iPhone, You Phone, Everybody Phones

The main reason for introducing Safari for Windows is bringing iPhone development platform to PC. Since iPhone uses Safari’s rendering engine, developing an application for iPhone is basically developing a web application for Safari using web standards and Ajax. Safari will allow developers to create and test third-party applications that will look and behave exactly like applications built in iPhone. These applications will be able to seamlessly integrate with iPhone’s services and extend its capabilities.

Browser

Browser alone is still a bit raw and needs a lot of polishing. In fact, it really feels more like an early alpha. According to first reactions many users have experienced frequent crashes and hangs. It crashed immediately on both of our Windows XP computers when we tried to add a bookmark or view bookmarks list, which made browsing very uncomfortable and unpleasant. It’s not possible to switch tabs by pressing Ctrl+Tab. Tabbing through links works only after you enable that feature in preferences, but it seems to work fine with form fields. Text in Safari is too anti-aliased and it looks kind of blurred, but I guess it’s just a matter of taste. You can change the font smoothing value from medium to light in browser preferences, but it still looks a bit too smooth. Dual monitor systems are also reported to have problems with Safari. There are a few more bugs related to Safari’s integration with Windows.

Claims about JavaScript performance are a bit stretched. It really depends on the JavaScript benchmark tests used. Safari really was faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox in some tests, but was even slower in others (DHTML JavaScript Benchmark).

Conclusion

I cannot recommend Safari 3.0 beta to average Windows user yet, though non-Mac developers will benefit from it. I’m sure Apple will fix most of the bugs before releasing the final version. All in all, it’s a move in a good direction, though Firefox will undoubtedly be the browser of choice for the majority of web savvy users regardless of the platform or operating system - and rightfully so.

If you’re willing to learn more and don’t know where to begin, read the excellent Mootorial, a complete MooTools walkthrough written by Aaron Newton. If you plan to seriously get into MooTools you will most definitely need Joe Hewitt’s Firebug, a Firefox extension without which you might easily loose your hair while trying to debug your code. I should mention that it’s very useful for monitoring and debugging CSS and HTML also. Once you get used to it, you’ll probably wonder how you managed without it.

Happy scripting!

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.

Leonardo Da Vinci

This weekend we attended to Yoga in Daily Life seminar in Umag, Croatia. Though we really enjoy our work, we find that getting away from it all for a while is very refreshing, even if it is just for three days. Aside from the main speaker, Paramhans Swami Maheshwarananda, who was very inspiring, we had the time to get reacquainted with some old friends and also meet new people, maybe even a few clients for that matter.

What good can a yoga seminar do for me and what does it have to do with web development, you wonder? Well, it really doesn’t, it certainly won’t earn you money in fact you will most likely even spend some. But if you’re anything like us, and by that I mean you’re spending most of your time in front of your computer screen, drawing, coding and creating new stuff, than you will definitely benefit from it. It seems that good ol’ Leonardo was right after all.

I must say that after clearing our minds a bit we were able to confront and solve problems much faster. And I don’t mean some spiritual or another world problems, I mean problems which all of you are faced with on daily basis, web design and development issues, business decisions and such.

Not to mention the benefit yoga exercises have on spinal column and body in general. Yes, I’m talking to you web designers and programmers! Do something good for yourself and for your health. All of those creative juices you intend to use on your next project, they need to start flowing somehow. And I couldn’t imagine a better way than exercising a bit.

What I’m trying to say here is, go out there, open your mind and be relaxed. Don’t get consumed by the work. If you get stuck with one thing only, even if it is the thing you like most, you deprive yourself of one beautiful thing in life, and that is diversity.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.

W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Choosing the right name is a creative process which one can easily get lost in. That is even more true if you don't have a clear idea about what you would like it to communicate to people. We wanted it to be something utterly simple but at the same time to reflect who we are and how we function as a team. The most important thing was - we just wanted it to really be us.

The truth is out there…

We did not want to spend too much time on it. There is a theory which says that if you think too much about what you would like to say, most of the time you end up telling a lie. Of course, we didn't want that. We came to the conclusion we should really describe the way we're living our everyday lives, and that is - we fill each other in, we complement each other in every way, we are worth more as a whole then each of us as an individual which makes us balanced and complete. It gives us more energy. That is who we are. That's what we are like. Simply ComplementaryDuo. And since we're a couple, that goes for both, our personal and professional life.

And then, there is the obvious

Most of you already know about the color theory. If you don't, I suggest you find out by visiting one of many sites that deal with that particular subject in detail. By definition complementary colors are any two colors which are directly opposite each other on a color wheel, such as red and green. These opposing colors create maximum contrast and maximum stability. Similarly, we are not the same. Sometimes we have completely different approach to completing the same task, and most of the time we find the best solution is a combination of both.

The fact that complementaryduo.com domain was still available was really a miracle itself. Anyone trying to buy a decently named domain lately will surely know what am I talking about. We took that as a sign of good luck, immediately buying it and successfully avoiding flickrizing the name to something like cmplmntryduo. ComplementaryDuo it was.

Early one morning, with time to kill…

The past two months haven't been as intensive for us as usually, so we took the opportunity and decided to do what we've been planning to for almost a year now. We have downloaded Instant Rails seven months ago and haven't really had the time to try it out till now. Instant Rails is a pre-packaged version of RoR for Windows. There is also one for OS X called Locomotive. There is even Rails Live CD Linux distribution for Linux fans. Pre-packaged solutions are by far the easiest ways of having installed RoR on your system in a matter of seconds. These provide you with everything you need to start, including the web server and the database.

