Release: WPhone 1.4.2: “Thanks!” Edition

Release early, release often being the FOSS motto, here we are again with a new version of our WPhone mobile WordPress Admin plugin.

Version 1.4.2 is all about thanking our community, because the main changes are the inclusion of new language packs, which were all gracefully provided by our very much vibrant community of WPhone users all over the World. This now brings us to a total of six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian), with a few more on the way. Not bad for a software that was only released a month and a half ago. :-)

So in the spirit of my teammates’ current holiday: Thanks a million to all of you out there who continually help us making this project better and better. Hoping we’ll keep living up to your expectations!

And on another note, watch for the upcoming 1.5 version. I’m thinking it’ll be a big one on the feature front, especially once we’ll have received our prizes and can develop natively.

Release: WPhone 1.4.1: Winner Edition

I can hardly contain myself: we won the challenge that got us started with WPhone! :-)

Well, the true starting point was a question/challenge sent by one of my teammates, Doug, to the wp-hackers mailing list and the animated thread that ensued. A true ode to OSS, in many ways.

So to celebrate, we decided to release version 1.4.1 tonight, which brings the first bundled translations into the mix (Russian and French), and addresses issues discovered through our truly helpful user base.

Now, what am I gonna do with an iPhone in Canada, uh Apple/Rogers? *nudge nudge, wink wink* Well, who knows, maybe I can get Android running on it. :-p

Release: WPhone 1.3.1: the Moment of Truth Edition

My team and I released version 1.3.1 of WPhone. This will be the version which will be judged in the little challenge we got involved in/with. Matt, at Automattic, will judge the entries with what is released by October 22nd, so we’re all eager to know how we did.

And now, let the wait and nail biting begin (00:16 in Montreal)… ;)

Release: WPhone 1.2.0

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

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).