deanjrobinson.com

Hahlo 3 goes live! • 5

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The latest and greatest Hahlo has just been released live to the world, the original Twitter client for iPhone just got even better. Hahlo 3 has been in development for the past month, and in active beta testing for the past two and bit weeks. The beta itself has proved popular among users, with over 1,000 people signing up to take part. Not bad when compare to just the 120-odd that tested the Hahlo 2 Beta last year. Several sites have run reviews of the Hahlo 3 Beta, including a nice detailed preview by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Go to Hahlo.com now!

Feature highlights

These are just some of the new and improved features in Hahlo 3. For further information please visit the Hahlo project page where you’ll find detailed feature info, support and more. [http://deanjrobinson.com/projects/hahlo/]

Restyled interface, introducing all-new ‘stack’ style menu, and tabbed navigation on some screens.
Built-in search capabilities made possible by the API provided by Summize.com
Customisable ‘home’ page
Avatar and text size settings
Inline replies and direct messages
User profiles - just like the sidebar in twitter
Improved auto-refresh for the friends timeline
Refresh buttons on almost all timelines
Added ability to add new friends, as well as follow/unfollow functions and ability to turn notifications on/off
Hashtags are auto-linked in timelines
New popup sub-menus when you tap on a users name or avatar
Countless bug fixes and enhancements to make the overall Hahlo experience even better

Hahlo 3 has only be in the wild, but its already getting some great feedback, which you can checkout here: http://summize.com/search?q=hahlo… or of course you could use the search box in the hahlo menu to fin the same info.

A huge thanks to all those beta testers who made suggestions, found bugs and gave it a thorough work out over the past couple of weeks. Its much appreciated.

An even bigger thank you to those of you who have already donated towards Hahlo, its always nice to know there are people out there who appreciate the time and effort I put into building and supporting Hahlo. If you’d like to donate you can do so via PayPal, you’ll even get a public thank you [Donation Page]

Filed under: Hahlo 5 Comments

TUAW reviews Hahlo 3 Beta • 0 •

Mike Schramm over at TUAW has put together a great review of the Hahlo 3 Beta. http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/25/tuaw-previews-hahlo-3-the-legendary-edition/

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Hahlo 3 Beta Testing • 2

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A couple of days ago I asked for some beta testers for Hahlo Version 3 via Twitter, if you haven’t already, and you would like to try out the latest “bleeding” version of “Hahlo 3 - Legendary Edition” then drop me a line at beta@hahlo.com and I’ll provide you with more details. It’s definitely worth a look.

While you’re at it, have a read of John Gruber’s thoughts about the current crop of Twitter webapps…and finally someone who agrees with me about Thincloud’s abuse of the Twitter logo.

New Leaders seem to have recently renamed Thincloud to the rather scammy-sounding “Twitter for iPhone”. They use Twitter’s logo and name in such a way that, unless you read the light-gray small print in the footer on their web site — which small print is not displayed when viewing the web site on an actual iPhone — creates the impression that you’re looking at some sort of official Twitter iPhone interface. - daringfireball.net

Yeah…What he said.

Filed under: Hahlo 2 Comments

What do you want in Hahlo v3? • 0 •

So last night, spurred on a little by some feedback that I received via Tony, I began work on Hahlo v3. I’ve already got a bunch of ideas after a quick brainstorming session on the bus ride home from work, but what I really want to know is what YOU want from Hahlo. I can’t promise that I’ll implement everyones ideas, but I’ll try my best. Post your idea or request here!

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Plugin Status Update • 2

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Over the last year or so I’ve released several plugins for WordPress. Some of the were adaptations of existing plugins, some were built from the ground up, some have been updated and some…well…haven’t. The release of WP2.5 gives me a good opportunity to take a look at what plugins (other than Fluency as I think I’ve covered it enough on here in the last month or so) I have released, and what their future holds.

Ultimate Category Cloud

Current Version: 3.0
Development Status: 4.0 is in progress.
Next Release: Before the end of April.

While this is relatively simple plugin, it took me a while to get the basics working as I had originally intended them too. The first release was quite buggy to say the least, which was the main reason that v2 follow fairly soon after. I was happy enough with v2 not to update it any further, until WP2.3 came out and changed the way that categories were handled. I updated UCC to v3, bringing WP2.3 compatibility, along with some much need “cleansing” of my code, the removal of unneeded cruft, basically it was an overall refinement.

