“That plane wouldn’t fly.”

Oh yes … so it wouldn’t. In choosing a child’s toy for the cover, the aerodynamics of said toy would guarantee that the plane depicted would never take off (judging by the top wing, at least)! Thankfully, the same can’t be said about the book. So it’s with great pleasure that I unveil just a slight hint of the forthcoming second edition. And look! No dodgy aerodynamics this time! Just a set of very useful tools with which to ply your trade.

So, I said that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to write a book again. Apparently I lied.

As the image at the top of this post suggests (assuming that you are looking at the blog version and not a feed), I’ve been working on something new for SitePoint – what they are calling ‘The Ultimate HTML Reference’. I couldn’t possibly use the word ‘ultimate’ without getting all terribly uncomfortable and just so darned British and bashful about it. But hey ho, that’s what it’s called, and it has taken enough evenings for it to be getting close to ultimate – and it’s definitely been an ultimate pain the arse to put together! Please, if anyone ever asks me to write a reference book again – that’s to say one where you have a formula to follow and templates to complete rather than writing free-form as you would with a normal book – be sure to stop me signing on the dotted line ;-)

Writing a reference is not an easy task – this has taken about 5 months on and off, mostly late in the evening when my wife is asleep, the dog has (mostly) calmed down and I can concentrate on the task in hand, but only for as long as I can physically stay awake. And you can forget about such frivolities as playing Nintendo Wii! But now that the job is pretty much done, excepting a few minor amendments that may be passed my way to address, it feels pretty good to see the end result on SitePoint.com, all searchable and just waiting for the likes of Google and co to start indexing it. Once the initial rough edges are all smoothed out and all the in-house editing has taken place, it’ll then be printed in (their words) a ‘sexy hardcover’. Yay! A hard-cover author, no more of that second-class ‘trade paperback’ malarkey for me, I tells yer! For the next one I want to gilt edge, embossed and with some kind of fancy lazer-cut emblem on it, no less. Which is fine, because there will be no ‘next one’, or at least not a book of this format (ie, the reference kind).

In recent days, as I’ve been telling people at SXSW Interactive about the work I did on this, I used the analogy of having a child. When a mother has her first child, sure it’s hard work – and for a long time, too – but in most cases once the child arrives, the stresses and hardships get quickly forgotten because the baby is here, so never mind all that. And later, the parents think “Let’s have another child”, conveniently forgetting the hardships they faced before. But before long, the memories come flooding back. And so it was with this book. I’d mentally blanked any of the difficult moments from writing the first book, forgot that it can take over your free time when deadlines come around and technically this was a much more challenging book than the first one. But, like I said, the baby has arrived and I feel a bit like a doting father.

So, please do have a poke around the HTML reference and feel free to add comments (need to be a SitePoint member to add comments to any topic file). But if you feel like leaving a comment here, then that’s all good too.

Now, as I’ve no longer got to write about stuff, I’m going to settle back down and watch a nice film. And it’s bliss!

So I then considered the possibility of offering some money to a savvy Mac developer to go ahead and built what I was after, for a fixed price, and I take the gamble on making enough sales and not getting screwed in the process. But I realised soon after that bright idea that software that you sell requires ongoing support, support that I would never realistically be able to provide myself and would be over a barrel for a retainer to the developer. So I’ve decided to just put my big idea down in writing and hope that someone sees value in this and makes it happen. So, here it is:

The Problem

I was presenting the other day and was using Keynote with presenter display on my laptop and the big screen showing the proper slides. I was using my Sony Ericsson phone with a Bluetooth connection to advance the slides. This all seems, on the face of it, to be a good approach. But there were problems:

• When I enable the Bluetooth remote on the Sony Ericsson, it disables/hijacks the mouse trackpad on my MacBook Pro, so I was having to turn it off and back on again when I needed to take control of the laptop
• The setup of the room was such that I could not see the presenter display showing on my laptop screen unless I stayed anchored behind the lectern (something I hate to do), and hence I didn’t have the prompts I wanted/was hoping for
• At certain points during the presentation I needed to take control of multimedia elements on slides (the scrub bar – progress of a movie), but in presenter display mode, these elements are not accessible, so I was having to crane my neck to see what was happening on the main screen to locate the mouse cursor (once I had switched off the Bluetooth, of course) – basically, I could not see the mouse movements in front of me because of the ‘helpful’ presenter display. Bah!

I worked out that there could be a way to solve all these problems with a really slick application for the iPhone. I am going to label it the Keynote Buddy. Here’s how I see it working.

The Solution

• The iPhone has Keynote Buddy installed on it and becomes an extension of Keynote on the Mac.
• The iPhone is used to control the slide advance (and back of course) using touch screen controls.
• The display on the main (projected) screen would be the full screen affair, while the iPhone would give the presenter’s display, similar to the existing Keynote presenter display but because it’s an iPhone it probably should be sexed up with a Coverflow-esque appearance ;-)
• Controls on the Keynote Buddy would allow for changes between presenter display and the audience’s view on the fly so at any time the presenter can see exactly what the audience sees without having to turn around and turn his/her back on the audience
• When embedded multimedia, e.g. a movie, appears on a slide, the presenter should get a nice fat thumb-friendly overlay on the iPhone screen so that he/she can pause and restart the movie, while the audience sees just that the movie has paused, with no distracting overlay
• The Keynote Buddy software will, by default, automatically disable the phone from ringing/vibrating during presentation mode – no embarrassing moments
• Finally, and this is a nice to have, for moments when the presenter needs to exit the slides for a live demo, the iPhone should allow the presenter access to the host Mac’s desktop so that with a few double-clicks, he/she can navigate around to a demo file.

