The Typer is launching this week

The code for thetyper is essentially done, but i have decided to wait a couple of days before turning the switch and deploying the code just to make it rest (and to do a final bug hunt and docs polishing).

It will have a bunch of new features, which i felt were needed to make it really useful (the most important will be the ability to push a document to a blog via the metaweblog apis), a bit of polishing of the interface (e.g. there is now a font chooser with font preview), and a lot to support the administrative part of having paying customers.

The main interface has remained the same so I think that it’s still true its purposes of being a distraction free writing environment.

Rails conf photos

Here is a set with my photos from the rails conf days in London (taken with a phone).

Europe Rails Conference Slides

Here are the Slides from my presentation to the European Rails Conference. During the talk, I lost some time at the beginning so i didn’t manage to dedicate enough time to the sencond half (which I think might have been more interesting) about routing internals and how to customize it (writing a plugin for instance). I’ll turn the material for that into an article some time in the (near) future (I promise!)

Principles of mobile (friendly) style

Inspired by the interesting discussion around mobile news rivers I thought I’d put down some ideas on what i think may be some principles for developing mobile pages. These come from using my nokia phone to browse and they are not written with a particular technology in mind.

• one column. Mobiles’ screens are usually taller than wider, they also have a low resolution, so having more than one column is detrimental to the readability of the informations on the page. (the worst is when you need to scroll laterally to see all the content). If you need to show some navigation elements they are best placed at the bottom of the page (after the content).
• fluid layout. Don’t build and style the page for a specific resolution: it will work and be well readable both on current narrow or large screens and on future ones, whatever shape they will have.
• meaningful also in text-only mode. Textual content should at least give enough information to allow the reader to take a decision on whether to download the full multimedia content (be it images, video or sound).
• be light. This is both to keep the download faster and smaller. The speed will be appreciated also if the cellular network is a fast 3rd generation one, moreover many users are paying by the byte transferred and will be happy to have more content for the same price. Lightness could be applied both by keeping a low markup-to-content ratio and by being concise in what you say.

I’d like to hear what others have to say about these ideas, and which other suggestions may be given to build nice mobile pages.