Valhalla Island

To the open letter writers of the blogging world

I used to really enjoy open letters as a way to blog about a topic, you know, instead of listing Vista’s faults, write an open letter to Steve Ballmer asking how on earth he allowed it to be split into five versions. It used to be really entertaining. It used to be.

It was enjoyable while they weren’t used for everything - “An open letter to my Mum: Dear my Mum, you make delicious sandwiches. Love you!”

So please, that’s enough, let us all go back to blogging normally, in perhaps a different style? How about in a science report - “Hypothesis: 72 Degrees looks good. Aim: To chat aimlessly about how I’d like to be an executive producer”? Or a screen play - “Joe: Oh boy, that iPhone contraption is just so darn cool Betty. Betty: When is everyone gunna stop talkin’ about that damn phone, Ima jus plain sick of it!”? Just throwing some ideas out there.

Kind regards, Jim Whimpey

Twitter is as simple as it gets. Tell everyone what you’re doing all the time, with a little bit of social networking thrown in. I tried Twitter and Twitterific a couple of weeks ago but after one tweet I completely forgot about it.

I think it might have been a lack of internet action today that drove me back to Twitter where I found some web pseudo-celebrities twitter accounts. After reading through a few of Paul Stamatiou’s, Dan Cederholm’s and John Gruber’s latest happenings I came to the conclusion that Twitter is slightly interesting. I don’t mean that in an “it’s actually really very interesting” way, it’s only just above not interesting.

Before Twitter, people might have called knowing what you’re doing all the time, “stalking”. Now people are going out of their way to tell absolutely everyone who wants to know. You don’t have to go far out of your way though, you can use their website, your mobile phone, IM or offline clients, they make it pretty easy and I’m sure that’s one of the reasons so many people use it.

I’m going to start again and see how long it lasts.

Fireworks was my graphics application of choice before I got to university. There was behaviour in Fireworks that I’ve now found to be ahead (or perhaps just different) to it’s Adobe brothers and sisters. When I was first told that filters were destructive in Photoshop I couldn’t believe it, Fireworks’ had been editable for years.

Something quite frustrating for me in Adobe applications is how colour is not treated at face value. When I use transparency, 95% of the time it has nothing to do with transparency and everything to do with colour. If I want a lighter green I’m much more likely to just drop the transparency rather than try to pick a colour from the vast rainbow in the colour dialog. You can also use transparency to get colours made from blends of a background and foreground, which otherwise might be really hard to create any other way.

So that’s fine but sometimes you want the colour the transparency creates but you don’t want the transparent property, you want a solid colour covering whatever is underneath. This is were Fireworks was great. Picking a colour in FW would pick the colour as you see it with your eyes, not according to what colour was assigned to the shape. When you try to pick the colour of a transparent element in Adobe applications it picks that element’s colour property, ignoring the transparency and any colour that may be created by blending with elements below. This is frustrating.

On a Windows machine it would be especially annoying as you’d have to take a screenshot, paste it into a new image and pick the colour from the bitmap pasting. On a Macintosh it’s slightly easier with a great little app called the DigitalColor Meter.

A system wide colour picker that takes colours at face value, exactly what I need. It even zooms, making it easy to pick individual pixels. It’s not without it’s downsides though. You’re unable to select a colour and have it stick, it follows the mouse everywhere as long as it’s open. The RGB hex value fields are separated, so even if you could select the characters (which you can’t) and you could select a colour and have it stick, you can’t easily copy the values out and into the hex field of Adobe’s colour dialog.

The only way is to move your mouse over the pixel you want the colour value of, write down the colour on paper (you can’t move the mouse), switch back to your Adobe app and then transcribe the colour in from your on-paper, outside of the computer version.

I’d love to see Firework’s colour picker migrated into the Creative Suite.

It’s that time again, when I get a free delivery from Icon Buffet and realise that they’ve added heaps more that I don’t have. At one point I did have them all but that didn’t last long. This is the beginning of another quest for all the icon sets… until they add more.

If you don’t know how Free Delivery works here you go. Sign up, Icon Buffet send you one free set a month with that set you get 5 free deliveries to other Free Delivery members. So you can all share the love! I’m going to post the sets I have with deliveries left and a list of what I don’t have. If you want to trade something I don’t have for something I have, send me and email or leave a comment letting me know what you’d like!

