Hope you all had a great Christmas and a happy New Year. It’s been a while since our last update and I thought I’d post something to at least show - to some people - we’re not completely missing-in-action. ;)

We’ve been really busy with work and organizing some big changes. A few of these I feel don’t need to be talked about much yet but they do effect the amount of time and energy we can spend on the free goodies that we, really do, enjoy giving you all. One of the most evident changes that will happen soon is we’re going to be overhauling the site to focus on content, brand (such as it is ;) and hopefully cutting down on the tedious work needed to post new content.

That should happen within the next few weeks, coupled with a server move. We love AmbitiousLemon and are very thankful for everything they’ve done for us.

Recently we previewed our upcoming theme, Myre, exclusively as a Christmas treat to the folks at MacThemes Forum. Personally, I’ve learnt that we need to explain a little more about how to actually use some of our widgets and themes so be sure we won’t confuse new Mac users so much in future. :)

Once again I have to apologize for the lack of updates. We’re really not slouching (honestly) - Chris and me have been busy with widgets as well as other work. Doubled with the fact there are some big changes going on, I decided to pretty much cease updates until our next big thing.

It’s going to be a great ride, and you’re all invited.

Some of our new stuff can be found at MacThemes Forums, including: My iPod nano icon (which when included on VS, will have both the White and the Black colours), 23” Cinema Display and BitSticks icons, and Noise; our fun DIY-soundboard widget.

Additionally: AmbitiousLemon have updated their systems and now everything should be speedier (like 140kb/sec downloads, yum).

It’s not often I sit here and do an Agora entry, but I wanted to apologize for the recent lack of new work. We have got some really cool stuff coming up; some new widgets, a few icons and maybe an update to our themes - if you all behave - but Chris has been really busy with other stuff like WidgetMachine and I’ve.. Well. I’ve not had a good July, to understate it.

Niqu 1.1 is not in the works, at the moment but I’m splitting my time between that and a ‘new’ theme. I’m not going to say anything else or tease because it’s still in the alpha stages and would be cruel to give a peek of it month(s?) before it’s out.

All the geeks out there will already know about Apple’s new mouse, gleefully I’m ordering one on friday to replace my battery-whore Microsoft mouse.

Seems as if the better half of the internet is going mainstream. As the commoners of the internet (such you and I) found and paved way to present their voice to the world, it seems that what started simply has evolved into something much bigger than intended. But for the better? Well, you be the judge of that yourself.

However, I will say all of the media and corporate hype of recent is getting on my nerves. Online Journals are now under the moniker of Blogs, which are of course becoming nothing more then a 48 second cable news segment. Internet Radio, which has been around a long time, is now Podcasting (though of course Podcasting is Net Radio wrapped in an RSS feed, I don’t mean to dumb it down too much) and is oozing into every U.S. commercial outlet for use. Most would call the recent venture of Apple into the Podcasting arena a great thing for us unknows who create the populace of the Internet and whom are the originators of both Blogging and Podcasting. “Bringing Podcasting, Wayne’s World for Radio, mainstream” as Apple descibes it, but it is this mentality where I can draw my case against Apple. Wayne’s World was on Public Access Television, which is truly in the hands of the public and is not to be confused with Public Radio, which in true form isn’t. Productions of KCRW are not Podcasts. It is corporations like Apple that are trying to change the definition of what the internet has created. Also, I find some of the “Indie” Podcasters stepping onto a commercialized slope. Adam Curry’s Podfinder is a good example. But don’t get me wrong, the aggregation of Podcasts into a product that millions of people use daily is a great thing, but when Apple added their own spin to it, I think it’s benefits may be down the drain. Apple calls this “Premium Content,” and I’m assuming this is done so that the millions whom are new to Podcasting find great content. But it’s the search for great content that keeps Podcasting, or Internet Radio, alive. If one finds no content to their tastes or on subjects they want to want to hear about, they can create their own shows. Putting this “great search” into the hands of commercial sources is a mistake and I think will limit creativity among the new Podcaster introduced through iTunes.