Something like this, in fact:

So that’s what I want. What about you? Are you a seasoned presenter with Keynote? Got an iPhone? Long for something that ties the two together in the way I’ve described? Please, tell someone who can make it happen. And if they do make it hapen, and if they want to thank me for suggesting the idea, I’d be happy to take a shiny new iPhone as a form of payment. As long as it’s got a copy of Keynote Buddy installed. Because I’ve got this need, you see, and it’s for a modern-day presentation prompt card thing …

Well, looks like we need to have another re-think.

So, one of the announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference in San Francisco was that Safari was going to be available for Windows users after all. The press release boasted that is is the "fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2". How reliable those claims are may be tested over the coming days.

But what does this mean to the world of web standards? The browser wars were played out a long time ago – does this mean that the ceasefire has been broken? Is it a new front being opened up or is it simply a minor skirmish that the rest of the world can turn a blind eye to?

I don’t have the answers – I was surprised as many people, blindly assuming that Safari would always and ever be a Mac-only piece of software – and I can’t claim to be massively excited about the prospect of using Safari on Windows. Or at least not until such a time as Firefox extensions, such as the indespensible Web Developer Toolbar, can be made to work in Safari but that’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But that said, I think it’s a good thing:

• No more will testing for Safari be left until the last moment (or at all) – finally developers can check their work early on
• If it really is faster to render pages, that can only be good for the user
• Mac users will benefit too, as it will become more difficult to reject support problems on Safari with a simple "Ah but that’s just a certain percentage (Safari users) of an already small percantage of users (Mac users)"

So, what’s your take on this announcement? Exciting? Will it change the browsing landscape massively? Or are you just thinking "meh, whatever".

Click on the thumbnail to see a comparison (it’s a 2.8mb animated gif).

[Note - I was accessing AOL's site from work and it appears to be missing some content blocked by the firewall, but you can still see the similarity]

Out of curiosity I checked the online web magazine out and thought "not bad". Since then, I’ve noticed it appearing more and more in the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and so on. There are lots of comments on the various postings they have – it seems like almost overnight they’ve built up a large readership by providing – shock, horror – good, well researched content on a regular basis.

So, what is this site/magazine I speak of? It is Smashing Magazine, something that my heading alluded to (as well as alluding to a catchphrase from a certain TV Show from days of old). The feature that I contributed to is entitled 35 Designers x 5 Questions:

35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.

Anyway, enjoy – there really is some good stuff here, even if I do say so myself :-)

A little while ago I received the sales figures for the book covering the March-December period. I won’t say what the figures are, as I’m not sure if it’s something I’m allowed to state publicly, but at the time I wasn’t sure if the figure was average/good/excellent (I was later informed by on person that what I’d sold with this book was more than what they had sold with two different books, so that was encouraging). Because the book is a beginner’s book, it comes with a lower retail sale price than others published by SitePoint and as such I just missed out on making enough in sales to cover the advance but we don’t do this for profit, right?

I do actually enjoy the writing process and have since contributed to other books (Pro CSS Techniques and Web Standards Creativity), but there’s still nothing quite like having one all of your own and be able to say “I did that”. I’d definitely be interested in doing another complete book at some point, although right now it’s nice not to have to worry about deadlines and have to put other stuff (general life things) aside when there’s a chapter due!

Read Setting & Retrieving Accesskeys with JavaScript and DOM on Think Vitamin, and please do add a comment if you have some suggestions for improvements on this idea

[tags]javascript, DOM, accessibility, accesskeys, tutorial, vitamin, think vitamin[/tags]

1. the effort you decide to put in to it when completing your profile
2. the quality of the contacts that you have, not the number

Of course, there’s more to it than that, and I’m actually having fun scrubbing my way through the various feature of LinkedIn, rather than viewing at as simply another social network to manage. It really is a different beast to the likes of Flickr, Twitter and whatever other social software I may have tried in the past.

What’s your experience of LinkedIn been? I’d be interested to learn how you’ve found it, and also keen to get any feedback about what I’ve done with my public profile.

[tags]linkedin, social networking, social software[/tags]

1. The site/service makes its way on to a blacklist that is farmed out to firewall services
2. The site starts using external JavaScript files that are blocked by the firewall
3. The login is moved to a 128-bit encrypted page which is blocked by your place of work

These all happen to me frequently at work. I cannot log in to del.icio.us and add a favourite, I can’t check on Flickr any more (although I should be doing work, I’m sure some of you are saying!). But the biggest loss was Bloglines. I tried other web-based services immediately after but they usually fell foul of point 3 above, and even if they didn’t then point 2 would usually catch them out. So then I gave up.

Having just come back from SXSW 2007, I realise now how much I’ve missed out. I do have a news reader but Newsfire on the Mac does not suit so well, despite its brilliance, because I tend to read my feeds during the day and I cannot connect the Mac while at work, it’s a definite no-no. So today I decided that enough was enough and managed to find a decent web-based RSS reader called Feedshow. It seems to do everything I need it to and I’m really looking forward to removing my head from underneath that proverbial rock that it’s been under for the last few months.

Now, if only I could find a workaround for adding del.icio.us favourites, viewing my friends’ Twitter posts and logging in to Flickr, I’d be a very happy man. Not so sure that the boss would be though :-D

[tags]RSS, feeds, feedshow, bloglines, freedbacking[/tags]