When we did some HTML prototyping for the new Myspace interface to help test out the unique and different layout we used Phrozn which is a static site generator for PHP (which is amazing, it will compile LESS stylesheets, allow you to use Twig for templating, wash the dishes).

Recently on a new prototyping endeavor for Digital Latin America I decided to try something different: Handlebars.js — essentially it’s templating using Javascript but supports some pretty advanced features. It supports loops, if statements, reverse if statements using unless (which is genius) and the ability to define your own custom helpers.

The benefit of Handlebars.js is that it requires almost zero configuration. You simply write your templates and load them in, support for raw JSON objects is also a definite bonus. Phrozn while undoubtedly great and still useful requires a UNIX like environment which for a Windows user like me isn’t happening unless I run a VM.

While my use thus far hasn’t been too advanced it does make breaking up a seemingly complex prototype into a modular one. Next time you prototype give Handlebars.js a go.

Are Tumblr drunk for thinking they’re worth such a large amount of money when apparently they’ve only got enough cash to run for the next few months? And are Yahoo! high even considering offering Tumblr one billion dollars when Tumblr is actually losing more money than it makes?

Remember Geocites? If you were born in the 80′s there’s a good chance you grew up making a free website or two on Geocities. Yahoo! bought Geocities for $4.6 billion in 1998 and then shut the service down in 2009. $4.6 billion just poured down the drain like that.

Tumblr bears a few resembelnces to Geocities. Tumblr is a very popular choice for creating a free simple blog, it’s what the hipster kids love to use and people who post memes and animated GIF’s cannot get enough of the service. The same content was being posted up onto free websites built on Geocities back in the early 2000′s as well.

So while Tumblr definitely gets a lot of traffic it is essentially a garbage bin of memes and animated GIF’s that will eventually stop being relevant when the next cool service comes along. Remember when Myspace was worth a lot of money and Facebook stole the show?

While downloadable starter installs of Codeigniter are definitely not new, most are outdated and don’t include the kind of libraries I require.

I went a step further and made some default config option choices, loading in a couple of Datamapper extensions and autoloading the session, database, auth and datamapper libraries as well as helpful helpers.

I decided to call it Preigniter as it is the first step before creating a web app. I’ve set up a Github repository here. This is my go-to starting base for any Codeigniter app that is constantly being tooled and tweaked to work better it includes:

• Datamapper ORM
• Modular Extensions HMVC
• A simple auth library with roles & permissions
• Oauth2 library for third party authentication
• Smarty integration
• With more to come…

For some this may be overkill, but for me these are libraries and features I cannot live without. Maybe this will help save you some time as well, maybe not.

When I apologised for asking them questions they probably get a thousand times a day, they actually said it’s quite the opposite. Apparently most of what you read is pure speculation passed off as authoritative commentary. Nobody it seems even has the decency to ask for the facts, so here it goes.

On other frameworks

Ellislab do not see more PHP frameworks popping up like Laravel or Fuel as a bad thing, in-fact they see it as quite the opposite. As the responder said, “It shows the health of the language, and that’s good for all of us.” and then points out the irony of people rooting for one framework at the expense of others when the PHP ecosystem is so big that it is possible for all frameworks to happily co-exist catering to the respective particular needs of the community.

This raises an interesting point: why should you only use and stick with one PHP framework?

When is Codeigniter 3.0 being released and what can we do to help to get it out faster?

Ellislab acknowledge that it’s pretty stable right now as I also mentioned to them, but there are apparently a few blockers Andrey Andreev (narfbg) has yet to resolve. They also point out this is no fault of Andrey as he is volunteering his time on an open source project.

The part the community can help with is continuing to thoroughly test the develop branch, submit bugs to the tracker on GitHub, and check the documentation for any problems.

Ellislab have also said they’ll see what they can do to resolve the last few blockers. These things take time due to testing and whatnot though. While everyone waits for an official release Codeigniter 2.3.1 is very stable and does anything 3.0 will be able to do anyway.

Do Ellislab plan on continuing with the development of Codeigniter for the foreseeable future or even consider writing a more modern framework to help compete with the likes of Laravel?

