Globe vs. Smart iPhone 4S webpage faceoff

December 3, 2011 · 1 comment

Globe & Smart iPhone 4S pages

I’m supposed to be hunting down a new phone (I have a 100% track record of losing phones on buses) but for some reason I can’t bring myself to choose, the main reason being I don’t depend on my phone that much. I wish voicemail were the norm in the Philippines because there are times when I don’t feel like attending to calls smack dab in the middle of work. Or sleep. Can’t people just text or email or Facebook or Twitter or—anyway.

Android feels like the safe one. I’m disappointed Palm-then-HP’s WebOS never stood a chance. I’m enamored by the idea of the Windows Phone 7 interface especially on the Nokia Lumia 800 but I may not be able to justify anything else about it (XBOX? IE?). Then there’s the iPhone: still the device to beat, but will always cost an arm and a leg, will always get obsolete after a year. Probably even sooner just like now, as rumors about a 4G (LTE) iPhone 5 surfaced shortly after Globe and Smart officially launched (people have seen it unofficially for a week earlier) its “interest” (not even preorder) pages.

Posting these screenshots (with commentary) for posterity. If you’ll notice, it seems like the choices these two telcos made in their designs are in direct opposition to each other. The biggest A/B test in the Philippines, perhaps?

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Singular vs. plural categories

November 22, 2011 · Leave a comment!

I recently worked on a site redesign that features different blogs in its posts. The site also used plural forms for category names, which to me felt unfriendly in describing individual sites. For example:

“Pet365, a pet blog”

seems more human and appropriate than

“Pet365, filed under Pet Blogs”

If people are lobbying for more readable hyperlinks with URL sentences and relative/fuzzy date formats are commonplace these days, I believe describing taxonomic and meta information should be tweaked as well.

There’s only the small matter of retaining the original category names because they’re still useful for describing multiple posts under it, so the goal is to transform the text non-destructively with some regex and string replacement calls:

  1. Change “blogs” into “blog”
  2. Grab the first letter in the string to determine whether the determiner “a” or “an” should be used

I hate it when WordPress themes use post thumbnails and don’t do fallback measures. I’m looking at you, Obox.

October 9, 2011 · Leave a comment!

There’s a WordPress Obox theme I’m editing right now that returns broken images when post thumbnails don’t exist. Considering this is a premium theme it’s completely stupid that I have to fix this myself. (This is why I use Get the Image most of the time, at least it’s able to pull images already entered in the post, in case the user neglects to upload post images.)

The culprit seems to be $get_thumbnail = get_post_meta($post->ID, $meta, true) returning an array instead of a correct string with the URL of the post image. Changing elseif ($get_thumbnail !== "") to ( is_string($get_thumbnail) ), which makes sure the object is a string before entering the condition. ((array) $get_thumbnail !== $get_thumbnail) could also apply, it might be marginally faster.

It’d be much better, though, if there were also a fallback image and the function didn’t just quit.

Things like these make me prefer writing themes from scratch (or at least use a non-invasive, less blundering starter theme) instead of make do with other people’s code.

Leaders

September 12, 2011 · Leave a comment!

Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.

John Holt

The <form> function() & .class web design conference 2011

August 20, 2011 · Leave a comment!

FFC 2011 poster

The <form> function() & .class Philippine Web Design Conference returns this September 10 & 11—yup, two days of workshops and plenary sessions tackling the future of web design from the industry’s finest talents, including Dan Matutina, John Leyson, Rico Sta. Cruz, Jason Torres, JP de Guzman, Drei Gonzales, Allan Caeg.

Visit PWDO.org for more details about the event. Early bird ticket rates end on September 3. Passes include conference gear, certificate of attendance, and dinner & drinks at our Saturday party slash networking night at Robot Lounge.

I’m going to write about the FFC, I promise…

August 5, 2011 · Leave a comment!

…But in the meantime:

  • Go register for our MiniFFC next Thursday (beer! pizza! FFC tickets!)
  • and the big FFC next September (workshops! networking! goodies! afterparty!)
  • and read Mae’s post, ‘cause if both our blogs were on Tumblr I’d be reblogging the heck out of it and adding a ton of applause/THIS/bless this post images below. I want to see it get over its rebellious teenage stage, quit its cocaine sniffing ways and be a proper adult who’s part of the sober society Perfect. Wait what do you mean that doesn’t count as a roadmap?

When I hit Save Draft in WordPress 3.1, I panicked. 3.2 fixed it.

July 27, 2011 · Leave a comment!
WordPress 3.1 Publish panel

Panic!!!

Here’s something I wrote a year ago:

I panic when I hit Save Draft in WordPress & see the Publish button gets the same “pressed” visual effect.

I switch tabs, then forget I’m just saving it, then what I see is the blue button getting pressed, then I panic

The probable explanation for this is to disable the Publish button when you press Save Draft. But there was no indicator which one was being pressed in that panel, only in the editing panel.

One year and one major release of WordPress after, there’s one tiny change that may explain why I panicked back then.

WordPress 3.2 Save Draft panel

Much better.

It wasn’t just the pressed state of the blue button. The AJAX spinner icon in WordPress 3.1 was right next to Publish, which probably subconsciously drilled in me that the post was being published instead of saved. In WordPress 3.2, the spinner is now to the right of Save Draft. No need to look elsewhere to find out if the post is being published or saved. That certainly made a world of difference for me.

And now I hit Publish.

P.S. I miss Lucida Grande in the admin panel.

The cultural equivalent of dark matter

July 17, 2011 · Leave a comment!

TIME Magazine writes about fan fiction (with a timely Harry Potter slant, of course). I want so badly to quote the whole thing here (but it’s long, 5 “pages” long) so I’ll just grab the snippet being passed around on Tumblr:

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

Now if they made a deeper exposé into the whole fandom—especially the way they bend social networks like LiveJournal, DeviantArt, YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter to their will (think stunning graphics, gifs, videos, and yes, RPG), in such a talented manner, for sheer entertainment, not profit—I’d be a happy camper.

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