I just had an epiphany. I might understand why Apple removed MySQL from OS X Lion Server. It's because of all things, MySQL should be a free app, downloaded from the app store. That's not Apple's job, it's MySQL's job. This is how software works now.

We'll talk about the inclusion of PostgreSQL in a second, just hold on.

Here's what my problem with MySQL has always been, and it's actually the reason I got a Mac Mini Server: installing and upgrading MySQL is always a major pain in the ass, especially upgrading. But it shouldn't be hard at all. Minor releases of MySQL should update just as easily as any other software, so why don't they? I don't know!

In MySQL's defense, they try to make installation easy on a Mac, but you can tell their heart just isn't in it yet. But everything even the most anal system administrator does when upgrading MySQL can and should be be automated. Shutdown? Yes. Backups? Yes. Rollback if necessary? No. They should actually work to make sure rollbacks are never necessary. That's what testing is for.

Having said that, I'm sure Apple would be willing to support multiple major versions for server applications. It's not something the current apps require, but we get it, some people need MySQL 5.0 and can't move forward yet, fine, that's a separate app from 5.1 and 5.5. Maybe these versions could be "in app" purchases (which have no cost, for the free versions.) There could be one MySQL app that can be configured for a specific version, or maybe even multiple versions at once.

The point is this, the days of manual software installs are over, even for server software. If MySQL doesn't do it, you can bet within the next year one or more other database makers will.

The other thing to factor in is that Apple released a new Mac Mini Server with OS X Lion Server. This would indicate that they aren't giving up on the server market. It says that as usual, they are trying to change it, for the better. I hope that's what happens.

Oh, I almost forgot about the inclusion of PostgreSQL. Apple needs a database on the server to support the wiki feature, but there is no app store database ready yet. PostgreSQL may have even been chosen because it is the less used package, to encourage MySQL to take action. Or maybe PostgreSQL was chosen because they've already committed to making an app which Apple will use once it's ready.

Anyway, this is what I'd personally like to see, an app store database. We'll just have to wait and see what actually happens.

Great way to organise and outline information

WordPress › WordPress Plugins

CSS Agent - a CSS Handler for asp.NET by Keith Clark

Home - Pencil Project

Color Trends + Palettes :: COLOURlovers

New Track: Progressive Thing I'm working on on #SoundCloud http://soundcloud.com/the_bard/progressive-thing-im-working-on

Captured from Twitter, here is Tom Henrich’s partial reconstruction of my conversation with Tantek Çelik, Glenda Bautista, Andy Rutledge and others on the merits of self-hosting social content and publishing to various sites rather than aggregating locally from external sources.

via Own Your Data / technophilia

Addy Osmani has compiled a large collection of resources for developers building large-scale JavaScript applications with jQuery. We've already mentioned JavaScriptMVC and how it can be used to break JavaScript applications into smaller, testable components in the past, but Osmani provides many more resources. Osmani recommends JavaScriptMVC but mentions several alternatives and components you can use to roll your own toolkit.

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The resources are organized into the following sections:

Dependency Management
MVC & Organization For Large-Scale jQuery Applications
Templating
Communication Between Modules
Build Process & Script Concatenation
Script Minification
Testing

Discuss

The IAN symbol libraries contain over 1500 custom made vector symbols designed specifically for enhancing science communication skills. The libraries are designed primarily for use with Adobe Illustrator (requires version 10 or better), however we also offer eps and svg versions for non-Illustrator users. The symbols allow diagrammatic representations of complex processes to be developed easily with minimal graphical skills.

Our aim is to make them a standard resource for scientists, resource managers, community groups and environmentalists worldwide. Currently downloaded by 58747 users in 239 countries and 50 U.S. states.

The libraries are provided completely cost and royalty free.

via IAN Symbol Libraries (Free Vector Symbols for Illustrator) – Integration and Application Network.

J Chris Anderson, CFO of CouchOne, has been hosting a curious CouchApp on his personal site: Twebz. Twebz is a "decentralized Twitter client." We were curious about what that meant, so I did an interview with Anderson about the project. He says it's a just a demonstration of what CouchApps are capable of. But it also hints at what CouchDB is really trying to accomplish: a radical re-architecting of the Web into a more decentralized system. Read on for the full interview.

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Klint Finley: Let's start at the top: what exactly is Twebz? It's described as a "decentralized Twitter client." What exactly does that mean?

J Chris Anderson: The aim is to allow you to interact with Twitter when Twitter is up and you are online. But if Twitter is down for maintenance or you are in the middle of nowhere, you can still tweet. And when you can reach Twitter again, it will go through.

If lots of folks are using it, then they can see each other's tweets come in even when Twitter is down.

Mostly the goal was to show the way on how to integrate CouchDB with web services and APIs.

It seems like it could be really useful for people in situations where Internet access is spotty, though.

Definitely. It's not production software yet, lots of rough edges. But it could be cleaned up and packaged like a normal desktop twitter client easily.

