This is a really interesting proof of concept: Building CoverFlow for Safari on iPhone

It uses a bunch of existing technologies built into WebKit in a creative way to mimmic Apple’s CoverFlow effect from right within a browser.

(Via TheAppleBlog.)

Yes, just last week I linked to a tutorial on Symfony 1.2 and Doctrine, but here’s another good one from Jonathan Wage (lead developer of Doctrine) himself: New in symfony 1.2: Doctrine goodies

In addition to some basics of setting up Doctrine and Symfony, he also covers a bit of the nested forms implementation that was recently updated in Symfony 1.2. Admittedly I didn’t think much of this feature when reading about it initially but seeing Jonathan’s implementation with translations was an eye opener.

Hot on the heels of Symfony 1.1’s release—at least as far as software development goes—comes the Symfony 1.2 beta:

1.2 may sound like a minor release, but we’ve actually stuffed in quite a few upgrades. Our focus was on the Forms and ORM, which combined result in the new Admin Generator. Secondary focus was to streamline the symfony API, and allowing a better foundation for plugins. As you can see this is a natural continuation of the strategy we took when building 1.1.

Symfony 1.2 marks another milestone in Symfony’s development. The core Symfony team has done a lot of work transitioning from the older, more tightly coupled Symfony 1.0 code branch into a much more flexible, powerful and decoupled Symfony. As I’ve mentioned previously, one of my favorite aspects of the new Symfony is the ability to pick and choose which components you need in order to build your own sub-framework for those tasks that are speed or memory intensive.

Be sure to read the rest of the official blog post for more. If you’ve been using Symfony for some time and you just want to know what’s new, then there’s also a document just for you.

Fabien just merged the new Admin Generator code into the main Symfony 1.2 branch:

Today, I have merged the new_admin branch into the 1.2 one, which means that symfony 1.2 now sports a brand new admin generator, based on the form framework.

Be sure to read the rest of the article which has an overview of the new features as well as the updated tutorial in the Symfony book. It looks like Doctrine users will have to wait a few days while the Propel version is stabilized before they port the work to Doctrine.

I, for one, have been waiting for this for a long while.

I recently finished integrating some nice Twitter functionality to this blog. You’ll notice that you can now see my Twitter updates at the bottom of the blog. Also, new blog posts will show up in my Twitter feed (hopefully at least). This was actually really simple to set up thanks to a couple of plugins:

To grab my latest twitter posts and display them on this blog I’m using: Twitter Tools

And to update Twitter when I write new posts I’m using: Twitter Updater

Twitter tools seems to have the ability to update Twitter on posting to the blog, but I decided to use Twitter Updater instead since it seems a bit more specialized for this task (and it’ll use tinyurl to shorten URLs).

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to get your feet wet with Doctrine and Symfony 1.2, check out NiKo’s excellent write-up: Let’s Play with Symfony 1.2 and Doctrine

It’s Oh So Quiet:

It’s so quiet in this blog, because it is closed. Forever. No more post will ever be published, you can’t send any comment, and you can unsubscribe safely from its RSS feed. More than 8,000 unique visitors a month now have time to procrastinate elsewhere.

Anyone who’s been reading Francois’ blog over the last few months probably won’t be surprised.

I’ve seen several other symfony blogs talking about this (in other languages) but it still seems to warrant a quick post here. Part of me feels like this may be the beginning of the end for Symfony. Not in some over-the-top “The Sky Is Falling” kind of way, but in a quieter more subtle sort of way. Although I haven’t always agreed with Francois’ stance on Symfony’s development, I do feel that he brings up some really great points. I’ve been using Symfony for a long time (my forum account was registered in January 2006—wow, has it really been that long?) and I have to say that the reason why I stuck with Symfony was because of the unusually good (and straightforward) documentation.

The Symfony community would not be where it is today without that documentation. Does anyone remember Mojavi or Agavi? Anyone? No. They are no longer relevant in the PHP framework arena and yet they are where Symfony gleaned its roots. For those that don’t know, Symfony started as a sort of fork of Mojavi. Agavi emerged as a Mojavi variant around the same time as well since Mojavi development had slowed. So, at the time there were three worthy frameworks to choose from (not to mention CakePHP which was also just starting out). So who pulled ahead and gained the adoption? Symfony. Why? Well, personally I think it was in large part because of the documentation and screencasts. The code itself had been greatly cleaned up compared to say, Mojavi (anyone remember having to use one class/file per action? Gross.), but the documentation was a huge deal for me. It was easy to learn and fun to tinker with; powerful and yet approachable. Francois was a major contributor to the documentation as well as the screencasts and since his departure I have sensed a void in that department.

Sad, but true:

Symfony used to be simple, well documented, and powerful; today it’s just powerful. Long forgotten are the days where symfony’s motto was “Professional Tools for Lazy Folks”.

I fear that had I just been starting out with Symfony development today, I might abandon it for something less complicated. This is a sad state of affairs since Symfony really is a fantastic framework for PHP.

What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end of an approachable Symfony?

Working WIth History in Bash

An article written by Allan Odgaard (creator of TextMate) that I tend to reference a lot. It has a lot of good tips and tricks for streamlining your Bash workflow.

Yahoo! just launched the Yahoo! Application Platform

According to their overview:

The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) is the software and services that enable developers to build Web applications that are available throughout Yahoo!– the largest audience in the world

Check out the PHP SDK example: http://developer.yahoo.com/social/sdk/

I suppose it’s an interesting approach… allow people in to Yahoo!’s data so that they can create applications that integrate with user data in some niche way that Yahoo! itself would never build. I’m not sure how useful it will be in practice though.

typeface.js

An interesting alternative to sIFR that uses SVG (FireFox, Safari) or VML (IE) to render text in custom fonts on an HTML page.