Journal

Gather. A Graphic Novel by Anton Peck

2012-05-01T14:56:43+00:00

Anton is trying to raise the funds to author, illustrate and publish a graphic novel called ‘GATHER’ using Kickstarter. You should back him!

First impressions of the 3rd gen Apple TV

2012-03-18T00:41:18+00:00

I’ve never previously been convinced by the Apple TV, for me it always fell short of what I could do with a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV in the lounge. I tried numerous different packages for media playback but always found myself back with good old Front Row – it’s simplicity and wife/child compatability being the stamp of approval required to make it a long term solution for audio/video playback in our lounge. Eventually as with all good things it came to an end… stuttering and spluttering I put the Mac Mini out to pasture and decided to have a shot at replacing it with a 3rd gen Apple TV. The Apple TV has no ‘accessible’ local storage so I was in part only convinced by the recent introduction of iTunes Match (£21.99 per annum) which would mean that we would be able to access and play any/all of our music collection without the need for another machine running iTunes somewhere else in the vicinity. I surmised that for £99 even if it didn’t do everything I wanted then I wouldn’t begrudge it. The first thing you’ll notice about the Apple TV is it’s size (or lack of). This box of tricks is epic in it’s minimal proportions and silent running, a welcome change from the humming Mac Mini it replaced in our Lounge. Set up is super quick and easy, only slightly delayed by having to input text with a directional keypad. Despite much ridicule on Twitter the revised ‘dashboard’ is quick and easy to use – however as you navigate down through the menus it very quickly becomes apparent this is the OS equivalent of a nose job. Elsewhere the menu system feels (and looks) exactly like Front Row did when it made it’s debut back in 2005. Hopefully future iterations of the operating system will see a more complete overhaul which makes better use of screen space to display more content at once. The beauty of the Apple TV is it’s simplicity, it’s ‘Wife approved’ and that means a great deal if you don’t want to spend your life providing IT support when the other half wants to catch up on some Prison Break – or other dramas featuring men that might be marginally more attractive than yourself. Streaming of iTunes purchased (or otherwise acquired) movies from a nearby iTunes library works a treat (smooth as butter with HD content) and the built in video apps work as expected. For me the biggest surprise of all is Netflix, a service that I’d never even considered previously had suddenly become the most used feature on our Apple TV. Yes the selection is mostly ‘older stuff’ but when you consider the cost (currently £6 per month / £72 per annum) it’s an absolute bargain. We’ve already watching 4 series of a particular ‘prison related tv drama’ which on iTunes at least would have set us back £80! Netflix has proved ‘very’ popular with the kids too, completely replacing what TV they did watch on cable with a great selection of classics (anyone remember Inspector Gadget?). So, is it worth the £99 price tag? If you subscribe to iTunes Match and Netflix then it’s an absolute no brainer, if not then at this price it’s almost worth a punt anyway. Hopefully future iterations of the Apple TV will continue to make it more relevant to wider use base with the introduction of other streaming services (fingers crossed!).

Things about ExpressionEngine 2 that wind me up good and proper

2011-10-28T11:38:22+00:00

Working day in and day out with ExpressionEngine 2 I’m seeing ‘A LOT’ of things that really peeve me off from a usability perspective. I keep meaning to make note of them so perhaps someone will take notice… this is going to be an evolving blog post which sets about doing just that. jQuery crazyness is ruining the ‘Content > Edit’ screen – The number of times I click through to the edit screen and then click on a entry title to edit it ‘before the page has completely loaded’ escapes me, but every time I do I get a ‘different entry’. I can only assume this is because some kind of post page load processing hasn’t completed yet and so what I’m seeing in front of me isn’t actually accurate. Publish layouts are completely borked – Yes, sometimes we might want to install a module, extension or field type after having set up a publish layout. If doing so results in a billion PHP errors on the edit entry screen then I’m simply not going to use publish layouts. Primary navigation is lethargic – Again, I’m pretty sure this is jQuery related… the primary navigation drop downs are sloooooooooow. They need to be super fast responsive becuase right now I’m tripping up on them left right and center. Entry ordering – In EE1 entries in the ‘Content > Edit’ screen had a fixed order (by entry ID). EE2 apparently does away with that approach and gives us sporadic ordering. Everything is just fine until you start editing previously created entries, ordering then apparently takes on a mind of it’s own. Go figure. Forgetful Dialogs – The new File dialog is a big improvement over the complete mess that came before it, however all I really want is for it to have some memory. Make life easier for me if I’m uploading 30 images… pre-select that same upload location I used last time… you’re gonna save me 60 clicks! Inconsistent Terminology – This one manifests itself in numerous places but here’s an example. In the Admin area a ‘Channel’ has a “Full Channel Name” and a “Channel Name” whilst a custom field has a “Field Label” and a “Field Name”, why not make things uniform… “Channel Name, Channel Reference, Field Name, Field Reference”. More to come as they hit me.

