Local Weather Forecast in Your Calendar

Posted on March 19, 2009 by andrew

Bare Bones have recently released a utility called Weathercal:

WeatherCal presents the latest available weather conditions and forecast (up to five days in advance) for your desired locations, as all-day events in iCal. You’ll always know the predicted weather well ahead of time.

(Via Daring Fireball)

However, as pointed out by David Friedman on Twitter this is also achievable for free from wunderground.com, by simply searching for your city/town and then subscribing to the ICAL link in the top right hand corner.

ICAL format calendars can be subscribed to from iCal (OS X) and from Google Calendar. Add this to Google Mobile Sync and you have a constantly updating local weather forecast in your iPhone calendar as well.

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Google Street View Comes to the UK

Posted on March 19, 2009 by andrew

Google has launched street view in the UK and the Netherlands.

I had always found it to be kind of a fun feature of Google Maps in other countries, but it is so much better to see your own street. Now I know that there is an argument for actually going outside and looking at your street (the imagery would be more up to date for a start ((I can tell you from the car parked outside my old flat that in Teddington (London) the pictures were taken between October 2007 and October 2008))), but this is a pretty useful feature for finding places you have never been to before.

Visit maps.google.co.uk, search for your street, and drag the little yellow man icon to it.

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iPhone OS 3.0 Features

Posted on March 18, 2009 by andrew

Not long ago, I posted about Tuesday’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, and speculated as to what I would like to see included. Well it seems that Apple’s enginers read this blog, and spent the next few days re-working the OS release to meet my requirements. That or they just had these features planned anyway, but I will choose to believe the former if you don’t mind.

Let’s take a look at the major new features, starting with those I was hoping for:

  • Cut/Copy/Paste. Finally, after three major releases, the iPhone will get this functionality. Apple have admittedly had a difficult task in integrating this into a multi-touch interface in a intuitive way, but  two years? Better late than never I suppose.
  • Background Push notification. The functionality promised to iPhone owners a year ago will finally arrive. According to Apple, developer response to the initial announcement necessitated a complete change in their push server architecture which is now complete.
  • MMS. My all-singing all-dancing multimedia smartphone can now send picture messages. I had a phone which could do this in 2002, but again better late than never.
  • Spotlight Search. This will live on a screen to the left of the default home screen, and will allow search across all applications in much the same way as spotlight allows in Mac OS X.
  • Landscape Keyboard. Always seemed silly to allow this in Safari but not in other apps. Now it will be accessible from any application, which is bound to please heavy email users and annoy the developers of all those landscape mail apps.
  • CalDAV support. This is a big one for me, but it has not recieved much attention ((This is also something of a surprise given the money Apple charge for MobileMe)). It will cut out the midle man and allow direct over the air synchronisation with calendars which support the CalDAV protocol (such as Google Calendar).

There are various other features too – turn by turn navigation apps will be allowed, a voice memo app will be included and notes syncing will be enabled. Developers will have access to the dock and bluetooth to allow interfacing with 3rd party add-ons and hundreds of new APIs will all be available.

The only thing I was after which didn’t materialise is better support for ActiveSync. My main reason for this being calendar/contacts syncing issues which have been partially addresses by CalDAV support.

A beta of the new OS is available to developers now, and it is due to be released to the public in the summer (I’d bet at the same time as a new iPhone model). It will be free to iPhone owners (1st and 2nd gen) and will cost iPod touch owners $9.95.

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Site Redesign

Posted on March 17, 2009 by andrew

Things have changed around here. A number of changes have been made to the site design, some obvious and some less so. Here is a rundown of what has changed, and why.

Grids, grids, grids

The site as it was felt somewhat uneven. It was difficult to say exactly what was wrong, just that it didn’t quite feel ‘correct’ (here is the old design, and the new design ((You might be interested to know that the snazzy zoom effect used for these images is freely available from Cabel Sasser at his blog.))).

To address this imbalance, I have aligned the major layout elements to a 960px-wide grid ((For those who care, it is a ’960 Grid System’ 60px, 12 column grid with 20px gutter. It is available here.)). This has increased the width of both sidebars (post date on the left, search box on the right) as well as the main content div. In addition, these widths are nicely set in a consistent ratio of 2:7:3. This consistency may not be obvious, but in my opinion it helps the page to feel more ordered (here is the new design with grid overlay).

For further reading on grid based web design, this article at Smashing Magazine is a good place to start.

Typography

The main change here has been margins and padding. A few headers and various other block level elements had uneven padding or margins and the overall effect was a slightly disordered look.

