nathan jara

So after watching Apple’s video describing all the new kick butt features of its latest operating system upgrade, OS X Lion, you can’t help but get excited. I couldn’t either and bought the upgrade not too long after it was released. Many of the new features I really am pleased with, including the Mac Mail revamp with conversations, full-screen view in applications, and the overall new look of icons and such. I even like the seemingly drastic change Apple made to scrolling in the OS by “inverting” the scroll as in iOS and mobile devices. Of course this is totally screwing me up when I go to use my work machine, which doesn’t have the update, and I have to scroll the “old” way : P However, I think Apple may have really dropped the ball on some things with the new cat. For one, I’ve noticed significant lag and delay when opening programs and moving through different applications; something I didn’t have at all with Snow Leopard. Another issue I have is the significant change to multiple desktop management. Even the simple task of changing your background wallpaper on all your desktops has become more complicated. While they’ve given you the ability to have different wallpapers per desktop, there is no option to change all wallpapers at once, as others have clearly had issues with as well. I realize this change isn’t the end of the world; it just doesn’t seem very logical, which is something that Mac UIs have always done well. Reading reviews of Lion, you’ll find similar complaints. While writing this post I read a few reviews that pointed out some features that calmed some of my initial qualms, including Engadget’s review. The Ars Technica review is particularly thorough and uncovered some more things that made me feel better about the upgrade. Clearly, Apple is moving in a new direction with some of the new features, or lack thereof. As noted in the Ars Technica article, Steve Jobs said we’re entering the “post-PC era” and as Apple has driven the technology train before, maybe they know something we don’t. In the end, though, they need to always remember to be like Tron. He fights for the users.

All the biggies, Amazon, Google and Apple, are heading skyward with their own implementations of cloud computing. I recently experienced the approach through Apple’s iCloud beta service with iTunes, and honestly I didn’t even realize it at first. After hearing about Apple’s iCloud service, I turned on the sync option on my Mac and iPhone. I mean, it’s free, why not, right? Forgetting that I turned it on and with one of my latest music purchases from iTunes on my Mac, I found that my new music automagically appeared on my iPhone. Now, when all the talk about cloud computing, syncing, downloading, et cetera et cetera began, I honestly wasn’t that carried away with the idea. It hasn’t really bothered me to have to plug in to update, charge, load up more music. But after having my music synced up without having to do anything, well, I guess I’m jumping on the cloud train. Other services like Google’s music streaming service and Amazon’s cloud storage sound more interesting than before and I think it’ll be fascinating to see how cloud computing evolves. One of my biggest questions lies in the sustainability of the physical space that will be needed as the “clouds” grow. In Apple’ recent announcement of iCloud, they provided images of their ginormous new data centers. If everyone’s going to eventually have their desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets in the clouds, I think they’re going to need to buy some more land. From a privacy perspective though, I don’t believe we’ll have everything floating around on company servers. I don’t really care if Apple, Google, or Amazon know that I like Dave Matthews Band or even a little Bluegrass, but I’ll be keeping my personal docs in my own cloud.

If you haven’t heard the latest Buzz, Google recently released its Facebook killer, Google+. The Google Plus Project is the technology giant’s all encompassing foray into the dangerous world of social networking. If you were lucky enough to get an invite to the initial beta testing period, you’ve already monkeyed around with Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts. While I haven’t jumped into all the new fancy pants features, I have to say I’m liking, no Facebook pun intended, the Circles feature most. Circles basically allow you to group your Google+ friends into different categories of your choosing. You can place all your closest chums in your Friends circles while keeping work buddies in a Coworkers circle. The best part about this feature is that when sharing a post, comment or message, you can select the particular person or persons with whom you want to share that post with and not always everyone under the Facebook sun. I think the customization and personal choice of who gets to see what with Circles is an awesome move by Google. As one who has complained about Facebook’s approach in the past, it’s good to see a company taking the user’s choice into account from the get-go.

I am surprised, however, that there hasn’t been more hullabaloo about this categorization aspect of Circles. I thought for sure we’d be hearing people complaining that this “putting people into circles” business (insert whiny voice here) is unfair and will hurt people’s feelings because everyone should be equal. I’m glad there hasn’t been such comments, or at least I haven’t seen any, because I think this feature is needed. When it comes to social groups, we all have people we’re closer to and not so close to. People we want to share more personal things with and those that we just want to say “hey!” to every now and then. I think Google+’s Circles reflects more realistically our offline social lives.

