karrderized

no time to blog, doctor jones

WordPress Plugins

Dec 20

Posted by Karrde in tech | No Comments

I’ve been working with WordPress for quite a while now, on and off. I started modifying it after discovering the Squible theme and subsequently became one of its developers. I’ve used it in a number of places for a number of sites over the ensuing years, and along the way have developed a few plugins of my own for it, mostly for my own use.

Recently I came across a post in the WordPress support forums referencing the Flickr Thumbnails widget I wrote for Squible a long time ago which prompted me to go back and have a look at the whole widget/plugin system as it exists now as compared to back when I was developing Squible. WordPress 2.8 brought in a much cleaner widget API and over the last couple of days I’ve converted the Flickr Thumbnails widget over to the new system. The new version won’t inherit the settings from any previous version of the widget you have installed, but it does allow for new functionality like columns (thanks to debashish, who posted the thread in the support forums that restarted all this) and multiple instances, so if you wanted to you could have more than one Flickr Thumbnails widget in your sidebar with different settings for each one.

I’ve also added a quick and dirty widget I wrote for my own use that allows you to include a file within a widget. It’s still very rough but does what I want it to for now, and if you’re keen and daring you can try it out.

The Flickr Thumbnails widget has been added to the WordPress plugin repository also, which is really quite clever with all its automation. Include widget is awaiting activation on the repository before it too will be added.

Tags: , , , , ,

Modding the HTC Magic

Aug 18

Posted by Karrde in tech | 1 Comment

I was lucky enough to win myself a brand new HTC Magic through a Vodafone NZ promotion a couple of months or so ago. Before that, I had been stuck with a terribly dodgy Motorola e770v, and when that gave out (or I gave up on it constantly powering off) I switched to temporarily using a Blackberry Pearl, but without the Blackberry functionality. Oddly enough, I had actually been thinking about buying a G1, the predecessor to the Magic, the day before winning so it worked out well.

The HTC Magic, also known as Sapphire or myTouch3G depending on where you are1 is an Android-based phone. Android is Google’s mobile OS, and is (more or less) open-source meaning modding it is not only legal but encouraged. Lots of apps are available for Android through the Marketplace that Google provides, both free and paid for. But to really push the customizability2 of the phone requires replacing the stock ROM with something fancier.

Plenty of smart people out there have started “cooking” and releasing their own ROMs, whether they be ports of pre-release code, images of existing Android phone OSes, or mashes of pieces from all over. One of the more popular variants at the moment centers around the ROM from the upcoming HTC Hero. Hero’s interface offers integration with Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter as stock, as well as the very cool Sense UI. Word has it that the Sense UI is officially coming to the Magic in around October, but possibly only to select versions3. In the meantime, we have the custom ROMs that people have whipped up.

I’ve used a few different Hero ROMs so far, each with varying successes. Flashing a new ROM onto your phone isn’t terribly difficult once you know what you’re doing, and since it took me a little while to work it out (and get brave enough to try) I wrote a guide for others. As these ROMs are made by fans working in their own time and learning as they go for the most part, there are bugs here and there. First off, things like the G-sensor for orientation weren’t working for me, causing the camera image to appear 90 degrees off where it should be. Other ROMs had issues with wireless, SD card reading, and of course slowness. The Hero ROMs have a lot of functionality, and the limited resources and non-optimized code caused a lot of slowdown. Various modders whipped up solutions for these problems as time went on, resulting in some pretty great ROMs available now. There’s still some issues to be ironed out, namely spotty SMS reception, but I have hope.

Currently, I’m back on the stock HTC Magic ROM. As much as I loved the Hero ROMs (especially Facebook integration) the SMS issue was a dealbreaker for me. I do plan on heading back to Hero once the SMS problems are cleared up, but for now I’m sticking with stock.

  1. Sapphire is the codename, myTouch3g is what T-Mobile in the US are calling it. There’s probably other names too. [↩]
  2. Yes, I know that isn’t a word. It is now. [↩]
  3. Non-Google-branded phones only, which sadly excludes mine. [↩]

Tags: , , , , ,

Blogging Again

Aug 17

Posted by Karrde in blog | No Comments

So, I have this domain, and it’s hosting my ROM guide at the moment and not much else. Since I paid for it I thought I should probably use it. So this is yet another attempt at blogging for me.. I have little doubt that this will turn out like the others and become pretty empty after a while, because I don’t really think I have much to say. However, we’ll try, and we’ll see.

Tags: , ,