My team and I released version 1.3.1 of WPhone. This will be the version which will be judged in the little challenge we got involved in/with. Matt, at Automattic, will judge the entries with what is released by October 22nd, so we’re all eager to know how we did.
And now, let the wait and nail biting begin (00:16 in Montreal)… 😉
Thanks to a lot of help from the support and development groups (special thanks to Richard and Adrian), and despite having focused on my upcoming job switch and WPhone in the last month, I finally found some time to release version 1.1 of wpDirAuth, an LDAP authentication plugin for WordPress I also maintain.
The new version adds support for more directory server configurations and vendors by supporting privileged pre-binding. It also adds a few interface and documentation tweaks, and has been tested under WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.
Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.
Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p
So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).
Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.
So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. 🙂
… or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.
Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.
See, I told you I wasn’t all there today…
I guess it takes a nasty fever for me to have forgotten to mention that Doug Stewart, Viper007Bond and I have jointly released the first version of WPhone last night, a plugin to bring the WordPress Administration to the world of mobile and accessibility devices.
The project was, originally, in response to a challenge sent to the wp-hackers mailing list, but our take on it actually goes beyond the original parameters by trying to support full universal access instead.
We’re now in the debug phase, since we’ve never actually had the chance to preview the souped up iPhone/iPod mode of our interface, but we’re hoping to be in a much better place on this front by the end of the weekend. The lightweight version of the interface, used for all non-WebKit browsers, is a lot more stable and seems to work like a charm on even my feature-deficient Motorola v551 (pre-RAZR, less RAM, about the same browser).
I have now released the first version of wpDirAuth, a WordPress LDAP connectivity plugin I have been working on for the last month, after an extensive community-based peer review period. The latter helped a lot with hammering desired functionalities as well as coping with the countless configuration permutations found in the directory server sphere.
Fun stuff. 🙂
I just released wpRedirect 1.1, now with WordPress caching goodness. I am also now packaging the generated code documentation for download, per release.
You can find more information on wpRedirect, a handy WordPress post and page redirection plugin, on the related project page.
Since I’m getting wpDirAuth peer reviewed before releasing the first version, due to its security implications, I have released another project as my first official WordPress plugin instead.
You can find more information on wpRedirect, a handy WordPress post and page redirection plugin I developed for my site, on the related project page.
After getting in touch with and having gotten “approval” from its author, I’m attempting to fork off and revive wpLDAP and would like the upgraded code to be peer reviewed by other developers before I release anything into the wild.
The current development version is in my SVN repo at:
http://labs.tekartist.org/wordpress/svn/branches/dev/plugins/wpDirAuth/
If you decide to try and/or review it, please add your constructive criticism and test reports to the related WordPress Forum entry.
Thanks for any help I can get. 🙂
Tada! I have decided to move away from Blogger and instead leverage features afforded to me by my new web host, DreamHost. I have now acquired the tekArtist.org domain name and set myself up with a WordPress instance to run the present site.
Besides having imported my previous Blogger posts to the new blog section, you can now also browse through two new main sections:
The base page is mostly there as a soft landing pad for visitors just stumbling upon my site, but also serves as an OpenID delegate through myOpenID.
Please bare with me in regards to the domain-wide search, as I’m only using Google’s most basic site search feature. They have not yet picked up my pages in their index, since I just turned off the temporary password I had setup at the root level this morning.
Technologically speaking, the new site features tools and options such as:
You can read more about the WordPress theme I custom develop for this site in the related labs page. Since there is nothing really private in it (sensitive values are protected through more appropriate means), I have also decided to make the theme’s source available publicly, fact which might change at any time if I realize that this leads to abuse or security issues outside of what I originally planned for.
I have been relatively quiet online in the past few years while primarily focusing my energies on my responsibilities as a dad and as a professional. I obviously never stopped playing, but limited my personal publishing activities to blogging and participating in online communities, rather than releasing products or experiments.
Now that my beloved children are starting to require less of my attention (IE: less then 24-7), I now have the opportunity to revert closer to previous levels of contribution to the web and Open Source spheres. Don’t get me wrong though, I still have clear priorities. 🙂
As a final note, I just wanted to mention that my moving away from Blogger had nothing to do with necessity, as they truly have an excellent blogging platform, but stemmed from a desire for the increased flexibility that only a full on web hosting account and a product like WordPress can provide.
I have released a new version of parseMe, my lightweight browser-based RSS/Atom feed reader utility, which main target remains mobile phones and accessibility devices (universal access).
You can find the latest release in the download section, and more information about it in the release log. There is now also a public Subversion repository.