One of the distinct features in the Path app is the fly-out menu that allows you to share photos, comments, location, etc. Two developers took it upon themselves to build out that menu both in CSS3 and using CoreAnimation. Both open sourced their work and gave credit.

• Path menu in pure CSS 3 by Victor Coulon.
• Path menu using CoreAnimation by ??? (Levy)

/via Mike Rundle on Twitter.

Crowd Favorite has released an open source WordPress plugin ^* that changes the Admin UI and sets up standards for a few different post formats. Here, their description is better:

“The plugin is a completely additive solution that leverages the default WordPress functionality, while improving the UI and standardizing the names and presentation of custom fields that support the various post formats.”

Post formats has limitless possibilities as you extend WordPress from a simple blogging tool to a much more powerful CMS… but this plugin seems to focus on the modern day blogger.

This interests me in that I use categories to handle my different post formats. Which is how everyone that has ever used WordPress had to do it. I’ve got mobile photos, links, videos, and longer posts I call notes, and larger photos. It would be great to start using post formats to post different types of formats – I’m looking forward to digging into this.

* Side note: So glad Crowd Favorite switched to Github. I hope other WordPress developers quickly follow suit. In fact, I think WordPress.org should change the way they host WordPress plugins to git.

Today I’ve stumbled across a slew of hidden settings that you can’t find via the UI.

However, there are times when I just want to focus on what I’m doing. Mac OS X Lion’s new fullscreen feature is designed to help me focus on a single application at a time. However, when Skype, iChat, Mail, or Twitter are open they will notify me (audibly or with bouncing icons) when they’d like my attention. They will inevitably pull me away from what I’m doing to see what is going on.

Skype, for me, is the biggest culprit because our team at Viddler uses Skype as the primary way to communicate. So even though Skype is notifying me that there is something new in Skype sometimes it is just some of the team members chatting about what’s for lunch and really isn’t meant for me and isn’t high-priority.

So there are times that I do not want to be distracted or even notified that something is going on in Skype. I want to be left completely alone and work on whatever it is I’m focused on. Enter Shh, an AppleScript and/or Alfred Extension (I love Alfred) that will quickly close these four applications. It is a dead simple script that closes all of these applications at once (rather than closing them individually).

I’m guessing that I will extend this script to include other applications over time and even enhance it in some way (perhaps by forcing the foremost application into fullscreen mode on OS X Lion or turning off Growl notifications) so if you’re interested in such things be sure to watch this project on Github or contribute to it yourself.

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.

Every since seeing Tron Legacy I’ve wanted Flynn’s computer. From what I’ve heard on the Interwebs it runs Sun Solaris. Since I’m a Mac guy maybe I can have my Terminal look like The Grid’s UI without needing to run an entirely different OS.

I’m basing this style solely off of this screenshot from the Tron Legacy movie trailer. Here is what my Terminal looks like now.

There is still more to do. First, I have to find the font that they are using (font experts, help?). If you want to contribute to this I’ve put the style up on GitHub.

My handy dandy little script that makes it easy to parse an RSS feed and send links to Twitter using PHP just got a nice little update. It now supports OAuth and has been cleaned up quite a bit.

Oh, version 1.0 is still available.

Chris feels…

• as though the GPL is not conducive to good business practice,
• that it is not an enforceable license,
• and that Thesis, a WordPress theme and the main product of Chris’ company, somehow steps outside of the bounds of the GPL and so it shouldn’t apply.

Those three main arguments would be great to debate, to discuss and to figure out definitive answers to. However, the way Chris went about it – by simply not distributing his theme under the GPL – is definitely breaking the law.

It is sort of like speeding down a highway because you don’t agree with the speed limit in that area and your arguments are that speed limits aren’t good for highway safety, that there are no cops around to write out tickets and that you are somehow exempt from the speed limit laws because you’re a remarkable driver.

Bringing up problems with a license or even saying that a license doesn’t feel right and you’d like to discuss it at large is always a valuable thing to do. Deliberately distributing software without the GPL on top of software that is protected by it is not a valuable thing to do.

Is the GPL good for business? Is it enforceable? Is Thesis somehow exempt from the terms inside of the GPL due to its complexity? I don’t know the answers to those questions but it’d be fascinating to find out.

If this goes to court it would set a precedent but I hope it doesn’t for everyone involved.

Recently Drew wrote up the backstory to how this all happened and it is a fantastic read.

I’m really proud of some of the stuff coming out of our blog lately and the hits are just going to keep on coming.