I’ve recently started work on v4.0 which will add (much needed) widget support which will make it even easier for users to add to their blogs, I’ve also sorted out a few oddities in the code which have been there since v2.

Twitt-Twoo

Current Version: 1.1
Development Status: Next version will be rebuilt from the ground up.
Next Release: TBA.

Originally built to ‘scratch an itch’ because while there were plenty of Twitter plugins out there I couldn’t find a nice simple one to do what I wanted, which was display my status in the sidebar, and allow me to update it from there as well. One of the biggest flaws with this plugin is that I built it to work with Redoable, but didn’t really bother checking it with any other theme (very bad I know). From what I’ve seen it still works relatively ok with some themes, but in some cases its just totally broken.

The plan is to rebuild it from the ground up using some of the knowledge that I gained from building Hahlo. I’m considering a ‘rebranding’ of this plugin to ‘Hahlo Widget’ or something along those lines. The basic functionality will most likely remain the same, but with better support for a sidebar widget, and an updated options page.

modMunch

Current Version: 1.0.r1
Development Status: None at the moment.
Next Release: TBA.

This was knocked together very quickly, with minimal testing, and as a result it works…sometimes. It could do with a lot of cleaning up, and I would like to make it easier to install and set up, so I will try and update it in the next couple of months.

Rechucked Buttons

Current Version: 1.0
Development Status: Current version is totally busted…..
Next Release: TBA…if ever.

Like Twitt-Twoo this only really worked properly with Redoable. When it broke (I can’t recall which WordPress version that was) I pretty much decided to abandon it altogether, however now that WordPress has switched to TinyMCE (which they say is pluggable) I might take another look at this in the future. Of course high on the list would be making sure it works no matter what theme you are using, beyond that who knows.

Redo-Recent-Links

Current Version: 1.0-beta
Development Status: Umm…
Next Release: Never, sorry.

I haven’t touched this since I released it, I only actually used it myself for a bout a month before I got annoyed with how badly it worked. This was based on another plugin that I found, but I modified it to work with Redoable (bit of trend appearing…). I’m sure there are plenty of much better alternatives out there now, so I’m going to official declare this one dead. DNR.

CaptainPlanet

Current Version: unreleased
Development Status: 1.0-very-very-very-alpha
Next Release: When the powers combine…

Without going into great detail (I’ll save that for when its released), CaptainPlanet is basically a ‘lifestream’ manager for your WordPress blog. Plans are to support a number of popular feeds, which are aggregated (and archived…) for display on you site. Will have an awesome ‘manage’ screen (one of the few bits thats actually working correctly at the moment), and also makes use of the new ‘shortcode’ API in WP2.5. Will also have several built in function that will do away with the need for some of the JS callbacks I currently use for things like Twitter and Flickr.

Filed under: Plugin 2 Comments

Fluency Admin v1.1 Available Now • 22

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Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! I had planned to play a prank on my visitors (I even had the post all written up) but I thought this would be better.

This is no joke, as promised Fluency v1.1 is now fully compatible with the stable release of WordPress 2.5. Thank you to all those who provided feedback and bug reports which helped iron out most things, and huge thank you to the 5,100+ people who download v1.0 (in just 20 days). Remember if you have any issues, jump over to the forum or the bug tracker and let me know. If I don’t know about a problem I can’t fix it.

Theres no new features as such, but a lot of “fixes” for things that changed between WP2.5-RC1 and the final release of 2.5. From big things like the “Add Media” modal dialogs now being styled correctly, to the smallest detail like adding 2 extra pixels of padding to an element. I won’t list all the changes, but if you’re interested you can get an idea of the main changes by checking out the bug tracker.

I’ve now got full and proper support for several popular plugins, including Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menus and NextGen Gallery. For full details about which plugins are supported head over to the plugin compatibility page, and if you’ve got a plugin you would like to supported just let me know. A big thanks to Ozh for his help and suggestions in streamlining the method used to apply the styles on a per-plugin basis.

Ok, thats enough talk, what are you waiting for. Download v1.1 now and give it a whirl. And you can find out more details here.