My name is Ruby, just Ruby…

First of all, let's clear one thing up. Ruby is an interpreted, dynamic, object oriented programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto who started working on it on February 24, back in 1993 and is completely independent of Rails. It got it's name after a colleague's birthstone. Ruby was released to the public in 1995 under the open source license. Ruby is guided by the Principle of Least Surprise (PoLS). It features introspection, reflection, meta-programming and threads and supports duck typing. If you would like to know more about Ruby programming language itself may I suggest excellent Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by 'why the lucky stiff'.

…and I ride on Rails

Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby, hence Ruby on Rails. It was extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson from his work on Basecamp project management application created by some very clever people in 37signals. They have generously decided to share it with all developers willing to try it out in July 2004. Rails implements Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture guidelines for organizing applications and follows Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and Convention over Configuration principles. Many people confuse RoR with Ajax and Web 2.0 because of it's seamless integration with Prototype and Script.aculo.us JavaScript libraries. Admittedly, it is almost too easy to implement Ajax in your web application using RoR.

Scaffold your way to perfection

This post consists merely of impressions we got from our first experience with RoR and we will not go into details on this subject. The first tutorials we went through were Rolling with Ruby on Rails series that we found on ONLamp.com. These are great introductory tutorials which show you how powerful RoR can be and what can be done with typing the famous line:

1. ruby script/generate scaffold model_name controller_name

I guess scaffolding alone will leave most people breathless, but do not be misled by it. While scaffolding really is powerful, it is only meant to help you get started with your application quickly.

That's it honey, I'm moving

After completing some of Internet tutorials on RoR, if you are still serious about it, you will want to read a few good books on RoR. That is exactly what we did. We took the advice from RoR official site and got Agile Web Development with Rails - Second Edition by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson and Rails Recipes by Chad Fowler. Both books are very insightful and cover most of the real world problems in detail.

That is where we learned about rails migrations, the feature we were truly impressed with. It is a RoR's way of versioning and keeping track with changes to database. RoR migrations are database agnostic, which means they are independent of the underlying database. Basically a migration is Ruby code and contains no SQL at all (although you can still use native SQL with the help of execute method if migrations don't provide methods you need).

We have merely touched the tip of the RoR iceberg in this post and have mentioned only few of many cool features RoR has. I am really looking forward to creating my first RoR based solution in near future, and I encourage you to try and do the same. Check for more detailed posts on particular features of RoR in near future. Until then, explore this new ruby world on your own, play with it. I think that you won't be disappointed.

When we were thinking about creating this website, we were not sure whether we should use one of numerous blog engines already on the market or we should develop our own solution, kind of a mini blog engine. The latter almost won the argument for two reasons. Mainly because we were not planning to use many of the features those engines had, and partly because that was the opportunity to learn something new while at it. Never the less, we've decided to check out what was offering.

Criteria

The first and most important thing we were demanding of a blog engine is the ability to generate standards compliant code. The second and equally important was that it should be fairly easy to customise not only the appearance but also the functionality of the site. Our intention was to use it as our portfolio and contact site as well. Ease of use was also very high on our list of priorities, since we didn't have much experience working with such tools. We didn't want to spend a lot of time just learning how to use it.

Candidates

Since our hosting company had Community Server already preinstalled on our web server, we have decided we should give it a try. First impressions were very positive but we couldn't help thinking it was offering too many features we were not going to make use of. Also, we were not sure we would be able to make heavy customisations. This might be the right choice for ASP.net developers.

Six Apart's Movable Type was next on our checklist. It was the closest thing to what we needed, and had a full set of impressive features, templating language being one of them, which was exactly what we were hoping to find. The price of this product is ranging from free for personal use (without support) to $279.95 for up to 10 users.

We have also tried Expression Engine Core (feature-limited free version of pMachine's Expression Engine) publishing system. There is no doubt that this product is very powerful, maybe even the most complete tool of all, but it seemed too complicated to use and a little bit overkill for the purpose we had in mind. The price of full version of product is $99.95 for personal and $249.95 for commercial licence, which was also something we had to take into consideration.

Then we have stumbled upon Vine Type. It didn't seem to have too many features (especially ones we didn't need) and at the same time it seemed to be easily configurable. The fact that it doesn't make use of the database but uses XML files instead was very intriguing, so we've decided to download it and give it a try. After a while we came to the conclusion that while it was really ambitious and innovative, the product still needed some polishing. The product is free for personal and $20 for commercial use.

And The Oscar Goes To…

Finally we have decided to try WordPress. And hit the jackpot. It was exactly what we were looking for. WordPress has the amazing amount of features but in spite of that, it's very user friendly and not too difficult to use. Suffice to say, though we are not PHP programmers, we were able to do everything we have planned with no difficulties. With slight modifications you can even use it as a CMS.

It is a highly customisable solution, but most of your demands can be met by literally hundreds of plugins which can easily be installed. Maybe the most important thing we liked about WordPress was the philosophy behind it. It is an Open Source project released under the GPL licence, which means it is free, be it for personal or commercial use. And best of all, it generates fully W3C standards compliant code.

WordPress, I think this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship.