Technically, it’s not summer yet, but this should put you in the mood. Enjoy.

1. Ripperton – L’Ardo
2. Moonbeam – Tokyo Dragon (tONKPROJECT Ebencrib Remix)
3. Estroe – Inspirited Away (Nuno Dos Santos Remix)
4. Julius Steinhoff – Something Like Wonderful
5. Booka Shade – This Is Not Time
6. Estroe – High Maintenance
7. Don Diablo – I Am Not From France (Linus Loves Remix)
8. The Kleptones – Hiding in the Bayou (LCD Soundsystem vs. Black Crowes)
9. Ajello – Silert Tears (Space Ranger Remix)
10. Way Out West – Future Perfect (Henry Saiz Remix)
11. Estroe – Kiss & Make Up
12. Moonbeam – Tokyo Dragon (Roger Martinez Remix)
13. Chromeo – Night by Night (Siriusmo Remix)
14. Rodion & Bottin Galli – Give It Up
15. Libex & Marshall – Psychic Harmony 2010
16. Bvdub – To Live (edit)

Add a keyboard shortcut with your favourite tool, like FastScripts or Quicksilver.

The script can be found on GitHub: Next Unread Message for Apple Mail

1. Memory Tapes – Treeship (edit)
2. Tigerskin – Platin
3. Fritz Kalkbrenner – Blackmail
4. Hernan Cattaneo & Soundexile – Butterfly Effect (remix)
5. Pryda – Reeperbahn
6. Sebastian Davidson – Nightbird (Shur-I-Kan’s Sound of Summer Mix)
7. Lindstrøm – The Magnificent
8. Good Guy Mikesh & Filburt – Someone Told Me
9. Woolfy vs. Projections – Absynth (Markus Worgull Remix)
10. Shonen Jump – Vincenzo
11. Antix – The Hoard (Dousk Remix)
12. Dølle Jølle – Balearic Incarnation (Todd Terje’s Extra Doll Mix)
13. Iridium – Lullabies In The Dark

1. The Black Dog – Train By The Autobahn (Part 1)
2. Danny Howells – September
3. Lindstrøm – Where You Go I Go Too
4. Adele – Hometown Glory (Pocketknife’s Familiar Faces Remix)
5. Junior Boys – Hazel (Ewan Pearson’s House Dub Mix)
6. Felix Da Housecat & Kris Menace – Artificial
7. The Chain – Geo
8. Matias Aguayo - Minimal (DJ Koze Mix)
9. Schodt – First Breath (Dankann Remix)
10. Tore Jarlo – Raining Down On You feat. Pia (Dumb Dan Edit)
11. Bertrand Dupart & Gwen – Lolita (Rocco Remix)
12. Low Motion Disco – Things Are Gonna Get Easier (Windsurf Remix)
13. Paul Keeley – Life Aquatic
14. Danny Howells – September (re-entry)

16 Bit Lolitas make a couple of appearances with tracks from their magnificent new LP. DJBS favourites UNKLE, Jaytech and Way Out West all contribute in one way or another — I even found room for the new version of the all-time classic Shapeshifter’s track, Lola’s Theme (which made an appearance on one of my first ever mix sets, many years ago).

This will probably be the last set released under the “phoenix sessions” moniker for a while, as I intend to explore some new spaces in the near future. Stay tuned.

1. Black River (Gui Boratto Remix) – Bomb The Bass
2. Reformation (Robert Babicz Remix) – Lucca
3. Coconut Blues – Gabriel Ananda
4. Bazook (Bazookapella) – Chris the Greek & Matheos
5. Formula of Fear (Uberzone Dub Mix) – Hybrid
6. Murder Weapon – 16 Bit Lolitas
7. Azteca (KOS’s Stadium Mix) – KOS
8. Twilight (Layo and Bushwacka! Remix) – UNKLE
9. Lola’s Theme (2008 Re-edit) – The Shapeshifters
10. Heart & Soul – Yvel and Tristan
11. The Warning (Terracotta Army’s Eastern Invasion) – Way Out West
12. Nobody Seems to Care (feat. Jennifer Horne) – 16 Bit Lolitas
13. Candy (James Zabiela Remix) – Spooky
14. Geko – Guy J
15. Meaningful Story (Jaytech Remix) – Dinka
16. Omptine D’Un Ature Ete, L’Apres Midi – Jay Haze and Yann Thiersen

But the more I read about their toolkit (Objective-J), the more unsettled I felt. It’s the same feeling I get when I see tools like Flex. These are some seriously complicated development environments, meant to abstract away to the fundamental building blocks of the web.

When 280 North released their Objective-J toolkit a few days ago, called Cappuccino, I poured through their documentation and demos to get my head around what they had built. And it’s very impressive. But as a jQuery addict, I didn’t like their dismissal of it as at tool for making small adjustments to a web page. I feel that you can build a full-fledged web application in jQuery just as simply — or simpler — by embracing HTML/CSS as a layout engine, and JavaScript as a scripting language.

So I tackled re-implementing their FlickDemo application (several hundred lines of Objective-J) using jQuery and jQuery UI. It took about 3 hours to build, and ended up being about 45 lines of code (plus the frameworks, of course), and just under 200 lines of CSS declarations.

What I didn’t do: I didn’t bother hacking the CSS to work in Internet Explorer. It’s not that it couldn’t be done — jQuery supports it just fine — I’m just lazy. So you’ll need a modern WebKit or Gecko browser to see the demo. I also didn’t implement the drop shadows that Cappuccino uses on their images.

