| ified_by, asset_modified_on, asset_parent, asset_url FROM mt_as- | |
| set WHERE (asset_id IN (?)) | |
| SELECT asset_meta_asset_id, asset_meta_type, asset_meta_vchar, - | 20 |
| asset_meta_vchar_idx, asset_meta_vdatetime, asset_meta_vdatetim- | |
| e_idx, asset_meta_vinteger, asset_meta_vinteger_idx, asset_meta- | |
| _vfloat, asset_meta_vfloat_idx, asset_meta_vblob, asset_meta_vc- | |
| lob FROM mt_asset_meta WHERE (asset_meta_asset_id = ?) | | -- snip--
'------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------'

Using the tool is relatively straight forward: all you need to do is give the tool the ID of the template you want to debug, in addition to any other contextual information that template might need, e.g. a category ID if you are publishing a category archive. Running the tool with the conventional --help flag will tell you all of the possible options.

Download mt-tmpl-test now

Keep reading behind the cut to learn more specifically how to use this tool.

Example Usage

First, installation:

prompt> cp mt-tmpl-test /path/to/mt/tools

Now, how to get help:

prompt> cd /path/to/mt
prompt> perl ./tools/mt-tmpl-test --help
usage: ./tools/mt-tmpl-test [template name] --blog <name> Specify a blog context by blog ID or name. --template <name> Specify a template to process by template ID or name. --category <label> Specify a category to process by category ID or label. --entry <title> Specify an entry to process by entry ID or title. --author <name> Specify an author to process by ID or username. --archive <type> Specify a archive type. --profile Enables SQL and template tag profiling. --debug <mode> Sets MT's DebugMode.

And finally, how to actually use the tool:

prompt> perl ./tools/mt-tmpl-test --template=123 --profile
* output to appear here *

[google reader] We Couldn't Call It "MTV"...

Anil Dash — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:11:43 -0700

Just over a month ago, we released Virtual Movable Type, which gives you all the power of Movable Type Pro on any machine, with no installation in just a few clicks. It's a completely virtualized version of Movable Type that includes not just the application, but all of the infrastructure needed to keep a site running great, from the operating system to the web server to MT itself. We've been excited about it and proud to see it join the MT family.

Of course, part of the process of planning such a release is basic tasks like picking out a name. The allure of "Movable Type Virtual" or something like that was almost too great — just think of all the awesome "I Want My MTV!" badges we could have made!

Fortunately (or unfortunately) we are blessed with a competent lawyer, and while our corporate counsel is a really nice guy and has a great sense of humor, he pointed out that there might be some issues with a brand conflict around the name "MTV". (Maybe we can use that name when we release Movable Type 5?)

The good news is, none of this has slowed down adoption of Virtual Movable Type at all: It's a hit! We frankly worried that it might be a little bit early to release a completely virtualized web application onto the market because, while virtualization has started to see adoption in enterprise data centers, it's less common to find regular web hosts who support it as an option. We wanted to take the opportunity, though, because we have one of the best scaling and infrastructure teams in the world and a virtual platform lets us build their expertise right into the MT product itself.

And the MT community has always been full of early adopters who love new technology. We know tons of you are on Macs that run Parallels or VMWare Fusion, or on Windows servers that can run the free VMWare Player. We've also been keeping a close eye on our good friends at Amazon's web services team, because they host their blog on our TypePad platform and we'd love to return the favor by having lots of our customers host their Movable Type communities on the Amazon EC2 platform.

The result: We're regularly seeing 5% to 10% or more of all downloads of MT being for Virtual Movable Type. Considering that many estimates say that fewer than 5% of all servers are virtualized so far, we think that shows tremendous progress. (Of course, these statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt, because anybody can redistribute MT under its open source license, and people can use one download for multiple installations.)

Best of all, we've been able to support all these different virtualization platforms while offering a great experience thanks to the expertise of our friends at JumpBox, who've partnered with us on Virtual MT. ChannelWeb offered up a great video introduction to the platform, which shows in just under two minutes how easy it is to get started.

ChannelWeb also offers up a detailed written review of Virtual MT as well, and it reaches the same conclusion as the video: There's never been an easier way to get started blogging. They sum up the benefits pretty well:

For solution providers, Virtual Movable Type offers several options. Customers wanting a blog but lacking physical infrastructure will appreciate the simple and straightforward solution. Because of its low requirements, this would be a good introductory application to move to a virtual environment for customers a little nervous about the whole "virtualization thing." And for solution providers, there's the option to set up a hosting farm for Movable Type blogs using these virtual machines. And that's only to name a few.

Of course, the best way to evaluate Virtual Movable Type is to get it for yourself. Whether you're interested in MT Pro for running a robust community, or just evaluating MT to learn more about how the platform works, get Virtual Movable Type and you'll be able to see for yourself just how easy MT can be.

[google reader] We're Celebrating Seven Years of Movable Type!

Ginger Tulley — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:25:24 -0700

October is a big month of birthdays here at Six Apart: Movable Type celebrates seven years, while TypePad turns five and Vox turns two. Even future blogger Penelope Trott, daughter of founders Ben and Mena Trott, turned one year old this month!

