So, have been behind on maintaining the blog again, which is no surprise given that I hardly update it. Did an update to the current version of WP, which was long overdue.
Also made a few tweaks to the CSS on the theme, which I’m now not seeing in the editor — think what I did next might have wiped it out.
WordPress was giving me warnings about the security risk of having unused themes laying around, so I took a little time to look at what themes I had. Some were pretty old. The main thing about older themes is that they aren’t responsive for mobile, so those had to go. Other themes that had to go were ones that don’t look good with the current content I have. Most of those are set up to have an image with each post, and so they have huge blank spaces.
I’ve kept a couple themes that I might use yet, but that’s another session.
Changing font size on iTunes 11 Fernando Alves points out that iTunes 11 does have a means of increasing the font size. To increase the font size used in lists, check the “Use Large Text for List Views” option.
Note that there is only one large text font and the standard font, there is no fine control of font or font size. This option also only changes the font size of the list-oriented screens (Songs, Playlists) and not the other display options (Genres, Artists, Albums).
Using the alternative font doesn’t really change the row height in these tables, so the end result seems a little crowded, but at least the text is bigger.
Elisabeth Ronson from O’Reilly just started a new webinar class today through creativetechs.com, called “Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps.”
It’s not too late to sign up, it’s a 2 hour webinar every Tuesday at 11am PST. Viewing the webinar is free, and the course videos can be purchased at a nice price if you are enrolled now. Find more info here. The first class was today, but that was more an overview, so you could easily jump in on the next session.
One thing that Elisabeth touched on that I think needs more amplification is the question “When should I consider a Web App, and when must I build my App natively?” It turns out that for many types of informational apps, a Web App makes a whole lot of sense, and few people realize just how powerful the iPhone browser is. So many people who want iPhone apps for their businesses or services could actually get by very nicely with a well-written Web App, it’s just that there isn’t much awareness of that option, and there aren’t a lot of designers who are savvy about Safari’s Webkit/HTML5 features.
You *can* build a web app that:
Has a tab bar interface to separate sections of the app.
Can play video.
Can use the accelerometer.
Can accept simple gestures, like a swipe.
Can animate UI display and interaction (acceleration, crossfades, etc.)
You *must* build a native app if your app:
Needs to be able to run standalone without a data connection.
Uses the iPhone camera for stills or video.
Is intended to be sold on the App Store, and/or has additional content you want to offer through the App Store.
Requires more sophisticated animation than WebKit provides, or uses OpenGL.
Has complex gesture interactions.
If your app can be done as a web app instead of a native app, you get some immediate benefits:
You don’t need an Apple developer’s account to develop your app.
You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to publish your app.
You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to update your app.
Apple is not going to stop offering your app.
You have a very wide range of CSS/HTML tools to choose from to do your development, and a large base of people who know CSS.
You can push changes to your content, pages, etc. in real time.
May also run on other WebKit mobile devices. Note that Palm, Android, certain Nokia phones, and certain Blackberries all have Webkit browsers.
Still working on theming the site and installing the plug-ins I want.
I ended up selecting the theme Constructor for now, which looks relatively nice out of the box. The theme supports several different layouts, and lets you customize a lot of things.
Here’s the same theme with a few minor adjustments, mostly different background images and font tweaks:
I’d spent a bunch of time scratching my head over how I might do something similar to the legos/crane motif. Finally, I found something I could isolate and put into the theme, and just went with a simple photocollage for the header file. I played with a few backgrounds, and decided to go with a bright, fairly neutral glass texture. With a couple hours of Photoshop, now the page looks more like my old one.
And, just for giggles, here’s what my test version of the site looks like with the default WordPress theme. It’s quite boring, and requires you to shove everything off to the left side.
Boring. The only thing you can change visually is the color of that blue bar at top, you can't even just drop in your own header graphic.
I will say that I am struggling a bit with the flow of the content inside these posts, things really fall apart if you have more than one small graphic, it seems. Perhaps I’m not doing this the easy way, I did see that wordpress has a built-in gallery function for putting a bunch of graphics in a post, but they didn’t look so good to me. Suppose my next step is to RTFM before I blame the theme or WordPress. I also think that my articles are already proving to be too long for the front page, I should use excerpts, but not sure if the theme supports that. At the very least, I may need to override some more things in the style sheet.
I found an interactive page for generating wordpress themes at http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/. It’s a very nice bit of Javascripting that lets you use your own logo image, control body size, sidebar location and size, choose a 2 sidebar or 1 sidebar layout, control the menu layout, and control all the colors. The result is a very lightweight wordpress theme with a minimum of images, though you certainly could further modify the CSS to add your own background graphics, etc..
Compared to my own interactive CSS manipulation scripts, this is an impressive bit of programming. The script not only generates the css styles, but also zips up a WordPress-complaint theme package that you can just drop into your wp-content folder. The theme is also Widget-aware and supports tags. You can interactively pick the column layout, fonts, background images, and all the element colors.
