Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

Pie Guy is a fun game for your iPhone that is free, is installed via the Web (it is a fancy Web page), works offline, and is actually a lot of fun (works sorta like Pac-Man).

Neven Mrgan, the developer of Pie Guy, built the game – not only so people can enjoy the game – but to help show what is possible via HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for building games or applications on the iPhone using the Web browser rather than native cocoa technologies.

“If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.

But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)”

A very notable thing to do and I hope a ton of talented developers take him up on it. I’d love to see stuff like jQuery for iPhone games/apps (which I’m sure exists in some form or another).

Also of note: As Neven pointed out in his announcement post – don’t try this on your first generation iPhones. This game only performs well on an iPhone 3GS.

Even though he’s publishing all of these “drafts” on the site for free, I will be getting the paper version when it is published.

Via John Gruber.

At first I thought that I somehow had to ask Google to whitelist Viddler as a video provider. But since then I’ve tried random YouTube videos to test and I have even had trouble getting those to show up.

According to the FAQ Google “recommends” using “YouTube or Google Video”. It doesn’t necessarily say that you can not use any other services, but for the one’s I’ve tried I’ve not been able to get them to work.

My method for trying to add videos to My Maps is this:

1. Place placemark on map.
2. Copy HTML embed code from any video service.
3. Paste into HTML editing view on My Maps.
4. Save.

However, it is easy to be fooled because everything works up until step 4. Until you actually save the map, your videos will appear just fine. Once you save, the HTML embed gets “ripped” out.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to 1) get embeds to work? 2) get Viddler whitelisted for My Maps? I would really like to finish my Viddler @ SXSW Google Map.

[tags]google, maps, my maps, video, viddler, youtube, html, embed[/tags]
[slug]mymaps-embed[/slug]

Kyle is doubting the usefulness of Microformats, and is also saying that he thinks the learning curve is too hard because of the documentation making things “too hard”. First I’ll address his comments on the documentation being much too difficult to follow:

“Maybe it’s just me — but I feel like the microformats crew are actively trying to make this an elitest club. I’m not very stupid (I don’t think) but when I first started researching microformats it took me ages to really understand it. It turned out to be dead simple.

You can see the documentation (featured to the right) is quite brief for simple formats like hCard. Wait a second… are you serious? This page is reeee-diculously (and needlessly) long and really needs to be cleaned up. It’s like a giant newbie-scaring-machine. hCard is dead simple to implement; a couple of paragraphs should suffice with two or three examples.”

I could not agree more with Kyle on this. The documentation for Microformats, in reality, is all spec information. There is a definitive need for someone with any type of documentation experience to get on the Microformats Wiki and really make some “Microformats for Dummies” type of documentation.

Someone on Kyle’s comments suggested just getting Jeremy Keith to spear-head the effort. Well, Jeremy is already a microformats “evangelist”, but I can see their point. He has the ability to make things that seem difficult, dead simple. Perhaps he could take some time to edit the heck out of the wiki and/or just add a series of pages explaining each Microformat in human language.

Onto Kyle’s other gripe; the usefulness of Microformats. I disagree with Kyle on this point. Microformats can be, will be, and already are extremely useful. I feel a little weird saying this since I have yet to really take full advantage of Microformats on my site here – but it is definitely in my plans. Kyle didn’t really expound on his reasons why he thinks Microformats are not useful until one of the very last comments that he wrote (he doesn’t have permalinks on his comments so I will copy it here):

“But… again, you seem to have proved my own point with “We haven’t figure out how exactly that will help us” — that’s my entire point. I’ve been following microformats since Tantek was talking about them years ago. An yeah, Tantek is a cool dude… but is it enough of a reason to use them?

I honestly haven’t found it.

I use web standards because it helps me work faster produce more maintainable code and standardize my practices. I can’t say the same for microformats. The best I could say is: “I use microformats so that the extreme minority of my browsers, who have an extension installed, who are looking for specific metadata, who have scripts installed to interact with their other data management applications can more easily add me to their address book.”

Oh, and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats ”

His argument here is really way off. When he says “we haven’t found ways” he really means himself. I think if you ask the folks at Technorati, and the people that have invested millions of dollars into them, they’d disagree with Kyle too. Microformats is just really starting to take off (if people do not use them, they are indeed useless but as more people use them, companies like Technorati can really build useful tools). There is no one definite useage for each Microformat, however each have their own implementation. The biggest advantage I see? One content delivery system for almost any type of data. I don’t need to create a vCard for my about page, I just need to add a few classes to the information that is already there. This brings me to his second point that falls short.

His argument that “…and for those pushing hAtom… the last thing we need in this world is more syndication formats”. Perhaps he hasn’t delved into hAtom much, but it isn’t another syndication format, it literally takes the place of Atom (which is becoming increasingly popular and is starting to become the syndication format of choice of some of the larger companies that have tons of data to syndicate [ see Nail Kennedy's article about feed syndication formats and their usage]). Also something to remember is the hAtom is currently in draft format, but imagine if if you had a blog and you didn’t need to serve an HTML version, RSS 0.92, RSS 2, and Atom version of your site. You could just serve the HTML version and all of the data you wish to syndicate – to different applications and services, could be parsed from that single delivery system. This is the biggest advantage of Microformats in my opinion.

The documentation does need a serious look, and update, to make it a much less steep learning curve. Broader usage will come of that, and in turn more uses will reveal themselves from a growing user base. I suppose Kyle’s post really cuts right down to the root of the Microformats problem – explain them better, and they’ll be used.

[tags]microformats, kyle neath, tantek Çelik, jeremy keith, hcard, hatom, rss, atom, feeds, syndication, technorati, html[/tags]
[slug]re-microformats-useful[/slug]