In honor of this auspicious occasion, we've gathered several stories that illustrate the creative, beautiful, and exciting ways our customers have used Movable Type over the years. Do you have a story about how Movable Type has changed your life or your business? Please join us in celebrating our seventh birthday by telling us about it here . We may publish it on this page (which will be updated throughout the month), in a case study, or in a Featured Movable Type article..

[google reader] Virtually Effortless: The Easiest MT Ever

Anil Dash — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:00:18 -0700

We've long spoken of Movable Type's power and flexibility. But frankly, we haven't talked much about how easy it is to set up Movable Type for your own sites, and that's because it's been harder than we'd like. Despite huge improvements in the setup process, web applications can be just plain complicated, especially since MT supports a ton of different environments. The complexity comes from having to set up the program while also getting all the supporting bits of infrastructure set up perfectly, as well.

So today, we're launching Virtual Movable Type by JumpBox. Because we didn't just want to make it easy to run Movable Type, we wanted to make it easy to run Movable Type right.

What does that mean? Well, we've learned from the best experts in the world and built their knowledge into this new option for the MT community:

We partnered with JumpBox, the innovators in creating virtual appliances that work everywhere you'd want to deploy an application, from VMWare to Xen, Parallels to Virtual Iron to Microsoft Virtualization, on Windows and Linux and Mac OS. The JumpBox folks make it possible to put Virtual Movable Type anywhere you want to test, develop, or deploy it, and they provide a simple setup experience to get you running quickly.
Six Apart Services contributed mightily to this release, partnering with the core Movable Type team to build in the expertise they've developed from creating, launching, and supporting some of the biggest publishers on the web.
Finally, and most importantly, we listened to our Movable Type community. Enterprise admins told us that you're concerned about server utilization and power costs, and that virtualization is a part of nearly every platform strategy going forward. Developers told us you want a simple, reliable standardized configuration to develop and test your work against. And everybody in the whole freaking blogosphere told us you wish you could try out Movable Type with just a few clicks. So now you can!

That's the most important lesson here: You can download Virtual Movable Type and run it on your own laptop or your own server in just a few minutes, using any common virtualization software. If you've got an old Windows server sitting in the corner, get the free VMWare player and grab Virtual MT. Or if you're a Mac user who's got Parallels or VMWare so that you can run Windows applications, that same platform will let you run the new Virtual Movable Type. (JumpBox has a list of all the supported environments.)

Once you've got it running, you answer a few questions, and you get a custom-tailored configuration of Movable Type. It's even tricked out with the features people want to try most, like the Action Streams plugin. And Virtual Movable Type Pro has all the awesome social publishing features that we highlighted at its launch, too.

Virtual Movable Type is available as an option with the same licenses and versions as the regular download of Movable Type, including the open source Virtual Movable Type, the free license of Virtual Movable Type Pro for bloggers, and our standard range of business and enterprise licenses that come complete with professional support. Naturally, we have a complete FAQ to answer all of your questions about VMT.

In short, we've made it easier than ever to get started with Movable Type, and if you've been using the pain of setup as an excuse to put off giving it a try, you've run out of excuses. Because if you haven't seen Movable Type lately, you just haven't seen Movable Type.

So, what are you waiting for? Go get Virtual Movable Type!

[google reader] Sandbox for Movable Type

Beau Smith — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:01 -0700

Ever thought about radically changing the look of your blog without much design work? Are you a designer who likes to work in semantic HTML and do amazing things with CSS? Maybe you’re moving from WordPress to Movable Type and want to keep your current design. Sandbox for Movable Type may just be what you’re looking for.

What began as a hackathon project of between Bryan Tighe and myself a little while ago has yielded some great results: today we’re releasing Sandbox for Movable Type as a plugin that allows the many Sandbox themes to be used on Movable Type blogs as well. (BTW, Hackathons—the ability to spend every Wednesday scratching our own itches—are one of the reasons why I love working at Six Apart. The Vanilla Template Set was another of my recent Hackathon projects.)

Sandbox is similar to the CSS Zen Garden in that it showcases the power of CSS—the ability to radically transform the look of a site without changing any of the underlying HTML. Movable Type has always supported this concept. Tools like the Movable Type Design Assistant have made it much simpler to customize the look of your Movable Type blog through CSS alone. And this concept and philosophy is also why we supported The Style Contest, which not only succeeded in producing over 150 new designs to style Movable Type’s default templates, but also in rewarding the awesome designers behind each of the winning designs.

Scott Wallick and Andy Skelton created Sandbox as a theme for WordPress and it has since been used as the base for many blogs over the last few years. At its core, Sandbox is a rich and semantic—yet simple—HTML structure with many unique CSS classes throughout in order to make it simple for non-designers to easily make small design adjustments to an existing Sandbox theme. More experienced designers can even radically change the look and structure of a blog using CSS alone. Using the dynamically generated classes, themes can even style the site differently each hour of the day!

This well-thought-out structure has attracted many web designers and developers to create themes for Sandbox which other can then use as a starting point for their own customizations to suit their individual needs. (Though Scott points out that his site uses purely unmodified Sandbox html!)

Here are three of our favorite themes showing off the flexibility of Sandbox… and remember that all of these designs use the exact same HTML templates!