Existing creative apps for designers are not suited to today’s web

2011-08-10T20:48:48+00:00

We all know it… it’s been a common accepted fact for far too long. We’ve been talking about the lack of interest from app developers at a regular local meet-up and decided it was about time we did something positive about it. Project Meteor is a campaign for the web design app we all need, if you agree that current tools don’t cut it – visit the site and add your voice to the campaign by tweeting for the cause.

Source Code for my Fireworks Extensions

2011-07-29T10:23:28+00:00

I will warn you, this ain’t going to be pretty but a few people have been asking. Feel free to tear these apart… do what you will with them… no license… no need to credit me… knock yourself out if you are that way inclined. FireworksExtensionsSource.zip I simply have no interest in writing extensions for Fireworks anymore… hopefully someone else might be able to pick these up and do something positive with them.

Hide template based content until a specified date in ExpressionEngine

2011-07-14T12:24:31+00:00

Sometimes it’s desirable to hide content on your website from users a specified date. With ExpressionEngine we already have built in functionality to do this with weblog/channel entries. If you want to achieve a similar effect for blocks of template code then you can simply combine the conditional and date tags as follows: {if {current_time format="%Y%m%d"} >= "20110717"}...{/if} Initially I thought I might need a plug-in to achieve the desired result but it was great to discover I could do just what I wanted out of the box. :) Update: As pointed out by Philip there are some issues with this approach so tread carefully people, I’ve only tested this concept in a scenario where the current date falls within the same month/year etc. Update: As suggested by Philip I’ve updated the code sample above to reverse the date format to Ymd, this ‘should’ prevent any issues as Ymd will always increment whereas dmY will not.

Alternatives to Flash (for animation) are starting to float to the surface

2011-06-20T19:20:47+00:00

As a one time evangelist of Flash it’s interesting to see new tools floating to the surface over the course of the past few months. As browsers become more capable of delivering animation and effects without the need for plug-ins like the Adobe Flash Player I think this market will become increasingly competitive. I’ve not had a chance to sit down and look at any of these tools in earnest, indeed some of them are not even available to download yet but I thought it would be worth creating a brief list and adding to it as time goes by. For now at least here’s the current crop of HTML5/CSS3 animation tools which I’ve stumbled across: Animatable – http://animatable.com/ Edge (from Adobe would you believe!) – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ Hype – http://tumultco.com/hype/ Radi – http://radiapp.com/ Sencha Animator – http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ It will be interesting to see how these applications develop over the coming months and whether any on them particular gain traction with the community as the ‘go to’ tool for online animation, just as Flash did back in it’s glory days. Let me know if you’ve seen a tool that I’ve missed and I’ll add it to the list! :)

Let devs prefix your ExpressionEngine variables with a custom value

2011-03-10T23:19:34+00:00

I struck upon a wonderful little idea which I’ve implemented in a simple plug-in I’m writing for a project I’m currently working on.., add a ‘variable_prefix’ parameter to your plug-in or module… allow devs using your add on to opt to have variables prefixed with any value. This is really useful if your add on might have variables which conflict with another add on or native ExpressionEngine variables. This could also allows a dev to nest once instance of your plug-in in another without having to resort to embeds, they simply specify a tag prefix for the outer tag pair.

The iPad as a family computer

2011-02-25T22:15:26+00:00

We’ve had out family iPad for some time now and whilst it truly is a ‘magical’ device it still falls a little short of being the perfect family computer. For many the iPad is a ‘personal’ device but for others it serves as a ‘shared’ device. Ours is used by all members of the family and often found in the lounge on the coffee table, or in the kitchen, or in one of the kids bedrooms! What the iPad (or more specifically iOS) really lacks is multi user accounts though. Both my wife and I use the iPad a fair bit – I’d love to be able to check my mail on it but that means giving 3 young children access to my work mail account (hmmm!). By the same token the girls hate having to wade through screen after screen of ‘boy games’ and well myself and my wife can’t both be signed into Facebook at the same time. The iPad is a social device which lends itself naturally to being shared, here’s hoping Apple makes more of this in a future software update! :)

Demise of the Kia Sedona

2011-02-21T09:28:11+00:00

It’s some time since we waved goodbye to the awful unreliable lump that was our Kia Sedona and back in 2009 I set myself the target of denying Kia Â£1 million in car sales to repay them for their glorious customer service ethos. Well, just over 2 years later the blog posts here on the subject have amassed a rather reasonable 32,508 unique views… if each person that read about our experience with Kia was turned off from ever buying one then that’s a lot of potential customers down the drain. Now it would be daft to assume that all those users are actually potential Kia owners (though they could be), instead lets work on the basis that only a teeny tiny 0.5% of those visitors were actually people who were considering buying a Kia and lets consider that the average Kia costs in the region of Â£10,000. Despite the small percentage this still suggests a rather impressive Â£1.6 million worth of potential sales now lost. Therefore I declare victory. To close I’ll just say that I found this recent article about the planned demise of the Kia Sedona in 2011 a mildly amusing read, in particular the following line from a Kia company representative: …production [of the Kia Sedona] will end due to reduced demand. Well hopefully my readers made a small contribution to that reduction. You might also want to read: Whatever you do, don’t buy a Kia Sedona Kia Reliability Don’t let the door hit you on the way out