Junecloud

After a year and a half of work, I’m excited to present the first beta of Junecode 3.0, my web site content management system. In short it’s a piece of software that makes creating, editing, and maintaining a web site easier. You may know it better as Tense Code, which is what I was calling it until about a month ago. I’ll explain more about the name change in the future, but for now let’s talk about what’s new in Junecode 3.0. The list is very, very long, but here’s a quick rundown of the best of it:

• All new design and improved navigation. Many areas have been tweaked to make it easier to get around and edit your sites. It’s also fully optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch, so you can access nearly every feature from anywhere.
• Re-order categories just by dragging them around.
• Unlimited metadata. It’s now easy to add various extra fields to your entries. Add a text field for the music you’re listening to, a pop-up field for a star rating, a checkbox for whether or not you want a muffin right now, or anything else you can think of.
• Automatic Google Sitemaps.
• Fully customizable contact forms are now as easy as editing a template (which is as easy as editing HTML).
• Display RSS feeds on your site. (I use this along with the clippings feature in NetNewsWire to post news I find interesting on my site.)
• Bookmarklets (or Favelets) for quickly posting stuff you find online to your own site.
• Take your site down for maintenance with a couple clicks if you’re working on a new template, rearranging categories, etc.
• Improved features for dealing with spam: spam detection is improved. You can delete multiple comments at once. Moderation emails look nicer and they’re easier to use. Contact forms have spam detection and they’ll present a captcha if they’re suspect.
• Many different languages are now supported, including Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Junecode’s own text is presented only in English, but you can use it to create a site it any language now. Various special characters are automatically dealt with too, which makes life a lot easier if you’re pasting it text from a Word document, for example.
• Much better compatibility. Among other things, it longer relies on DOCUMENT_ROOT. I’ve tested myself on Dreamhost and GoDaddy servers, but it should work just as well with many other web hosts. Installation is much easier too!
• Optional caching. On average pages will load 3-4 times faster when they’re cached, because it’s just displaying a file instead of doing a ton of database lookups and parsing templates.
• Many many bug fixes and security enhancements.

Aside from all that, and all the little features I didn’t mention, there are a couple of other big things in the works:

• Online store support. Adding a product is now as easy as adding an entry. You add different formats for things like shirt sizes, CD vs. MP3, and so on.
• Download sales are supported so it’s easy to sell songs or other files online.
• Payments can be handled by PayPal or through the mail. PayPal Payments Pro is supported too, so you can accept credit cards directly on your site.
• FedEx can be used for automatic shipping calculation (or you can enter set prices for shipping if you prefer).
• Mailing list support. You can now manage all your contacts right alongside your site, and create beautiful HTML emails as easily as creating any other template. Custom tags are supported in emails so you can automatically insert your latest entries, products for sale, or whatever you want.

These store and mailing list features are not included in this beta. They’re currently undergoing a private beta, and they will only be available with a paid license. The rest of the software will continue to be free for personal and non-profit use!

Of course there’s also a new Dashboard widget for Mac users:

Aside from the new look, the widget also has some new features:

• You can now drop multiple files onto the widget at once (and then open them all in your browser with a single click).
• You can now copy the URLs of the uploaded files after they’ve uploaded (using command-c). Due to a bug in Dashboard this feature probably won’t work for most people right now, but once Apple updates Safari it should start working.

If you’d like to try it out you can download Junecode 3.0 beta below. I’ve been using this for a while now myself and I think it’s pretty solid. However it hasn’t been widely tested, so I recommend some caution. If you’re upgrading from Tense Code, I strongly recommend that you back up your database and your files before you proceed. Also please note that the help has not been updated yet. Most of it is still true, but you’ll probably find many things are missing or inaccurate.

Updated in beta 2 on November 12th, 2008

• The Junecode logo will now display correctly in Internet Explorer
• Miscellaneous bug fixes
• Added a juneindex:audio tag
• Added a hidden argument to the juneindex:files tag (a comma-separated list of file names to skip, including extensions but not paths)

Downloads

Download Junecode 3.0 beta 2 (see instructions for requirements)
Download Junecode widget 3.0 beta 2 (requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later)

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Moto Racer is a fun game with a few unfortunate flaws. Gameplay is simple: press the gas button to go and tilt the phone to steer. Occasionally some bad guys will swoop in beside you, and a punch button appears. At first the placement of the punch button seemed like a terrible design choice, because it’s on the same side as the gas. But then I realized it was intentional—it feels like a good approximation of how challenging it would really be to punch someone on a motorcycle. It adds a lot to the challenge.