Essay by Ian Stewart
Takimata by Robert Ellis
Blackbox by Hillary Louise Johnson
Diurnal by Carolyn Smith

Diurnal is a great example of a theme using Sandbox’s ability to change appearance based upon the time of day. Diurnal has different styles for sunrise, morning, afternoon, sunset, and night which you can see across the top of this screenshot:

And we owe a huge thanks to the designers of all of the variations of Sandbox that we’re making available. Here are their names and the designs they’ve created — be sure to check out their sites and show your appreciation for their work!

Magnolia by Andrea Daigle
Ponjong by Nurudin Jauhari
Prima by Sunaryo Hadi
Sandpress by Arpit Jacob
Shades of Gray by Leslie Franke
Tiffany Blue by Ia Lucero
Moo-Point by Will Wilkins
Promised Land by Adam Freetly

Installing Sandbox on Movable Type 4.2 is pretty easy. Sandbox requires that you have PHP setup on your web server in order to create dynamic classes; this should be easy as nearly every host comes standard with PHP out of the box these days.

The Sandbox plugin also ships with a newer version of StyleCatcher (the Style selector within Movable Type), making it simple to switch between different Sandbox styles. Installation instructions for Sandbox and StyleCatcher are included in the plugin, though if you’ve installed a plugin before it should be a snap.

We’ve shipped all the winning themes from the Sandbox Design Contest and a handful of other Sandbox themes. You can also install other themes from the Sandbox Design Contest with Sandbox for Movable Type or create your own Sandbox theme

Download Sandbox for Movable Type from the plugin directory and please let us know what you think and how we can make it better.

[google reader] Cars

Benjamin Trott — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:22:15 -0700

Yes, it's come to this: I actually laughed at a New Yorker cartoon, today. But, but... it's so funny!

[blog] Shortcuts for Bookmarks

Brad — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:20:37 -0700

Did you know you can assign a keyboard shortcut that invokes any browser bookmark you’ve created? For example, I have a bookmarklet for sharing a link on FriendFeed.com. I’d like to run that bookmarklet on the active page using Ctrl+Cmd+F. To do this, I can create a keyboard menu shortcut for OS X:

Creating the shortcut is easy: open your System Preferences and go to the “Keyboard & Mouse” preferences, then click on the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. Click the “+” button below the shortcut listing. Set the shortcut to apply to “Safari” (or “Firefox”) in the Application list, then type in the name of your bookmark (exactly as it is labelled in your bookmarks), and set a keyboard shortcut.

After you do this, you may have to restart your browser to try it out. I’ve also noticed that these shortcuts are not always recognized right away, due to the way the menu options for bookmarks are lazily loading until it is needed (Safari and Firefox both behave this way). Just click on the “Bookmarks” menu option if your shortcut isn’t already working; you only need to do that once after the browser has loaded.

I love this tip because it makes bookmarklets so much easier to invoke, and it doesn’t involve using any weird third-party software hacks to do it.

[blog] 7 days to go

Brad — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:04:09 -0700

This may be the last week I have to use this clunky 1st generation iPhone. I’ve been anticipating the 2nd gen model since June 30, and the original doesn’t hold a candle to my expectations for iPhone 2.

[delicious] Shadowbox.js Media Viewer

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:34:14 -0700

A YUI-based shadowbox library that handles lots of different media.

[vox] Input Managers and Leopard

Brad — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:44:21 -0800

Lets talk about a variety of Mac OS X software called Input Managers. In brief, an Input Manager is software that can affect other running applications. The original intent of Input Managers was to provide a means for customizing the operation of...

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[blog] Input Managers and Leopard

Brad — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:44:16 -0800

Lets talk about a variety of Mac OS X software called Input Managers.

In brief, an Input Manager is software that can affect other running applications. The original intent of Input Managers was to provide a means for customizing the operation of the keyboard and/or mouse to support things like locale-specific input behavior (treating keyboard input differently for different languages or regions) and software that aids handicapped individuals. The name “Input Manager” is thus appropriate for these intended uses. (Read more about Text Input Management.)

However, it wasn’t long before Mac developers found this to be a useful way to graft additional functionality into other applications. There are several OS X software products out there that are input managers which have little to do with input management (Inquisitor, 1Password, Chax are three that I use today). These products are typically unstable in nature, since they often times rely on undocumented aspects of the “host” application. But when they work, they can add real useful functionality to other programs.

The downside to Input Managers is that it is a tempting means for rogue software to exploit. One such example is the “Oompa-Loompa” trojan which surfaced about two years ago. This was a download that supposedly contained pre-release screen shots of OS X 10.5. It masqueraded the installation program as an image file, and when the unsuspecting user tries to view the file, it installs itself into the user’s “Input Managers” folder. It then can access any application that is run and affects iChat in particular, so that it tries to spread to others in your iChat contact list.

One of the changes in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was in how OS X dealt with Input Managers. The early rumors were that Leopard wouldn’t permit them to run at all. But after release, Leopard did run Input Managers, but only those that are installed in the system-wide “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The distinction is this: before Leopard, if a user runs software that tries to install an Input Manager, there is nothing to stop it from installing one that is local to that user’s account (installing it to the “/Users/username/Library/InputManagers” folder). With Leopard, installation of an Input Manager requires system-administration rights (so the user is prompted to authenticate to permit the installation), and the Input Manager is installed to the “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The authentication requirement is the key and is a welcome change. There should be some kind of barrier to install software of this nature. BUT, it is wrong for Input Managers to only be installable in a system-wide fashion.