Heh, I can hear some of you already; “If you’re so up on what Podcasting is and are against commercialized iTunes content, what should I listen to then?!” and that is certainly a fair assessment of my character, indeed. Well, while I find little time to give full attention to the many great indie Podcasts out there, I do have a few I regularly enjoy.

Little Gray Books (Available through iTunes Podcast Directory) (Website)
While not exactly indie wholely, the Podcast version of the Little Gray Book Lectures out of New York are simply a hilarious waste of time. John Hodgman, aged writing behemoth and gondola-riding mastermind behind LGBs, and Jonathan Coulton, half-pony-half-monkey musical monster, take us with them on their journey across the landscapes and all the while schooling us on the finer ways of generating D&D Characters and selling Electric Organs. For those intellectualy curious in such things. ;-)

StarWars en Direct (Not Available through iTunes; Abridged Version Soon) (Website)
Three Sci-Fi/StarWars movie geeks broadcast to us weekly from their hut located in Montreal, Quebec. Faithfully serving the French StarWars community as the place for news and info during the StarWars prequel movie run; StarWars en Direct truly evolved into the voice of StarWars fandom when their English version launched two years ago after the demise of JediTalk. Revolving around deeper StarWars topics and fan projects as well as official Lucasfilm content, get a French-Canadian insight into StarWars, as well as loveable accents.

The Dawn & Drew Show! (Available through iTunes Podcast Directory) (Website)
A Podcast which needs no introduction or review. An addictive half of an hour that works so well due to its fundamental Podcast qualities; seemingly unedited aimless bander and insight.

Tokyo Calling (Available through iTunes Podcast Directory) (Website)
Scott Lockman, Oregon-er computer nerd teaching English in Tokyo, Japan, blesses us with his ramblings on life in the orient as well as his acquired obsession for Podcasting. One of the original Podcasts.

AmbitiousLemon is going to be updating their stuff around the 18th, and so you may have a bit of trouble accessing us and jazz. All should return to normal shortly.

On a more sentimental note: I cleaned out our old files today (since we don’t need the past two VS versions cluttering up the folders, as well as my old Kob blog). I’d kept some of the older things so that any old links would work okay - but I think there’s been enough time now for people to get used to our new structure.

Lastly, I’m going to try and get some icons repackaged and back available soon - as well as a few new wallpapers. Oh and before I forget, can people please remember to send Widget-Support stuff to Chris and not me? I don’t mind (it’s probably easier if any emails address graphics stuff) but he must be getting irritated by all the forwards from me.

Hope everyone enjoyed WWDC05 and has got past the shock (and crying, for some of you) to the exciting prospects for 2006 and 2007. Only a year until we get to see Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. :)

So, I spent this morning finally updating Capture. This is the last update to the old style Capture, and all future versions will have a gorgeous new look (I’ll also keep the VS one up to speed, too).

So what’s new?

Weee-eeell, I added in the fix for some people seeing the Dashboard in the middle of being removed. That’s just a simple time out (in fact, for those of you that are curious enough, you’ll notice when I did this, I laid the framework for user defined time outs, but that hasn’t been added fully as yet).

I also added the ability for the capture to go straight to the clipboard and added in GIF and PDF support, although there appears to be a resizing issue with PDFs and the GIFs are horrible quality.

What else? Oh yeah, I changed everything to be actual text, rather than relying of images of characters and building words that way. This is because when I originally wrote Capture, you couldn’t add in custom fonts, so we had to work round it. Well, now it’s all changed and the code/widget is much smaller because of it :)

And I rewrote the plugin and added in French localisation. So it was quite a productive morning :)

Since this was all done rather rapidly, any comments on bugs etc would be greatly appreciated.

Err, a little late - but better then never. I’ve removed icon entries that aren’t ready yet (including Adium Super Pack, iConquer, iPod minis, Apple Ages, Chat Jam, Dmgize, Lamps, Mac mini, ToDo). These’ll be added as I repackage them as well as new icons.

