raoli.com

• iPhone GUI PSD
  (tags: ui mockups iphone design cite:ldandersen)
• iPhone Touch Events in JavaScript
  (tags: javascript iphone js webdev touch event cite:rentzsch)

I’m a litle late to the party, but the August 2008 edition of ATPM came back from the virtual printer a few day’s ago. Chris breaks down this month’s contents and touches on a delayed personal milestone — 10 years at ATPM as of the July issue.

I’ve been at ATPM for a while, but Chris inspired me to dig back into our review archives to see exactly how long. Going back, it turns out that my first review ran in issue 4.08, 10 years ago this month. I contributed that first article after some prodding from Evan Trent, who introduced me Michael Tsai, our Publisher and Editor for the entirety of my time at ATPM.

I’m certainly not writing as much as I used to (and I’m hoping that will change), but I’ve consistently enjoyed the experience. In addition to reviewing numerous compelling products over the years, I’ve gotten to know many interesting people through my involvement at ATPM, both virtually and in person. The world of online publishing has changed quite a bit in the last 10 years — one of the reasons Evan was able to prod me into writing was that I’d lost my previous outlet and was looking for something new. At that point, I think there were 3 or 4 other monthly Mac e-zines regularly published. As far as I know, ATPM is the only one left, as personal and professional weblogs have lowered the barriers to entry for electronic publication. I think it says something about the people involved in ATPM over the years that we’ve remained in publication through this shift in the landscape.

I was looking up something on RetailMeNot a little earlier and saw that they’d added a sparkline in addition to each discount code’s success rate.

I love seeing little visual additions like this — it doesn’t add much clutter to the display while giving a clear indication of the trend related to the coupon that the success rate alone lacks. In this case, the failures most likely correlate to the 4/14 expiration date. For coupons that don’t list the expiration date, though, the sparkline provides a visual clue as the whether any failures are random or due to a change in the code’s validity.

I had a chance to take in a bit of a game at Nationals Park last night. It’s a very impressive stadium and I’m looking forward to getting back later during the summer.

Attendance was fairly sparse, but we chalked it up to the combination of the cold weather and the championship game scheduled for that evening.

Daring Fireball:

And that’s just it. Firefox 3’s shortcomings as a Mac app are behavioral, too.

I’m giving Firefox for just reason that Gruber highlights later on in his piece — improved memory management. I’ve only got 1 GB of RAM on my PowerBook and my computer’s performance would noticeably drag when running Safari for extended periods. Conversely, I’ve noticed little-to-no slowdown with Firefox running.

That said, Gruber’s definitely right that Firefox isn’t a particularly good Mac app. In addition to his list of issues, there are two that I’m finding bothersome.

• Doesn’t Respect RSS Reader Setting — Apps like Safari, NetNewsWire, and others are capable of registering as the default feed reader and Safari will happily pass feed URLs over to the selected reader. This makes it simple to subscribe to new feeds. Firefox, however, doesn’t honor this setting, instead displaying the feed contents in a new tab/window.

  Update: Turns out that while Firefox won’t respect the default system feed reader, you can configure Firefox to use NetNewsWire or your other feed reader of choice. The Applications panel in the preferences lets you (appropriately enough) configure external applications for different content types. I’d originally looked here for some sort of setting, but missed the Web Feed option among all the audio and video formats.

  

  Firefox doesn’t seem to auto-detect the feed readers installed on your system, but you can point it at NewNewsWire and it seems to work as expected. In addition to supporting external applications, Firefox goes one step further and allows you to specify web-based feed readers, like Google Reader or My Yahoo. So, as is often the case with Firefox, the desired functionality is present, but not necessarily Mac-like. (Thanks to John Gruber for pointing this out to me.)

• Doesn’t Use System Keychain — Old news, I know, but I’ve been retyping a bunch of passwords lately and I’ve occasionally had trouble remembering which password is associated with which site. I have the choice between trying a number of passwords till I find the right one or firing up Keychain Access and looking for the appropriate record.

  On the plus side, the save password display in Firefox is quite nice. The display is similar to the new search bar in Safari and hangs around after the password-protected page has been loaded. If you’re not sure whether you’ve entered the right password, you can defer saving the password until after you’ve confirmed the validity of the password. Definitely an improvement of Safari’s ask, then process approach.

I’m not saying that Firefox isn’t a good web browser. However, it’s very likely that I’ll switch back to Safari once I get a computer with more resources.

While I appreciate the effort on Flickr’s part, I’m don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say I really don’t know how to greet people in Icelandic

• MT Action Streams => PHP
  Port of the Action Streams MovableType plugin to Wordpress
  (tags: weblogging movabletype wordpress php)

• Macworld | Set up a free CalDAV server
  This has been on my to-do-list for a while. Walkthrough should come in handy.
  (tags: opensource osx caldav calendar)

Brian Dolan:

“Icon Mobile helped us with the icons and other parts of the UI, but Sprint took a more aggressive role than we ever have in designing this device,” Owens said. “It’s the most aggressive push into UI I’ve seen by a carrier, and I spent 18 years at AT&T.” Sprint conceded that the iPhone exposed a weakness in the market: user interface, so the carrier decided it needed to build a UI consistent with the iPhone experience, while creating a device that leverages the capability of Sprint’s Rev. A network. [Emphasis added]

You know, I thought one of the reasons for the iPhone’s success was that AT&T stayed the hell out of Apple’s way and had almost no impact on the UI development.

Wow, what a way to start the season. The Red Sox won took the opener in come-from-behind style, getting a game tying 9th inning home run from Brandon Moss. Moss had a huge game, going 2-5, driving in a pair, and getting his first career home run off A’s closer Huston Street. Manny Ramirez was the other offensive star of the game, going 2-5 and driving in 4 runs on a pair of doubles.

After a rough start to the game, Daisuke Matsuzaka settled down to pitch 5 innings, setting down the final 7 hitters in order. Hideki Okajima get into the game as well, pitching a scoreless 9th and getting the win after the Sox took the lead in the 10th. Jonathan Papelbon struggled a bit in the 10th, giving up a run on 3 hits and a walk. He was bailed out when Emil Brown tried to take third after doubling. Instead, he was cut down on a nice 9-4-3-5-6-3 play by the Sox (yes, I had to rewind the TiVo to get all of that).

Oh yeah, 2004 hero Keith Foulke made his return to major league baseball during today’s game, pitching a scoreless 8th inning and striking out Manny.

And with that, the 2008 major league baseball season has begun.