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?

Title, URL, Favicon

Globe doesn’t seem to have a favicon on my end while Smart uses the right half of the dots on its new logo. (Side note: When Melissa Limcaoco was asked about the meaning of the new branding in the World Usability Day symposium, she said it was about going digital and how that empowers everyone.)

Smart has a pretty ugly web address (although their Twitter account uses smart.com.ph/iphone4s and bit.ly/SmartiPhone4S). If I start typing “iphone” in my address bar, guess which one shows up first.

In the title bar, Globe uses “Globe iPhone 4s” (lowercase? no!) while Smart puts “iPhone 4S” before its company name. Both sound very dull though. Wouldn’t including a short call to action be a little more enticing to customers?

Signup Form

Smart uses an iframe to include the whole iPhone 4S section on their site, located at http://smart-registration.com/iphone4s/index.php and displays a straightforward vertical form on the same page.

Globe takes you to a new page within the same microsite for its form, making you choose the phone and subscription specs before entering one’s personal information.

Touches of Apple

Basically every reseller of Apple products attempts to copy their website aesthetics. In Globe’s case it’s the icon + box combo.

With Smart it’s the horizontal icon navigation. Problem is, both their executions lack subtlely. The shadows and gradients are too heavy and they don’t have the shades of color for the text quite right.

Who wins?

If you examine each choice they made more closely, you’ll discover the tradeoffs. For example: Smart wanted to reinforce its brand and ties to the rest of the site while Globe wanted visitors to focus on nothing but the new phone. Smart put the signup form on the same page and fewer elements to look at, while Globe promotes the iPhone’s most important features and other iGadgets it’s selling. Overall, I think Globe had the better signup form, while I like that Smart’s layout is a tad cleaner.

“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

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 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 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.

• 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?

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.

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.

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.

In 1997, when I was first hired at New York magazine, Kurt Andersen, now a best-selling novelist and radio-show host, had just been fired as editor. Everybody was grieving about this, though not me, since I wouldn’t have had a job there otherwise. And though it wasn’t until years later that I even met Kurt, he unwittingly left me a gift: tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine. Just yesterday, I rescued it from a bunch of old office stuff that I was throwing out, and I have to say, 14 years later, it’s still a pretty useful list of phony-baloney vocabulary that editors are well-advised to excise from stories.

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