In no particular order:

• Yes, 10.5.2 fixed much of my beef with Leopard, but there remains some issues I’d dearly like to see fixed with Spaces. In particular, dragging windows from one space to another using the Exposé-like overview screen has a nasty habit of moving all the windows for that app rather than just the individual window selected. This doesn’t happen when dragging windows off the sides of the screen, but doing this is much slower, particularly when trying to move a window diagonally across spaces. We’re so very nearly there on this, though, and someone in Cupertino needs a big hug for fixing Stacks.

• I’ve been aware that Time Machine had been grinding hourly for reasons I couldn’t fathom. I knew to exclude my Parallels images, so what the hell was making each backup take so long? Thanks to this magnificent device, I found out. It was my SpamSieve history database. My advice: set Time Machine’s preferences to exclude ~/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/History.db — in my case, this accounted for 213MB every hour.

• I’m right there with Elliot Jay Stocks: I love Things too. Unlike Mr Stocks, however, I find the project and areas features completely invaluable. My work life generally involves looking after a number of websites, for which development projects come and go. So, I’ve set Things up to have a different area for each site I (help) manage, each containing a variety of day-to-day items and a handful of larger projects. I then use tags to divide tasks into broader groups: design, code, writing, debug. So far, this is working brilliantly.

• For what it’s worth, you can now find me on Twitter.

For over a year now, we’ve been planning and working on a new version of www.woking.gov.uk, and it’s now finally live. For me personally, the project has absolutely dominated the past six months, and together with Buy Our Honeymoon, represents some the best work I’ve ever done.

The old Woking site had evolved gradually since prior to my involvement over ten years ago. Sure, we’d redeveloped the CMS a couple of times in that process, but each successive version of the site used content largely copied verbatim from the previous version. The structure had become labyrinthine, and the design (last updated in 2000) had become known internally as the “Rover dashboard”.

The Council’s Web Strategy Group saw the opportunity to completely refresh the site from scratch, with a brand new design, a completely reworked navigation structure, and a refresh of various aspects of the CMS. I’m terribly grateful that Article Seven was commissioned without hesitation to deliver both the new design and the technical implementation of the new site.

Accessibility was a key priority in the new site, and to that end we asked the Shaw Trust to help us work through the process. Just under a year ago, they carried out a full audit of the old site, highlighting any areas of concern. Once the new site templates were ready, the Shaw Trust assessed them, and just before the final site went live, the entire site was audited again and any final recommendations implemented. This whole process was incredibly valuable, particularly since it’s not a mere workthrough of the WCAG checkpoints. The Shaw Trust extensively test the site using people with a wide range of real disabilities, and any issues they highlight generally stem from real access problems experienced by testers using a variety of assistive technologies.

For example, there’s no WCAG checkpoint that encourages you to implement distinct link restyling on :hover and :focus, but doing so is a great help to both keyboard-only and dyslexic users. Moreover, in attempting to follow WCAG checkpoint 10.4, we’d included placeholder text in our search box on the old site, which actually caused genuine problems for a blind tester using the screen-reader software, JAWS. The new site doesn’t have placeholder text, 10.4 be damned.

We also included an option to switch accesskeys on (your preference saved in a cookie), and have a pair of zoom stylesheets for low-vision users — that also happen to be great for mobile access too.

We wanted to include Google Maps in a number of places on the site, and so I developed a system to try to mitigate the accessibility issues of this. Maps embedded on the site have their zoom and pan controls moved to a row of keyboard-accessible buttons below the map itself (although the normal click-and-drag mechanism continues to work too, of course), and a link to Google’s HTML version of the map is displayed instead in the event that Javascript isn’t enabled.

As a result of all this, the site has been awarded Accessible Plus accreditation from the Shaw Trust, one of only seven organisations in the UK to achieve such a high standard. All of us who’ve worked on the site (including a substantial team of web publishers) are immensely proud of this — but none more so than me.