Side note: OneWay is open source so there’s that.

/via TJ Luoma on TUAW.

/via Simon Willison.

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.

Go forth, and hack! Oh, and its completely open source too. (More on this later.)

But there is more. id is releasing the source code for the game. (See link at the bottom of this page.) And John Carmack, the brains behind nearly every id project for the last several decades, wrote about his experiences with development on the iPhone.

Via: John Gruber.

“So that’s it. Before you even get into the technical merits of the platforms, think about the license, especially if you’re a theme developer. Slapping a Creative Commons license on your theme will work just fine for Habari. Doing it for WordPress is a violation of their license.”

He says this because WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License that states that if you create a work that contains any part of WordPress it must “be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”. Which is pretty much anything built “on top” of WordPress, right?  Plugins, themes, small widgets, all have WordPress’ built-in functions in them.

Should this be a real cause for concern? Owen thinks so.  There is some interesting chatter in the comments of his post too.

Source: One Way in which Habari Absolutely Slaughters WordPress.

Timeframe demo

The demonstration (pictured) is by far the best calendar “widget” I’ve seen in a browser.  One of my favorite things is the date range tools which is where Timeframe strived to excel and succeeded.  Not only can you enter in a date range by typing it in, which will then result in the same range being selected in the calendar view above, but you can also click, drag, and select the range within the calendar view itself.

There are some desktop application calendars that pale in comparison to Timeframe.  iPhoto is the first example that comes to my mind – you can’t even select a date range in iPhoto!  Anyways.  Give Timeframe a spin and if you’re a developer, start putting this into your applications pronto.

Source: Timeframe.
Via: John Gruber’s linked list. 

After reading through your list of feature requests I’m not so sure I have a ton to add at the outset. But here are some things I’d like to see added “long term” (and may even take the time to help you with should I get a few free moments):

1. Export to vCard
You can setup a permalink per contact (an address card if you will) then just push the URL of said card to Technorati’s Contact Service (eg. my vCard).

2. Option to show and/or link to maps service.
Typically a link would be created to open the current address in Google/Yahoo! Maps or Mapquest. However now that Google Maps can be embedded easily I think it’d be a nice addition.

3. iPhone version
Perhaps this is in your plans with the ‘mobile version’ you mentioned. The iPhone could easily navigate the current layout (since it has a full version of mobile Safari running Webkit) – but creating a simple look up and entry point for this application for the iPhone would be killer. I could see companies or family sharing a contacts database this way.

4. hAtom for the hell of it?
The main reason I think it’d be cool to add hAtom is so that coworkers or family members could subscribe to changes found in the database. If someone’s number is changed and/or a new contact is added to the database by one of the applications users – all other users would be notified via a feed.

5. Data import / export / share.
Obviously having some way to import my current address book would be killer. Also, exporting for backup or moving to another platform (or just into my address book) would be killer too. Exporting into vCard per card is ok but if we could have one big vCard with all contacts that’d be neat). This could be done pretty easily with a large list of all contacts on a single sheet marked up with hCard. Though that probably wouldn’t scale too hot.

Sharing though – is something I think would be really neat. It’d be neat to create a community around this project and allow people to share their contact information through this system automatically importing anyone that shares their information into a new “company” called “shared contacts”. Quick and easy way to get in contact with other people that use this app. Just a thought.

6. AIM / Skype contact information
I suppose support for Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, Gmail, etc would be a plus. But for me AIM and Skype information is crucial.

This isn’t all – I will have more. Now you have wanting to help you out!!

I’m leaving comments off on this post because all discussion surrounding this project should be done on his site.

If you experience any problems, let me know. If you don’t, upgrade your own blog to the latest version because, from what I’m seeing so far, it is definitely a lot faster and cleaner than it was previously.

UPDATE: One of the features that I didn’t see documented elsewhere, but I have found to be a really nice addition, is that now when you post a comment you are automatically redirected back to your comment instead of just the post’s permalink. So, if I’m the third comment on a page – I no longer need to scroll down to make sure my comment was recorded properly – WordPress forwards me right to my comment’s bookmark.

Go ‘head, give it a whirl here on my blog on any post. Pretty cool.

[tags]wordpress, open source, upgrade, ella, mysql[/tags]
[slug]wp21[/slug]

I have the plugin activated here on my site, but haven’t decided how I am going to style my links yet. Fun fun!

[tags]wordpress, plugin, happy pals, open source, chancecube[/tags]