The answer was a strong absolutely, they’re not planning on dropping Codeigniter whatsoever. Just because a framework isn’t being rewritten 3 times a year breaking backwards compatibility doesn’t mean it’s an outdated framework.

Ellislab have had numerous internal discussions about how best to modernize the framework, but acknowledge a framework regarded as highly stable and backwards compatible makes this a delicate process. The responder then points out we’ll probably never see the kind of rapid turnover Laravel has but some would call that a feature of Codeigniter.

What is going on with Mojomotor, is it still being maintained and what can we expect down the pipeline?

There are some exciting things coming for Mojomotor and the application is still being maintained, but I was pointed to a Joel on Software link and told they’re adhering to the same policy of ExpressionEngine and not talking about features that haven’t shipped which is fair enough.

Does Ellislab’ future still involve Codeigniter and have you considered creating a more modern fork and keeping an older non-feature-rich version for internal use?

The future of Ellislab appears to still involve Codeigniter (which is a good thing).  The guys and gals are already hard at work upgrading ExpressionEngine to use the latest version of Codeigniter to push its development along and also benefit the future of Codeigniter.

There appears to be no plans to fork the framework and split it. After what happened with Codeigniter Reactor, I can see why they would be hesitant to splitting the framework up and having to maintain two branches.

-Conclusion-

Rumors of Codeigniter’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Ellislab have no plans to match the change cycle of Laravel or any other modern PHP framework and release a new version every few weeks instead preferring tried and tested releases. Considering Ellislab’s flagship product ExpressionEngine is based on Codeigniter and they’re planning on updating EE to use the latest version of Codeigniter, that should be assurance enough Codeigniter is not going anywhere.

Remember not one single framework meets 100% of all developer or client needs. While hosts running 5.3 is pretty common now, some clients like enterprise clients especially are running their own private servers with older versions of PHP due to support required for legacy extensions and scripts built for PHP. Sometimes the cost of maintaining is lower than the cost of upgrading and results in less testing and issues. Not everyone has the luxury of the latest and greatest.

I’ve worked out you can do anything in Zendesk but it requires a lot of hacking using CSS and JS to get it to do what you want. The following code will load in all stickied posts and remove the pagination links from view. It works really well, enjoy.

To use the following code, go to settings > extensions and then add a new global JS widget and paste in the below code.

;(function(window, $) {

    /**
     * Author: Dwayne Charrington
     * Email: dwaynecharrington@gmail.com
     * Website: http://ilikekillnerds.com
     *
     */
    
    // Document ready
    $(function() {
    
        // On the homepage iterate through all entry pagination links (except next page link)
        $(".home #entries_pagination a:not('.next_page')").each(function() {
            
            // Link
            var $this   = $(this);
            var $href  = $this.attr('href');
        
            $("<div />").load($href + ' #pinned-entries-frame', function() {
                $('#pinned-entries-frame').append($(this).find("#pinned-entries-frame").html());
            });
        
        });

        $("#entries_pagination").hide();

    });

})(window, jQuery);

The mind-boggling thing about all of this is Flash and Dreamweaver will be getting the Creative Cloud treatment, two products in my opinion that should have taken Fireworks place on the discontinuation chopping board. So the real question here is why?

Adobe has no other tool that does what Fireworks does

Fireworks is like a mixture of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator that gives you a combined list of features Photoshop could only dream of; 9-slice scaling, ability to save out HTML/CSS, proper image export functionality (32bit PNGs’s), proper save-for-web image compression, small file sizes, pages, master pages, vectors.

The common issue I’ve seen with Photoshop files over the years is if you want to design a website consisting of different pages you have to either intelligently group your layers and label them (nobody ever labels their layers or creates groups except for a select few that care) or create multiple PSD files but then things really start to get messy when you have different versions of one PSD file.

Evident by the current lack of organisational features in Photoshop, it’s more than obvious that Photoshop was never designed to be used for web design. If Adobe were to implement pages and master pages into Photoshop it would be a nice start, but still no true replacement for Fireworks.

