Ronin

Yes, people of the planet Earth and outlying satellites, I am as a matter of fact a ‘free agent’, even if this blog seems as inactive as ever, which would be because I spend my days basking in the sun, reading long-overdue books and experimenting with various outlandish fruit combinations for smoothies that’ll blow your socks right off and send tears of joy rolling down your cheeks.

Alright, so I’ve started reading some books, the other stuff I’ve only dipped by toes into. But I’m working on it.

But a I am a free agent, having had the opportune fortune of ending my 6+ year stint at Io Interactive by being escorted out the door along with some 30 other people who for various reasons found themselves down and out in Copenhagen on the single most beautiful spring day in a decade or more.

No, I’m not entirely sure what happened. I don’t think any of us are, including friends and colleagues left behind, but considering that I’m the least experienced of the developers let go—most of them having 10 years or more behind them—I’m left to wonder on my own what the overriding idea was…

But, as is always the case, the bad memories fade and the good persist, and much as I’ll miss the excitement of working on large-scale games like the Kane & Lynch series—where I spent most of my time—I’ll miss my friends there infinitely more. The banter, the heated TF2 matches, the coffee trains and the overarching eagerness to prove our meddle and just create great games.

So hurray for Facebook, Twitter, blogs, mail and Skype. These things truly shine when you suddenly find yourself going it alone.

Lucky for me, I’ve had it in mind to quit for quite some time, having made several preparations for doing so, and this quite literally couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. Add to that the timing of having spring making its way into Denmark and me getting to soar my oates on some of those vanity projects I’ve been wanting to do for years, while Io continues to pay me for a few months more…

Things could be a lot worse.

Beyond that, my plan is to hook up with friends of mine for a pretty cool project we’re all very excited about. After that I’ll go the way of the modern-day ronin: The Freelance Web Designer.

Hopefully, this also means I’ll be able to find the time to blog some more, not to mention bringing out the next version of K2 within a foreseeable future.

Oh yeah, and then Red Dead Redemption is coming up in May, so…

I’ll expound on my plans in the near future; for now I just need to get them more organized as well as learn this new routine of not having an office to go to for a little while, which is probably the hardest part about not being employed. It’s surprising how fast time flies when you’re just milling about the house.

Goodbye Io, and thanks for all the fishcake.

Where Were We?

Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.

I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.

The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.

And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languagesDanish, german, spanish, latvian, norwegian, dutch, polish, swedish and turkish, with a russian translation on the way. We’re still looking for more, so if you’re interested, read this and give me a shout. in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.

Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.

Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.

Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.

The OS & Fluid Designs

In laying down this new design—Kalamari—I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screenThe lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness., but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do thatWell, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows, Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

Habari Design

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.

Semantics 101

Now I don’t personally use the visual editor in WordPress. I like me some Textile and control. But it is in there, and I think non-tech users are better off overall because of it.

And now with WordPress 2.1, you can even switch between WYSIWYG and code views. Great!

Yeah, well it is great, but what in the hell is going on with those buttons?!

WordPress in Safari

First of all, I’ve scraped everything I don’t use off of the edit page, so that’s why it’s so ‘light’. But that’s not what you’re supposed to pay attention to. No, rather you should have a look at the two form buttons to the upper left of the content text area.

Form buttons. As ‘tabs’? Oh no you didn’t! It looks like someone does all their designing in Firefox, seeing as how they are styled to not look like buttons when viewed through the right looking glass.

WordPress 2.1 Admin

Now, WordPress normally styles its buttons in a horrible manner. That’s one thing, I can deal with that. But I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to use buttons as tabs to change between WYSIWYG and code view rather than two styled links.

If code is poetry, I don’t know what that is. Someone at Automattic needs a slap on the wrists, a few hours with Mr. Zeldman and access to Safari :)

Now, as Joen so rightly pointed out, the code view was one of the things we advocated strongly while we were doing Shuttle. In fact, this is how we had thought it could look.

Shuttle Write/Edit Page Mockup

Luckily, I don’t really care, since I never use the visual editor anyway. But come on.

Prototype 1.5 Released

Yeah, so I’m still at home, eating oat meal and yoghurt very slowly. Very carefully. Which by the way, for those of you keeping track, means I missed out on the burgers at work today. Which sucks, because they are legendary burgers. And free.

Anyway, it does give me an opportunity to mindlessly check my feeds when I’m not feeding myself with painkillers. And as luck would have it, Prototype 1.5 was released today, complete with a new site and brand-spanking new documentation! Shiny!

I’ve already updated our K2 SVN repository, which by the way is as near as I can tell ready for the imminent release of WordPress 2.1.

