Got myself a new blog theme. The old one was getting…well…old. The design was made by Andrei Chirea. It’s still in beta. Some things may work “funny”, other may not work at all. Should work in Internet Explorer.

Suggestions are welcome!

As a Zend Framework user I use a lot the Zend_Form component to render my forms. I like it, it’s easy to use, pretty versatile and comes with lots of ready built filters and validators meant to make life easier. But the problems with Zend_Form begin when one tries to style it. Problem partially solved by the developers of ZF with the use of the decorator pattern.

Using decorators, the form’s elements can be wrapped in custom HTML tags and alter the way the form displays.

But in some cases, for example when you want each element of the form to have its custom markup, to have 3 elements on the first line and 2 on the second or you want to have all the errors grouped in a single area like in Drupal, the decorator pattern fails. Bad. What to do then? Stop using Zend_Form? Or hacking it? If the second choice sounds better, then keep reading Keep reading»

How will the future look? Here is Microsoft’s point of view:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

I consider Microsoft’s point of view to be very optimistic. I’m not sure that in only 10 we’ll reach that level of technology, and even if we do, there will be a lot of people that will reject it, due to traditions, personal convictions that it “was better back in the days”, religious beliefs and so on. And, before developing that technology, we should figure out some new energy sources, to have enough juice to power it all. But the ideas expressed in the movie are impressive, not the less…

Credits for finding the movie go to Radu.

Few days ago, I’ve watched a presentation on TED Talks about the computer’s user interface held by Anand Agarawala. It’s extremely interesting, so sacrifice 5 minutes of your lives and watch this video. It’s worth every second!

Impressive, isn’t it? But the question that pops in my mind is would I really like that kind of User Interface? I think not. Especially now, after I’ve gotten used to the point-and-click one. It’s like walking and driving a car, it’s natural and intuitively to walk but once I’ve learned to drive and interact with the car via its wheel, pedals and gear stick interface, any attempt to drive a car that was supposed to be handled with a revolutionary interface that would make driving similar to walking would quickly turn me in an even greater menace that I already am.

The interface is funny to use, but after a some time it gets boring. It could be more intuitive and help old people use the computer, but by the time this interface will be widely used, we will be the “old people”. I think it’s a very interesting experiment, just like dontclick.it was 5 years ago, but I doubt that will ever hit the market.

I’m waiting for the vocal computer interface, just like they had in Star Trek.