Before Leopard, I always— always— installed Input Managers for my own account only. By doing so, I could always login as another user to disable them. Remember— by their nature, they are less stable, and can cause applications to crash. A common request of developers when reporting bugs in their programs is to disable any third-party Input Manager software to see if it resolves the problem at hand. I could do that by logging in under a different account before Leopard, but now I cannot.

Personally, I would have preferred that user-specific Input Managers were still supported, but also require an administrator’s password to install. So, you would have a path, perhaps like “/Library/InputManagers/Users/username”, which may even be symlinked to “/Users/username/Library/InputManagers”. I think this is a better option, than requiring Input Managers to be activated for all users of that machine.

Hopefully a later update or release of OS X will address this and restore the option of user-level Input Managers.

[vox] Netflix adds insult to injury

Brad — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:11:35 -0800

Netflix.com has this option to watch a selection of their movies through your browser. Assuming your browser is running on Windows, as they require Windows Media DRM to play it. But their promotional graphic (pictured here) shows it running on a ...

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[blog] Netflix adds insult to injury

Brad — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:11:33 -0800

Netflix.com has this option to watch a selection of their movies through your browser. Assuming your browser is running on Windows, as they require Windows Media DRM to play it.

But their promotional graphic (pictured here) shows it running on a black MacBook (Update: apparently, I’m jumping to conclusions — see comments below).

They doctored the thing of course, placing a still frame over the display, covering the portion that has the built-in camera and all evidence of the ‘MacBook’ imprinted at the bottom of the display. But you can make out the key layout, the size of the trackpad, and even the infrared receiver on the front-right side. It’s definitely a MacBook.

Now, it’s not impossible to get those videos on a MacBook. You can do it if you’re running Windows under Parallels or VM Fusion. Performance is fine, even at full resolution. But I seriously doubt they expect their average customer to do that!

[vox] Are you sure?

Brad — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:36:00 -0800

The new empty trash confirmation dialog in Leopard. But… I’m using Time Machine. There is an undo! This seems contradictory. Also, the window grab action includes the huge drop shadow Leopard puts on focused windows. Is that necessary?

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[blog] Are you sure?

Brad — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:35:58 -0800

The new empty trash confirmation dialog in Leopard.

But… I’m using Time Machine. There is an undo! This seems contradictory.

Also, the window grab action includes the huge drop shadow Leopard puts on focused windows. Is that necessary?

[vox] Mac OS X Leopard menu bar loses its rounded corners

Brad — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:54:47 -0700

Just wondering how long it will take for someone to restore the rounded edges that have always been on the Mac menu bar. From Tiger: From Leopard: Update: Not long.

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[blog] Mac OS X Leopard menu bar loses its rounded corners

Brad — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:54:44 -0700

Just wondering how long it will take for someone to restore the rounded edges that have always been on the Mac menu bar.

From Tiger:

From Leopard:

Update: Not long.

[delicious] Leopard Simplifies Sharing

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:21:34 -0700

[vox] Probably not what Vonage was expecting Mint.com to recommend...

Brad — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:11:26 -0700

I suspect Vonage doesn’t want Mint.com to recommend existing customers to switch to a cheaper plan, but hey, you save $117 a year if you do!

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[blog] Probably not what Vonage was expecting Mint.com to recommend...

Brad — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:11:22 -0700

I suspect Vonage doesn’t want Mint.com to recommend existing customers to switch to a cheaper plan, but hey, you save $117 a year if you do!

[blog] Domain waste

Brad — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:16:05 -0700

I guess if you’re a domain name registrar, you use entire domains for even trivial things like, say, your e-mail help manual. ‘emailuserguide.com’ is a domain for hosting the Network Solutions email user guide. Apparently, the whole thing is meant to be in a pop-up help window.

But wait, it gets better. The bulk of the guide is actually in a PDF file. So the domain, as best I can tell, hosts about 19 pages altogether (mostly FAQ material), with links to other places or files that have actual useful information.

Oh, and if you’re managing your account, you’ll want to use accountmanageruserguide.com.

[vox] Halo 3 and legendary difficulty

Brad — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:25:58 -0700

I played through the Halo 3 campaign at the 'Normal' difficulty to start with. I typically play normal and sometimes even easy when playing games these days... I just don't have the time and patience anymore. But the normal difficulty was actually...

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[blog] Exposé key assignment choices

Brad — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:43:40 -0700

The Exposé preferences dialog has some odd choices for key assignments.

Namely…

Why are ‘fn’, ‘Right/Left Shift/Control/Option/Command’ choices for these commands? Seriously, who maps these to a shift key?
Why are they not choices for the Dashboard command?
Why can’t I assign ‘fn+F3’? When I hold other modifier keys, the function keys become prefixed with that modifier, but not for the ‘fn’ modifier.

I just bought an Aluminum wireless keyboard and it’s great, but where it natively supports ‘fn+F3’ for “Show All Windows”, I have no way to do that for my MacBook keyboard (where fn+F3 mutes the speaker— that command is mapped to fn+F10 on the Aluminum keyboard).

And while I’m discussing the new wireless keyboard, I should also mention that it really strikes me as odd that they don’t have a Num-lock built into it as it exists on the MacBook keyboard. And my ultimate wireless keyboard would have a built-in trackpad or other kind of pointing device (“Mouse keys” doesn’t really cut it).