What I have to trade:

• Alexandria Architecture
• Alexandria Atmosphere
• Alexandria Audio
• Alexandria Cosmonauts
• Amsterdam Free Love
• Ashbury Menagerie
• Ashbury Welcome
• Athens Beach Party
• Blinksale
• Dresden Auto
• Dresden Tournament
• Farewell Snow
• Kyoto Auto
• Kyoto Geometry
• Mallow Buzz 1
• Mallow Buzz 2
• Mallow Symbol
• Manhattan Finance
• Manhattan Metroplex
• Manhattan Night Life
• Manhattan Smilies 1
• Manhattan Smilies 2
• Manhattan Symbol
• Manhattan Tech Toys
• Marseilles Breakfast
• Marseilles Cafe
• Modena Alfanumerico Cold
• Modena Alfanumerico Cool
• Modena Alfanumerico Molten
• Modena Simbolo
• New York Noir
• Pumpkin Eve 1
• Pumpkin Eve 2
• Oslo Easter
• Oslo Finance
• Shanghai Fortune
• Shanghai Tech
• Shanghai Smilies
• Shanghai Tech Vector
• Shanhai Tool Box
• Taipai Buddies 1
• Taipai Buddies 2
• Taipai Monkey
• Taipei Night Market
• Taipei Plastic Primates
• Tower Grove Cheer
• Tower Grove Elementalist
• Tower Grove Melee
• Tower Grove Promenade
• Tower Grove Wedding
• Helskinki Hi-Fi
• Dresden Atmosphere
• Gingerbread Suite
• Manhattan Veggie
• Shanghai New Year
• Super Modena Bros
• Turkey Hunt
• Yuletide Snow
• Anaheim Alert
• Durango Research
• Groom Lake Invasion

Sets I don’t have and want:

• Got them all for now!

That’s it. Icon Buffet really need to make these lists public and dynamic. I’m suprised they haven’t yet but until then, this is the best I can do.

Update: Thanks to Kristin for a lot of sets, changes have been made to the lists. I also just realised I didn’t leave an email - jim (a t) fightingfriends (dotcom)

Update: List reupdated, lots added!

Update: Thanks Harrison for all but one set!

The other day something made me do one of those “Which superhero are you?” quizzes. The kind that give you some <TABLE>ed code for you to paste into your MySpace when you’re done!

The first two questions were:

1. Do you like to wear a cape?
2. Have you ever worn your underpants on the outside of your pants?

Whoa, I think they could have stopped right there. “Did you answer yes to either of those questions? If so, you’re Superman!” Some other questions included “Can you run really fast?” (100% The Flash) and “Can you sling web from your wrists?” (100% Spiderman).

So it turns out, to make one of these amazing quizzes all you have to do is ask some really obvious and specific questions. Since I only ever do something if it’s easy, I’ve made a quiz of my own. It’s called How Jim Whimpey are you!? Just answer the questions below.

1. Are you Jim Whimpey?

If you answered yes, you are 100% Jim Whimpey. If no, you are 0% Jim Whimpey. I’ve even included some code for you to paste into your MySpace profiles!

100% Jim Whimpey:

<a href="http://jimwhimpey.com/blog/2007/amazing-quiz/">I am 100% Jim Whimpey! LOL =D</a>

0% Jim Whimpey:

<a href="http://jimwhimpey.com/blog/2007/amazing-quiz/">I am 0% Jim Whimpey! =(</a>

And if you were wondering, I’m 95% Wonder Woman.

This weekend I made a theme for the Colloquy IRC client. It’s called Typeable. You can download and read all about it on my other blog.

Unbelievably, I will be the first Wordpress blogger not blindly jumping on the all-star Habari bandwagon.

I feel bad writing about Habari when every second post everywhere else is also about Habari. But it’s the ridiculous amount of posts about it that makes me want to write about it… Which makes me a hypocrite. Oh well.

An extremely quick sum up: Matt is an evil dictator that runs a company full of his equally evil minions that together work on a horrible monstrosity called Wordpress. Crippled by Matt’s oppression on them all, nearly every big name Wordpress user and developer moves to Habari, a new, supremely wonderful, blogging platform with a philosophy of goodness so heavenly it’d make Jesus jealous. Now everyone is free, at last, to blog without the torture Wordpress lashed upon them.