The GUI Section does however have some new goodies. Such as a brand new release type: Screensavers. Although these are only for OS X Tiger. There are also some new wallpapers, so be sure to have a root around.

I just finished setting up GuiKi, it’s an OS X Theming Wiki that will hopefully make it much easier for new themers to grasp how themes are created as well as helping modders customise themes to their liking.

Going to be making the skin much sexier over next few days, so if you’d like to add to GuiKi, please feel free to!

There have been quite a few emails and questions on a few places about Niqu related things so I thought, before I go to bed, I’d answer a few I get.

Q: Does Niqu theme everything?
A: No. As far as I’ve seen, no theme does. 1.0 is not a one-hundred percent complete project and isn’t going to claim to be. Everything I started out intending to do, I’ve done for this initial release. That does mean a few applications aren’t done.

Q: What colours does Niqu have?
A: As of 1.0, it will only have Regular and Regular Blackmenu. I intend to release an updated guiKit with new colours in a timely fashion later on, perhaps rolling them in to a 1.1 update.

Q: If an element isn’t themed, should email you?
A: Preferably not, unless you find what you believe to be a bug. My beta testers were very thorough and seemed to find any issues. If something is obviously unthemed (for example: The view buttons in Address Book) then it’s either a: A limitation or b: intentional.

Things such as some Address Book images and QT7 are limitations. Things like Menu Extras and iPhoto are intentional. I see no need for Menu Extras to be changed, they work perfectly already, and iPhoto was never on my list for 1.0.

Q: So what’s in 1.1?
A: That would be telling. ;)

Q: Can I beta-test updates?
A: Thanks for offering but I’ve already got a list of trusted friends and people that test for me. Please do not email me asking!

I haven’t been doing much over the past few weeks, since it’s exam period here at Durham University :/
I have, however, been able to do some stuff, the main bit being an update to the scrollbar object for VSUIElements. It now supports mousewheels, clicking to jump to the point and an extra class name for buttoned scrollbars. (Get it here). Not much of an update, is it? Well, there’s quite a bit of changes ‘under-the-bonnet’ but nothing to get excited about, I suppose.

So anyway, my mate Phil asked for a widget to show HTML entities etc, so here it is. It takes a while to load (couple of seconds), since it’s got such huge tables in it - there’s about 6500 lines in the HTML alone. Also, copying the actual chars of the ones in the first tab doesn’t work yet - but the other two do. I’ll nail this once exams are over. It also spams your console.log at the moment, as I haven’t been able to finish my workaround for webcore’s getComputedStyle returning null for elements that have no display…

Anyway, back to revision.

Bah! Well, looks as if VanillaSoap is finally up again, and here I come, strollin’ in late. Oh well, what is one to do but apologize, if that.

Anyways, things seem to get unto normal as soon as things get back to normal. That’s really the way of things I’ve come to realize, and it’s certainly a sad thing. If only change could retain with the staying of maintenance. Anyhow, I’m sounding as I did last time around. Heh, see what I mean?

Moreover, I would like to introduce myself to those who visit Agora and do not know me; I am Amis Raiden, long time mate of Rick, longer then all Chris, Razali, and Crystal, I think. I’ve been appointed to be an editor on VanillaSoap’s website, to fix the constant abuse by Rick, lol (kidding of course). While other project of VanillaSoap may come to frutition with myself onboard, I have a high doubt that I’ll be involved beyond the VSD wbesite, in development.

I’ll keep things at slight for now, but best luck to Rick and VanillaSoap, as always!

When I wake up, well I know I’m gonna be,
I’m gonna be the man who wakes up next to you.
When I go out, yeah I know I’m gonna be,
I’m gonna be the man who goes along with you.

But I would walk 500 miles,
And I would walk 500 more.
Just to be the man who walked 1,000 miles,
To fall down at your do-o-or.

