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OK, so I can’t guarantee that the Tweenies themselves could use this Tweener Documentation and Language Reference, but if like me you have only occasional need to use tweening functions and each time end-up going through a trial and error scenario of “what’s the difference between bounce out and ease out”, then it’s a very handy visual reference.

Not a blog title I ever expected to write but I love the look of this Augmented Reality app this AR iPhone app and can see it being a big hit in Japan with it’s quirky but cute mass-user game approach. I think AR is still being mainly used just because it’s cool, but I guess increasingly both games and useful applications will come forth. And I’m not discounting the excellent where’s my nearest tube station app, but you’re never more than 50m from a tube sign in London anyway so I don’t find myself reaching for the app in practice.

Maybe there are already lots of 3rd party software/website testing companies out there, but if so then I’ve not come across them. Therefore, when The Crowd/Software Testing Club started following me on Twitter I thought it worthy of a mention. It seems an obvious idea - a network of skilled people who can test software on a structured basis and feedback the results in a helpful and knowledgeable way. Or in The Crowd’s own words, “A directory of socially approved testers for hire”. Whilst we have NOT used the service so can’t vouch for their effectiveness yet, it feels like an interesting and hopefully successful approach to testing software and websites.

We’re looking forward to the forthcoming release of Wordpress 3.0. Continuing the excellent evolution path from blogging system to middleweight CMS, from a developer perspective it’s great to see that version 3.0 ignores some of the often requested improvements such as media management and focuses on fixing some of the core CMS framework issues that we all too often have to patch up using plugins or bespoke code. Features such as “Custom taxonomies” or “Menu management” might not excite the average user but they are fundamental improvements from a development perspective and will continue to ensure that Wordpress is a perfect solution for small to medium size web deliveries. Furthermore, the integration of WordpressMU in the form of “Multisite” and features such as “child themes” will further extend the suitability of using a single Wordpress install to deliver a suite of related sites.  Mashable have a good write-up of their 5 most important new features, or the full list can be seen on the Wordpress site.

Though Apple’s iWorks is generally a great Office suite to work with, one of the most annoying workflow issues is it’s requirement to always save files as .pages/.key e.g. if you open a Word document then you can’t just save it, you have to always “Save as…”. It turns out there’s an easy way round this, albeit one that requires editing the applications’ config files. I’ve used the fix described on Nothing To Say Here on my last two Macbooks without any problem, even editing the .plist file with a text editor if required. It goes without saying though, do backup the .plist file before editing it incase anything goes wrong.

Very interesting US start-up Square seems to be developing a service to let anyone accept payment by card using a mobile phone. I love the visible verification system for checking the card holder is really who they claim to be (identical twin fraud anyone?).

At the FOWD tour event in Leeds earlier this year, Brendan Dawes gave a great talk on the importance and role of beauty in everyday life and how this should be applied in interface design and digital systems. The Small Worlds Flash game is definitely an example of this. I’m not a gamer [not by modern standards, though I'm still weak to temptation when it comes to any release of FIFA on XBox 360], but there is something magical about the Small Worlds game that just draws you in. Despite winning a recent gaming award, I guess Small Worlds won’t be challenging CoD7, WoW9 or DGACAG5 in the annual gaming honours, but it’s a fine way to waste 10 minutes online, and might just remind you that small can certainly be beautiful.

Those folks at Google continue to be pretty busy, although if you look closely it’s not hard to see much of their activity [Docs, Apps, Wave, OS, etc] coming together behind the common thread that is their web browser, Chrome. Chrome is a very fine browser already, despite it’s present shortcomings such as not being available [properly] for the Mac. However, one issue that Google face in their drive to offer everything the mass-market computer user needs through a humble browser is to educate people as to what exactly a browser is. Of course, we in web development [and to some extent our clients who run web and mobile sites] use multiple browsers and often understand the pros and cons of each, but to the average computer user a browser is at best a means of saving bookmarks and at worst is “The Internet”.

