Oh, I forgot to mention that my other purchase was a 2006 Calendar, from none other than Michele Finotto. Michele published the calendar using Lulu (really cool – you should check it out). The said calendar costs $14.99USD and contains some powerful black and white shots taken by Michele and his nephew.
I’ll let you know what the quality is like when it arrives in 10 or so days, but from what I have heard, Lulu make great quality products.
Okay, I know i’m late to jump on the bandwagon, however it was only recently that Australian bank account support was added to Paypal and it took 4 days to get funds transferred into it. (thank you to the weekend.)
First on the list of things to buy: Mint. Of course, i’m not going to go into it here apart from say it is a Web 2.0 aware statistics analysis script. At $30USD, i’m telling you, it was well worth every cent.
I threw it up on http://www.mybboard.com a few hours after purchasing my license (by the way – I never told you how easy and quick that was!). Took a few minutes to get installed (mainly me creating the database and database user). Up and away we go.
For those who don’t know, Mint contains a plugin system called “Pepper”. You download new “Peppers” and place them in the pepper directory on the server. They can then be installed via one click, and interface themselves directly with Mint. A list of “can’t live without pepper” you say? Okay then,
This is a screenshot of my setup of Mint, with the plugins I have installed after 13 hours of logging with the software installed:
Sexy, innit?
Last time I checked, the year was 2005 and we’re almost about to hit 2006. Is it me or do the majority of text editors for Microsoft Windows look like they pre-date the year 2000?
I spend the majority of my time in a text editor whilst working on MyBB, SurfiOnline and various other projects and because of the amount of time that I do spend using these text editors, I’d like one that looks good as well as provides all of the functionality I need.
Today I’d had it, and went looking for a replacement for EditPlus. Don’t get me wrong – EditPlus is a great application; it just doesn’t look like it was created this century. I looked and looked everywhere and couldn’t find one which suited me best.
The features I want in a text editor include:
Features which I would like to see, but could be optional:
Of course, I could go on for a while on what I need and what I’d like to see, however the reality of it is that nothing seems to exist that fits what I need it for.
I managed to find GridinSoft Notepad, which looks good, however lacks functionality for build in browser testing and doesn’t even have a file browser task pane. The GUI is nice, but minimal which is good and it even supports live document searching.
I also decided I’d try PHP Designer 2005 (freeware) which, after closing most of the task panes and removing most of the toolbars came close to exactly what I was after and the interface looks like it was created this year (<required buzzword:web 2.0> style baby!). However, as you can expect, there were problems. PHP Designer 2005 seems a little bit slow for me, especially when opening documents. It also lacks a decent status bar and spell checker.
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| GridinSoft Notepad Screenshot | PHP Designer 2005 Screenshot |
If you’ve looked at the screenshots for both PHP Designer 2005 and GridinSoft Notepad, you’ve probably noticed something common between them: Office 2003 style icons and toolbars. Why? They look damn good, and a lot better than those old pre-2000 16 colour icons.
And before you say “What about Zend Studio?” I have one word for you: Java.
Of course, I didn’t continue looking much further because I knew I wasn’t going to find the sort of results I wanted. I’ve settled in with my very much trimmed down version of PHP Designer for the time being and we’ll see how that goes, but an alternative would be good.
Know of any or got a complaint about a text editor yourself? Leave a comment.
I like mine with a touch of AJAX functionality and the script.aculo.us effect library for both commenting and live previewing of comments.
Coming soon.
Okay, so I promised earlier that I would have a new redesign finished by 1st November for the CSS Reboot. However, due to a few reasons, this is far from done.
I’ve been having trouble with inspiration and creativity recently in regards to design. In the little time that I’ve had to actually work on something, most of the time was spent sitting around trying to think of new and creative ideas. Of course, I came up with a few then when I began to play around with them – they were gone, didn’t look good or were almost impossible to create (mostly thanks to Internet Explorer).
A serious lack of personal time to do such a redesign is also something I’ve been suffering from. Too much work, too many assignments and just way too many other things to really even think about the CSS Reboot and redesign. I’ve tried to focus the majority of my spare time into MyBB as it is far more important to me than a design for this place.
Oh, back up on that Internet Explorer issue – when I finally did manage to come up with a header and menu design that I’m going to use eventually (Yes Peter, that is what I sent you – well a rough copy of it), I was struck with Internet Explorer like nothing else! “Well, scrap that, back to the drawing board,” I thought. I changed a few of my ideas and after hours and hours of tedious debugging in Internet Explorer and little changes to the header design I worked it all out.
I’m facing another problem now though – how should I design the rest of the layout? At first I was going to adopt a “semi-fixed-liquid width” layout similar to the Mozilla.org layout. However this wasn’t going to work because I really needed the min-width support in Internet Explorer – but wait, it doesn’t support it! In the end, I opted for another fixed width layout. Decision has been made.
For colours, I’ve decided to go back to orange and blue – two colours I now feel comfortable with. However I’ve decided I’m going to throw in a bit of a Retro 60’s look to the design with some green, yellow, and red too – that’s if I can make it look decent.
Taking a look at the rebooters – i’m very impressed and am now feeling very jealous! Here’s a short list of a few I prepared earlier:
.. Just a few.. There are plenty more on the CSS Reboot website.
There’s an update – sorry to disappoint those who were waiting on a redesign as well as my fellow rebooters.