It’s been said that I loves me some Apple. It’s been said that I’ll run out and buy any old crap they release. It’s been said that I’ve got a tattoo of Steve Jobs on one buttock, and a tattoo of myself on the other, such that when I clench it looks like they kiss.

These things have been said. But with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, it seems that my miniature Steve has kicked me sharply in the back of the balls with his tiny, inky foot, for Leopard is just one big daily regret.

My irritants, let me show you them:

• The pointless translucency of the menu bar. This isn’t eye candy, it’s eye manure. Even with a much-welcomed salve, the anti-aliasing is still noticeably worse than the rest of the system. It’s like someone at Apple saw the ridiculous, illegible window chrome in Vista and thought “Gee, Microsoft have hit the aesthetic zeitgeist with that one: all aboard the shitwagon!” At least they haven’t changed the font yet to Marker Felt, though I feel sure it’s coming, like another testicular jab from illustrated Steve’s perineal boot.

• Stacks. Much has been written about how Stacks is broken, all of it true. Just to ramp up the gall, when you drag a folder with a lovely custom icon to nestle in the Dock, you’re treated to an animation of its own icon transforming into the collection of its contents’ icons. Oh, look what you could have won. To try to ameliorate this, some plucky soul put together an assortment of drawer icons, which have the upside of making each stack distinguishable from all the other Stacks, and the abundant downside of always being there when you open the stack — into either a cramp-inducing fan or a comedy grid where giant icons loom over inadequate, truncated text labels. Here’s my alternative icon to put at the head of a stack.

• I’m going to harp on about Stacks, actually, because the old behaviour was a source of not inconsiderable joy to me, joy which Apple has punctured like a schoolyard bully with a flick-knife. You see, I’d keep a selection of oft-used folders down there, and would frequently mouse down to open one conveniently and quickly. No more. Yes, I could create a stack of aliases to these folders, but that’s two clicks and a bunch of muttering. Or I could put aliases on the Desktop and use Exposé to clear the windows out of the way to get to them. Or I could just drive a staple into my leg and throw curses toward the East Coast. Hallelujah that dragging an alias into the Dock gets you halfway there, the other half being the hierarchical menu of folder contents you used to get when right-clicking.

• I hate the 3D Dock, with its confused perspectives, annoying reflections and exaggerated shadows, and I frankly hate the new 2D Dock too. Many application icons are designed to work best over a pale background, since that’s generally what one finds in a folder view in the Finder. The great thing about the Tiger Dock was that it was a simple, elegant pale sheet beneath the icons. The new 2D Dock is a black smudge at the bottom of the screen, making icons murky and indistinct, and even then trying to draw attention to itself with an excessive border.

• Spaces promised much, but delivers only frustration. Thanks to the glory of Desktop Manager, I’ve used virtual desktops for a couple of years now. Generally, I have a desktop open with a collection of windows for each project I’m working on at a given time — a TextMate window, a Transmit window, a Terminal window. Any letter, as long as it’s T. But with Spaces, this seems impossible. If you set up one desktop and then move to the next, the moment you switch to TextMate to open a new project, you’re shuttled back to the first space. OK, you say, why not set TextMate to open in all spaces? Ah, but then when you change space, the TextMate window follows you into the new space, like a little yapping chihuahua. So, off goes Spaces, and back on goes the elderly Desktop Manager.

• My printer is behaving badly, but that might be Oki’s fault.

• Leopard includes Apache 2, but not mod_perl 2, and I’m led to believe it’s difficult to get it to install correctly.

• I lament for Volume Logic with the passion of an effeminate teen under a blanket.

On the bright side, at least Mail now allows you to forward messages as an attachment, tempting me away from the smashing orangeyness of GyazMail. The final feature of GyazMail that I’d sorely miss is its ability to attach a Finder-label style colour to a message (which I use for “Urgent Action”, “Action”, “Reference” etc). I know that one can use rules in Mail to achieve the same thing, and perversely, to assign arbitrary colours to messages using the Show Colours menu option — but were someone to create a Mail plugin that allowed assignment of Finder-label colours to messages from a toolbar icon, and further allowed these colours to become criteria in a Smart Folder, I swear I’d love them longtime. Alternatively, GyazMail could acquire smart folders and let me use Spotlight to find messages, but that seems even less likely.

