After using iChat and Adium on my mac for so long, I decided to try the real Windows Live Messenger…

You may want to see the large size to get a closer look at its ugliness.

My photo of an alarm clock finally got over 1000 views on Flickr!

It’s been there for just over 1 year and gradually increasing, but I recently found a very good way of getting lots of people to see you: Try joining lots of groups that give out awards to each other. These groups’ rules say you have to view and comment other people.

Text editors annoy me. Microsoft Word is too slow and is usually overkill. Apple’s TextEdit and other RTF editors are good, but usually a little too basic.

That’s why I have decided to create my own text editor. It uses Adobe Air, so I can create it in a similar way to creating a website (with HTML/CSS/Javascript). Adobe Air also means it will be cross platform — Mac, Windows (and Linux coming soon). It is based on TinyMCE with a totally custom interface, with much less clutter.

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I have started to create a new version of the SWF Object Generator. The old one doesn’t look very nice, so I decided to make it a bit nicer.

Because the audience of this is mainly web developers, and all web developers shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer, I decided to totally not support internet explorer, and have fun with new CSS styles! (This is a very rare opportunity)

My version is based on the old one (copy/paste code, then modified) which means I have released it under the MIT license.

It still has has a lot of work to do (like adding javascript tooltips on the help messages).

I just discovered a new way to vertically (and horizontally) centre objects in CSS!

All it needs is 1 line of CSS (no dummy objects either!)

#theobject { position:absolute; top:0; bottom:0; left:0; right:0; margin:auto; }

After testing on all of my browsers, I tried it on browsershots.org, which lets you see screenshots of your webpage on many diferent browsers. You may have guessed, the only problem is that Internet Explorer ≤ 7 doesn’t support it (grr). The sort of good news is that Internet Explorer 8 (still beta) DOES support this, so this technique may be usable in the (hopefully not to distant) future.

You can view my test page.

Today is DHD’s 4th birthday! (as the title says)

I haven’t done anything extra special to celebrate, other than give my website a much needed update:

• The flash contact form works! (this is really cool)
• Redesigned this blog
• New Logo! This is actually pretty special
   

Paparazzi is a very useful program for Mac that takes pictures of websites. This is much better than using keyboard shortcuts (command + shift + 4) because if the web page is longer than your screen (as usual), Paparazzi will capture the whole page as one image.

Paparazzi uses WebKit, so it will look the same as in Safari. This means that if you want to take a picture of something you must log in for, such as a wordpress control panel, you can!

You can download Paparazzi from www.derailer.org/paparazzi/.

Look at this text from the MySpace profile editor page (I added boldness):

You may enter HTML/DHTML or CSS in any text field. Javascript is not allowed.
Do not use HTML/CSS to cover MySpace advertisements. 

Who wrote that? A real web-designer would know that DHTML and Javascript are the same thing. It also doesn’t say you can’t use “DHTML” to cover the advertisements (because they think it must be different to javascript ).

I have decided to create a new logo:

It will be often seen in interesting grunge/colourful/spacey designs like in my blog header, and this Flickr image I made with my old logo.

I think it looks a lot more professional than the old one:

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I have created a new design for my blog! I have also recently moved to my own hosted wordpress rather than blogger.

I created this theme totally from scratch, with valid strict XHTML and CSS. I also used jQuery Javascript Library to add nice little animations around the place (try the menus!). This idea was based on a NetTuts Tutorial.

The theme is not finished yet — the comments and post footers still look ugly. There are also a few different things I would like to do to make it a bit nicer.

If you would like this theme for your blog, sorry, I won’t be releasing it.