Songs often seem the best way of saying things. So I thought I’d let a song explain to you home much I love you.

Here’s to another wonderfully awesome year!

I’ve recently been realising some of the stupid things I do when it comes to web/widget development. It’s mainly down to having done the stuff for so long that I do things out of habit. OK, here’s an example:

<script src=”whatever.js”></script>

Now, I’m using that in the widgets a lot, and they’re XHTML pages, so anyone with two brain-cells to rub together (and who knows about this stuff, I might add) would realise there’s nothing inside the tags, so why use the two like that? Just close it like:

<script src=”whatever.js” />

Now, every time I write the former, I generally think of the latter and think it’s stupid you can’t do that in this one case. Well you effing well can, of course. My whole stupidity comes from being stuck in 2001 or before where Mozilla pre-1.0 (as in actual Mozilla, not Firefox) wouldn’t let you do it (and maybe IE, I wrote a lot for that at the time too), so I just assumed that 4 years later it would be the same - and on a completely different platform. Now that is dumb. And every time I thought of this - why didn’t I even try it?! Frustrating.

So anyway, whilst basking in my stupidity, I then had a look at the dashboard mailing list. There was a post about parsing XML documents pulled in with XMLHttpRequest and how having a name space defined in it was making things go awry. I’d had this exact same problem back in January when doing the Gmail checker widget. Now rather than engaging my brain, I just assumed it was a bug in webcore and forged on iterating through childNodes instead (which is about 2-3 times the amount of effort). Name space. You can’t use getElementsByTagName when a Name Space is defined. It’s so annoyingly obvious, that when John Louch pointed out that using getElementsByTagNameNS would work, I had to go to bed early with a head ache and a red mark on my forehead from slapping it so much. Argh. I’ve even used getElementsByTagNameNS quite a bit before, too. I’m putting it down to such a large workload on a plethora of different subjects, and of course nothing to do with drinking my brain cells away in the last 4 years of University. >_>

So, rather than being stuck in my old ways and doing things habitually, I may start thinking again when I develop stuff. Sigh.

Well, I lurk at MacThemesForums.net every-so-often these days, and noticed a thread about the VS widgets.

So, since I’ve been bored recently, I thought I should do some of the suggestions. So here they are:
The FTP Uploader widget and an updated iChat List widget that lets you double click on a name to send the person a message. I’m afraid the FTP widget only supports standard FTP at the moment, and not secure. I tried just making it a wrapper for `sftp’ but it proved to be more difficult than I’d imagined. I’ll probs end up writing about it in the near future, just to bore everyone to death :)

In order for the FTP one to work, you’ll need to replace /System/Library/WidgetResources/vsuielements/libvs.js with this one. I’ll add them into the Pack.dmg in a bit. Although, I reckon I’ll make a few more random widgets before I get round to it.

Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed - you can now donate to us, by clicking on the button at the bottom of the widgets page.

Ahh, it be back, and sexier than ever as I can see. PLUS WIDGETS! Oh my word..

I’m going to have fun rummaging about the new site ;) Well done Rick & Chris, for getting this all sorted out and making the Z go “bawk!” and “Crom!” a lot after each page load or download. :p

Hopefully we can now get Niqu, rOC-Z drives and the rest out of the door ;), now lets make others aware of VS’ return and get it ohn!

Oh, and one final thing:

I SAW’T YOU RICKAY!

It only took like three days longer than expected, but hey who’s counting? VanillaSoap is alive again (or at least a rather active tap-dancing undead)! We’ve even got juicy new bits to make up for the months of wasteland-like lack of posts.

Although it went relatively smoothly (bar the usual moments of panic), and Chris made up for the relatively quiet six-weeks of no nagging.

So I’ll leave you to glance around and play with our widgets. ;) Oh and a few last notes: The sections closed at the moment will be opening throughout the week as well as us clearing up a few last templates (such as the search one..). Have fun!