I must go. Buttocky Steve requires nourishment.

Over the weekend, we launched our new registry notification cards on Buy Our Honeymoon. For customers in the UK or EU, we send out a set of 100 cards as part of the service. Previously, these had used our logo, URL and a standard message, but we’d wanted to offer customised cards pretty much from the beginning.

One of the key challenges in doing this was finding an easy way to generate the artwork for the cards without having to manually alter a template each time. In some ways, the obvious thing to do would be to generate a PDF — but that’s not easy at all. Have you seen XSL-FO?

Instead we decided to use a non-obvious choice: HTML. And it worked beautifully.

There’s a couple of things that it’s easy to forget about HTML:

• CSS includes a whole bunch of physical units, like mm and pt. As web designers, these are verboten because (a) they’re absolute units, and are consequently less-than-accessible; and (b) a 10mm square box in the stylesheet almost certainly won’t be 10mm square on screen. But — and this is the key point — it will be on paper.

• Changing the size of a graphic using HTML or CSS often looks like ass on screen, because browsers generally aren’t as adept at resizing images as, say, Photoshop. But, as this venerable A List Apart article shows, scaling down a hi-res image in the CSS just ups the DPI in print.

• Browsers normally won’t print background images. But they will print a foreground image that’s had text overlaid using absolute positioning.

Was the resulting file fit for use on the web? Was it accessible? No — but that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to load it into Safari and print it using a very high-quality laser printer onto some nice thick card. It’s HTML, but it’s not a web page.

Why Safari? Well, for one thing, it’s the browser I use on a daily basis — but, crucially, you can also set it to miss out the normal printed headers and footers (such as the page URL), so you’re left with the content and nothing else.

So, having set up a sample file, it just needed some experiments to get the page margins correct. And then a workaround for the discovery that Safari seemed to miscalculate some of our mm box sizes by 3mm. I have no idea if Safari 3 fixes this — but if it does, it’s just an adjustment to the stylesheet.

In an attempt to cultivate more focussed blogging habits for myself, I’ve now added a companion tumblelog to this one, tentatively entitled element->down();.

With what amounted to an amorphous clog of small links and snippets finally being posted somewhere they belong, I’m hoping I may be able to more regularly attend to meatier blethering here. We’ll see.

It’s anniversary season for Andrew.

Ten Years.

In July 1997, I set up Article Seven. My original intent was to provide graphic and web design to students organisations, with a greater emphasis on the former. But I quickly discovered that this wasn’t really a viable market niche, and that I was far better at getting things to work properly on the web than I was in print.

Although I was fortunate enough to be able to keep everything afloat, it took two years for the company to really find its feet, when I was brought on board to redesign the web sites of both Woking Borough Council and FISITA. Those relationships have lasted to this day, and form the vast bulk of the work I do. I barely feel like a freelancer: it’s like being a staff member at each place. I’m invited to Christmas meals, mentioned in Annual Reports, discussed in the staff magazine.

I moved to Woking in mid-1999, and noticed that the Council’s site contained a page of links to local companies, so I emailed them asking to be included, and offering to reciprocate by providing a consistent set of button images, since the navigation buttons on their site at the time had been clearly built from a variety of sources over time. It was my very great fortune that the Council were just about to start a tender process for the redevelopment of their site, to which I was invited to submit a proposal. At the time, I was able to promise a lot for very little money, and by spring 2000, the new site was launched.

Since that time, the site’s been redesigned a couple of times, and the Council have sponsored the development of the Content Management System that now powers their main site, community site, intranet and kiosk sites — together with SurreyWaste, The NPC, Monks and, of course, FISITA and FISITA 2008.

