Last month we started using Campfire as our primary mean of internal communication. Being a little distributed team scattered over several places and  time zones we are using it not only as a group chat, but also as a collective stream of consciousness.

So far, so good. Except that sometimes we can’t coincide there, and whenever someone gets back, the room is littered with a lot of meta-clutter.

So I made a bookmarklet that will hide all that stuff and only shows the real important information and I’m sharing it here, just in case it’s useful for somebody.

[burn noise] <– Drag it to your bookmarks bar and try it.

It won’t work on IE.

Four months ago, entrepreneurs extraordinaire Andres Barreto and Jason L. Baptiste, contacted me about working on this new project: make a WordPress plugin that will make a site  look and behave like a native iPad app. After talking him into use my own framework, of course I said yes.

Look, I haven’t even seen an iPad at this point. I knew that was a problem, but I was not going to let a rich hipster guy steal me this opportunity. So I had to make it work with what I had: Safari 5 (which has just been  released with an iPad UA option) and the iPad simulator. Is funny, but the only chance I had to see my work running on an actual iPad was via a video that Jason sent me of him using his iPad every other morning.

Remote iPad Testing

So for the next month  I worked  very hard and came up with clever hacks to overcome this tiny limitation because we wanted to release before somebody else with the same idea and more resources. It was only after releasing the first version of the plugin that Andres and Jason graciously gave me a iPad, which was, btw, smaller and heavier than in my dreams.

Fast forward to yesterday, when we launched CoverPad, our second theme (which also got covered on TechCrunch) after three months of supporting and listening to our customers. So far, the reactions have been very positive (with one painful exception) and we are already looking into the future.

Our intention has been to stretch what CMS’s (WordPress in this case) and browsers are supposed to do, both on functionality and user experience. We are committed to keep doing it.

I’m very happy with what we’ve done, but please crash my ego and shatter my dreams with your criticism*.

* Not really. Please be nice

I’m working on a new theme for PadPressed which is quickly becoming more of a JavaScript app built on a thin slice of PHP rather than a regular theme.  It also uses a lot of Ajax, so I found myself creating DOM elements on the fly  a lot. Concatenated strings is something I grew up tired of very, very quickly.

So I thought of using some kind of templating engine. I liked mustache.js the most, which is supposedly  a minimal templating engine. I like the concept a lot, but It turns out that it’s not so minimal, at least it was too much for what I needed.

My necessities are very simple: I want to pass a template as a string with variable placeholders , an object, and receive a parsed template. No logic, no edge cases, just that. So I came up with this simple function:

I use it like this:

Granted, developing for one single platform is a rare luxury among web designers, so I’ve not tested it outside Safari/iPad but I’m leaving it here, just in case somebody finds it useful.