Filed under: Plugin 22 Comments

By your feeds combined • 5 •

…I am Captain Planet. I’ve been looking for quite a while for a “decent” lifestream plugin for WordPress. All those that I found either didn’t work, or didn’t work how I wanted them to. Solution: Make my own. Its still a work in progress (but good progress, since I only started it a little over 24 hours ago). More info soon. http://deanjrobinson.com/lifestream

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Internet Explorer and Fluency Admin • 6

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Ok, since so many people keep asking why Fluency Admin “does nothing when activated in Internet Explorer”, I thought I should post a nice graphic example of why I have it set up this way. I can guarantee that I would have had dozens more complaints if I had released it with broken IE support from the beginning…

On the left is a screen shot taken of Fluency running (or trying to) in Internet Explorer 6, quite clearly something is VERY wrong. And I have absolutely no idea how long (if its even worth it) it would take to fix. On the right is a screen shot taken of Fluency running in Internet Explorer 7. I was extremely surprised at how close it is to working correctly (since it was never tested in IE7), only really seems to be a few things out of alignment, which should be fixable.

What does this mean? Well, since IE7 is so close, I’ll see what I can do to get it working for the next release. All I need to do is find a different method of ‘hiding’ Fluency so that IE7 can see it, but IE6 can NOT.

Filed under: Plugin 6 Comments

Upgrades and design tweaks • 11

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On and off for the past week I’ve been re-working my current design. I was completely happy with just about all of it, but there were a few things (like adding my twitter status back in) that I just hadn’t gotten around to doing. I also monitor the response times for my site, and noticed that they had blown out since going to the new design, so I wanted to make some changes to try and counteract that.

With the release of WordPress 2.5-RC1 earlier this week I figured that the long weekend over Easter would be a good time to upgrade WP, and launch my revised design. So thats exactly what I’ve spent most of the afternoon doing. Most of that time was waiting for the full backup of my blog and forum to download, after that it was all fairly quick.

WordPress 2.5-RC1 and Fluency Admin

Its been a while in the making, mainly because they skipped 2.4, but WP2.5 finally landed earlier this week even if it was just the release candidate. By far the most obivous change to the average user is the overhauled admin interface. It is a huge improvement over previous versions, and overall I don’t mind it…but.

But, after using Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin plugin for the past year and a bit I had become very used to, among other things, having my menus down the left side. I tested Tiger admin with an earlier build of WP2.5, and it was pretty clear that the two weren’t going to play nice together. Which is exactly why I put together Fluency.

And now that I’m actively using WP2.5 with Fluency I’m more likely to pick up on any little bits and pieces that I’ve either missed completely, or those bits that have changed since I released version 1 (such as the menu in the add media HUD.) If you spot anything submit a bug and I’ll check it out. There will be an updated version once WP2.5-final is out.

The redesign thats not a redesign

I see it as more of an evolution of the design. Yes at first glance it looks quite different, but in reality not much has changed. I’ve dropped the rather large and bright orange ‘grunge’ style header graphic in place of a simpler, calmer header. Overall the design is even more white and clean that before, I’ve increased padding and margins around some items to add some more clean space.

One of the most obvious changes is the shift of the sidebar from the left to the right, and at the same time the whole page is centered in the window as opposed to being left aligned. There were couple of reason for switching the sidebar across to the right, mainly due to the load order of the page. For example if flickr is down (rare, but its is occassionally quite slow) the pages ‘hangs’ while it tries to load the widget. Now, the content is always loaded before the sidebar so, at worst, you can still read the content.

One of the less noticeable changes is that there is a little more variance in the colours I’ve used. Most of the link, or hover, colours remain orange as before, but I’ve made some green (to match the new logo), and in some sections I’ve coloured them to match which section they are in. Take for example the flickr images in the sidebar. Hover over them and you’ll see the first three have blue outlines, the fourth has a pink outline. Just a small thing to make it match the familiar flickr logo.

I’ve also added a new plugin called wp-typogrify which as the name implies helps with the typography of blog entries and titles. The changes is make are only small, but are visually pleasing.

Further optimisations

For some reason (ok, I know it one of the plugins I use) both prototpye and jquery are being loaded. Great. But I’m not using them. I’m sure there is no GOOD reason that I should need to load 150kb+ of javascript when the same things could be achieved much more efficiently…I’m having trouble even identifying what some plugins are using these libraries for. I’m going to seriously look at removing the dependency on these libraries form the plugins, or at least finding a much more compact alternative.

Filed under: Blog 11 Comments

Learn how to Juggle • 0 •

I’m sure at some point we’ve all looked at the the unwanted Zunes sitting in our desk drawer and thought they would be good to juggle, right? Ok, maybe not but if you ever wanted to learn how to juggle then this new site from Neil Ang would be a great starting point. http://learnhowtojuggle.info check it out now!

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