Realestate.com.au is still has a few things missing, such as allowing for more fine-grained searches and displaying a bit more information about each property (such as what type it is). Overall though the site is easy to use and navigate. It’s good to see that some large sites are starting to transition to functional mobile versions as it makes browsing the web from your phone a whole lot nicer.

Try it on your mobile now.

I’ve had an account for a little while but only recently started using it regularly. This is likely because I got around to integrating it with other systems I use - such as Facebook and this very blog.

Another great help is the Twibble! Mobile app which runs very well on my Nokia E71 and allows for easy posting throughout the day. It evens has some features I’m unlikely to use for a while, such as location-aware posts.

So I’m starting to get more use out of Twitter but I honestly cannot see what all the fuss about microblogging is. Maybe I’m just not following the right people.

Some of these are simple code quirks, such as spelling mistakes in code that are repeated elsewhere by necessity (what does the variable $accress do?), others are amusing comments (”TODO: ask Moshe about this”). Most irritating are the features that one might expect, based upon what is already there, but that don’t exist - being able to restrict user access based on store for example.

One thing that I’ve spent a bit of time working on lately is being able to sort products by their average rating. It seems to me that, if you have a rating system and the rating is displayed on products, then it would make sense that you’d be able to sort by those ratings. Apparently not.

Whilst I do hope that some of these major annoyances will be fixed in the future, a part of me also hopes they don’t as it will mean all the work that I’ve put into them will be rendered meaningless! What would be really nice would be if Varien accepted patches for Magento. That way we wouldn’t to expend even more time trying to “extensionise” something that should be in the core system anyway.

Magento as a product continues to progress but sometimes I wish the community had more involvement in direction and helping it move forward.

The basic operation is that you sign up for an account, install the desktop client on whatever device you want to synchronise files with and then start copying things into your dropbox directory. Anything in that directory will be synchronised with your files stored on the Dropbox server. This arrangement means that you don’t need all your machines to be on at the same time and that you can get around firewalls much more easily. The other major benefit is that you can access your files from the web, which is handy if you just need to get at a single file on someone else’s computer.

The web interface also has a mobile component (unfortunately intended for iPhone but it works on most mobile browsers), unfortunately it doesn’t quite work on the default browser for my phone - I can browse my files but am unable to download them. Thankfully Opera Mini is up to the task and can download the files to the phone.

The synchronisation process is fairly robust and has timely updates when files are changed. You can tell when an update is being done as the icon in the taskbar changed to a “processing” icon. The Dropbox clients for Windows and Linux also place fitting icons on files and folders when viewed in Windows Explorer or Nautilus.

Overall Dropbox is a great system and one I highly recommend using if you need to keep a small number of files synchronised between several computers. For the future I’d like to see some better mobile integration but at least it’s not something that is completely missing.

I installed MobilePress and it appears to working very well. My impetus was that I was sick of trying to access my blog on my Nokia E71 which, although it has a fairly full-featured browser, is still a small screen making it an utter pain to scroll around. Not to mention the pointless download of many superfluous kilobytes of data. So hopefully, if you happen to be looking at this on a mobile browser, it will be that much easier to read.

While I was at it I also had a go at WPhone and Wordmobi. WPhone is similar to MobilePress in that it presents a different interface for mobile browsers but, in the case, does it for the Wordpress administration area. I haven’t used it too much so far but it seems functional enough. Wordmobi is functionality the same as WPhone but is an S60 (Symbian) application so I don’t even have to worry about downloading unnecessary data or how the interface is rendered - only the data I need is retrieved and sent. Interestingly it runs on Python, which I didn’t even know was available for Symbian. That in itself may require further investigation in future as it could seriously lower the barrier to entry for programming mobile applications.

One final thing to note is that I installed the two extensions via the Wordpress plugin system available through the admin panel. It was stupidly simple and meant I didn’t have to mess around with FTP clients and the like. I’d say it was a very positive experience and practically worth an upgrade to 2.7 in itself! I’m hoping that having better mobile access to my blog will help me carry through on my new year’s resolution to post more frequently.

My 2008 turned out to be a pretty great year in general so I’m eager to see what 2009 brings. With a couple large jobs already underway, a new version of Magento just released and a lot of personal projects begging to be either completed or just started, it looks like it will certainly be busy!

One change is that I most likely will not be continuing my role as a project supervisor at Melbourne University, thus ending my three year run there. It was fun but full time work is too demanding on my time and far, far less frustrating. Although there are some good people at the uni, I honestly feel that the whole place is going to the dogs and that some of the people in power really don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Particularly disturbing is when people teaching engineering lack any kind of engineering skill.

I do look forward to having some time to do some work updating and expanding the range of Fontis Magento extensions. 2008 was the first year I made a real contribution to an open source product and I feel a great sense of achievement for having done so. Overall responses to our extensions have been positive and I have been thanked for quite a few people for releasing Australian extensions. I’d like to say a big thank you in return - I truly appreciate hearing that the work that I and my colleagues at Fontis have done is helpful to people.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to post here more frequently, and hopefully I’ll end up following through on it. It does require a fair amount of dedication to write stuff regularly.

Here’s again to a fantastic 2009!