[delicious] Free, cross-platform, zero-configuration VPN networking software.

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:12:05 -0700

[delicious] One more reason to buy an iPhone - MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:42:13 -0700

[blog] 100+ iPhone Features I Want

Brad — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 15:39:07 -0700

As wonderful as Apple’s iPhone is, it has a lot of room for improvement. I’m hopeful that many of the wishes listed below will some day be realized— either by Apple or by the tireless and industrious iPhone hackers out there. What follows is my brain dump of the dreams I have had for iPhone. As they are realized, I’ll be updating this list.

And much of these would also apply to the newly announced iPod touch.

Thoughts about the “Home” button

Once again, Apple has produced a minimal design device, and as with the mouse we’re now left to imagine creative ways in which to maximize function out of a minimal design. I’m talking about the one-button smart phone; specifically, the ‘Home’ button.

I think the ‘Home’ button at the bottom of iPhone could be used in combination with other actions to allow for lots of new behavior. These behaviors would not necessarily be required to use the device, but would yield features to users that want them. In this respect, this is akin to a right-mouse button on a Mac.

So here’s how it would work. I’ve noticed that the ‘Home’ button doesn’t actually take you to the Home screen until you’ve released the button. This means that it is possible to program the button to work differently when combined with other buttons or actions.

For instance: pressing the Home button plus the Wake button for a few seconds will trigger a shutdown action, which then lets you slide to confirm and upon doing so, iPhone shuts down. This works reasonably well on iPhone today.

I think this would make for an easy way to do text selections, which would then let you copy text to a clipboard. The first step is to define a copy point— this would work by pressing and holding to display the ‘loupe’. You place the cursor where you want to start selecting. Then while still holding the loupe open, with your other hand’s thumb, press and release the Home button. This toggles you to a selection mode. From this point, you drag the loupe to make your selection. Upon release, you get a popup menu which lets you choose between cut/copy/paste/cancel.

If you didn’t make a selection— if you just left the loupe where it was, you still get a menu, but one for just paste/cancel.

So how about ‘Home’ key plus volume up/down keys? That could be useful for specific tasks, but to me, the real extensibility is with the touch screen: gestures. The one problem is the current behavior of the Home key.

Pressing and holding the Home key for a few seconds currently forces the current application to close and returns you to the Home screen. I think this should change to Home key plus Wake key— not holding both, but just pressing both in conjunction. This frees up the Home key for many other uses. Left as a ‘force-close application’ key, I’d be afraid to use it for fear of triggering the close mechanism.

Another way to add more functions to iPhone’s UI is through voice commands. I think these are useful, especially for hands-free operation, like when you’re driving. But I would probably use gestures more frequently, since they can be done silently and are more easily recognized.

Thoughts on iPhone as a Mountable Drive

I’d really like to try using iPhone as a small computer. To do so, making it work as a mountable drive when attached to another computer would go a long way.

For instance, I could copy files from my laptop to iPhone, then while away from my laptop, I could email those files to others, or could edit text files right on the iPhone. I could take files I receive my email and put them on another computer. This wouldn’t require syncing— it would just mount the iPhone data volume.

Custom applications would also be able to locally edit and manage files in the data volume on iPhone.

Thoughts about iPhone Games

While iPhone doesn’t yet offer any (legitimate) games yet, I think it could make for a really good game platform. And the video out support that is coming for iPhone may promise even more. Think— would it be possible to hook iPhone up to a TV and play a game that is controlled while attached to a TV? Imagine playing a full-screen video game on a HDTV display while holding iPhone— and mind you, it has a built-in accelerometer which makes for some really cool possibilities. Now add to that, the idea of being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. You could be playing iPhone DOOM this way some day.

General Features

Custom application support. Number One Request. These are already available, but non-sanctioned by Apple.
Custom Dashcode widgets. You know, so mere mortals can make iPhone apps! I’m surprised no one has enabled this yet.
Custom keyboard overlays/layouts. ~~Switch to international keyboards.~~ (Available as of the iPhone 1.1.2 release)
Use iPhone as a mountable drive, just like an iPod. This would create a file-based data storage area that could be drawn from for Safari file uploads, editing local files in the Notes app, email attachments, etc.
Method to copy and paste text and pictures.
Word completion dictionary learns new words/patterns from typing history.
Better recognition of caps mode. For example, when typing two or three consecutive upper case letters, enable caps until end-of-word character is pressed.
Use of wallpaper for background of home screen, not just for the unlock screen.
Better Bluetooth support: file transfer, keyboards, mice, stereo headsets. I’m hoping this doesn’t require new hardware.
Spellcheck! One that works for every instance where a keyboard is available.
Sync over WiFi.
Transmit your contact card to another iPhone user, just to annoy Palm.
Support for Bonjour.
Remote control for a desktop computer via WiFi. This would employ a mouse pointer that you could drag around with overlay buttons to click, right-click, double click and so forth.
Easy tether support to let you access the Internet over EDGE on your laptop.
Customizable keyboard input macros. I.e. ‘zsig’ might be a trigger to suggest input of a common signature line.
Spotlight… for email and notes at least!
Voice commands— “Music”, “Videos”, “Play”, “Next”. These would go a long way and would make up for a number of missing buttons.