Do you plan on releasing it?

Not currently - I did it when I was around the house right after my daughter was born. So it's really just to show other developers how to build these things.

So I guess the idea is that you'd run a local copy and it would connect with other instances of Twebz running on other people's machines and everyone's client would try to connect to Twitter when possible?

Yes. The hard part is ensuring that someone else can't trick your client into tweeting something as you that you didn't write. So I had to do some JSON cryptography stuff to protect against that.

I was going to ask about that - so your Twitter credentials are passing through other people's machines?

No, your credentials are private to your machine. Potentially someone could send you a tweet that looked like it's supposed to be from/by you. The crypto makes sure that the Twitter-posting code can't be fooled by that.

So if you did release this, and people started using it, and then one day Twitter decided "We're done. We're going to go raise pigs in the Ozarks," Twebz would actually still be up and running fine basically forever and everyone could keep reading each other's Tweets.

Yep. And as a side effect you have a complete personal Twitter archive of the folks you follow.

There's even a feature to pull in the complete history of a user, so you can get the back fill of your closest friends if you want.

The full history is what is used to power these types of word clouds for a user. Aside from the autocomplete, I think the word clouds are the best feature. It subtracts the global frequency of each term from the per-user frequency of a term. So for each user you see the terms that are distinctive to them.

How does the autocomplete work?

Autocomplete uses CouchDB map reduce to build a prefix index. Then CouchDB sorts the matches by popularity when each time you type a letter into the search box. So it may start out: aardvark apple alligator (as things that start with "a"). But CouchDB will sort it so you get apple first, as that's the most popular. It was inspired by Google Instant.

If people want to try it, the code and instructions are here.

It says on GitHub that it doesn't work yet.

That's the same as on the site - it certainly isn't ready for the faint of heart. But someone comfortable hacking node.js and CouchApp would be able to dig in and run it.

I wish I had time to clean it up for release, but this week will continue to be busy with all that actual business stuff I've got to do.

Could CouchDB and Node be used in conjunction to create some sort of decentralized darknet? Something along the lines of Freenet?

Node is a good fit for CouchDB because Couch encourages asynchronous background processes, but people also use Ruby / Python / Java for the same purposes. But yes, eventually the plan is that CouchDB will make web applications a lot more robust because they will no longer depend on a centralized point of failure. E.g., even if Twitter goes out of business, people can continue to share messages.

The turnover of Web 2.0 startups is so fast that I think users get discouraged from signing up for services. Why bother with a new photo share if there's a chance it won't be around in a year? But when those are CouchApps, users can continue to use them even if no one is maintaining them, which makes it more rational to invest time in using them. Imagine if Pownce or Dodgeball were still being run by fans.

Have you seen CouchAppspora?(Disclosure: CouchAppspora contributor Tyler Gilles is a ReadWriteWeb employee.)

Yeah, I like that project because the social aspects of it get to the core of the stuff that "comes for free" with the CouchApp platform.

For another example of how CouchDB is useful in low-connectivity settings, check out this case study on how Better Health Outcomes through Mentoring and Assessments is using CouchDB in rural Zambia.

Discuss

I posted recently about switching to Google Chrome. Safari seemed to be going very slow. Well, Google Chrome was definitely not the answer. It was a little better on flash content, but not much. The biggest problem is flash.

So instead, I still use Safari but I use the Click to Flash plugin which blocks all flash content unless you click on it’s location. Browsing is so fast now.

It seems like Google might be differentiating itself by trying to be nice to flash. This is a huge mistake. Flash just needs to go away. I’m sure Google will learn this as people start complaining about battery life when there are Android tablets.

We keep hearing about how people can do everything they would need to do on a desktop on an iPad now. Heck, Damon Albarn even composed the a new Gorillaz Album on an iPad.

But what about developers? Can you code on an iPad? Several developer-centric text editing apps have been released, but most fall a little short of what developers need to actually get their jobs done. We've narrowed the list of available code editors down to the three most useful.

Do use one of these for your development work? Is there a better editor that we didn't mention?

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Textastic

Textastic ($4.99) is quickly becoming a developers' favorite for coding on the iPad. It supports syntax editing for several languages, but has no internal means for handling FTP. However, you can always just use FTP On The Go.

Joshua Ellis, the developer behind Stikki and Dbasr, recently tweeted "Textastic + FTP On The Go = best code editing solution for iPad so far. Almost as good as TextWrangler on the desktop."

You can find the official Textastic site here.

Gusto

Gusto ($6.99) was one of the first code editors of the iPad. It features Coda-like project thumbnails, tabbed editing and a built-in FTP client. One downside is that it doesn't support syntax editing, but that's promised in a future version. The official site is here.

CodeToGo

CodeToGo ($2.99) doesn't have syntax editing or built-in FTP support, but it does have one feature other code editors don't: the ability to test your code via the ideone.com API. CodeToGo can't execute code locally, so an Internet connection is required to check your code. The official site is here.