Invader60 Commands Obedience

Dear reader, meet Invader60; Invader60 meet one of the people who will be using you. Great, now that we have that out of the way, allow me to explain to you what exactly is going on.

Invader60 is the 60% mark of Invader. You will no doubt have noticed that it is considerably slimmer than earlier versions of Invader, or indeed any layout previously seen on Binary Bonsai, which is actually quite contrary to what I had originally planned (which was a layout which would be considerably wider than anything before it).

The implementation is filled to the brim with bugs at the moment, but I’ll be hammering most of them out today; I just wanted to make sure I actually managed to publish this today instead of letting it slide.

There are quite a few ideas behind the way this new layout is structured, some are evident some aren’t quite as evident yet. Most importantly is the use of AJAX and fancy schmancy effects, all of which I’ll also want to talk more about as soon as it’s all working as it’s supposed to.

Order of business: Fix the currently slightly broken functionality, then order the content properly, then fix the styling.

Now if you’ll excuse me.

PS: Oh yeah, in the midst of all of this, I forgot to tell you that this is another Bachelor Weekend! :)

Segregation and iPod

Well, as promised when I launched Freya, I have finally gotten down to segregating comments from ping- and trackbacks. Something I might add, that I believe WordPress should do by default. The Livesearch Entry is a good example of how a list of pings will look like. Either way, I’ll probably post some code soon for those of you interested in something like that. I’m about to send off the latest version of the Latest Comments plugin that Brian wrote, after doing some 1.3 compatibilitization (so a word!) to it, and once Brian gets the time, he’ll put it up on his site for everyone to download.

In other news, I sent in my iPod for repairs today. I’ve also got the box for my Powerbook down at the office, just need to backup the harddrive and it’ll go in too. I hope the wait won’t be too long.

Either way, I think I have most of the things I need to run the world without it, but in case I disappear from the surface of the Earth; well now you know who to lynch.

Meet Freya

Everyone, please welcome Freya, previously designated 4, the new glazing on top of the bittersweet pudding that is, Binary Bonsai. There are many things to say, many things to apologize for. Feel free to leave some comments while I run her through the necessary trials to see if she is ready for the world. Though keep in mind that I will come back, hopefully later tonight, to write a full super-size entry on all the thoughts I’ve had or not had and why things are in new places and in many cases in their old habitual place.

Needless to say, the minor incident this morning set me back a trifle; while I quickly covered the major rewrites, minor changes are still lingering in the recesses beyond the frontpage.

Though for what it’s worth, I’m quite happy with how it turned out, though I regret not having had the time to flesh out some of the details that I have planned. But I could feel that I had to activate it today or slowly get bogged down in the repetitious routines of adjustments ad nausea.

Now I will leave you to it, while I head off to clean up the code a little and patch whatever holes I might find.

Update: Freya Upgrade Continued

Stomped on Kubrick

Kubrick for WordPress

As I said a few days ago, the Kubrick Theme is alive and well. In fact, I have in a sense been working on it throughout the weekend. So I do hope that you will forgive me the longer-than-anticipated wait, but I want to make sure that this thing is right from the get-go (I hate ‘patches’, they never propagate as far as the original.)

As you can see from the checklist, I have nailed almost all of the things that I had on my to-do list.

So as soon as I get to the bottom of the two most pertinent issues on that list, what’s left for me to do to get Kubrick out to you guys is a) cut out all the Binary Bonsai stuff from the CSS and XHTML pages, and b) decide what exactly this theme should contain.

To be quite frank, there are many many things that WordPress does ‘out of the box’, that I don’t agree with. Many of them rather small things (though I really don’t have much left over for the default design, sorry), but nonetheless. The question is if I want to put myself in the place where I bundle a bunch of plugins (or maybe just throw them all together in one super plugin) with the theme for functionality’s sake, or if I go the way of the meager and make do with what’s in the box.

“Give us an example Michael!”

I’ll give you an example then. WordPress doesn’t have any way of showing latest comments, something that I would consider a vital function on something as people oriented as a blog. I have personally lobbied long and hard to get this functionality into the core, but I guess if you want something done… be a coder. Which is fair enough.

But the point is, I don’t really know where I want to draw the line. On one hand, I don’t want to dictate to you, what you should have on your blog. But on the other, you would have chosen this theme, so aren’t you sort of asking for it?

What’s the line for themes? Should it be CSS, and that’s all, or do you – as I – think that some of the default setup that comes with WordPress is so atrocious that overrides it should be hardcoded into the theme (like the dates.)

Please use this entry to tell me what you think.