Tag Archives: coding

FaceBookCampMontreal

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One more! Tonight was FaceBookCampMontreal, an unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform. Once again, great event, great crowd, very interesting subject.

I’d venture to say that the event was actually a bit late for the developer crowd, since we’ve all drunk the Facebook API Kool-Aid months ago, and most of us have been playing with it publicly or in private sandboxes. On the other hand, the PR crowd was there in full force and was visibly excited by the torrent of opportunities the FB ecosystem truly is.

So if you need a Facebook application and don’t know where to start, a good first step is to call Plank. :o) We’ll hook you up with a strategy that makes sense for both you and your users/audience.

I also have my own pipe dreams, but I’m just too busy to take on yet another project right now. Maybe in December…

Release: wpDirAuth 1.1

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Thanks to a lot of help from the support and development groups (special thanks to Richard and Adrian), and despite having focused on my upcoming job switch and WPhone in the last month, I finally found some time to release version 1.1 of wpDirAuth, an LDAP authentication plugin for WordPress I also maintain.

The new version adds support for more directory server configurations and vendors by supporting privileged pre-binding. It also adds a few interface and documentation tweaks, and has been tested under WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.

Release: WPhone 1.2.0

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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.

Release: WPhone 1.0.0

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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).

Release: Moostick 1.0

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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.