What bothers me most is fanboys (and girls) who are blindly dousing their Wordpress installations in kerosene before racing to kiss the feet of the mighty Habari. Ignoring the years of development and huge community around Wordpress for something that doesn’t have a graphical installer, any plugins, any themes or even it’s own website yet.

The Habari Wank blog is great at calling out some stupid things they’ve done. To be fair I’ll mention the Wordpress Wank blog too. Both of them are great reads. I love Habari Wank’s tag line:

“More developers than users.”

I’ve heard many people talking about Wordpress being bloated in reference to Habari. This is something I completely disagree with. Wordpress does have a lot of features but they’re real useful features. I’m the type of person that usually doesn’t use software to it’s full potential but looking around at the moment, I’ve used nearly every feature in Wordpress at least once but most more often.

Something else there’s been a lot of is Matt bashing. “He won’t commit any of our patches or use any of our ideas” they wail. If it’s good code and they’re good ideas, Matt will use them, it’s in his best interest to use them. If someone came up to you and said “Here’s a great free upgrade to the product you’re using” and you agree, you don’t turn it down. I like Matt and I think he’s done very well to handle a project that’s exploded to massive proportions.

While Habari might turn out to be very good, I’m not going to declare my allegiance to it before it’s even made a developer release just because it has big names attached to it.

Funnily enough, all those names attached to Habari are very similar to all those names attached to a certain project that’s been coming soon for a very long time now. Who remembers the hype around that before it became vaporware?

Jamie T’s If you got the money is a great song with a great video. I like the expressions on the girl’s faces.

“A tiny street art project”

This is a cool idea. The people are so small but look great close up. I had a really hard time chosing which scene I would use for this post, they’re all great. The balloon man and road worker are two other favorites.

Macworld invited John Gruber of Daring Fireball, one of my favourite websites, to speak on a panel. John then invited Cabel Sasser of Panic to join him. Macworld recorded it and filled a podcast with it.

I found this audio about 100 times more interesting than Steve Jobs keynote. A third is iPhone related and the rest on other matters like Panic, indie Mac software, the good old days of OS 8 before multitasking and Daring Fireball.

At the end there’s a little Q and A when John gets asked why DF isn’t commentable. Something he’s touched on lightly before but went into depth on in the recording. His reasons make a lot of sense. He doesn’t want Daring Fireball to be something people just skim over. What he said was 100% true for me, I read every DF post from top to bottom, on posts on other sites where there’s over 50 comments (or even over 10) I will rarely read any of them, just skipping through.

It makes a lot of sense to me. John makes a living off the writing on DF, just like a writer in a magazine would. In a magazine you’d never see a one page story followed three pages of various reader responses. I liken it to that.

I also have a lot of respect for and look up to Cabel. It was a great combination and I’m glad they were invited to do the panel and that it was recorded. It’s definitely worth a listen.

This came as a massive shock to me. On IRC this morning Matt tells me Sunburn has been added to Wordpress.com. It joins Day Dream as one of 51 themes instantly available to almost 600,000 bloggers.

It feels really strange to have Sunburn added. Last time I spoke to Matt about Wordpress.com themes he was thinking about adding Chewy, something I like a lot more and would have preferred to have added. I just don’t like Sunburn that much and it’s embarrassing to have it there. Matt even used an old version that was severely broken, I’m not sure if it’s fixed yet but until it is, it’s even more embarrassing.

I was ecstatic when Day Dream was added because I loved it and I’d put a huge amount of work into it that had paid off. That’s not the case with Sunburn, I don’t like it, I haven’t put that much work into it and it’s just unpolished. I feel like I’ve cheated Wordpress.com by having it added.

The comments on the launch post have been really positive so far though and it’s an honor to have another theme chosen by the Wordpress creators.

In short, this year’s Macworld Steve Jobs keynote was boring.

Apple TV, it’s OK. I don’t have a big TV and I don’t watch much TV at all, maybe 4 or 5 shows a week and the occasional movie. Would I watch more TV if I had Apple TV? I doubt it. It’s basically Front Row for your TV, I barely use Front Row as it is.

The biggest iPhone suprise is that it’s actually called ‘iPhone’. While there is no doubt that it’s better than any current phone/smartphone/PDA out there (not hard) it didn’t innovate like I expected it would.