Notes

Choice of font. Nobody really likes Marker Felt— it’s the equivalent of Comic Sans for Mac OS X.
A way to sync notes to host computer. Good news: this should be in Leopard.
Assign title of note independently from content.
Simple formatting: bold, italics, etc. I’m not asking for Pages functionality, just the basic stuff. This requires some means of selecting text— a feature also required for copying text.
An easier way to produce bulleted/numbered lists. Like, if you start a bulleted list, continue it with each new line, as most word processors do these days. End it when the user makes a new paragraph. And support for a simple asterisk as a bullet choice, since that’s Markdown-friendly.
Ability to post content in note to a blog using metaWebLog or Atom APIs.
Folder support.
Ability to type notes with a horizontal iPhone.
Ability to open/edit text files that are stored in data storage portion of iPhone (if configured to work as a mountable drive; see above).

Calendar

Ability to assign events to specific calendars. I hate that this is a choice you make in iTunes. I want more control.
Ability to subscribe/publish iCal calendar updates over WiFi/EDGE.
Colored events matching the colors assigned to calendars in iCal.

Phone

Better prevention of accidental dialing. No calls can be initiated by clicking on lists such as the recent calls list- they must be initiated by clicking a button.
Taking a photo for assigning to a contact should also place that picture in your photo roll.
Voice dialing. “Call home” dials home regardless what screen you’re on.
Set an option for a contact to force their calls into voicemail immediately.
A mode that forces ALL calls into voicemail. That lets you leave the phone on.

Maps

Way to plot a route and email it to someone.
~~Hybrid view. Map labels + satellite view.~~ (Available as of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware release.)
Google street view.
~~Ability to bookmark locations and routes and add notes to them.~~ (You can drop pins to create your own bookmarks with the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware, but you can’t add notes yet.)
Ability to define a location as your current location, which would allow iPhone photos to be assigned GPS coordinates.
Ability to define a “trip” which would save the route, along with cached imagery for the route. Multiple resolutions to allow scaling, viewing satellite/streets, so that maps could be accessed even without WiFi/EDGE.
~~Fuzzy location detection based on cell tower position.~~ (Available as of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware release.)
Ability to reveal GPS coordinates for a particular location.
Home button gesture— Home plus tap, add a bookmark to tapped location. Home key plus tap on a bookmark, menu options for removing, editingng it.
Home button gesture— Home plus drag on a route— alter route.
Home button gesture— Home held down; raises menu options, among them being the “Set as current location” command (see above) which would let you pinpoint your current position on the map.

Mail

Support for flagging email for IMAP based accounts.
Support for junking an email.
Option to prevent loading of images from people that aren’t in your contact list.
A way to exclude certain IMAP folders from being listed/syncing.
A way to specify the photo resolution for photo attachments; both a default and per email setting. Or just a simple on/off switch for rescaling photo attachments. It’s rather atrocious that 2 megapixel pictures are resized down to 360x480— that’s a paltry .2 megapixels. This makes “moblogging” to Flickr and even .Mac Web Gallery rather useless.
Ability to add new attachments to an existing message. From photo library, or from files in the data storage portion (see above).
Ability to save images from email to your photos.
Ability to save other attachments to a ‘Documents’ folder, or a folder of your choice. These would be accessible when connecting iPhone to any computer as a mountable drive.
Email templates. A “Templates” folder, which is similar to a “Drafts” folder, but once you edit and send an email, the template version stays in the “Templates” folder.
Ability to compose email with a horizontal iPhone.
~~A bonus wish for Google: Google Mail via IMAP.~~ (Yay! Google supports IMAP!)
Home button gesture— Home pressed down while “Delete” button is shown for a message changes the button to “Junk”, which marks the message as junk and moves it to the Junk folder.

Stocks

Actual trading.

Weather

Weather forecast text.
Ability to set the weather to something more desirable. Okay, I had trouble coming up with ideas to improve this.

Clock

Time server sync support as a fallback if AT&T service is unavailable.
It’s silly, but I’d like a display mode for a big analog/digital clock. One that tilts based on orientation of iPhone. That way, I can prop iPhone on my desk when it’s idle. Perhaps another mode that displays clock plus calendar.
Ability to assign any song / playlist for an alarm.

Calculator

Programmer mode. So I can add DECAFBAD + DEADBEEF.
Scientific mode. Graphing calculator even?
Support for paper ticker that can be saved/revised.
Home button gesture— hold Home down, raises menu with alternative modes.

iPod

Voice recording.
~~Buy songs from iTunes over the network.~~ Yay! Already announced. (Available as of the iPhone 1.1.1 firmware release.)
Buy TV shows and movies (and games?) from iTunes over the network.
Play music over AirTunes to an Airport Express.
Play media from shared iTunes libraries.
Remove prompting to erase videos on watching them; make this a function of syncing alone.
Free WiFi at Starbucks with purchase of $5 or more from iTunes store?
Could iPhone’s accelerometer serve as a pedometer similar to the Nike iPod Sports Kit?
Home button gesture— Home plus slide right: next track.
Home button gesture— Home plus slide left: previous track.
Home button gesture— Home plus tap: play/pause.

SMS

~~Multiple recipients.~~ (Available as of the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware release.)
Save/email SMS conversations.

