As part of the development of the soon the be released Vistered Little 1.7, I created a skin selector based on the Theme selector that comes with WordPress, which has resulted in the Skinner Plugin. Now all themes can enjoy the benefits of being skinable.

I've also created a Presentation Toolkit Plugin based on the Wordpress Theme Toolkit by Ozh. It's basically the same, except now it's a plugin and it supports skins (i.e. with the Skinner Plugin.

Enjoy,

–
Tom

For a few years I ran an open source simulator project, which was used for a number of competitions each year. This put some pretty strict deadlines on the project as not only did in need to be ready for the competitions, the participants had to have it pretty far in advance in order to adapt their code to work with the newer versions of the simulator. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you (especially the Vistered Little users) may be wondering what I've been up to lately. Well the good news is I've been really busy, which is why there haven't been many updates lately.

Busy with what? Well, here we go: Read the rest of this entry »

During this years MacWorld keynote speech, Steve Jobs made the following comment:

"over the course of the next several months we're going to roll out some awesome stuff for the mac"

You can find it in the podcast version at 4:35

Am I the only one that noticed it? Where is the speculation on the rumor sites that would normally accompany a comment like this?

Here is my list of what we might get:

• In the no-brainer category:
  • OS X Leopard
  • iWork 2007
  • iLife 2007
• In the 'we can hope and pray' category:
  • Multi-Touch Tablets, MacBooks, iMacs and Displays

Is there something I've missed? Leave a comment and let the speculation begin.

Early yesterday morning (about 6am in Sydney) Apple unveiled their revolutionary iPhone. While most of the technology media is be focused on iPhone, I’m far more excited by the Multi-Touch technology it uses and the other types of products we can expect it to appear in. If you aren’t excited about Multi-Touch yet, you should be. Read the rest of this entry »

The default-flex theme was getting a little heavy for my liking and with inspiration from Chris vs Chris I decided to create a lighter version of the default and default-flex skins for vistered little. You can download them using the links below. Just extract them into you skins directory and change the skin via the 'vistered little 16a' section of the presentation panel. Enjoy.

• default-light
• default-light-flex

Demonstration Quick Link

In Part 1 of this series, we saw how event driven AJAX (a form of Comet) can be used to push data to the client without the need for periodic client side polling. However, we also observed that event driven AJAX broke as soon as the client had multiple views of the same page. Worse still, event driven AJAX in its current form also fails to support having more than one page open on an event driven AJAX site. This this article we will investigate how to solve this issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Please read the Security Alert for Vistered Little

I have just stumbled upon the Vistered Little Theme for WordPress and I have to admit I'm smitten. I've switched the site to use it and in the process found a few bugs/issues:

• The default wallpaper is not available in the wallpaper list
• The wallpaper thumbnails require the entire set of wallpapers to be downloaded, making the site very very heavy (at least on first load)
• There are extra images in the images directory that are not references (e.g. old wallpapers)
• There is some redundant PHP code and redundant generated CSS/JS

I've tweaked the theme to fix these issues and you can download it for yourself below: Read the rest of this entry »

Handling AJAX errors is about more than just checking the readyState, status and statusText. Read the rest of this entry »

Java applets are so late 90's and so web 1.0, so what place do that have (if any) in the web 2.0 craze? Read the rest of this entry »