If you agree, ask around and demand an invite from a pal. It’ll be interesting to see how Google+ progresses and grows over the next few months and if any Facebookers will jump ship for the new web hotness or just double up their social worlds. I doubt the Madelaine Zammits of the web will be coming aboard, but I’ve definitely tested the waters and am feeling much more relaxed. Heck, even the Zuck-man himself took a dip. +1 Google, +1.

For about a week and a half now, I’ve been fighting with WordPress. While I really like using the tool, it’s been very frustrating when trying to use some new HTML5 web elements, specifically the HTML5 video tag. I mentioned my first foray into the latest web language addition a while ago in a past post and tried again with my previous post. Out of the box, WordPress’ post editor doesn’t allow you to enter any HTML elements other than the specific elements and attributes of those elements defined within a file called kses.php. This means that if you try to add a <video> tag to the HTML area of the post editor, for example, flip back to the visual editor, your spiffy new elements are kaput. Tears. Sadness. Frustration.

The kses file basically tells WordPress which HTML elements are safe for blog post entries. Anything other than what’s defined here will be torn asunder. (See Otto’s post for a more detailed description.) Many queries to the all powerful Google resulted in this post by Rhys Burnie for a solution to my quandary. Rhys’ code basically creates an addendum to the allowed HTML elements defined in the kses file. The additional elements and their attributes are then plopped into the filter used for the WordPress editor, called tinyMCE, before it’s initialized. The additional PHP code can then be added to your theme’s functions.php file, a quick FTP upload, and you’re off! Pretty slick, eh?

I found, however, that Rhys’ element list wasn’t quite up to date, most likely because the HTML5 spec has changed since the post was made last year. I added some additional element attributes, particularly for the video tag. You can see the attributes for each element noted by [#|attribute|attribute|etc....] on the various lines. Here’s the code:

//extending valid elements
function extend_valid_html5($init) {
	//Standard attributes
	$atts = 'role|accesskey|class|contenteditable|contextmenu|dir|draggable|hidden|id|item|itemprop|lang|spellcheck|style|subject|tabindex|title';
	$html5Elements = array(
		'article[#|cite|pubdate]',
		'aside[#]',
		'audio[#]',
		'canvas[#]',
		'command[#]',
		'datalist[#]',
		'details[#]',
		'figure[#]',
		'figcaption[#]',
		'footer[#]',
		'header[#]',
		'hgroup[#]',
		'mark[#]',
		'meter[#]',
		'nav[#]',
		'output[#]',
		'progress[#]',
		'section[#]',
		'summary[#]',
		'time[#|datetime]',
		'video[#|src|poster|autoplay|loop|controls|width|height|type|style|id|preload]',
		'param[#|name|value]',
		'source[#|src|type]'
	);
	if(!isset($init['extended_valid_elements'])) {
		$init['extended_valid_elements'] = '';
	}
	$init['extended_valid_elements'] .= str_replace('#',$atts,implode(',',$html5Elements));
	return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'extend_valid_html5');

Rhys also gives mention to Nick Gallagher’s approach to solve the HTML5 element issue, which I also tried, but found the kses modification technique to work more successfully. An additional note, if you plan on giving the whole thing a whirl: I found that even by adding all of the attributes for the video tag above, the editor was still stripping out the controls and preload attributes. By HTML5 definition, so far, these attributes can be used by declaration only, as follows: <video controls width=”640″ height=”360″ preload>. But the gosh darn editor stripped out these anyway. Trial and error found that if you add these declarations with values set: <video controls=”true” width=”640″ height=”360″ preload=”auto”>, everything stays put :) An additional additional note, don’t forget to update your doctype to HTML5 :P

For more info on the video tag, check out Dive into HTML5 and Camen Design.

Sooo, I finally beat the system. And I feel great. And now I can post with HTML5 video galore and be accessible all around and everyone can enjoy my multimedia-tastic posts with the browser of his or her choice. Without silly Flash. You can use Chrome. Or Safari. Or Firefox. Or even Opera. I guess you can use IE too. I’m falling back to a Flash player if you’re still using that silly browser. Enjoy.

(At least until WordPress releases an update that fixes the problem in core and makes this fix obsolete  :P, which according to their bug tracker, will be the case. ;)

Remember back in the day…playing those kick butt video games…amazingly retro in their 8-bit graphical glory? Well now you can re-live those days everyday with Neven Mrgan’s Pixelfari. Yes, I said Pixelfari. Pixelfari is Mr. Mrgan’s latest creation that allows you to view the web with the Safari web browser, but enhanced to transform all the places you visit on the world wide inter-web into 8-bit clarity. Below is yours truly’s site with the browser. I know you’ll want to download here.