Google’s answer? Create a website that explains exactly what a browser is, how it’s role will increase in our day-to-day activity and, without too much disguise, why therefore you should choose Chrome for your browser.

Slightly more niche post than usual but when you’re working on a Friday night and pulling what limited hair you have out then surely it’s worth it. For much of today I found that if I clicked in some empty space in Textmate then instead of the cursor jumping to the last valid space - usually the end of line - it would just stay where I had clicked. Unless you’ve experienced this it is indescribable just how infuriating and unproductive this is. [If you don't believe me and actually want to experience it then follow the same steps as my 'solution' below]. Anyway, it turns out I’d somehow enabled ‘Freehand Mode’. This can be toggled on and off by going to Edit -> Mode -> Freehand Editing. Should you ever have this problem, look there first. Ideally before you pull all your hair out.

I really enjoyed reading Carsonified’s recent article on 10 Vital Lessons for Web Start-Ups [received via Smashing Magazine]. It’s an excellent account from the guys behind the new[ish], lightweight Perch CMS regarding the challenges and learnings in launching their first full product outside of their web development day jobs. It’s undoubtedly something that many small agencies/developers also face, or hope to face [ourselves included]. If nothing else, the article itself demonstrates an excellent PR exercise as I remember looking at Perch when it was launched and feeling that, without a demo, it wasn’t something I could evaluate quickly and, typically, haven’t been back since. However, amongst other things, the article explains how quickly such short-comings were revised and overcome. Looks like I better head back there soon and check out the now available demo!

I figured one of these would be coming along from somewhere soon. I nearly threatened to do one myself but, presumably like so many others, have battled on with a varied mix of GUI elements used in creating Android screensflows/wireframes and never quite feeling that I had a ‘kit’ that was worthy of sharing. Well, good old Smashing Magazine have done one for us! This Android GUI PSD Vector Kit will be an invaluable resource for anyone needing to design Android flows and screens.

We’re on the brink of finishing our first ‘full’ iPhone application to be distributed through the Apple App Store, and as such have been trying to learn more about the obvious pitfalls to avoid in terms of having an app accepted. We’ve already had some excellent word of mouth advice, and general rule of thumb seems to be “follow Apple’s guidelines like a bible!”. The following sites seem a good start for your checlist too… Avoiding iPhone app rejection from Apple offers a good starting point for the things to run through, with a round-up of comments/replies. Unsurprisingly, Stackoverflow always has excellent developer advice and discussion, and they too are a good starting point for successful AppStore submission.

Obviously we’ll update our own experiences in a few weeks once we’ve been through the process ourselves.

There are some excellent Fireworks extensions available from johndunning.com. Some of the older one’s are now rendered obsolete by recent Fireworks releases but mostly the extensions add some great features that can significantly improve your workflow if you’ve been using workarounds. For instance, Smart Knife, the latest extension, allows shapes, text or bitmap to be split into two just by defining a curved path [the built-in Fireworks knife only allows for straight splits].

It seems the iPhone has an answer to everything. Or at least iPhone developers/marketers do. I can’t pretend to have tried out the TentFinder App so please do download it and give it a go rather than considering this a review but hasn’t anyone realised a] there’ll be a lot of tears when a lot iPhones go missing or get waterlogged at this years festivals and b] after using GPS, making some calls and recording some ‘amusing’ festival videos, the chances of the iPhone battery lasting long enough to help you find your tent on day 2 would be a miracle! Call me old school but personally I’ll be digging out an old robust Nokia with a black-and-white [black-and-green] screen, two weeks battery life and the kind of casing that you can drive a bus over, and then tieing a flag to the top of our tent.

Web usage has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, with even the average user now utilising web services alongside informational resources. As most of the major browsers have moved towards tabbed browsing, many web sessions now involve hopping between your ‘web service’ tabs such as rich email client, project management service, image manager, etc and other websites. Well, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I could just run my web services as an application and separate them from this tabbed browser model”, you actually can. [Of course you always could just by running them in a separate browser window but that often results in even more confusion].