The question on Firework users lips is: Why discontinue a product you have no true replacement for? Fireworks is arguably the best tool for UX/UI designing and prototyping, nothing else Adobe currently has comes anywhere near it and yet they’ve just cut-off further development without consulting the community.

Answers to questions like, “What will happen to my Fireworks files, will Photoshop support opening them?” and “Will Photoshop be getting any Fireworks features?” would be a nice start.

Proposal #1 — Modes for Photoshop

I’m no software developer or designer, but having the ability to toggle between different layout modes in Photoshop, one for photo editing and one for web design sounds like a nice idea in theory.

Photoshop loads, you are presented with a splash screen offering you the choice of “Web Mode” or “Standard Mode”. Web mode would give you a similar interface and stripped back functionality of Fireworks and Standard Mode would present to you the standard Photoshop interface.

If splash screens are a bad idea, even offering the ability to select from the Window menu a custom interface mode and then go one step further and have sub-options. In web mode you could offer the same templates for mobile applications, tablets and non-desktop devices as well as prototyping and wire-framing templates like Fireworks currently offers.

Proposal #2 — Sell Fireworks to another company

Adobe could try shopping Fireworks around to see if any other companies are interested in purchasing the rights to the source code under the guise it cannot be called Fireworks.

The one potential buyer that comes to mind is Bohemian Coding, they have a well-known currently Mac only application called Sketch which is often referred to as a very decent alternative to Fireworks.

Proposal #3 — Open source it

Not very likely, but Adobe have been increasingly contributing to open source over the years and shifted their focus to HTML5 and CSS3. If Fireworks is no longer a priority for them, where is the harm in releasing the code so the community can continue improving it?

First Impressions

This phone is fast, smoother than butter. You open something and it loads instantly. Candy Crush on my iPhone 4 would sometimes take a good 30 seconds to load, on the Galaxy S4 it loads instantly faster like it already loaded before you even opened it. The build quality isn’t iPhone quality, the back plastic feels flimsy and no doubt will be the first part to degrade. This phone is light, it has more sensors and features than a luxury sports car and if you’re new to Android it might be overwhelming.

It took me about an hour or two to get used to the new interface and where everything is. Forget everything you know about operating systems if you’re coming from iOS, Android doesn’t limit what you can do. You can view the file system, make video calls using Skype as well as audio calls using Skype, you can replace the interface or keyboard and set application handlers.

The S4 if you’re coming from an iPhone 4 or even 5 is big. In-fact it’s so big if you’re used to holding your iPhone comfortably in one hand, you will need to retrain yourself to mostly use two hands as the size of the screen makes it uncomfortable to use one thumb to navigate most of the phone without accidentally dropping it. The number of options you have with this phone as you do with most Android devices is overwhelming.

Performance

The Galaxy S4 is the fastest phone I’ve ever used, period. I’ve used the S3 before and the S3 is impressive in its own right but the S4 is the equivalent of a Ferrari to S3 being a middle-range BMW: still good performance, but the Ferrari wins.

This thing has 2gb of RAM and a 1.9ghz quad-core processor. The Australian version I have does not have the Exynos octa-core CPU (8 cores for those of you playing at home) which is fine because apparently only 4 can be used anyway, so this is a non-issue really.

The TouchWiz interface is smooth and somewhat flawless. The added touches by Samsung on-top of Android are mostly welcomed ones that actually make using the phone easier. Multi-tasking is unlike that of any iOS driven phone, it’s actual multi-tasking which means you can consume all of your RAM if you have too many background processes running.

The S4 also supports 4G networks here in Australia which are somewhat still limited in coverage and who actually has a 4G network. Because I am with Telstra I get good 4G coverage and was able to test the speeds of the network for this review. Optus is another good choice for 4G networking as well and Vodafone have a 4G network coming that will supposedly be the best (we’ll see).

Apps from an iOS User Perspective

The iOS marketplace having being around first of course has a large number of apps and established brands/services who build apps on the iOS platform and have done so since 2007. The Google Play store has all of the usual app suspects: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Candy Crush and whatnot, there are some apps (maybe obscure to some) that aren’t there but a lot of more useful utility apps for developers and power users over iOS’s zero.

