So it should come as no surprise that when looking for iPad apps, I search on their name, hoping to find some can’t-live-without killer iPad app for world travelers. What I found was 1000 Ultimate Experiences — a complete cop-out of an app, and rightly rated 1.5 stars (out of five) on the app store.

Now, yesterday I see their bogus free offer for their app. It’s clearly in hopes of getting people to rate the app higher, so they can make money from it on the app store. Personally, I find this completely offensive.

Rather than looking at their low rating and learning from the mistakes of their horrible app, Lonely Planet is trying to change perceptions and create a false sense that their offering is much better than it really is.

So Loneyly Planet, I hope you’re reading this, because I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to hear about your app.

• First and foremost, it lacks content. It’s a graphics-heavy presentation of what is essentially just a bullet list of information. FAIL.
• Second, for all of those graphics and animation, the app is not at all interactive. If you’re going to give me something as basic as a list of things to do and see, at least give me a checkbox for the ones I’ve done and for those I want to do.
• It’s not searchable. WHAT!? You give me a giant (disorganized!) 1,000 things to do and see in the world, and fail to give me any tool to break them down by geographic location? Another epic FAIL.
• Too much waiting. I hate any animations that leave me waiting before I can click/touch/tap and do the work I wanted to do when I opened your app.

The bottom line is that Lonely Planet’s app demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand what the iPad is and how it is used. That’s called a mistake, and it’s something that can be overcome. They also fail to recognized their audience, which is a bigger mistake but also able to be overcome.

But failing to learn from mistakes — or worse, trying to repaint history as if they weren’t mistakes at all — that’s much harder to forgive. It puts a stain on the Lonely Planet name as a whole, and makes me far less likely to buy the hundreds of dollars worth of LP products that I buy… and much less likely to recommend them on my web site.

I wanted to burn a DVD containing AVIs of Russian video, and I had given the Burn Folder a Russian name. Every time I tried to burn, I was greeted with error 0×80020022, and the media was immediately ejected.

Remembering the days of CD-R media and the compatibility hassles I once experienced, my first thought was to go buy a different brand of DVD media. But I experienced the error with the new media as well.

After stumbling onto a Mac support forum in which users blindly suggested that renaming a file had fixed the problem, I realized that I was probably trying to use forbidden characters in the volume name. Spelling my Russian words out in a Latin alphabet did the trick, and I am now burning the files.

Description

TweetPost is a multiuser plugin which allows wordpress publishers to automatically tweet their new posts to their Twitter account. Tweets consist of a message (“New post from @user”) including a reference to the author’s Twitter name, the title of the post, and a bit.ly shortened link to the post.

Currently, the Twitter Poster consists of the following features.

• Authorize a global Twitter account with the site
• Specify a Bit.ly login and API key to associate with the site
• Adds a “Twitter” property to user details, so users can manage their own Twitter name
• Automatically submits the permalink to bit.ly and adds that to the tweet
• Adds a reference to the author’s Twitter account in the tweet
• Fits the tweet into Twitter’s 140-character limit.

License

This Twitter Poster plugin and WordPress Plugin Framework are being developed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

[GNU General Public License, version 2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/elderly-licenses/gpl-2.0.html “GNU General Public License, version 2″)

Download

The current version can be downloaded here: tweetpost

Installation

1. Unzip the archive file.
2. Verify the name of the unzipped folder to be “tweetpost”
3. Upload the “tweetpost” folder to the root of your WordPress “plugins” folder.
4. Activate the “tweetpost” plugin in your website’s plugin administration page.
5. Navigate to the “Settings” ~ “TweetPost” administration page, to add account info.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to register my blog with Twitter?
Yes. Due to details of Twitter’s implementation of the OAuth protocol, it is
necessary to register your blog as a Twitter API consumer application. It’s silly, but fortunately it’s not difficult to do.

Change Log

• 1.0
  • Added support for Twitter OAuth protocol
  • Removed support for Twitter’s (now defunct) Basic authentication
  • Added messaging missing configuration
• 0.1
  • Initial version

Scrolling through posts by keyboard may not be useful to everyone, but it makes a lot of sense for anyone with a photoblog. Users can quickly flip through your content without enlessly flicking a scroll wheel or clicking and dragging until they grab their wrists in pain.

Features:

• Press the “J” key to see the next post, and the “K” key takes you to the previous post.

Planned features:

• Add “next” and “previous” keys for page-by-page navigation.
• Add an options page which allows the navigation keys to be customized.
• Automatically load the “next” or “previous” page when you hit the end.
• Detect the scrollable element in a site’s design. (Current version only scrolls the body.)

