It’s been a relaxed weekend, mostly Halo free and steeped rather in the internal workings of K2. The codebase of which is in a pretty good place currently. So much so, that I can usually spend whatever time I find for development on tweaking and polishing the smallest parts of the interaction ‘experience’, if you will.
And really, that’s why I’m doing this; because I like perfecting the details. The fact that your popup takes just so much time to animate, or that the help text says exactly what it needs to say, not a word more.
If the core mechanics are the torso and head, I work mostly on the ‘bodily extremities’. Which, I guess, makes me a digital manicurist.
Now I don’t know whether it’s Automattic setting a rather mediocre example when it comes to the finer details of interaction design. Or if it’s simply because many plugin authors aren’t that great at finalizing the details. But the WordPress’o‘sphere does seem riddled with plugins that could be twice what they are; if only someone would love them.
Well, I guess the same can be said for the mothership product.
I mean, consider the WordPress widget system for a moment. It’s over a year and a half old, yet I don’t think a line of code has been changed in it since the day it debuted. At least it still has all the shortcomings it was born with, of which there are many.
And as of a few weeks ago, with WordPress 2.3 2.2, the widget system was integrated as a new default feature of WordPress, which in turns means that as of this writing, it will already have propagated to tens of thousands of blogs—if not more. Which in turn means, that every single shortcut is amplified by tens of thousands.
When you look at it that way, maybe they should’ve waited…
That’s why we’ve spent so much time writing our own sidebar manager for K2, rather than using WordPress’ default widget system. A decision which no doubt has cost us months of development time. But every time I use it, I’m assured that it was indeed the right decision.
The thought of ‘shipping’ something that isn’t just right makes me uneasy. It might take twice as long to make sure all the details fall into place, but when they do; it’s always worth the wait.
And really, with tools like jQuery, Firebug, CSS Edit and whatever else makes up the modern web developer’s arsenal, it’s as easy as ever to get things just right.
Anyway, that’s what I spent my day doing. ‘Fly fucking’ as the Danish expression goes, K2.
Darling, make a note of the phrase ‘Fly fucking’… I like it, I want to use it more in conversation.
Michael, you ought to consider publishing some reviews of what you’d like fixed, polished, or updated in whatever plugins you have a problem with. Somebody might be motivated to make some changes.
I know we’re supposed to infer the definition from context, but I’d love to hear a more formal definition of “fly fucking!” I really want to use it, and I want to make sure I do so correctly.
Fly fucking is when you’re fiddling with really small things. Like whether the background should be #112233 or #112234. It’s often used as a slightly derogatory term, as in: “Stop fly fucking and take a look at the bigger picture”.
Oh! Not too dissimilar from “turd polishing.” Despite the urban dictionary’s definition, around here it means to ignore the core architectural problems of the system while you clean up little ancillary aspects of it.
Thanks!
Well the difference might be that with ‘turd polishing’, you’re inferring that the product needs attention in another place, whereas ‘fly fucking’ can be used in cases where the product is fine the way it is, and whatever it is you’re doing, might be superfluous detail.
“turd polishing” … “fly fucking” what an interesting conversation..
at least your off the halo theme… :P
Widgets were added in 2.2. For what it’s worth the interface is being radically redone for 2.4, which you’ll start to see go into trunk over the next few weeks.
I’m still slightly annoyed that your site is messed up in IE 7.0 (Yes, it’s a shitbrowser, but nonetheless… And the moment I am using FF-Portable to make up for the fact I can’t install FF on this computer) and that is even more messed up in IE 6.0 (When you for example want to show someone else the page…)… Even if I sometimes feel that it is quite okay for the good looks it already has.
Will we get the same annoyance with K2 (Despite it looking quite smooth and cool on the image)?
Well, the reason my own site isn’t playing nice with IE, is my own silent protest against really Microsoft’s utter lack of respect for the standards that bind the web together.
This design is rather old by now, and once K2 hits 1.0, I’m probably going to either update it or redesign entirely, and in doing so, I’ll try to keep it as IE-friendly as I can.
The problem is, I have a Mac, so IE isn’t readily available to me. I do have boot camp and what not, but it’s still a major deal when I need to get IE up and running and actually develop for it. And since this site is where I’m supposed to have fun, I rarely bother.
As for K2, no. K2 will be as IE compatible as we can possible make it. As a matter of fact, I’m about to check some changes into our svn repository that’re all IE-specific fixes.
But, since the K2 team doesn’t have anyone on board with particular interest in IE, it often lags behind.