The initial creation of the CMS has consequently been the professional highlight of the past 10 years, although having my work nominated for an award, and being mentioned in an O’Reilly book (page 114 — what a thrill!) were inarguably bigger ego inflators.

Five Years.

And in July 2002, we moved from Woking to Greenwich. Article Seven, which had been run from the world’s best shed, grew up and found a proper studio, behind and under which we live.

I love it here, always have, and I can’t imagine wanting to move again for some considerable time yet. About a month ago, Tesco’s opened down the road, Marks and Spencers moved into the garage a couple of hundred yards away, and The O₂ opened its doors. I honestly don’t know which of these pleased me more.

Just beyond the Maritime Museum, there’s a shop selling nautical paraphernalia that proclaims itself as “the first shop in the world,” being a few seconds west of the meridian. I’m about four seconds east of the meridian, and thus by the same logic, the last web development bureau in the world. I rather like that.

Two Years.

30 July 2005, my wedding day. A happier whirlwind of a day I couldn’t have asked for, followed immediately by the most carefree, indulgent and fun three weeks of my life. I really can’t believe it’s been so long already.

Shelley and I are as close now as we were then — closer, in fact, due in no small measure to working together on our honeymoon gift list service and the birth of our fabulous daughter, Zoë.

Zoë’s ten months old now, and seems to believe that Daddy is Mister Potato-Head, with removable nose and ears.

Life is good.

We’re now running a honeymoon gift list for the UK, and a honeymoon registry for the USA.

Aside from the different terminology (which actually works in our favour to help to direct the most popular search queries on each side of the pond to the correct version of the site), one of the key changes we had to make was getting the various dates and times to behave correctly outside of the UK. I’d never actually built proper timezone support into anything before, so this was something of a learning curve for me.

Dave Rolsky’s excellent DateTime modules bore the brunt of the real work for this, of course, but I was anxious to make sure that assigning the correct Olson timezone to a couple’s list didn’t become a hurdle when signing up.

Although there are 26 actual Olsen timezones for America, only a handful are currently relevant. For example, both America/New_York and America/Detroit describe Eastern Standard Time. So, instead of asking our customers to choose between them, we only need ask whether they’re in Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaskan or Hawaiian time. Or Arizona, which irritatingly is just the same as Mountain Time, but without daylight savings. If you choose Eastern, you’re assigned America/New_York behind the scenes.

There aren’t many countries that have more than one timezone, of course. So I set up a small database table for the Olsen timezones, recording the country for each. When you select a country from the dropdown list on our registration screen, a small blob of Ajax kicks in to query this database. If there’s more than one (relevant) timezone for the country you’ve selected, a second dropdown appears listing those timezones. If not, a hidden field is assigned the ID value of the only timezone for that country.

There’s another small Ajax routine on each page of the UK site now to try to direct US visitors to the US version of that page. If your offset from GMT, as reported by your browser, is more than 3 hours behind, a panel is revealed at the top of the page:

We had our first sale to the US today, thanks to the glory of AdWords. Let the conquest begin!

Very nearly ten years ago, when I started Article Seven, my intent was to focus on print design for students’ organisations, with web design as a secondary concern. The basis of this was my work as a sabbatical for Kent Union, plus my role as Publications Assistant for the NPC, but over time, I discovered three things:

1. The niche market “graphic design for students’ organisations” wasn’t really a market at all.

2. Print design is a frustrating business: you send off your artwork, wait, and when it comes back with a problem (because you’re too cheap for proofs), there’s nothing you can do about it.

3. I was getting much more skilled at web design than I’d ever be at print design. What’s more, my poor old Acorn couldn’t really cut it. As much as I loved Photodesk, ArtWorks and Impression, anything but mono work would always come back shockingly desaturated, at poor resolution, or with myriad unpredictable glitches (exacerbating point 2 above).

Consequently, before long, my print work trailed off to a logo here and there, and the occasional NPC newsletter.

When we launched our honeymoon gift list service last month, we began a careful marketing campaign, which included trying to make personal contact with a number of wedding blogs and magazines.