Camera/Photos

Option to make the entire surface the button for taking pictures.
Option to take picture upon press instead of release.
Way to create albums/events and place photos in them.
Ability to create, manage a .Mac gallery from iPhone itself, including syncing of new pictures down to iPhone.
Rate photos.
Tag photos.
Support for Flickr— Apple is a Yahoo! partner for this device after all. Better yet… define an API that can be implemented for any service.
.Mac web galleries should be listed here and viewed here rather than in Safari. I want to be able to use the same gestures to navigate photos: sliding my fingers on pictures, etc., and you can’t achieve that in Safari web apps. At least, not yet.

YouTube

Login support; view bookmarked/my videos; create bookmarks.
Comment support.
Save YouTube videos to iPhone, for fast viewing offline.

Safari

Upload file support which would offer selection of files drawn from: photo library, email attachments, MP3 files such as voice recordings, files stored when used as a mountable drive (which is another request; see “General” list above).
Ability to save files to iPhone when configured to allow use as a mountable drive; files would be stored in portion of iPhone dedicated to data storage.
Ability to customize viewport size/scaling for a given bookmark/domain.
Flash support with ability to enable/disable on a domain basis.
Pressing and holding the forward and back buttons for a second or so will show the history in that direction.
Support for richtext editing in web-based applications.
Save / prefill form support. I would love to run 1Password on my iPhone.
A semi-transparent keyboard overlay; one that is controllable with respect to layout via JavaScript or HTML input field hints. I.e., keyboard for entering a URL, or e-mail address.
Enable/disable JavaScript on a domain basis.
Option to hide toolbar at the bottom. It could be raised through holding down the Home button. Ie, push and hold Home button raises toolbar, tap forward/backward/bookmark/windows button.
Home button gesture— Home plus tap link, opens link in new window. Either that, or tap and hold on link shows menu when gives you the option to open in a new window.
Window button shows a button that lets you save that window as a web archive for offline viewing.
Bonjour support would display a list of web sites discovered by Bonjour under your Bookmarks list. Just like it does in Safari.

New Application Ideas

Twitterific for iPhone. The web-based Twitter clients are nice, but I want an app that sits on my iPhone’s home screen that shows an indicator when new messages are there. And I don’t want it just over SMS.
Colloquy for iPhone.
Skype for iPhone. Voice-over-IP, please! This is forward thinking, and I hope the most forward-thinking computer company would embrace it.
Some kind of drawing app? Bitmap and vector drawing seems obvious for a device with a touch interface. Is the screen sensitive enough to allow for drawing on with a stylus for finer precision?
“Mobile Numbers” app; simple spreadsheet creation and/or support for viewing Numbers documents.
“Mobile Keynote” app; for playback alone. Would be super with the video-out support.
App for tracking expenses. Could also use “Mobile Numbers”.
App for tracking time at work.
App for doing product lookups based on barcode picture— think Cue Cat and Delicious Library; and support for those Japanese square barcodes that are used for all kinds of things.
iChat or AdiumX for iPhone; persisting network connections even as you use other applications.
Translation widget. This would mostly require clipboard functionality.
Movies widget… maybe with links to Fandango for easy purchases. moviesapp.com is a pretty good alternative until then.
~~Web clip widgets.~~ Or, sync these from your Mac. (1.1.3 firmware now lets you place web clips on the home screen)
Dictionary and Wikipedia widget.
NetNewsWire or better UI for the mobile Google Reader on iPhone.
Flight tracker widget. This one stores data for the last flight viewed so it can continue to work in plane mode.
Some games for crying out loud! Soduku; Tetris, were you otate gesture to turn pieces, down gesture to drop it; PacMan, where you press on edges of display to control; and DOOM of course. DOOM is, after all, the Turing test for whether a device is a gaming platform.
Terminal app, with secure shell support.

Updates

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware release:
- adds faux-GPS location for Google Maps (using cell and WiFi positioning).
- adds web-clip feature and customizable home screen.
- adds support for multi-recipient SMS messaging.
iPhone 1.1.2 firmware release:
- adds international keyboards.
iPhone 1.1.1 firmware release:
- adds iTunes WiFi Music Store support.
- adds ‘double-tap’ support for ‘Home’ button to surface iPod/Phone features, depending on configuration.
- adds TV-out support.

[blog] MT hack-a-thon day at Six Apart, Japan

Brad — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 23:25:04 -0700

Today I’ve been participating in the Movable Type hack-a-thon hosted by our Six Apart office in Japan. And I’ve been updating some of my older Movable Type plugins for 4.0 compatibility. Hey— did you know we released MT 4.0? They even made a cool t-shirt for the event— one that won’t make sense to a lot of folk, but I certainly appreciate it (and the irony is that my work today eliminates the ‘extlib/bradchoate’ installation path for these plugins).

Anyway, I made a list of some of the plugins that are obsoleted by MT 4 or previous versions since joining Six Apart. Each of the following plugins have most if not all of their functionality built into Movable Type itself:

MT-Authors (exceptions: AuthorBlogCount, AuthorEntryCount, AuthorPublicKey)
Supplemental Category Tags
IfEmpty (use the new ‘if’/’unless’ tags instead)
Regex (exceptions: many arcane uses; the important stuff is supported)
Textile (bundled)
EmbedImage (replaced by asset framework and assetthumbnail tag)

And some other plugins I have written are now re-released for MT 4:

The SQL and PerlScript plugins were also improved upon. The SQL plugin now allows you to connect to additional databases (even running on different servers) for issuing queries against them. Pretty nice if you need to pull content into your blog from other sources.

