Surreal Dreams

I’ve discovered a marvelous thing and I can’t. Use. It. It’s making me a little crazy. It’s called Zen HTML and it a very fast way to knock out a pile of perfectly compliant HTML. It even works with text that’s already written out. Let me explain.

Zen HTML translates CSS like markup, like this:

div>p#myid>ul>li.classy>strong>em

Turns into this:

<div>
<p id="myid">
<ul>
<li class="class">
<strong>
<em>
</em>
</strong>
</li>
</ul>
</p>
</div>

Boom, done.  Quick, formatted, perfect.

It also repeats segments of code, so you can make a
<ul> with 25 <li>’s in it in about 3 seconds. In the right editor, it can apply code to selected text, so the plain text list of 200 names your boss emailed you can be made into an series of divs in a few seconds, not 15 agonizing minutes (or even 5 mins of clever spreadsheet usage). The only downside is that my versions of editors don’t seem to like it very well. It’s pretty lame in NetBeans and while it supposedly works wonders in DreamWeaver, it does nothing in my copy. I’ll be trying Notepad++ next. Try it yourself: http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/

Dreamweaver users – want to slim down your giant CSS file using a standard shortcut, but don’t want to hunt down every instance of #336699 or #CC66FF? Try this regex search and replace:

Search: #([\da-fA-F])\1([\da-fA-F])\2([\da-fA-F])\3
Replace: #$1$2$3

This finds those hex color values in #AABBCC form and replaces them with #ABC form. It’s a small savings, but it’s super fast to do and it skips all those more complex color codes that cand compress. Be sure you check the “use regular expression” checkbox.

This same search & replace set will work in other editors with regular expression search & replace tools, check your documentation for the way to refer to a previous parenthetical group in the find box – \1 may or may not refer to the first set of parenthesis.

I have a new concept to keep me writing here regularly, to keep this blog fresh and to keep me reading, expanding, and writing. I call it “blog or else,” and it’s simple: I pre-schedule a number of posts to launch every Tuesday, with a lame or embarassing message. It’s up to me to come up with a good idea to replace this junk post, write it up and launch it. The consequences are mildly unpleasant, but it’s a consequence to balance the small benefits that blogging brings. It’s not the invention of microblogging or anything, but it’s an idea, and I’m going ahead with it. Blog or else, pride or shame, victory or defeat, expert or novice. Stay tuned.

I enjoy the use of a few sweet apps. All are, or at least were, free, if only for a while. No, it’s not a top apps list – it’s a rocking apps list. These are great at what they do. I make no claims as to bestness, just awesomeness.

Dunnit – An achievement based To-Do list. It uses OpenFeint to rank your “score” compared to the rest of the crowd, just as many games do. (I’m level six.) Every action earns you points, so you have a tiny, slightly addictive reason to jot down your to-do items. As a bonus, the programmers are very receptive to comments and suggestions, and respond surprisingly quickly.

Gorillacam – It’s like the regular camera app but with sweet extras that can actually improve photos. You can enable a grid, a bubble level, allow a tap anywhere to capture the photo, an anti-shake feature, and more. Best of all, it saves the photos in the background, so you can keep shooting and it saves all the photos once it has the chance to catch up.

Calc Lite – This spreadsheet app is surprisingly complete and functional. Normally I avoid any app with “lite” or “free” in the title, because that’s code for “crippled.” Not this time. While the full paid version does add some useful features like importing spreadsheets from files, this app is a full featured working spreadsheet complete with multiple sheets, formulas and formatting.

DropBox – I just found this one, but it’s pretty obviously sweet. I’m not going to be emailing myself anymore when I have moderately sized files to take home from work – Put them in the DropBox from work and pull them out of the DropBox at home, or on the iPhone, and possibly on my Hero – apparently the Android app is a little shaky yet. As a bonus, the iPhone app can automatically sync photos and video (If you have the 3GS) and for items you stash locally, it will let you know they are out of sync so you can freshen them. I can even store video in the DropBox and stream it to the iPhone to watch it. 2GB of free storage and you can share any files by emailing a link from the app.

Less productive – WootWatch keeps you up to date on the ultimate deal-a-day sites. The WordPress app is almost as nice as logging into the blog’s admin panel to compose. FluxTunes lets you control your music with a swipe – no poking at little buttons, nice in the car. Shazam accurately identifies music that you don’t know. CardStar lets you input all those discount cards and scan them right off the screen – doesn’t work for me, your mileage may vary. Some users report that it works. Last.fm works with the website of the same name to stream music that fits your taste directly to your iPhone, just like the site streams it to your browser.