Fluid is an excellent little freeware app for Mac OS X that enables websites to be run as applications. The site is shown without the usual browser clutter around the edges and is presented as a standalone application in your App menu. The execution has been thought through excellently - such as web links to other sites being launched in your preferred browser, rather than the ‘app window’ losing the original app. For instance, I run the project management web service Basecamp as a Fluid app. This means that I can flick back and forth to it with ease, it never gets lost amongst other tabs in a browser, links to client sites/resources open appropriately in my browser, etc. Give it a try!

Spotify are apparently working on an application which would enable you to listen to their streaming music service via your mobile phone. The killer aspect is that a playlist prepared whilst you have an internet connection can then be cached on your phone for playback when you don’t. The demo is currently on Android, with an iPhone version promised soon.

The lengthy beta of Skyfire [which apparently saw over one million downloads] has come to an end and Skyfire has moved to an official v.1.0 release. If you have a high-end Nokia [N or E Series] or a recent Windows Mobile phone [WM5 or 6] then Skyfire is certainly worth downloading and installing.

At a glance, the features are similar to the very capable Opera mobile browser. The big win for Skyfire however is that it supports Flash 10 content. This means that a wealth of previously unavailable content is now supported on mobile, not least of course Youtube [and similar video sites such as Vimeo]. Having only used the browser for a short time, my first impressions are that it is not as fast at rendering a page as Opera, nor is the rendered text as sharp. However, in general usage the browser performed excellently, and standard browser functionality such as automatically rotating to landscape when I tilt the device worked well. Furthermore, using Flash content worked like a dream. It would also be a dream for mobile operators too of course as, when not in wifi range, the Flash content would typically chomp happily through my data bundle.

All in all, Skyfire is a highly capable browser and brings my N95 mobile browser experience to a new level. Whilst not quite threatening the alround iPhone or Android browser experience just yet, it demonstrates that we can continue to expect a high quality mobile internet experience on non-touch screen phones for sometime to come.

Symbols are too easily overlooked in Fireworks. Although we’re used to using them all the time in Flash, it’s only recently become apparent how useful they are in Fireworks as, yet again, it proves how much more effective it is for web and interactive design than Photoshop. Symbols allow you to define a visual object once and then re-use it time and again, with the ability to modify each instance’s paramters whilst having a single master object in the library to update if needed. The obvious usage in interface mock-ups is for buttons but once you’ve grasped the concept it’s easy to use for logos, site-wide graphics, navigation elements, etc. Check out this excellent Adobe article to get started.

Fireworks is pretty much the most powerful tool in our box, enabling us to deliver everything from interactive wireframes through to fully design UI mock-ups. However, it wasn’t until recently that we started to dig a little deeper into it’s customisation potential, and it was a very pleasant surprise to find that with only a little Javascript you can create very powerful Fireworks extensions. Photoshop introduced ‘Actions’ many versions ago but they always felt a little clunky and only worth setting up if you had a lot of repetitive tasks to get through. However, with extensions it is much quicker and more flexible to consolidate a whole range of steps into one command, and vastly increase your productivity in the meantime. Check out the Adobe documentation Adobe documentation or this tutorial to get started. You won’t regret it when it avoids a thousand select/copy/paste/tweak/save tasks!

Note to Mac CS4 users: the place to put your saved extension files is:
Macintosh HD:Users:<User>:Library:Application Support:Adobe:Fireworks CS4:Commands

Looks like when Adobe offered to supply the $699 software package for free to developers who could prove they were currently unemployed they may not have expected to have to withdraw the offer so quickly. Cynics might suggest however that Adobe fully expected the deal to be snapped up and now they can sit back, happy to have rapidly expanded their Flex community by another 15,000 developers. Either way, it is often the case that innovation and creativity are increased during hard times so let’s hope this paves the way for yet more exciting new Flash developments. At least with Flex we’re unlikely to see 15,000 new ’skip intro’ sites!