Download
The current version can be downloaded at WordPress.org.

Changelog

• 0.6
  • Updated the algorithm to work with fractional scrollTop property in Firefox
• 0.5
  • Added scroll event listener to make the navigation sensitive to your current scroll position
• 0.4
  • Continues to next/previous page when you navigate past the last (or first) post
• 0.3
  • Javascript has moved to a separate file and is now added through via wp_enqueue_script
  • jQuery has been implemented for all DOM functions
  • ScrollTop is now at the top of the screen, as expected
  • Tested on Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 3
• 0.2
  • Key navigation is no longer added on single posts
  • Keypress events are ignored inside of TEXTAREA and INPUT elements
• 0.1
  • Initial version

Politically Correct swaps the occasional “politically incorrect” term with a more socially acceptable replacement. For instance, if your author types post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), your viewers see post-traumatic stress disorder. If your author types mentally challenged, your viewers see mentally challenged.

Example:

What output shows up if I say “homosexual people”? What about “African-American men”? And “caucasian men”? Does it know the difference between “African-American men” and “black licorice”? Can I say that “Asian people are good at math”?

What about expletives? What happens when I say “have sexual relations you”? “Eat defacate”? “Kiss my rear end”? Does this thing know the difference between “a sexual favor” and “several sexual favors”?

Is this going to give me “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)”? What will the “vision-imparied”, the “hearing-impaired”, and “the disabled” think about this? What about “elderly people”?

If you have a serious web site, perhaps with a rogue author or two, you can use this plugin to help slow down some of the offense. Or, perhaps more likely, you have a personal web site and you think you could have some fun by replacing words with their PC counterparts.

Features:

• Force filtering on individual posts by use of a custom tag
• Admin can apply the filter to all users or only to specific users
• Admin can apply the filter to all categories or only to specific categories

Planned features

• Allow admins to define custom terms

You can download it here: politically-correct-v0.2.zip

Please note:
Creating this plugin was meant to be a joke, since I find the entire concept of “political correctness” to be not only mentally challenged and wasteful, but I also think it runs completely in opposition to the very nature of “the internet”. It started as a joke, and it continues mostly out of my own desire to learn more about WordPress and its APIs. I won’t be putting a tremendous amount of energy into this plugin, but I provide it both for the enjoyment of those with a sense of humor, and also on the off chance that someone might actually get some legitimate use out of it… such as a multi-user blog with one particularly “brash” author.

But to the losers who are writing in to say it’s a “stupid idea”, I simply say stop taking yourselves so seriously. Instead of whining about what you think is a stupid idea, why don’t you write to me and tell me what you think would be a better idea? Put up or shut up.

Example:

This is a government test of a new top secret plugin for ufo homeland security. I wonder what will happen to George Bush and Karl Rove when I type their names. Do you think John F. Kennedy was involved with the Secret Service’s plot to give H1N1 Swine Flu and Mad Cow Disease to the citizens? I wonder who knows about President Obama’s secret plan to bring socialism to the United States?

Current version is 0.1, and you can download it here: freedom-of-information

I have a photoblog, for my iPhone. I take a lot of pictures, and I want them to post quickly and easily. And I’m lazy. I want to send the photo to Flickr, and let Flickr update my blog. But I also want my main pages to reflect the latest additions. And what’s more, I want customized images on the front page, and I need to use the gallery to get those.

This WordPress plugin creates local copies of all external linked images in the SRC attribute of IMG tags. It extracts a list of IMG tags in the post, saves copies of those images locally as gallery attachments on the post, and then offers the option to replace the external link with a link to the local copy.

Features

• Finds all external images linked in the SRC attribute of IMG tags and makes local copies of those images
• Allows the SRC to be updated to point to those local copies
• Can be applied to posts in all categories, or only those selected
• Can be applied to all authors, or only selected authors
• Administrator has the option to replace the external src with the url of the local copy. Another option allows the plugin to be applied to all external images, or only to those on Flickr.

This plugin is particularly useful for photobloggers, especially those who update using the mail2blog Flickr API. The plugin will saved the linked image file from Flickr locally.

Planned features

• Add internationalization support
• Integrate with Flickr API in order to allow always downloading the original image size regardless of which is linked
• Additional options to allow running the plugin only for specific users or categories

Download

Download the current stable version: Add-Linked-Images-To-Gallery.

