My last web conference was nearly three years ago (the Highland Fling back in 2007), so it was good to venture out again and meet like-minded souls. The line-up was great (Andy Clarke, Peter-Paul Koch, Dan Rubin, Tim Van Damme to name but a few), the venue was excellent (The Sage Gateshead) and the hospitality (free WiFi, Red Bull and muffins) was spot-on. Special mention also to The Sancho Plan who finished things off in some style.

My only real beef was the two-track schedule - you chose either the ‘Design’ track or the ‘Development’ track. You could easily shift between the two halls but it seemed an awkward format to me.

There were several occasions when I had to choose between two great sessions, and, as a result, you felt a bit frustrated about the one you had to miss out on. You also had the situation at the end of talks where people were moving to and from each hall, which caused some disruption.

Despite this, it was a great conference and it was good to hear there’ll be another coming along in 2011.

The new features in Transmit 4 are great - particularly the Disks feature which lets you mount a remote server (such as an Amazon S3 bucket) as a volume on your desktop. You can then easily drag and drop files to it in the Finder (the Transmit app doesn’t even need to be running).

I’m still getting used to the UI and navigation changes (it took me a while to find the ‘disconnect’ button - it’s changed to an ‘eject’ style button in the top right of the remote server pane) but overall it’s very impressive.

It’s also interesting to compare the launch of both apps - Transmit 4 was announced to a big fanfare, but, in contrast, Bare Bones released BBEdit 9.5 without hardly a whisper.

Panic also created a fantastic Javascript-enhanced webpage announcing all the new features, whereas Bare Bones were happy to simply publish a long list of release notes (though they are wonderfully verbose - including this obscure WoW reference).

When you’re registered to flattr, you pay a small monthly fee. You set the amount yourself. In the end of the month, that fee is divided between all the things you flattered. You’re always logged in to the account. That means that giving someone some flattr-love is just a button away. And you should! Clicking one more button doesn’t add to your fee. It just divides the fee between more people!

Worth keeping an eye on this one.

They claim it was ‘found in a bar’, which just sounds ridiculous. I can’t imagine an Apple employee would be (a) careless enough to fiddle with such a device in public and (b) daft enough to leave it behind. The most obvious conclusion is that an Apple employee has stolen the device and sold it to Gawker (the owners of the Gizmodo website).

If this is the case it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Sure, Gizmodo are getting the pageviews just now, but down the line it might do them more damage than good. Apple are sure to deny them access to any promotional events or pre-release products, and there may even be legal recourse if it can be proven they have received stolen goods.

Audit results provide you with hints on unused resources, caching optimizations, the number of resources to load per domain, image tag parameters and many other suggestions.

What an awesome idea. I can see this feature alone saving me hours of painstaking debugging and testing.

I use Safari for my everyday browsing, but always keep Firefox in my dock for when I need to do some work. Although sluggish and crash-prone, the main benefit of using Firefox was the fantastic Firebug extension, but with each update to Safari’s Web Inspector the day when I can finally drag it out of my dock gets a little closer.

The result is Mindblaster - a simple puzzle created using Javascript, HTML and CSS which you can run as a standalone app on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Visit xlab.co.uk/mblast on your iPhone or iPod touch

Once you’ve got the app loaded in Safari, click the + icon to add the app to your Home Screen.

Here’s a few screenshots -

The actual puzzle logic was knocked together quite quickly using jQuery, with jQTouch handling the interaction and UI. The app uses localStorage, HTML5’s built-in client-side storage, to keep a track of your previous attempts. There’s also offline support so you can still play the game without a web connection.

The most rewarding thing was the speed it took to get things up and running. I worked on the app on and off for 2 days (getting to know the Safari Developer tools quite closely in the process). If you’re comfortable in Javascript, HTML and CSS, download jQTouch and give it a go!

I should also tip my hat in the direction of Jonathan Snook - his Hundred Pushups app gave me the inspiration :)

UPDATE : Improved method of selecting numbers - replaced the sluggish widgets with up/down arrows - http://skitch.com/plindsay/n9x3r/mindblaster

]]> Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:37:37 BST http://www.xlab.co.uk/weblog/714 http://www.xlab.co.uk/weblog/714#comments