Update: A reader pointed us to Turbosh, which looks quite good as well. Has anyone used?

Discuss

sprite.js is an open source framework for working with JavaScript sprites more efficiently.

The library provides two rendering backends: HTML and Canvas. The HTML version, which displays sprites using DOM elements, is used by default because the Canvas backend is slower when running on Firefox, Opera and Chrome. According to the project's notes on Github, "Canvas seems faster when there is a lot of transformations applied to the sprite."

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There are three demos, each with a system load counter:

Particle generator
32 animated sprites
Input test

Discuss

Fundry.com is like KickStarter for web developers. The site was started by Stateless Systems, the company backing projects like CushyCMS and Droolr. Unlike Kickstarter, however, funders get to vote on whether to accept features before releasing funds.

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Here's how it works, according to the Fundry.com web site:

When a Developer has completed a feature, all funders of that feature are notified and invited to vote to accept or reject the feature. To receive all the funding for that feature the Developer needs to receive a majority of acceptance votes.

If a Funder accepts a feature then their pledged amount for that feature will be paid to the Developer, even if there is not a majority of acceptance votes among Funders for the feature.

If a Funder rejects a feature, and a majority of Funders also reject the feature, then their funding for that feature will not be paid to the Developer.

If a Funder rejects a feature, but a majority of Funders accept the feature, then all funding for that feature (including Funders who reject the feature) will be paid to the Developer.

If a vote is not received from a funder within 7 days of the date on which the email invitation to vote is sent by Fundry then Fundry will count that vote as an acceptance.

In addition to raising funds for popular WordPress plugins like WP-to-Twitter and WP-Optimize, Fundry.com is raising funds for itself.

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For nearly fifteen years, if you wanted to set a paragraph of web text in a serif typeface, the only truly readable option was Georgia. But now, in web type’s infancy, we’re starting to see some valid alternatives for the king of screen serifs. What follows is a list of serif typefaces that have been tuned—and in some cases drawn from scratch—for the screen.

Stephen Coles, December 6, 2010:
Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

Now we have something else to be thankful for. Nathan Smith of Sonspring has created a library that gives designers and developers “some measure of control over form elements, without changing them so drastically as to appear foreign in a user’s operating system.” Smith calls his new library Formalize CSS:

I’ve attempted to bridge the gap between various browsers and OS’s, taking the best ideas from each, and implementing what is possible across the board. For the most part, this means most textual form elements have a slight inset, and all buttons look consistent, including the button tag.

For more, including demos, options, screenshots, thanks, and the library itself, read Smith’s write-up at SonSpring | Formalize CSS. Hat tip and happy Thanksgiving to my good friend Aaron Gustafson for sharing this gem.

Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

After a long time of installing WordPress manually on my test machines, I have finally switched to using subversion. It is so much easier.

It wouldn’t be, except that for some reason WordPress will not update properly if your site is not on the open internet. I don’t know what their deal is with that, but this gets around it easily. If you use subversion for other things and are familiar with it, but don’t yet use it for your local WordPress installations, I highly recommend making the switch.

Vincent (no last name given) has designed a beautiful, extremely useful, feature-rich interface design framework for web designers who create their initial design mock-ups in Adobe Illustrator. And it’s free for personal or commercial use (credit link required).

The set includes:

GUI library – Hundreds of vector elements for interface design
Minimal UI icons set – 260 vector icons for Illustrator
Styles library – 200 styles to apply in Illustrator

I’d pay cash money for the color schemes alone: 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

The back-link requirement may be a deal breaker in some situations. I’d happily use these GUI icons on a personal project, but I might refrain on a client project if it seemed awkward to include a widget credit on the site. (It all depends on the client.)

That possible caveat aside, this is an extraordinary set of widgets and gizmos many web designers will want to have in their tool kit.

Business Insider: Why Tumblr Is Kicking Posterous’s Ass

Posted via web from Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat?

Via instantshift.com

Pulling the trigger just got easier. Now anyone can have a beautifully designed, standards-compliant WordPress site. The 60-plus recently created free WordPress themes (AKA template collections) listed by InstantShift’s Daniel Adams are categorized by function and style: “Clean and Minimal,” “Artistic and Fancy,” “Magazine Style,” “Portfolio Style,” “News and Social Media Style,” “Showcase and Galleries Style,” “E-Comerce and Shopping Cart Style,” “Domain Parking/Coming Soon Style,” and “Other.” Something for everyone.

Not everything here is a winner or will appeal to every taste, but there is plenty of great work to be had here. If WordPress is your CMS (it’s mine), even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.

Posted via the web from Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat?

@nsbunofficial testing podcasting over twitter http://dl.dropbox.com/u/70903/Another%20Offer.mp3

This is a bookmarklet made for web designers who want to rapidly check how different fonts and font styles look on their screen without editing code and refreshing pages. 

Download the amazing and oh-so-practical Soma FontFriend bookmarklet.