Not to be outdone by recent publicity regarding the iPhone v.3.0 release later this year, Google has just announced the availability of the SDK for developing for Android 1.5. It’s not the final release of the v.1.5 SDK but apparently is pretty close. From a development perspective it will help with developing for multiple Android versions and introduces some important changes to the SDK/OS structure. In terms of features, some key stuff in v.1.5 are soft keyboards, home screen widgets and speech recognition.

Here at Common we’re no strangers to Wordpress. In fact, it’s our blog and indeed CMS of choice for many small/medium site requirements. However, it’s often hard to keep up with the rapidly developing options regarding theming so some of the examples covered in fresh trends in Wordpress themes are worth checking out just to see the breadth of experience that can be created beyond the simple blog.

Not much point in pretending we’ve had chance to play with iPhone OS 3.0 [it's not officially available until summer '09] but it looks like a pretty significant update and shows just how serious Apple is about staying ahead of the field. Check out the excellent Gizmodo review and some great screenshots from Engadget.

I was only recently introduced to the wondrous suite of visual/design online applications at Aviary.com. Having had a brief explore, I’m sure Adobe aren’t worried just yet but as a demonstration of how usually complex graphics applications can be delivered online using Flash they’re an amazing showcase. As with Google’s online application suite, the opportunities for such applications are best maximised either by focussing on the 10% of an applications features that are used by 90% of it’s users or when they deliver features that couldn’t be delivered with offline software. In Aviary’s case this might mean being able to quickly alter a photo before posting to a blog or photo-sharing site or being able to collaboratively edit a visual in real-time with other users.

OK, quite possibly my finest ever “sandwich short of a picnic” moment but I’ve just realised how easy it is to schedule future posts in Wordpress. If sometimes, like me, you blog in bursts and then save some of your posts as drafts to publish at a later date, but then inevitably keep forgetting to go back to the drafts folder, then scheduled posts are for you. Or of course if you’re in the habit of writing posts such as press releases that have a specific release date. That would be a far more obvious example! Anyway, just write the post as usual but change the publish date to a future one and, in Wordpress 2.7+ at least, the ‘Publish. button will miraculously change to read ‘Schedule’ and your post will not be shown until the specified time. I’m sure I’m pretty much the last person ever to cotton on to this but I find it very useful.

If like me you’ve ever moved from a PC to a Mac you are probably freaked out by uninstalling apps on the Mac e.g. just dragging the relevant app to the Trash from the /Applications directory. But what about all the DLLs and Registry entries? No such thing on Mac. True though that is, there’s still a bit of other related clutter that each application keeps somewhere else. Usually just small Preferences files and the likes but still, if something’s worth uninstalling then it’s worth uninstalling properly! In this case, AppTrap. comes to the rescue. It’s a small freeware app that pops up when you trash an application and prompts you whether you’d like to remove the app’s related preferences etc.

Ever since I started using the iPhone I expected there to be a glut of decent Basecamp apps due to both being slanted towards a design and tech savvy audience. Also, due to a very capable API, Basecamp seems the ideal focus for an application that could offer high-productivity benefits and hence demand a fairly high price on the App Store.

However, I’ve been largely unimpressed with all the offerings I’ve tried. I’ve used Minivan for a while but it has often suffered from poor responsiveness and isn’t easy to use across multiple projects. Outpost appears to be flavour of the month with a slick website and top billing in a recent 37Signals mailshot but the reviews on App Store are dreadful [though it's fair to say the app may have been through several development cycles since]. And hence I’m currently trying out Groundwork, which seems good so far though there’s definitely room for improvement.

In short, none of the apps tested yet seem to be clear winners and I’d even go so far as to say none are yet worthy of anything other than infrequent or urgent access to your Basecamp projects.

One of the biggest issues we found with Google Apps as a genuine business/enterprise mail and calendaring solution was the difficulty of synchronising calendar clients with the Google Calendar server. For example, it was straightforward to set-up a calendar application to pull in events from a GCal using the iCal format but ‘publishing’ events involved a convoluted workaround or use of 3rd party syncing software. Recently this has changed however and having followed the instructions from Google on getting started with CalDAV we now have a much more savvy centralised calendaring system.