I reset all text margins and padding, and then spaced elements as required. I hope that this makes for a more ordered feel to posts.

UPDATE: I have had another crack at this as it still didn’t look correct. Whilst I was at it I also converted font sizes and top/bottom margins from px to ems. This should help the site to scale more easily when users change the default font size.

I have changed the margins of most elements in order to achieve a better flow from one to another, and to help separate discrete bodies of text ((Here is an article from Smashing Magazine and another from 24 Ways which helped)).

Browser Compatibility

The initial design for this site was tested in Firefox, Chrome, IE7 and Safari (Mac/Windows and iPhone). You may have noticed an IE6 sized gap there, and just recently, so have I. My server stats only show a handful of unique visitors using Internet Explorer 6, but given the sight which would have greeted them, I don’t think I should expect them back in a hurry.

Take another look at that last link. It has the title of the first post kind of overlaid onto the post body. It has the menu bar, header and sidebar way off to the right. If you were to scroll to the comments section, you would find a similar problem. Not ideal.

It turns out that this is the result of a well known bug in IE6. The result is that margins on floated elements are doubled. Since many of my div boxes are floated with margins, they have this problem. This is fixed by a small browser specific CSS file, which is called only if  IE6 (or lower) is detected ((This is done using the Internet Explorer specific feature “Conditional Comments”. Read more here.)). This means that the hacks are targeted at IE, and do not affect any of the more compliant browsers.

Colours

I have am a big fan of minimal, large typeface web design and have tried to keep this site true to that. It uses lots of white space, and type large enough that the reader can sit back in their chair. I felt that the clean colours of the site could do with a brighter accent colour than the muted red from before, so here is is! Also, I like green more than red. So there.

Comments

The layout for comments section has been revised.

Each comment is enclosed in a kind of drop shadow speech bubble, and they alternate direction as they move down the page. These speech bubbles are formed from a top, middle and bottom background image, and are able to increase in height to accommodate long comments. This alternate design is loosely inspired by the threaded speech bubbles in iChat and the iPhone SMS application.

And Finally… XHTML 1.0 Strict

The last change of note was a move from XHTML 1.0 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. This was not really a big ask, as it involved replacing the DOCTYPE declaration and fixing two validation errors.

Being a new site, there is no legacy HTML lying around requiring the use of the Transitional DOCTYPE, so why not!

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On Internet Explorer 6

Posted on March 17, 2009 by andrew

Today it came to my attention that this site looks like complete bollocks when viewed in Microsoft’s piece of work web broswer, Internet Explorer 6.

I have to say that this grates somewhat, having taken the time to design a standards compliant site (which displays perfectly in a standards compliant browser), but what can I do? Well, I can deploy a number of hacks and work-arounds, and by trial and error it should work eventually…

I have been working on a minor re-vamp for a few days, fixing my layout to a nice uniform grid, and also adjusting typography sizes/margins and colours. I have also included a number of fixes for these IE6 bugs, and it should come out okay ((More on specific fixes later)).

This design is still a little bit work in progress, and I am aware of some problems with the comments section (in IE6 only), but for now it is better than it was.

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6 iPhone Bookmarklets

Posted on March 15, 2009 by andrew

The word bookmarklet is an amalgamation of bookmark and applet, and this describes it pretty well. It is a small application (‘applet’) which is stored as the URL of a browser bookmark, usually as JavaScript.

Bookmarklets add functionality to a web browser, without the need to install any third party extensions. Firefox is an example of a browser for which there are literally thousands of extensions available ((More on this in another post)), but each of these extensions require a small amount of resource to run, and when many are installed it can lead to a slow browsing experience and long launch times.

Perhaps even more handy than this is the potential for bookmarklets to add functionality to browsers which do not allow any kind of third party ad-on, for example the Safari app on the iPhone. The following is a list of my favourite iPhone bookmarklets:

