tekArtist

Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.

Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p

So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).

Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.

So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. :)

• Nokia devices running the S60WebKit browser or earlier versions (w/ or w/o JS),
• Blackberry (any xhtml capable generation),
• Windows Mobile smart phones or PDAs (EDGE and/or WIFI),
• Symbian-based devices,
• Opera Mobile and/or Opera Mini capable devices,
• Jaws or other accessibility device/software,

… or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.

Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.

See, I told you I wasn’t all there today…

I guess it takes a nasty fever for me to have forgotten to mention that Doug Stewart, Viper007Bond and I have jointly released the first version of WPhone last night, a plugin to bring the WordPress Administration to the world of mobile and accessibility devices.

The project was, originally, in response to a challenge sent to the wp-hackers mailing list, but our take on it actually goes beyond the original parameters by trying to support full universal access instead.

We’re now in the debug phase, since we’ve never actually had the chance to preview the souped up iPhone/iPod mode of our interface, but we’re hoping to be in a much better place on this front by the end of the weekend. The lightweight version of the interface, used for all non-WebKit browsers, is a lot more stable and seems to work like a charm on even my feature-deficient Motorola v551 (pre-RAZR, less RAM, about the same browser).

Moostick is my take on a Mootools-powered, unobtrusive, Javascript news ticker library.

Moostick will take in any type of <li> container (<ul>, <ol>…) and turn it into an animated news ticker, fading between each entry at a set interval.

This project is an experiment in mootoology. Quite arguably over-engineered for its core purpose, I use it to hone my MooTools skills while trying to still provide a fun and stable tool for others to use.

The unobtrusiveness aspect of the project is key in keeping the content accessible when pages are loaded without Javascript and/or CSS, whether by users or machines, and is one of Moostick’s top goals.

See the project page for more information.

Since we’ve committed to MooTools for our RIA and AJAX development needs in the McGill WPS, I’ve been using it on my recently released personal site as well, so I can experiment outside of work but still try to gain from it professionally.

Therefore, I just opened a new section and repository under tekartist.org to feature little projects I plan to release publicly, as FOSS, for people to download, use, comment on and modify as they please.

You can currently only find more information about my source repository, but I will release a little project I’ve been toying with shortly, after I document it properly.

Tada! I have decided to move away from Blogger and instead leverage features afforded to me by my new web host, DreamHost. I have now acquired the tekArtist.org domain name and set myself up with a WordPress instance to run the present site.

Besides having imported my previous Blogger posts to the new blog section, you can now also browse through two new main sections:

• labs: the geeky side of things
• more: the public disclosure area

The base page is mostly there as a soft landing pad for visitors just stumbling upon my site, but also serves as an OpenID delegate through myOpenID.

Please bare with me in regards to the domain-wide search, as I’m only using Google’s most basic site search feature. They have not yet picked up my pages in their index, since I just turned off the temporary password I had setup at the root level this morning.

Technologically speaking, the new site features tools and options such as:

• LAMP environment: Debian Linux, Apache httpd, MySQL, PHP.
• WordPress as a blogging and CMS platform.
• MooTools compact Javascript framework to enhance the client-side experience when possible, but without relying on it for the core functionalities (see Unobtrusive Javascript).
• As close to valid XHTML and CSS as I can, with an emphasis on relative sizing to accomodate a wide array of screen sizes.
• Universal access through proper document structure and adapted stylesheets (EG: try printing or disabling all stylesheets).
• Microformats, where and when valuable, such as hCard, hAtom, XFN, rel-license, rel-tag, etc.
• Sitemap protocol for search engines to easily pickup my pages in their index.
• and more, as the site evolves.

You can read more about the WordPress theme I custom develop for this site in the related labs page. Since there is nothing really private in it (sensitive values are protected through more appropriate means), I have also decided to make the theme’s source available publicly, fact which might change at any time if I realize that this leads to abuse or security issues outside of what I originally planned for.

I have been relatively quiet online in the past few years while primarily focusing my energies on my responsibilities as a dad and as a professional. I obviously never stopped playing, but limited my personal publishing activities to blogging and participating in online communities, rather than releasing products or experiments.

Now that my beloved children are starting to require less of my attention (IE: less then 24-7), I now have the opportunity to revert closer to previous levels of contribution to the web and Open Source spheres. Don’t get me wrong though, I still have clear priorities. :)

As a final note, I just wanted to mention that my moving away from Blogger had nothing to do with necessity, as they truly have an excellent blogging platform, but stemmed from a desire for the increased flexibility that only a full on web hosting account and a product like WordPress can provide.