Web designers have always battled with, and found creative ways around, the limited number of fonts available for ’standard’ use on the web. On mobile there is usually no option but to allow the device to just render using a single system font, but on iPhone at least there is a selection to choose from - though not the complete set that is included on Mac OS X. This excellent review of the iPhone fonts explains the comparisons to the ones available on OS X and some of the shortcomings with the iPhone subset.

Having been a fan of OmniGraffle since moving from PC to Mac over a year ago and needing a Visio replacement for wireframing and user flow work, Graffletopia has proved an invaluable resource for extra stencils. The free resources have saved significant time and have often helped provide far more coherent and clear documentation.

Nothing like a live demo to destroy an otherwise stable system so here goes… a live test of wordpress’s own iPhone app. It’s feature set is adequate as opposed to desirable but it’s simple to use and has some good offline awareness of your blog settings (such as categories). Shame it doesn’t handle tags the same as categories though. Many users would miss posting images too, though this is not a problem for me. So, if you’re after amazing features then maybe try one of the 3rd party paid-for alternatives but for something a bit better than just posting by email (and with the official Wordpress badge on) the app seems worth a free install.

Web developers and designers using Mac OSX should check out the Hex Color Picker extension which adds an extra method for working with colours right at an OS level. The result is that all apps which use the standard OSX colour picker [yes, the one with the option to pick colours from a selection of crayons] benefit from an extra tab that allows you to use web style hex values such as #ff0000 [for red].

iStockphoto, a favourite amongst many designers for cheap image/video/flash stock assets, is developing an application to allow richer access to it’s library. The application offers enhanced features over an already capable web interface, adding things such as ‘cover flow’ view, multiple/batch downloading and improved lightbox management. The initial release - public Beta due in February - is Mac OSX only, with an Adobe AIR version to follow shortly after.

One thing missing from the OSX finder is the ability to toggle hidden files. If you’re a web developer you’ll have conctinual need to access hidden files such as .htaccess or .svn, but equally you may not want to make every Finder view look so untidy. Sure, you can use Terminal to enable/disable hidden files but sometimes you just want quick access to something you know is there but can’t see it. Well, this application appears to do just that. I’ve only just installed it so I can’t vouch for it’s long term usage but for now it offers exactly what I needed - a button on the Finder toolbar to toggle the visibility of hidden files.

Before reading this I’d already installed 1-6 of Wired’s 10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008 and was using Tweetie as my preferred Twitter app so either I’m very common or this is genuinely one of the better iPhone app round-ups. Of the one’s I’ve not used, NetShare sounds good - a feature I used previously for free on Windows Mobile. I’d also add a great little puzzle game called Subway Shuffle which I’ve used to occupy many a train journey.

As a designer with all those screen-hungry design apps, a mail program, a couple of browsers, file windows, text editor, etc all open at once, you can quickly lose your mind. Spaces - the multiple desktops feature in Mac OS X [borrowed from Linux I think] - is invaluable to solving this problem, allowing for a much more structured working environment. However, sometimes when moving between a dual-display and single-display set-up Spaces stops working and if you’ve become dependent on it you’ll suddenly feel shackled. However, before reaching for the “Restart” button, try this…

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Type ‘killall Dock’.
3. Spaces should come back to life.

Yes, it’s true. Since the start of November you can no longer buy a license for Windows 3.1. In case that feels worrying, to put this into perspective here is a rough comparison of a PC specification to run Windows 3.1 vs a current Windows MOBILE specification…

Windows 3.1 PC: 10 Mhz processor speed, 640Kb RAM, 640×480 VGA screen [16-256+ colours], 7Mb hard disk, 9.6Kbps dial-up modem.

Windows Mobile Smartphone [e.g. HTC S740]: 528Mhz processor speed, 256Mb RAM, 320×240 QVGA screen [65k colours], 256Mb ROM + 1Gb SD removable disk, Bluetooth/Wifi/GPS/Quad-band GSM connectivity.