Changelog

• 1.0
  • Finally found the “WP_Error on line 48″ issue. Added trapping.
  • I’m ready to call this a 1.0
• 0.9
  • Replaced externimg_loadimage() function with a call to WordPress’s media_handle_sideload()
• 0.8
  • Fixed a pad path, preventing imported images from showing up in WP media library
• 0.7
  • Fixed a syntax error in creating the new attachment
• 0.6
  • Suppresses safe_mode warnings from CURL
  • Adds compatibility with WordPress 2.9
• 0.5
  • Fixes a bug that cause all img tags to be rewritten as the last matched image
• 0.4
  • Option added to option panel allowing the plugin to run only on posts in specific categories
  • Option added to option panel allowing the plugin to run only on posts by specific authors
• 0.3
  • Improved pattern matching for images
  • 404 errors not processed
  • Flickr “image-not-found” jpg not processed
  • Improved local file naming
  • Replace feature was replacing URL in entire text. Now only replaces in IMG src.
  • Added feedback when options are saved.
• 0.2
  • Added options panel
  • User can apply plugin to all external images or choose only to apply to Flickr
  • User can choose to either mark images by custom tag, or to replace image source
  • Custom tag name is user-definable
  • Improved regular expression matching
• 0.1
  • Initial version

• No menu bar They’ve taken the application-ness out of the application, and turned it into a direct-to-web browsing experience. This change also leaves more screen real estate for the actual web sites to be viewed without scrolling.
• Less clutter Not only is there no menu bar, but there’s also no status bar, no search box, and with the exception of the start page, there’s no favorites toolbar. It’s a sleek, experience-centric design that reminds me of browsing on the iPhone.
• One box In true Google fashion, everything can be done from one text input box: navigating, searching, opening a bookmark, etc.
• Incognito browsing This is the first time I’ve seen such a straightforward way of surfing the web without leaving a trail. While most web browsers offer cleanup after the fact, Chrome’s incognito window never creates a trail to begin with. I think this is something that most people want, but which might scare managers and parents who want to know what their employees or children are doing online. This may be the one controversial feature of Chrome.
• Fast, attractive rendering Being built on top of Apple’s WebKit browser framework, Chrome loads pages super-fast, and renders them beautifully.

After messing around in Chrome for a few minutes, my experience is basically positive. To a certain extent, I miss the extensibility of Firefox, but at the same time I’m tempted to prefer not having it, due to the incredible performance bloat that occurs once you install a bunch of add-ons. Still, I’d like to be able to hide ads the way Adblock lets me in Firefox. Still, it supports Flash, so apparently there is some extensibility in place already.

I think I’m going to spend the next week or so using Chrome as my main browser and get an idea of how I really feel about it.

For my first foray into writing Firefox extensions, I decided to go with something simple, but which I find useful. So I made PlusOne.

What PlusOne does is quite simple. It finds the numerical part of the current URL you are browsing, and simply adds 1 to it. (You can also subtract 1 from it.) So, if the page you’re viewing is called page1.html, you could right-click on the page and choose “Plus One”, and it will navigate to page2.html. Likewise, if you are viewing britney-spears-naked-17.jpg, you can right-click on the page and choose “Minus One” and it will navigate to britney-spears-naked-16.jpg.

Of course, if the file doesn’t exist, you’ll still get a 404. But often you can discover many interesting, and somewhat hidden, gems just by exploring the possibilities of incrementing the URL. It’s also easier than searching the entire page for the tiny “next” link hidden at the bottom when you’re reading a six-page scientific essay. (Yeah, right… you’re looking for naked pictures of Britney Spears.)

Please try it out and leave any comments on this page.

I was unsure if Apple was still supporting G4 computers, but I was able to find that answer on their web site: they are. What I was not able to find, however, was any indication that I could upgrade. In other words, I was not prepared to do a clean install and wipe out my computer. The representative at the Apple store confirmed that I could do an upgrade.

The upgrade process took nearly three hours, and used almost all of the 10GB of free space on my hard drive. I hadn’t expected that. But I’ve found some ways to recover some space, so that’s not an issue. In fact, there really aren’t any issues. It just goes in and works. All of the upgraded software kept my settings and kept on working as I expected.

The only thing that stopped working was the driver for my Wacom tablet, but Wacom has provided almost a dozen driver upgrades on their web site in the three years since I first installed it, and after downloading and installing the new driver, my tablet worked like a charm.

The new features, going from 10.3 to 10.5 are amazing, and seem to run quite well on my iBook, even if it’s not a dual core Pentium. And yes, I took a few minutes to play with the new features of the OS, but only a few minutes, because what I really wanted to do was play with Lightroom… which is awesome.

And what about the iPhone? No dialogs popping up when I plug it in. No device listed in iTunes. I think something must have gotten set to ignore the iPhone when I tried it on 10.3.9 and it didn’t recognize it. Time to Google it.