  • LastPass is a cross platform password manager. It stores all of your passwords in an encrypted format, and allows access to them via a Windows application, a Firefox extension or a web interface. This means that I am able to set long, random passwords and access them from anywhere. Lastpass has a couple of handy bookmarklets as well, which auto-fills log in forms when activated. No link is provided for this bookmarklet, as you need to first sign up for and start using LastPass.
  • NewsGator is an online service which synchronises with the popular Mac and iPhone feed reader NetNewsWire. When browsing a page which has a feed associated with it, this bookmarklet will add it to your NewsGator account. As with the LastPass bookmarklet this requires a signup first.
  • iTransmogrify by Joe Maller translates embedded flash content into something recognisable by the iPhone – this can be used to provide a link to content in the YouTube application or to play various flash based MP3 content. Here is the bookmarklet. To add it directly from your iPhone, bookmark the link, and then edit it to remove the ‘http://appleton.me?’ section (so that it starts at ‘javascript’).
  • iCopy is a basic copy/paste implementation for Safari. It allows for the URL of a page, of for a paragraph of text from that page to be copied, and pasted to another web page or to an email. It isn’t quite the full blown copy and paste functionality that the iPhone needs, but it is a good start. Here is the bookmarklet. As before, bookmark the link and remove the ‘http://appleton.me?’ section from the front.
  • Short URL takes the URL for the current web page, and creates a mini version using bit.ly. This URL can then be used in a Twitter Tweet. Here is the bookmarklet.
  • Find in this page is a simple one – it allows you to search for text on a web page, and highlights the results. Here is the bookmarklet.
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Google Voice

Posted on March 13, 2009 by andrew

In 2007, Google bought US telephone service GrandCentral and promptly closed access to new members. Everything went quiet, development apparently stopped and it seemed that was it. Well today the Google Mobile Blog has announced a relaunch of the free service, rebranded Google Voice.

Google voice is a kind of cloud service for your phone(s) in the same way that GMail is for your mail, calendars and contacts. It offers a huge list of features, these are my favourite:

  • You have one phone number, and calls can be routed to all or any of your physical telephones.
  • It will give you the option to answer, reject etc based on who is calling, and will even allow you to give a ‘this number is no longer in use’ message – useful for telemarketing calls.
  • It will also allow you to seamlessly switch phones mid-call, good for switching from land line to mobile if you are heading out for example.
  • All of your text messages, voicemail and contacts are stored and are accessible from the online interface, and are available no matter how many times you change your phone, carrier etc.

New features are currently only available to pre-existing GrandCentral users, but Google expects to be offering it to new users within the next few weeks. No word on UK availability, but I would guess it is some way off.

David Pogue has a full run down of the service over at the NY Times.

UPDATE: Lifehacker has a good rundown of the new features along with screenshots and videos.

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iPhone OS 3.0

Posted on March 12, 2009 by andrew

Apple are set to announce the third major release of their iPhone OS at a media only event on 17th March.

Things I hope will be included:

  • Copy/Paste – finally please?
  • Background push notification – so that the copy of MobileChat I bought almost a year ago might actually become useful.
  • Improved support for ActiveSync – Why can MobileMe set the colour of multiple calendars properly, but Google Mobile Sync can’t?
  • MMS – Like every other mobile phone with a colour screen in the world ((Although in the UK we are lucky to have a pretty good substitute in the MMS app.)).

Things which will probably actually be included:

  • None of the above but something big which will make the previous list seem unimportant (until the gloss wears off and we all remember we actually wanted copy/paste etc).
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Only 7 of 100 Top Web Pages Validate

Posted on March 11, 2009 by andrew

In designing this blog I have been careful to adhere to web standards, and you should find that it validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional ((I know my CSS 2.1 has three errors, but to be fair they are CSS 3 or target specific rendering engines.)).  This is because web standards are important, and should be taken seriously.

With this in mind, it is a little worrying to read that when Jeffrey Zeldman tested the top 100 US sites listed at Alexia, only 7 validated.

On this day, in this test, seven out of 100 “top US” sites validated:

  1. MSN (#7 in Alexa’s list) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Who’d a thunk it? (Validation link)
  2. Craigslist (#10) validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional. I’ll buy that! (Validation link)
  3. WordPress (#22) validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The power of the press, baby! (Validation link)
  4. Time Warner RoadRunner (#39) validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Meep-Meep! (Validation link)
  5. BBC Newsline Ticker (#50) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Cheers, mates! (Validation link)
  6. The US Internal Revenue Service (#58) validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional. Our tax dollars at work! (Validation link)
  7. TinyPic (#73) (”Free Image Hosting”), coded by ZURB, validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. (Validation link)

Still, maybe there is hope if MSN can manage XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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iPhone Prototype Pulled From eBay

Posted on March 11, 2009 by andrew

This is very interesting. For a short while a pre-release iPhone prototype was available for sale on eBay. Bidding reached $2000 before it was removed, presumably at the behest of Apple’s legal people. There was an accompanying video on YouTube, showing the software which is also gone.

Gadget blog Engadget have managed to rescue it, and have posted it for posterity. Always interesting to get a behind the scenes peek at the development of something like this – is it just me or does it seem much snappier than the actual iPhone we all get to own?

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