Also, the jQuery version doesn’t take over all you keyboard shortcuts, so you can still navigate around in your browser.

Original Cappuccino version

My jQuery version

Download the source here: flickrDemo-jQuery.zip

Update: Due to popular demand, I’ve changed the behavior of the slider so the image size updates in realtime. Total change: one word.

Update 2: Alexander Simmerl was nice enough to provide an upgrade to the image loading, bulking up the code by a few lines but greatly improving the load animation. In the comments, dak contributed a 2-line CSS fix for the inline-block layout problems in FF2 and IE7, which I’ve also merged.

I think this is as far as I’ll take the demo. Ultimately, it’s not that compelling of an application (but it does make a good demo). To respond to some of the criticism I’ve read, my point was not to argue that jQuery was a drop-in replacement for Cappuccino. Clearly there’s a ton of nuances to the Cappuccino runtime that would need to be carefully reimplemented if we wanted a 100% identical demo. My point is that it’s quite simple to do web application development in jQuery, and something as heavy as Cappuccino is not the only option (and in many cases, probably not the best option). I see Cappuccino as a kind of AIR-in-reverse (native apps that run in a web browser!) and possibly an interesting technology path for coders that are already familiar with Cocoa but don’t have experience with the nuances of direct web development. One thing I’m sure of is HTML/CSS/JavaScript are not going anywhere… they may be complimented by frameworks like Cappuccino, but the core will remain.

Now, nothing really bad had happened to the machine yet, but when live and die by a single machine you tend to trust your instincts with these kinds of things. The hard disk was definitely threatening to take a dirt nap.

In one of the few signs of intelligence I’ve managed to display over the past few years, I have regular Time Machine backups, so I wasn’t overly concerned about losing any work. It was more an issue of timing… when was this thing going to bite it, and what would I be working on while it happened? And how could I circumvent the inevitable 2-3 day layover associated with the local Mac repair shop? (Keep in mind, there’s no Apple store — hence, no genius bar — in Calgary). Then it occurred to me: why simply replace the hard drive when I could upgrade it?

Enter the Seagate 7200RPM, 160GB Momentus, hard drive of kings. At a mere $125, how could I not? Well, except for the warrantee violating thing. But that had expired already, and I like to play with stuff, so off I went to purchase my shiny new toy.

The Macbook Pro wasn’t really designed with a user-replacable hard drive, but I’ve never been one to let 25 microscopic screws get in the way of my fun. (As an aside, as a 12-year-old I once disassembled my Atari Lynx to clean Dr. Pepper out from behind the d-pad, so I have a history of these sorts of ventures). After depositing the cats in yard for safety, I set about lovingly removing nano-screw after nano-screw, carefully storing them in tiny ceramic bowls for later reinsertion. The actual drive replacement went fairly smoothly, and within about half an hour I was booting up the Leopard Installation disk.

Time Machine usage is fairly well documented from within Mac OS, but using as a pure recovery drive has only been covered in a handful of places. Of course, in a rather genius decision, at some point in the past I had decided to exclude my System folder from Time Machine, and then promptly forgot about it. I imagine this saved a few GB of space on my Time Machine drive, but scared the hell out of me when I attempted to use the Leopard Installer to restore the backup.

No matter though, as the Migration Assistant (launched on first boot of the new system) brilliantly offers to import everything from the backup drive. A few hours later, and all was magically well. In fact, almost creepily perfect. Everything, from the placement of my icons to the default launch services, came up exactly as it had on the old drive. And FAST. Stunningly FAST. The upgrade from 5400RPM to 7200RPM is exactly what I was hoping for.

Of course, over the next few hours I discovered a few gotchas. It turns out aligning the case perfectly while closing it is pretty tough — my latch is a bit tighter than it had been. And Firefox, for some reason, gobbled up 95% CPU whenever I clicked on anything, although a quick re-install solved that problem. And the Time Machine drive itself didn’t want to accept new backups until I wiped it and started over, which was also a fairly stressful few hours.

Otherwise… another successful project, and one I’d highly recommend to anyone as crazy as me.

Only one comment this time about the set: Sultan and Ned Shepard have delivered one of the most mind-blowing breakdowns in recent memory in the form of “Jeopardy”. I’ve switched things around a bit here by combining the original’s techy progressions with 16-Bit Lolitas’ funkier remix, and it gives me chills. Enjoy.

1. Bonafied Lovin’ (Juri Hulkkonen Remix) – Chromeo
2. Movin’ (UNKLE’s Surrender Sounds Session 9) – Skylark
3. Mongoose (Guy J Remix) – Sasha
4. Jeopardy feat. Kuba Oms – Sultan and Ned Shepard
5. Jeopardy feat. Kuba Oms (16-Bit Lolitas Mix) – Sultan and Ned Shepard
6. One Dress, Two Legs (Dub Mix) – Jaytech and Jeff Drake
7. Fun Punch (Bag Raiders Remix) – Bag Raiders
8. Ikaros feat. Nicky (Retroid Remix) – Clesk, Pea and Shuda
9. Anime (Rocco Main Mix) – Hernan Cattaneo and John Tonks
10. Shine On – Soda Inc.
11. The Big Space (Subsky Mix) – 3kStatic
12. Dusty Horizon (Trafik’s Sirocco Mix) – Roland Klinkenberg
13. Pyramid – Jaytech

Well that’s a relief.

(Forgive the bad flash from my cell phone camera…)