Shelley discovered a recently-launched magazine named Perfect Wedding, whose next issue was to be a honeymoon and gift list special. We contacted them, and were offered a full-page ad at an excellent price, but only if we could deliver the artwork within a few hours, as they were just about to go to press (I believe the page would otherwise have been used for a cross-promotion of one of the publisher’s other titles).

With no small degree of art direction from Shelley, the following ad was created in about two hours flat:

I can intuit InDesign much better than Photoshop, so I’m glad that the design was much more of a traditional DTP project than an image-manipulation extravaganza.

Having picked up a copy of the new issue yesterday, I’m delighted with the result. The colours are rich, vibrant and match the screen colours near-perfectly, and there aren’t any horrible gotchas. Perfect Wedding were also kind enough to locate our ad right next to their honeymoon article, so we’re situated brilliantly.

Print work will never be a significant part of Article Seven’s output again, but it’s good to know that whatever skills I once had haven’t completely evaporated, and a complete thrill to see both our company and artwork in a major newsstand magazine.

At long last, and just as the cobwebs on this poor old blog start to get cobwebs of their own, the Big Project that’s been rumbling away in the background for the past couple of years finally goes live.

It’s called Buy Our Honeymoon, a site that couples can use to compile wedding gift lists that, instead of the usual department store fare, ask for honeymoon experiences and upgrades.

While we were planning our wedding back in 2005, we were also planning an epic, three-week, three-thousand-mile road trip across the Deep South of the USA. This was to be the best holiday of our lives: theme parks and plenty of them in Florida, the honeymoon suite at the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans, a touch of Elvis in Memphis, a touch of country in Nashville, the resplendence of Dollywood, the serenity of Savannah.

We realised that we really didn’t need any of the things traditionally found in wedding gift lists. We’d been living together for years, and had cultivated a fine habit of buying each other kitchen implements as Christmas presents. A normal gift list would have been slightly redundant and, frankly, a waste of our guests’ money.

And then Shelley had her genius idea: what if our guests could contribute to that wonderful honeymoon instead? But nobody likes to just dump cash into a big pot — we’d ask our guests for specific things we were planning for our honeymoon. Theme park tickets, a car upgrade, a cabin in the Smokey Mountains, meals, champagne. Actual gifts, not just cash contributions, and things we really wanted. Things that would make the honeymoon that much more special.

It turned out that honeymoon gift list services did already exist, but they weren’t quite to our tastes. We didn’t want our guests to pay a commission to the list company (we’d much rather have just paid an up-front fee), we didn’t want to be tied down to a travel agent’s packages, and we wanted our list to look great.

And, dammit, I’m a web developer. So we made our own.

Our guests loved it, many of them going well beyond the call of duty in their generosity. We asked for the dollar value of gifts in a card on the day, and promised to send photographs of us enjoying each gift on our return. Actually getting dollars didn’t really feel like just being given cash (the difference in currency made all the difference), and allowed for a palpable sense of decadence spending it. Paying for an upgrade to a convertible using cash is somehow as exhilarating as driving it (especially if you’d never have afforded the upgrade without the gift).

The honeymoon was everything we could have hoped for. A year and a half later, and I still get misty-eyed over it. A cabin in the Smokey Mountains. A cabin!

Off and on, we’ve spent the time since getting this ready to offer as a commercial product. We’ve put together a set of payment plans that range from the basic list to a list with 50 gift suggestions (individually researched by Shelley) and a custom design theme (hand-crafted by yours truly). Couples can ask their guests to bring the cash value of gifts on the day (just as we did), or to allow guests to pay by credit card immediately into a PayPal account. We don’t take any commission on gifts, and offer a no-obligation, 7-day trial of all list features.

From a geek perspective, the system to manage lists is dripping with Ajaxy goodness, and the magic of CSS allows us to offer a range of themes that transform each list from a database into a design.

I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out, and now we’re just waiting for the first trial accounts to be created.