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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is Binary Bonsai, the online journal of Michael Heilemann — a Danish expat Interface Director at Squarespace, ex-Computer Game Developer and Film Lover — coming to you out of New York. It contains thoughts on games, interface design, movies, books, science fiction, Star Wars and various other subjects as befits the author, who is available for comment on Twitter.