Blogger Play is live!

I spent a fair bit of the last few weeks working on the UI for Blogger’s latest gizmo-distraction: Blogger Play!
Play is a rocked-up version of the old Blogger photoscroller, which has been kicking around in various public and not-quite-as-public places ever since there were Blogger photos. I wrote a bit more about that over at the Blogger Buzz.

This is an interesting example of doing something in HTML and JavaScript that could probably be much better done in Flash, but hey: it works on the iPhone. I actually felt a bit Apple-y getting the polish done on the UI. The fade timing and speed slider settings took hours to get right. I hope you like them.

Joseph did the visual design, so give him all the credit for that. I worked from his mocks. And of course Pong, who wrote the original scroller and several since, and did all the backend coding and plugging together for this version. Katie made this launchable by cleaning out very nearly almost all of the images that aren’t good to show to people.

Enjoy! Remember to stop watching and do productive things.

iPhone Tour thoughts

I just finished watching Apple’s iPhone guided tour. Two things stood out:

• There seems to be some inconsistency in how to zoom: When viewing photos, you pinch to zoom in and can double-tap to zoom all the way out; in the Maps application, however, a double-tap zooms in, while a two-finger touch zooms out.
• Where is the option to set an iTunes song as a ringtone? I smell meddling corporate interests.

Nevertheless, DO WANT!

Gilliwind Islandsong, as performed by ARRR!!!

(Video presentation made possible by video upload and ARRR!!!)

"These are the gears..."

I just noticed the description of the Google Gears plug-in in Firefox:

“These are the gears that power the tubes!”

Interestingly, this is one case where the “big truck” metaphor actually seems to make a bit more sense…

Safari 3 beta for Windows

I'm typing this with Safari 3 for Windows, which is showing the Blogger rich text editor. This is not supported and kinda not supposed to happen.

Image upload and autosave appear to be broken. :-P



Update: If you're following along at home, Safari 3 does not implicitly create a <head> element when you programmatically (e.g. with document.write(...)) set the contents of an IFrame. This causes an initialization error in the Blogger post editor because there's no place to stash the <style> tag for spellchecking, which throws off the autosave initialization.

Without autosave, image upload to draft posts doesn't work, since Blogger autosaves before showing the upload dialog.

Another update: Damn Safari 3 is speedy-quick. It is now a contender for browser-of-choice.