PerlScript now uses the Perl ‘Safe’ module to run in a protected compartment. This can be customized (and even disabled), but it is a good default to use for such a plugin.

[blog] On the iPhone SDK (or lack thereof)

Brad — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:17:08 -0700

There is a lot of controversy in the Mac development community over Apple’s newest computer— the iPhone. That wasn’t a typo— the iPhone is a small computer with phone capabilities. That’s what separates “smartphones” from “dumbphones”.

But, unlike most smartphones on the market, there isn’t a proper way to develop for it. For now, Apple has chosen to limit development for the iPhone to web-based applications. This is severely limiting and Mac developers are fuming mad over it. With good reason.

So why would Apple do this? Maybe they just haven’t finished work on the developer tools? That’s a little silly, because obviously they have such tools and they work well enough to develop the built-in iPhone frameworks and applications. So why not release them? Why not make an open device, as the Mac is open?

I suspect the real limiting factor here lies in legal contracts that have been signed with partners: AT&T (their service provider for the iPhone), Yahoo and Google.

Think about it— if the iPhone were truly open, you could measure in days the time it would take to port these key applications to the iPhone:

Skype (or other VOIP software)
Twitterific
Adium
NetNewsWire

These are communication tools that would draw usage and control away from existing communication tools on the iPhone. VOIP over WiFi is a threat to the minutes-based model AT&T has for all their plans. If you could Skype to other Skype users (anywhere in the world, mind you) on your iPhone for free, that cuts into their profits. Likewise with using Twitter or Adium instead of SMS. Also, these services would also place a heavy strain on AT&T’s EDGE network.

But the biggest risk an open iPhone poses isn’t to add-on services like SMS. If the iPhone can be truly open, then the future replacement for ‘EDGE’ is not 3G, but WiFi. An open iPhone means that two years from now you won’t need an AT&T contract— or a contract with any mobile phone provider. And that is why there is no SDK today.

I think the next step Apple will take is to allow custom widgets to be developed and installed for the iPhone. This is little more than a web-based application that runs locally on the device. There are thousands of these widgets for Mac OS X today. ‘Dashcode’ (the widget development tool, currently in beta) is a decent environment for making these. And these would likely still not be able to run ‘native’ compiled code, but it’s a baby step toward custom applications on the iPhone’s ‘Home’ screen.

But even that would not be enough. Apple will need to allow full-blown, rich Cocoa applications to run on the iPhone. Maybe it happens after some contractually-imposed moratorium, but I believe it will happen.

[blog] iPhone web apps

Brad — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:47:59 -0700

A nice roundup of 25 iPhone web-based applications. This is one of the biggest reasons for buying an iPhone— Apple’s developer community. Number 26 is Ta-da Lists.

[vox] More iPhone stuff

Brad — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:09:23 -0700

So here’s a hodge-podge of additional thoughts after using an iPhone for a day or two. About the Speakers I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but the iPhone is the first iPod ever to have built-in stereo speakers. That’s pretty signi...

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[vox] iPhone'd

Brad — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:19:45 -0700

Well, I did buy an iPhone after all. My Verizon contract was up, it’s a few days from my birthday— all the rationalization I needed was already there, so Apple, you got me. Again. I drove up to the local mall at 6:30 PM and found a pretty long li...

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[delicious] MTTags.com // A Handy Reference For Movable Type Template Tags

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:29:35 -0700

[vox] Number Fifteen

Brad — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:27:34 -0700

I must pause a moment from this Movable Type 4 busyness to say that, as of today, Georgia and I have been married for 15 years. No, we’re not that old, we just married young. In that time, we have produced three little Choate-lings, lived in 4 st...

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[delicious] Movable Type v4.0 (Athena): A Developer's Perspective | Movalog: Movable Type Tips & Tricks

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:43:05 -0700

[delicious] 10 Ways MT 4 Will Rock Your Blog | PlasticMind: Blog

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:36:27 -0700

[vox] Ockham's razor fails

Brad — Sun, 06 May 2007 17:03:16 -0700

You might assume that a modern-day book about Java and RPG programming would have something to do with creating role playing games. But, you'd be sadly mistaken. (Taking into consideration that this is an IBM publication, Ockham's razor is ali...

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[delicious] Vi blogging bundle

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:55:29 -0800

A 'port' of my TextMate blogging bundle for vi.

[delicious] The Uniform Server

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:05:52 -0800

WAMP package with Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP (plus other goodies like phpMyAdmin, etc.) all in a convenient 6 MB package.

[delicious] Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:12:51 -0800

[delicious] The Plugin Walkthrough: Creating Your Own Tables

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:23:44 -0700

[delicious] Cub Scout Popcorn

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:41:58 -0700

This particular item is almost too good. Chocolatey crack, if you will.

[delicious] Movable Type is Free for Personal Bloggers

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 20:54:48 -0700

Free and unlimited for personal use.

[delicious] Brad Choate: At OSCON 2006...

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:34:01 -0700

[delicious] alogblog's MTy plugins: QuickImagePost for MT 3.3

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:43:38 -0700