The first big flaw is that the game doesn’t save your progress as you play, only when your game ends. If you unlock 3 levels and then hit the home button in the middle of the game, you’ll have to play those three levels over again. It’s even more frustrating if the game crashes while you’re playing. I didn’t mind replaying some levels, but after doing the same few levels a fourth time it got a bit tiresome.

The other big problem I had was that the game would sometimes think I’d driven off the track when I had just touched an upward slope on the side of the track. In most areas you can drive far up these inclines, and the inconsistency is a problem. In most areas the game is forgiving about driving off the course or into things, which is good as the controls can be tricky. The courses get more challenging as the game progresses. (On a side note, the game starts with the difficulty all the way up. I had to turn it down quite a bit to get past the first few levels.)

The graphics range from below average to great. Some tracks are impressive for the hardware while others are bland. The characters look awkward in a way that probably could have been improved on without affecting performance. The story frames between races are often entertaining (it involves a stolen kitten), but most are a single still frame with no animation. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be going on.

Despite my complaints I did have fun playing it, but as it is I’d simply call it an average game. If you’re dying for a racing game I’d recommend it, but otherwise I’ve found games like Critter Crunch, Tetris, and Trism are more fun and last longer.

Check out Moto Racer for iPhone in the iTunes

Updated review of NetNewsWire 1.0.7 on July 25th, 2008: What a difference a week makes! NetNewsWire has been updated, and the latest version addresses the worst of my complaints. Once you’ve read all the items in a feed it disappears from the main list, and there’s also an option to hide certain feeds or delete them entirely. Syncing is faster. When you tap the “Mark All as Read” button it now returns to the main list. If you follow a link to a web page it’s now a single tap to return to the news item. You can even make clippings of web pages, which is a great feature. (Worth noting: you can’t view your clippings in the app itself.) The app’s icon now shows your number of unread items too, but since this is only updated while you’re using the app, it’s fairly useless. (Once Apple has made background notifications possible, that should change.)

I still have some complaints, namely it isn’t possible to mark an item as unread, and collapsing or hiding the folders on the main list isn’t an option. The app is now a pleasure to use though, and I will no longer be using the NewsGator mobile site.

One caveat that I didn’t mention in my original review: this app is essentially useless if you don’t want to use one of NewsGator’s desktop apps or their web site to subscribe to your news feeds. I don’t see this as a problem really, but it’s worth pointing out.

Original review of NetNewsWire 1.0 on July 18th, 2008: 2 stars out of 5. NetNewsWire for Mac is one of my favorite apps, and I like it enough that I bought it even before it was free. It has a slick interface that makes going through hundreds of RSS feeds quick and easy. It also syncs with NewsGator, so I can keep my other Mac and my iPhone in sync, automatically.

NewsGator has a mobile site that’s optimized for the iPhone, and I’ve been using that for months. It’s not perfect but it’s nicely done. The main disadvantage is speed—if you’re on a crummy EDGE connection it can take a while just to see anything. It’s also a little clunky just because it tries to act like a real iPhone app, resulting in some slow animations. So I’ve been waiting anxiously for the launch of the App Store and NetNewsWire for the iPhone. Unfortunately I found the app so disappointing that I went straight back to NewsGator Mobile after a day of struggling with it.

The biggest problem is clutter on the main screen. I have roughly a hundred feeds, organized in folders by category. NetNewsWire for iPhone shows these folders, but doesn’t give you the option to collapse them—so you see both the feeds and the folders in one big list, making a long list even longer. The folders also show a total unread count for all the items inside, so if you have a single unread item, you’ll see two numbers. This is really frustrating if the feed with an unread item is at the end of a folder. I end up having to look around too much just to figure out if it’s something I actually want to read right now. On top of all this, read items never seem to disappear. NewsGator Mobile will only show feeds and items that haven’t been read, which works out much better on a tiny screen. It’d be nice to at least have the option. NetNewsWire for Mac only hides read items in a folder once you move to a different folder, which is perfect.

Finally, there’s no way to mark an item as unread after you’ve opened it. Often I’ll open an item, and then decide I want to read it later. You can save clippings, which helps a little, but I prefer not to use clippings for this purpose—I use them more like bookmarks, for things I’ve read but want to keep around.

I’m confident a future version of NetNewsWire will address my complaints, but for now I can’t recommend it unless you have a very small number of news feeds.

Check out NetNewsWire for iPhone in iTunes