Javaguidelines.com

Hope you all are enjoying some time off with friends and family.

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• Apple Wireless Keyboard Review and the Big Control Key - Brilliant!
• On the re-appearance of the OS X Java 6 Developer Preview - heh.
• FlyClear Discount Code - whoa.
• Cliff Shaw on lessons learned and moving forward - some good tips in here.
• Is Pownce Going To The DeadPool? - I haven’t gotten a Pownce invite of file distribution in a while.
• Making the most of hashtags - people have asked for hashtags to be treated as special links in Twitter Tools, might be interesting.
• Printing four-to-one - this makes a lot of sense, as long as your eyes are good enough.
• Weave: Integrating Online Services with Firefox (thanks Nick)
• WebKit gets Native getElementsByClassName

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There’s a new version of the ShareThis WordPress plugin available. Officially it’s a beta because we didn’t have as much time to test it as we wanted to. There may be a couple of bugs lurking out there, but we wanted to get it released before the end of the year because it adds some features people have been asking for:

• An option to let you choose if you want the ShareThis link automatically added to your posts/pages or not.
• If you disable the option to automatically add the ShareThis link to your content, you can now use the sharethis_button() template tag to add the ShareThis link wherever you like in your theme.
• The ShareThis link is now an inline element, just like it is in the ShareThis Classic version. This allows you to place it wherever you like in your theme.
• An option to have the ShareThis window open in a pop-up instead of inline.
• An option to keep Flash and other embeds active when showing the ShareThis window inline. Sometimes those can bleed through, depending on your browser, so they are temporarily disabled by default when showing the ShareThis window.
• Changes to make the loading of the window and the loading of the link a good deal speedier.

If you are currently running ShareThis 2.0, I would recommend upgrading to this version. If you tried ShareThis 2.0 and decided to stick with ShareThis Classic because of the positioning limitations, I’d recommend giving this version a try.

The download is available on my WordPress Plugins page and on ShareThis.com.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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At Crowd Favorite we use SVN at the core of our team development work. We recently tried to switch from Word and Excel documents to Pages and Numbers documents for estimates and proposals. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that iWork breaks SVN.

The .numbers and .pages files are bundles - plain directories that OS X treats differently. Quite reasonably, as a cross-platform solution, SVN does not care a whit about bundles, and treats these as any normal directory and files. The problem appears to be that when saving new versions of these files/bundles, the .svn directories inside these bundles are removed/altered/damaged.

This is clearly a problem with bundles and the iWork apps, not SVN. At least that’s my view - read a counter-argument here.

More reading on the subject, including some work-around scripts:

• Restore .svn in Keynote/Pages documents
• Working with iWork and Subversion
• Subversion and iWork

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Congratulations to Mike and Julie on the arrival of their little girl! I got to see some photos this evening (you’re right Mike, the iPhone is a great portable slideshow device).

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Interesting commentary, also here. To be honest, I only added the explanation link to the Popularity Contest percentage after getting lots of questions about what it meant. I certainly didn’t intend to benefit from the link to the explanation page… who wants GoogleJuice™ to a random page with a ? as the keyword? I did think that a side effect might be people liking the idea and choosing to download the plugin themselves, so I guess my intentions were not completely pure.

It’s always interesting to see people assign motives to my actions, especially when the motives are their own invention and were often never something I considered. Something about hindsight being 20/20 might be appropriate to insert here…

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I really wanted to like Spanning Sync, I bought a lifetime copy and tried it for over a month. However, I’d had to give it up and go back to my old solution: subscribing to my Google Calendars in iCal.

Here are the reasons I’m turning Spanning Sync off (for now):

• It would somehow decide not to do scheduled syncs for long periods of time (8+ hours, sometimes days) with no notification to me. I’d have to go look for issues when I realized things were out of sync.
• Every time I upgraded it would forget which calendars to sync. This meant I’d have to reselect all of the calendars on every machine and it would take a very long time to do the first sync again.
• When an upgrade was required, the app would just stop working. It wouldn’t tell you this - you had to open the preference pane to discover the reason why.
• Event alarms did not sync, and there was no setting (that I could find) to set default alarms for items being synced in to iCal. This resulted in me being late for things because I rely on those reminders.

I’m hopeful that this will be a temporary departure from Spanning Sync, and that in a couple of months when I try it again I’ll be able to rely on it. It was a very handy service when it was working and now that we have over-the-air sync between Google Calendar and the BlackBerry, this would really make a nice solution.

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I was really excited for this, then I discovered it only syncs a single calendar. I applaud Google for embracing iCalendars and making it easy for us to create lots of them to keep things nicely organized, but then they go and add all kinds of features that only work with the Default Calendar. That part sucks.

UPDATE: I was wrong - YAY!!

I believed that the sync only did the “Default Calendar” because after I entered my username and password I was presented with only this option. Since I wanted to sync more than just the Default Calendar, last time I didn’t proceed any further.

This time I did, and went ahead with the sync. Lo and behold, the first thing it did was download the calendar list (then synced the Default Calendar). After this initial sync, I was then able to go into options and choose my additional calendar; including my Google Apps calendars.

Most Excellent!

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I’m very excited to announce that Crowd Favorite has grown once again, this time bringing on a developer who needs no introduction to most people in the WordPress world: Dougal Campbell.

Dougal has made numerous contributions to the WordPress community, from core code contributions and plugins to Ping-O-Matic. Like me, he’s got years of experience working with WordPress. Since much of what we do at Crowd Favorite is custom WordPress build and functionality work, this experience is a perfect fit for us.

However Dougal also has a broad depth of experience in general web technologies and web application development. He’ll be helping out on Crowd Favorite products as well as the custom WordPress work we do.

I’m very excited that Dougal has agreed to come on board, and look forward to working with him again.

Here is a brief bio on Dougal (also on the Crowd Favorite About page now):

Over the past 25 years, Dougal has molded his fascination with computers from a hobby into a career. Dougal joined the WordPress effort early on and developed much of the initial XML-RPC code and the Ping-O-Matic service, and now enjoys “Developer Emeritus” status. From the early ’80s to present day, he has worked on customized inventory database systems, and developed web applications for trucking companies, the hospitality industry, and a startup with a web-based video platform, among other things.

Along the way, he has contributed his efforts to several open source projects, the most well-known of which are WordPress and POV-Ray. Dougal comes to Crowd Favorite with a strong background in developing web applications in Perl and PHP, and with with an eye towards web standards and the emerging semantic web.

Dougal’s offline time is spent with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat. He hasn’t taught the dog and cat how to set up their own blogs yet, but he’s working on it.

UPDATE: read Dougal’s post as well.

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Over the last couple of weeks we at Crowd Favorite have had the pleasure of working with the good folks at TechCrunch to help get the new CrunchGear site design up and running (read about it on CrunchGear and TechCrunch).

The designers at ACS did the majority of the new design work¹, then we helped integrate and implement various features and functions in WordPress and made sure all the Ts were crossed and the Is dotted.

On Friday, we brought the new design and features live on CrunchGear.com. Congratulations to the TechCrunch and CrunchGear teams on the successful launch of the new design, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to help make this a success.

Have a web development or WordPress project you need development, design or consulting help with? Get in touch with Crowd Favorite.

1. Redesigns on high traffic sites are never universally well-received, and this is no different. The comments on new CrunchGear design are somewhat mixed, but I like the new design and enjoyed working on the implementation. [back]

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