Est. 2003
The blog of one Michael Heilemann, expatriated Dane coming to you out of New York City. Half machine, half grapefruit, Interface director at Squarespace, design lover, film enthusiast, Star Wars historian, creator of the Kubrick and K2 themes, and holder of opinions, many of which are shared on his Twitter account.
We’ve done some pretty cool work on Habari’s administrative interface over the last months, and I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to walk you through it.
Oh, and if you like what you see, please, by all means, link back here, drop some comments on Viddler and let everyone know about this, because we want to get more people hyped about Habari, and you’re the key to making that happen.
PS: Download the 93MB quicktime file for full non-aliased pleasure.
Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…
Hello Habari.
Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.
And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!
Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.
As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?
I thought so too.
But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.
Well, except for the design.
I’m calling it Kalamari.
I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!
Now, down to business.
I think I’ll try and upgrade BB to WP 2.6 one of the next few days, just to have the chance to play around with it properly, before finally taking the leap up to the just release Habari 0.5. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to play around with it yet, but I’m so very proud to have been a part of that project so far. The work we’ve done these last few months is really something. There’s also a new project site, which is quite an improvement already.
So that’s coming along strong. I can’t wait to get it up and running on BB; I’m really just waiting for Chris to do the textile plugin he promised me… (nudge nudge, eh eh?).
Now, I’ve got some drafts for various entries I didn’t get to post over the last week, but now that the weather in Copenhagen has turned from LA to Seattle, what else is there to do but honker down and get some writing done?
Well, there’s watching movies, reading books and cooking food, but… Well, I’ll get them written, alright? I get enough whine from my friends about the activity-level on here already, so I guess I need to pick it up a bit, eh?
In the meanwhile, Steve Lam has been working quietly behind the scenes, and just released a new release candidate (haha… We just like the sound of it) of K2 yesterday, all 2.6 ready and everything. Knock yourself out!
And in closing: Twitter killed the blog. It’s true.
It’s with great joy, that I can link to the newly released Habari 0.5. It took less than half a year to go from an idea to a fully fledged and wonderfully implemented Monolith.
I might have done the design, but I could never have pulled off the implementation, which was not only a team effort, but a sight to behold.
Work is being done on a demo version, but for now, I hope you’ll take out the time to try it out on your own. I think you might like it.
I’m back from Rome in one piece, albeit paradoxically now in serious need of a vacation. Touristing it is hard work.
Just before I left, a few thing happened in relation to Habari and Monolith, which I didn’t find the time to comment on, but which may be of interest to those of you following the progress of these two projects.
First of all, I was cordially invited to become a member of the Habari cabal, which—roughly speaking—grants me access to the trunk of the subversion repository for Habari as well as voting rights in discussions on the in- or exclusion of for instance plugins, themes and any other such matter.
This is really helpful in fact, because where the Monolith codebase had previously existed on its own branch in the subversion repository, it was recently rolled right into the trunk. A gutsy move, which I think started paying itself off almost immediately, as the patches have been continually pouring in since then (and I’ve been keeping track of them from my iPhone while in Rome).
I’ve hardly even had the chance to play with it myself, let alone contribute any code; but I’m excited as hell at the prospect of having a fully functional Monolith in the very foreseeable future.
I’ll try and keep the updates flowing as work progresses, though you are of course more than welcome to try it on for size.
Today I started coding Monolith, and the first thing on the menu is… yeah. And for that, I need your help. It’s a 3-step program:
What I’m doing, is trying to figure out how to best use that button for the menu, so I need the keycode for that particular button. But since it’s different in the various territories (192 on my US keyboard, 52 on my Danish), it’s not as easy as it could’ve been.
Update: Turns out I’m getting radically different keycodes with my own code. Never mind for now. I’ll try and figure something out tomorrow. Thanks anyway :)
It’s true, I did. And this is where I would cue the dissonant choral music that builds to the crescendo of civilization taking a step up the ladder; which, by the way, had Rikke trying so very hard to suppress her laughter at its pompousness… Foiled, again!
These things are hard to gauge, and even perhaps overly self-centered, at least by Danish standards. But between Kubrick, through various endeavors, like the Latest Comments plugin and Live Archives (and its successor) and up to K2, I hope my time in the world of blogging has left a mark of some kind; an echo of sorts, for low-level interaction designers, like myself, to not merely lemming their way through the craft, even if it’s on a hobby-level.
That’s one thing I believe. Another thing, is putting my money where my mouth is. For one thing, that’s why I spent 3 years working on K2. And also, it’s why I’ve been involved on or off, with interaction design for what I think is a contender for the crown of the open source blogging systems throne; Habari.
The process has been a long haul, as these things often are, especially when everyone is intensely invested, wanting only for the end-product to shine. And admittedly, it hasn’t been without its fair share of frustration, for those exact same reasons.
To cut a lon… a few weeks back, I went AWOL and started crunching away on a complete design for the administration interface for Habari, in an effort to create a set of blueprints, from which this thing can be built in proper.
And though it was an exhausting project, which has no doubt left Rikke in need of some much-deserved TLC, and my stylus-wrist in need of some R&R and perhaps a bit of ointment, I feel pretty good about it right now.
I’ve put together the following 18-minute screencast, in which I in a drowsy, recorded-at-different-times and with a horribly accented voice, walk you through the entire thing from start to finish. For further entertainment, check out the flickr set and the Human Interface Guidelines.