Lately I’m working on some professional development – reading books and articles, and then putting these lessons to work in my code. I’m making much heavier use of objects, for instance, and losing much of my usual procedure based code.

At first it seemed artificial, or at least contrived. I think I was locked into the assumption that the overhead of writing OO code would outweigh the benefits on projects of the moderate scale I work on. But I tried it on a small project anyhow, and found it remarkably effective, even on a rather small scale. I feel silly now that I’ve done it – it’s not like I thought I knew some secret everybody else was missing.

Now I am thinking about code generators, database abstraction layers, and design patterns. It seems like a rapid shift, but it’s not like I just read about these things for the first time. I’ve often read of them, but always dismissed them too hard, too elaborate, too formal. But it turns out that they work well if applied correctly, even on projects that span two afternoons.

One thing I wanted to mention was my recent search for articles and my difficulties. I was wanting to expand my knowledge of OO programming in practical ways. I know how to do it, but I wanted to learn more about the when and why. Knowing that objects are supposed to be more flexible is great, but building a class that reminds you of why you build classes is a lot better. After some fruitless searches, (Google gives good results but only if you know what you’re looking for), I finally clued in on some good search terms. Now I have several good articles to (re)read. Here’s a good sample:

Best Practices
Seven good habits
5 common PHP design patterns
5 more PHP design patterns

I have encountered a handful of useful tech cheat sheets over the last few years, including a particularly good one for CSS. I did some searching for more, and found a few good sites with many more. I’ve actually wallpapered a good deal of my cubicle with a series of useful cheat sheets, including some that are a bit more attractive than strictly useful. The best, of course, are both.

There are also Refcardz, which are a bit more thorough and weight in at 5 to 8 pages, written by subject matter experts. I have a pretty thick stack of those as well. Not really suited for wallpaper, but an excellent reference. Not bad looking, either, though I could do without the gratuitous “z.”

I’m in the unusual position of posessing both an iPhone (personal) and an HTC Hero (work). It’s sort of strange because they have a lot in common, but they have distinct feels about them. The iPhone OS is probably a little more polished in general, though I feel like the Hero hardware is a little snappier. After getting used to the touchscreen iPhone, the Hero is mostly touchscreen, but it has some buttons as well as a trackball, which I often forget are there. Both are pretty easy to touch-type on and predict your words quite accurately, though the Android “keypad” tries a little harder to give you several predictions and forces you to switch keypad types less often. I will give Android a bit of an edge for the multitasking. I can stream music and surf the web (in Opera, no less – your move, Apple) and do other stuff at the same time, if I want to be busy/ambitious.

In the end, I’m kind of on the fence – is it novelty, or genuine admiration that I have here?

Huh, I made another one. This jQuery plugin floats little icons by the mouse pointer when you hover over a target. Or big icons, or giant portraits. Don’t matter. It will also make an associated link open in a new window, too. If that’s your thing. Some folks are vehemently opposed to that sort of thing, so I made it default to not do that. It’s actually in use all over the site. I wrote it and added it to the site, and then broke it back down and made a plugin of it. So check it out – the hoverIcon plugin is waiting for you.

This weekend I got the idea to make a simple jQuery plugin of my own. (What is jQuery?)  I’ve used a number of plugins with great success, and decided that the best way to learn more about jQuery and give something back to the community would be to develop a plugin of my own. So I sat down, worked out my goal plugin, coded and tested it. It’s not going to change the world overnight, but it might be useful to some folks who like interesting interactions. I’ll try it out here, too, and see if it’s got any real promise.

I call it Sliding Doors – it takes an ordinary image on a web page and adds some interaction. When your mouse moves over the image, it slides open like the doors on a supermarket to reveal the “alt” text, which describes the image in the code of the page. You can see a demo and download the plugin here on the slidingDoors Plugin page.

I’m not going to complain about spam – it’s pretty much a dead horse I don’t plan to beat. What I want to complain about is a certain webmail services inability to filter out some really obvious spam – some that might have a subject like @*’;. shiz! .;’*@ – or something like that. I mean, honestly – I get many, many identical messages like these that could be filtered by the subject line alone. And then I get a few in Chinese, Russian and most notably Farsi – I wish that I could set my language or charset in my settings so it would be obvious to the email server that I don’t speak Mandarin so that is probably spam. And by probably I mean DEFINITELY. And if it’s not – I still can’t read it – so I wouldn’t miss it.

So please – can you guys filter the obvious stuff? Maybe somebody over at Y! get on that.