I am pretty happy with the Android marketplace, it’s a lot better than I expected to be honest. You can crack apps easily without having to jailbreak your phone which is awesome. The one app I miss is Vine (a service from Twitter) that currently is only available on iOS devices at the moment, but I’m sure Android will get it soon.

Battery Life

If you’re not careful you’ll chew through the battery on this thing like there’s no tomorrow. Because of the true multi-tasking, you can have a lot of background processes quietly chewing through the battery until it’s too late. Holding down the home key will bring up the multi-tasking window and then holding down your finger on a running process to close it. The removable battery is handy if you’re going somewhere like a wedding or concert and know you’re going to be draining your battery.

The super AMOLED screen as the battery statistics show consumes the battery quite a lot. On my phone over a 24 hour timeframe showed the screen was responsible for 69% of my battery usage, so turning down the brightness definitely helps as well as not using it every minute (which is hard for a new phone).

Audio/Image/Video Quality

The sound quality is decent, it’s not as good as the HTC One, but it’s very loud and clear. Watching movies and TV on this thing is easy, as well as playing music and whatever else you find yourself using this device for that requires sound. The quality of the sound from video recording is clear and loud as well, I have yet to test it in a live setting like a concert to see how badly it clips at a metal show, but we’ll see. Once again you don’t buy the S4 if you’re after perfect sound, you should be buying the HTC One if you want great sound.

Photo image quality is amazing in great light, the 13mp camera not only means larger photos but also means more light is captured which is paired with a decent sensor inside that also helps capture fine detail. The Galaxy S4 has the HTC One beat in decent light, but when it comes to low-light the S4 seems to suffer badly. You can bump the ISO all the way up which means grainy photos and even with the flash, it doesn’t seem to help much. Hopefully a software update addresses the low light image quality.

Video quality is very very decent, once again in decent lighting conditions. The video records in full HD at 30 frames per second, and definitely will produce some of the best video you’ve ever seen (if you’re an iPhone user, you’ll be super impressed). You have the option of different recording modes, slow motion recording and you can pause and resume recording without stopping it (a handy feature when you’re recording and don’t want to finalise and stop the video just yet).

Air Gestures

While impressive, they sometimes get in the way. I found when scrolling through my images in the gallery it would sometimes jump to the top of the list because of the air gestures. I have left them on to wow people however and look cool on the train waving my hand over the screen to move between pages and skip music (which works surprisingly well btw).

Conclusion

Easily the best phone I’ve ever owned. While I do consider myself a bit of an audiophile, waiting potentially a month to get the HTC One and not having a removable battery and expandable storage irks me so the S4 is a worthy choice. Coupled with Telstra’s 4G network (which is faster than my cable Internet connection at home) this phone is exciting and impressive.

As a developer who isn’t wooed by Apple’s brushed aluminium rubbish bins, I use Windows. I was running a Windows/Ubuntu hybrid setup for a while but after issues with getting file sharing to work between the platforms and trivial things like running a web server in my Linux VM and being able to access it via a web browser in Windows I reverted back to plain old Windows.

My bread and butter job is a front-end developer who works closely with designs provided from designers who then expect them to be cut-up and made into real websites, these files are usually Photoshop PSD files or Fireworks PNG files (both Adobe products). Linux purists love to tout the fact that they have GIMP and while GIMP is pretty impressive for an open-source project, it is no where near a viable replacement for Photoshop nor Fireworks and this is the reason adoption of Linux is slow.

Could you imagine what would happen with Adobe announced a Linux version of even just Photoshop? Developers would be moving in droves to the platform. But there is a bigger issue here in regards to the attitudes of Linux users: price.

Adobe have considered the Linux platform on quite a few occasions and the number one reason there is no Photoshop in Linux is because people who use Linux are supposedly less than likely to purchase software and it would not be economically viable for the company to explore a Linux version. While I can somewhat see where they’re coming from, I personally know I would pay as would many others who’ve been wanting to change to Linux but need Photoshop to do their jobs properly.

