Galaxy Tab 10.1

A handful of thoughts about my new tablet:

  1. Facebook is worse on a tablet, Google Plus is better.
  2. This soft-keyboard is really slow. Not to type on, though, it just lags really bad. Deleting text is painful.
  3. The WordPress admin panel works better than Fluency Admin. But still not smoothly.
  4. The little code buttons on top of the post editor work really well on a touchscreen. I’ve never used them before but on this tablet I love them.
  5. Android’s tablet UI is better than iOS, but is generally kind of jerky when stuff starts moving around.
  6. I likr the 2011 theme on a tablet more than I thought I would. It feels better here than it does on a phone.

The Travails of Mobile

It’s been too long since I’ve posted here. I’d like to write about all the fascinating things I’ve been doing. Unfortunately, there’s really only one thing, and it’s only fascinating to certain people. But it’s the only thing I have to write about, so here it is.

I’ve been working on a new theme for my site, one that will play nice with mobile browsers. I thought it would be easy. I thought I would just copy some stuff out of the Mobile Biolerplate and stick into my theme and that would be that. But it happens to be more complicated than I thought.

So I decided to make understanding this stuff a project, something I would spend time on and labor over and work through with fear and trembling. Initially, this meant going through the MBP line-by-line, scouring the docs and blog and drawing out the reasoning behind what was in there and why it mattered. But this soon broadened into a search across various sites looking for more detail on things like viewports and font formats and conditional Javascript.

So now, after about a month of sifting and sorting, I’ve got a nearly finished theme. What I had intended as a lyric has grown into an epic, and not a very good one. But it has accomplished it’s purpose. I get the whole mobile thing now, and hopefully will find time soon to begin a more polished attempt. In the spirit of my unexpectedly long and difficult journey, I’ve named the theme Odysseus, and will activate it on this site once I’ve ironed out the last few wrinkles.

Now that I think of it, I should have blogged this whole project as I worked on it. >:|

This Site Needs a Makeover

So after trying thematic and hybrid, and playing with toolbox for a while. I’ve decided it’s time to write a theme from scratch. I haven’t done this since I first got into WordPress a few years ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long), so it’ll be interesting to see how all the new features alter the process.

I’ll also be designing for mobile first and desktop second. I’m actually really excited about that, since smartphones and tablets can orient vertically, which allows for a lot of more traditional, bookish page layouts. My lifelong fascination with books and book design has always been at odds with the conventions of Web design, defined as they are by landscape-oriented desktop monitors.

Trying Thematic

I’ve been trying to redesign my site lately, and for simplicity’s sake I wanted to use a child theme. I’ve been trying to do this with Twenty Ten, because it just made sense to keep things easy and use the default theme. And, of course, Twenty Ten was just so new and shiny and awesome!

Alas.

What I want to do with my site is too much, and Twenty Ten isn’t quite flexible and simple enough to let me pull off the redesign. It’s tantalizingly close to being such, which is why I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to make it work. But still it lies on the far side of a very thin but definitive line.

So now I turn to Thematic. I’m sure plenty of people would tell me that Thematic is and always has been the obvious choice for what I wanted to do; I myself have actually been thinking about it almost since I started. But the many hours of closely reading Twenty Ten’s files—searching for clues to impertinent quandries—have been an education. I will definitely hold my own code up to a higher standard of readability from now on.

All that said, Twenty Ten is still the best general use theme out there. I wish it well and safe homecomings for the holidays.

HTML5 Canvas

Web games. No plugins. How cool is that?

All you need to know is javascript, so it’s not surprising that there’s already a lot of stuff out there, even though canvas has yet to be fully implemented across the major browsers. Along with the video element and svg, it would seem Flash’s days are numbered. Anyway, it’s worth checking this stuff out.

The Cameras are Not to Be Trusted

So I was looking for information on how long Twitpic hosts photos, and I came across this rather disturbing article about how much EXIF data is stored in images online. These people culled 15,291 images from Twitpic and got all kinds of information from them, especially photos taken by iPhones.

The iPhone is including the most EXIF information among the images we found…. It not only includes the phone’s location, but also accelerometer data showing if the phone was moved at the time the picture was taken and the readout from the build[sic] in compass showing in which direction the phone was pointed at the time.

In his secret lair under 1 Infinite Loop Steve Jobs broods before his minions, contemplating world domination.1

  1. Yes of course he’s an evil genius. He’s a bald man who wears black turtlenecks, so he’s that or a celebrated artist of the avant-garde. []