(For those keeping track: To differentiate former design efforts from one another—the old ones being Space Odyssey and Idocto—this one is code-named Monolith)
Or, you can view it on Viddler, though the audio isn’t nearly as well sync’d.
Phew.
There’s so much more I’d like to say, but it’s all details. Most importantly, understand that this isn’t finished; it’s merely been abandoned in favor of the next step.
My plan is to develop this separately from Habari itself, and once it’s in a workable state, to offer it as a sacrifice to the mighty Habari core and then cross my fingers that it is wanted and welcomed.
This is also the first time since early January that I’ve enabled comments. Make me proud!
The second in the series, this time considerably shorter at a mere 12 minutes (felt like 2 when I was recording; man brevity is hard!) about the Write Page in WordPress.
You can comment on the Viddler page or download the fullsize quicktime, if you’re so inclined.
When in the future, bound to the wheelchair by an injury sustained in the Chrome Wars, I look back at 2007, I will see Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.
It’s not that I consider my other endeavors insignificant. I’m very happy with K2, even if we didn’t ship a 1.0 as I’d hoped. And I’m already very proud of the little work I’ve been able to contribute to Habari so far. Furthermore, both Rikke and I were able to chalk off Paris and New York from the ‘must travel to before impending death’-list.
But Kane & Lynch definitively marks the end of me wanting to make computer games for a living, and me having made making computer games for a living. And dammit, I’ll wear that chip on my shoulder and parade it around town like nobody’s business. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to!... Look what you made me do.
2007 will also go down as the year I spent an excessive amount of money on a whole range of (fantastic) new Star Wars books, it being after all the 30th anniversary and all. And yes, I’m still a sucker for that stuff; you wanna start a fight or something? You a trekkie? Huh? Huh?!
Furthermore, this will be the last year Binary Bonsai will be brandishing WordPress. I’m a-shippin’ out and a-joinin’ Habari. It was fun, smell you later.
2008 will be the year where I leave the quantity of content to Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr and the seemingly never ending onslaught of something-r, and instead turn my focus on quality for this here site.
Proper writing, or at least, more attentive writing. Which is to say, if you enjoy reading about Russ Meyer and thinking about whether or not Chris Foss planted the seed for the Star Destroyers, then gosh darnit, you’re in luck Lucy, cuz that just about sets the style.
And proper writing, unlike this whole piece and this segue in particular, is exactly what 2008 will be tagged, bagged and sold as.
I love film. I work with games, but honestly, I can’t deny that my love is with film. And sure enough, the ‘I could do that better blindfolded!’-bravado is abound, but the actual product? It has yet to be manifested.
I’ve pseudo-dabbled in creative writing, and even half seriously discussed with Rikke the option of moving to New York for a stint, leading a bohemian life as a writer, living off of the wonderful New York deli’s and churning out socially subversive, but mostly un-produced scripts (that last part is a lie; it would be pulp sci-fi; you know that).
So this is the year where I, creatively, bend down to check whether I have a pair or not. And if I do, great, who knows what it might lead to? If I don’t? Well, shit.
So that’s it for 2008; you can go home now.
PS: This entry by the way, is the last entry to brandish comments. The spammers are too clever, they’ve won. But they can’t cross the bridge, if there is no bridge, so… Boom.
Catch me on twitter if you need me.
Early this year, I spent some time with a bunch of other people setting up a direction for Habari’s administration interface. It was mostly blue-skying, but loving interface design as I do, it felt like time well-spent.
In fact, it felt good.
It was a little early to start implementing stuff like that, when the platform itself hardly even existed at the time. So I went off and spent most of my time on K2 instead. But now that K2 is nearly done, I’ve started working on Habari designs again, and just submitted my first major patch (with no assurance it will be accepted of course).
Habari is like the promised land in terms of the kind of interaction design I’ve wanted to see in WordPress for years. It’s like a digital catharsis to finally apply these thoughts and frustrations.
It’s based on, and comes pretty damn close to these reference mockups, and looks like this in motion (Full resolution):
Whether all of this will work in practice, no one knows, but it sure feels good.
Alright, I wasn’t planning on posting this just yet, but since I won’t have proper time to work on it for the next few days, my lack of patience got the better of me.
Now it is important to note that this isn’t even a mockup as much as it is a sketch (albeit rather a polished one). There is some functionality missing and so on and so forth.
First up is the edit page with the media manager closed. As you can see, I also put in Flickr and Youtube as similar services to hook into. However, the media manager itself is meant to be a way to manage your local files (images, video, audio primarily I think).
Click the My Media tab, and the page splits open, revealing the media manager underneath. The rest of the admin is obviously better off being centered and fixed width, but the media manager gets the benefits of ‘stretching from ear to ear’.
A quick quick quick walkthrough of what I like to call a ‘feature-rich environment’:
And that’s what I’ve been up to in Habari. I’m pouring some of the stuff I work on into a flickr set, and of course both mine, Khaled’s and any other volounteers discuss all of this on the mailing list (and here is the thread for the above sketches).
And no, it won’t be coming to a Habari installation near you in the near future. In fact, I think I probably caused a few gray hairs in the Habari coders when they saw this. But it’s doable, and I’ll gladly chip in with my own meager skills.
Ideas, suggestions and what not are of course very welcome