Blaze New Media

The first release of the CSS Tweak dashboard widget is done! Now you can optimize your CSS from the comfort of your Mac’s desktop.

This is the first widget that I’ve ever made, it’s been really great to get into the guts of how they work.

For those of you that have never seen inside a widget, they are simply a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript. So if you are a web developer, you most likely already have the knowledge and skills to make a fully functional dashboard widget.

Actually, I cheated a little with the CSS Tweak widget. Well, not so much cheated, but I didn’t code the whole thing in Textmate. I managed to be one of those lucky people who had an installed version of Dashcode on their new MacBook Pro. I used Dashcode to develop this widget from start to finish and I really only have great things to say about it.

Despite the program crashing a fair bit (which is understandable considering it is a pre/non-release version) it provides wysiwyg and debugging features that go a long way to help you set up your widget and get it working exactly how you want it. Plus, it has a gorgeous interface as you would expect from an Apple developed tool.

Anyway, more about the widget itself. The widget will accept CSS files dropped onto it (which is annoyingly unintuative, but Apple fails to provide file input any other way). Once you drop a CSS file in, you are presented with tweaking options. You can choose to enable or disable any of the options, just the same as on the CSS Tweak website. Once you hit tweak, the CSS file is sent to the CSS Tweak server, tweaked, and then sent back and saved in the same location as your original file.

I hope that people find this tool useful. It will definately save time not having to visit a website, you can simply drop your file in from anywhere and you’re done.

This is of course the first version, and there will no doubt be a few bugs to iron out. Please let me know via email (andy [at] this domain) if you find anything out of whack. I should mention, you do need to be connected to the internet for this widget to work.

Download Widget

Durable has been named the best overall design in the Wordpress Theme Competition.

I am very honored to have been named the winner by the judges as the field contained many great designs this time around.

Well, actually to be honest I am a little surprised. There were designs in the competition that are aesthetically far more pleasing than Durable. I was sure that those designs would have the extra edge over the themes that concentrated on function over form. I guess that was where the multiple categories came into play, my personal favorite was Derek’s very beautiful Foliage Mod Theme which won “Most Creative Design”. Well done Derek.

That begs a question though, are people beginning to pick themes based not solely on the look and feel, but also the bundled functionality? I can’t help but think that people’s feelings towards what makes a good Wordpress theme have changed quite a lot since the Wordpress 1.5 competition. The boundaries of what theme authors can do with Wordpress has been pushed since 1.5, simply because better documentation is now available, and we’ve had more time to fiddle around with the Wordpress code.

Anyway, that was more of a brain dump than anything. It’s just great to see that judges really took time to look at the themes, judging functionality just as much as the look and feel.

Thanks to everyone who put in their free time to make this competition possible, your hard work is much appreciated.

Update: I have released a minor update to Durable. Version 0.2.1 is available for download and decreases page load times by 25%.