We have WINE which worked with older versions of Photoshop albeit with buggy behaviour, but last time I checked CS6 will not run in WINE under Linux. It’s Window or Mac, or hit the road.

Not many people like to admit it, but Adobe are one of few roadblocks to Linux’s success.

You spend 9 til <insert variable time here> working for an employer and although you were hired to work 9 am to 5.30 pm Monday to Friday it’s a known thing in the industry that you’re not always guaranteed to leave on-time nor even start at the time you would like. Some places basically make you feel as though you’re not a team player if you try and leave on time too.

You come home from your sometimes long day and spend time with your family, but you’ve got a freelance project you need to finish and an impatient client who forgets you work full-time and can’t respond to their emails, text messages, telegrams or phone calls during the day, so you head to your computer and do some coding until about 11 pm. Your partner and family try and understand but all they see is; you come home, have dinner, make a beverage and head straight for the computer, it can sometimes make you feel pretty bad like you’re neglecting your family but you’re only trying to help pay the bills.

You are always checking your work and personal email accounts, you’re trying to work on your own personal projects and or contribute to open source projects and you like to visit Hacker News more than a couple of times a day (even though you’re knee deep in work). Unless you’re a developer who specialises in one of the trending, hip languages and frameworks like; Rails, Go, Haskell or Python you’re probably not getting paid as much as your family and friends think you are.

You’re doing things and not always getting the credit and accolades you deserve, higher ups are taking credit for their teams work all while you’re trying to climb the ladder and make more money for your family. You’re hitting your head against your desk for 6 or 7 hours out of your day fixing bugs with solutions that are so simple you get even more frustrated. You’re eating lunch at your desk because a project manager gave an unrealistic timeline to a client that didn’t factor in testing and changes.

So next time you meet a developer don’t ask them to fix your computer, don’t assume they’re loaded and don’t assume just because you’re outside working and they’re inside that they’re working any less hard than you or anyone else are.

While the PHP framework race heightens; Codeigniter, Kohana, FuelPHP, Laravel and Yii there has been one silent contender in the background with a larger user-base than all major PHP frameworks combined: WordPress.

Many framework purists will arch their backs and hiss at you for suggestion WordPress is anything but an application, but when you break WordPress down into the key areas it makes a developers life easy you see a lot of similarities between what it provides and what a framework provides.

• A rich and well documented API — Mostly every single aspect of WordPress can be changed via the actions/filters hook based system.
• Authentication — User levels, capabilities and roles, register, login and logout functionality, session management
• Administration panel — WordPress provides a well-styled administration panel which can be completely customised to your hearts content. Limit access to menu items based on user level or capability, custom editing screens, custom option pages, plugin and theme management.
• User management — Add users, edit and delete users, support for custom user meta
• Powerful rewrite system — Most frameworks refer to them as routes, WordPress calls them how they’re known if you’re familiar with mod_rewrite and Apache: rewrite rules. WordPress allows you to create pretty URL’s for anything using the rewrite API.
• Categories & Tags — Support for both categories and tags right out of the box. Easily categorise your content and then easily sort it via WordPress’ easy-to-use taxonomy functionality.
• Decent menu management — The ability to drag and drop order your menus, specify menu locations, unlimited depth of items, ability to easily add in pages, posts, custom post types and links from within the one screen.
• Themes — Complete control over the presentation of your site. No forced conventions or defined ways of styling and presentation of data.
• Plugins — Improve or modify any aspect of the front or back-end of your site. Access to thousands of plugins that vary from adding in support for logging in via Facebook to plugins that completely change the post editing interface.

Although WordPress lacks any kind of structured way to build your applications in a formal sense (MVC for example) there are ways of building a clean application with WordPress. The functions.php file is where you usually would add in all of your logic, but as some of you have probably experienced the bigger and more complicated you get with WordPress the larger this file gets. Don’t be afraid to break up functionality into separate files and include them via your functions.php file.

Think outside the box and consider using WordPress next time you want to build a site in PHP. It might not support cutting-edge PHP functionality or features, but it can get the job done within half the time it would take you to add in any of the above aforementioned functionality.