I hope to see the iPhone go in the same direction as the iPod. The first iPod was ordinary, compared to the current iPods, the first generation was positively shit. Over time I’m sure the iPhone will reach my expectations, it’s also hard to keep things simple when you have to pack so much into it. It’s really expensive and won’t be in Australia for ages, it won’t even be availible in the US until June.

An iPhone isn’t really something I’d use. I don’t own an iPod, I have no need for one. I don’t have a need to view websites, send email or watch videos while out somewhere. It has a 2MP camera, but didn’t show it’s functionality, I would bet it wasn’t working yet. I already have a phone that I use a few times a day to make calls and recieve messages and that’s all I use it for.

The nicest thing about the iPhone looks to be the text messaging interface. The nice conversational style is something I would really enjoy. If Apple cut everything back to calling and messaging with the same interface and cut the price by 1/3, I would buy it very quickly.

Overall, it was boring. No new iPods, no Macintosh software at all, no new Macs, no new portables, no speed bumps, no new features, no price drops, no cinema displays, no Leopard. Just two new products I’d never use and a whole bunch of CEOs.

Recently, in the last few months, there’s been a lot of conversion around the blogs I read about indie Mac developers, their software and how it’s priced. The basic message to come out of the whole thing is “do not sell yourself short when you pricing your software”.

From what I’ve read at various indie developer’s blogs, when they up their product prices they don’t only make more money but they sell more copies. This is true for WriteRoom 2, which went from freeware with version 1 to $25 with version 2, as Jesse speaks about it’s pricing and the backlash.

Mac software is something I’m very interested in because I beleive in doing one thing and doing it well. There’s a lot of Mac software out there that does this. I also like the idea of projects I can be completely in control of, from the building to the marketing to the selling. I don’t quite have the skill, even with Apple’s excellent developer tools. That’s why I was so amazed with the story of xPad’s (attempted) sale to Brian Ball of MacZot.

Garrett Murray, xPad’s founder and developer wrote about selling xPad to Ball and basically getting screwed over in the whole deal. The basic deal was Murray selling xPad (paid with installments), with all supporting material, source code and website included, as well as 50 hours of service for $5,520.

Basically Ball screwed him by exploiting a clause in the agreement but what I was shocked by was the price!$5,500, what a bargain! I hadn’t used that app when I first read this story but since then (it’s freeware now) I have and it’s not a bad application, it’s kind of like TextMate for non-coders. Like Garrett says in his post, a lisence back then was $10 so only 500 copies needed to be sold to make the initial investment back.

If I had $5,500 I would have bought it in a flash, it’d be like my own little marketing project, you’d sell as many copies as you possibly could and then pass it on, selling it and the source code to someone else. I’d like it a lot.

And so would Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software. He obviously felt the same way as I did but he has the cash so he came out with an invitation for sellers to contact him about their software. Since that post he’s had 20 offers with products ranging from $2000 to $20,000.

I’m very interested to see what he ends up buying.

Being a hipster that follows trends like a sheep I thought I’d throw my very own MacWorld predictions out there for next week.

What we will see

Next Generation iPods This one’s a given. They will have widescreens but they will not have wifi and they won’t play ‘true’ video.

OS X 10.5, iLife and iWork ‘07 Won’t be readily available but we’ll get a very good look at them and a release date will be set.

Document and Spreadsheet apps added to iWork The iWork suite has felt incomplete to me and while Pages is ok for writing documents it’s definitely not made for it.

8 Core Mac Pros Available straight after the keynote.

New Cinema Displays With built-in iSights. We won’t see any new sizes but we will see a significant price drop.

12″ MacBook Pro
Yep, overpriced too.

What we won’t see

Blu Ray
This is stupid, it’s way too early. I’d be pissed off if a computer I planned to buy was bumped up a few hundred in price just to support Blu Ray.

iTV
Maybe we’ll see a better demo but it won’t be shipping for a while yet.

Tablet Computer
I don’t think there’s demand enough for this to be done. I also think it’s too obscure for Apple to do it really well so they just won’t.

GPS built into anything
Apple’s not known for adding almost useless features like this.

Apple branded phone (aka iPhone)
After all the ridiculous hype people are going to be far more surprised if this isn’t announced and that’s the prediction I’m making.