In my quest to understand all things interface related I stumbled across this TED Talks video of Beau Lotto. His insight into optical illusions and how our brain processes the visual information it receives is well worth the 15 minute watch.

A while back I posted some concept pages for digital download software I wanted to create. It’s a project that got sent to the backburner and never revived.

Now I’m back in need for such a solution and I simply don’t have the time to build it myself yet. I’ve searched high and low and come close to a solution but nothing seems that robust, so I ask: Are there no good digital download solutions?

My needs:

• Use PayPal IPN to handle payments.
• Manage digital downloads.
• Handle recurring subscriptions.
• Handle affiliate tracking.

e-junkie comes close, but they don’t handle any recurring subscriptions whatsoever. So if you know of something that will solve my problems (please don’t say os-commerce) please let me know!

And that’s how I feel about it. I’ve expressed my displeasure with the WordPress.org plugin repository before, (it’s gotten slightly better since then) but now it’s time to gripe about the theme directory — and it sucks.

I’d like to post a few themes from Bustatheme.com to the directory, but I have a few issues as do nearly every other WordPress theme developer that offer premium WordPress themes for free. There’s a reason we all offer our themes from our own sites: We work hard and strain our brain of all its creative juices when producing AAA themes and we’d like to benefit from that hard work.

I’ll start with the WordPress mission statement as it is laid out on the the WordPress theme directory about page:

The goal of our themes directory isn’t to have every theme in the world, it’s to have the best. WordPress is Open Source, and all the themes we host here are Open Source. If you want your theme to be proprietary or promote things that violate WordPress’ license on your site, the directory probably isn’t the best home for your work.

There are a number of issues with that statement. Firstly:

The goal of our themes directory isn’t to have every theme in the world, it’s to have the best.

Failed. Let’s not leave out the obvious: Other than the very few exceptions, the themes available for download on WordPress.org are average at best. Most of them are poorly structured and offer very little in the way of progressive UI design.

Lastly, we have the ubiquitous “we’re open source” declaration:

WordPress is Open Source, and all the themes we host here are Open Source. If you want your theme to be proprietary or promote things that violate WordPress’ license on your site, the directory probably isn’t the best home for your work.

There are many that will argue that WordPress is free and we should be so generous as well. Automattic — the company behind WordPress — is not so philanthropic. Open-source just happens to be their business model. It benefits them to offer WordPress for free, and it further benefits them to offer plugins and themes on their site for free. For them to require the same of the people that add value to their product is selfish. If you provide a quality theme for free to WordPress users, you should be able to specify a few things. Which leads me to the gripes I have:

1) The first and most important gripe I have is that if I want to share my theme on wordpress.org I need to upload it to wordpress.org where it will subsequently be downloaded from wordpress.org by anyone who wants to use it — completely bypassing my site. There are legitimate reasons for this, but I’m not here to argue on their behalf. If I spend the time to make the theme, I’d like (the option to push) the traffic to my site. Whether I’m displaying ads or offering paid themes, most of the time a good designer makes a theme for free is so they can benefit from it in another way. A link back to the authors site just doesn’t cut it.

2) Let’s face it, most of the best themes for WordPress aren’t even themes that are meant to be used as blogs. They’re news sites, video sites, portfolios and sites that use WordPress as a general CMS. Forcing us to use the wordpress.org theme viewer with its strictly-for-blogs content is completely counter-productive if your goal is “to have the best”. Not giving us the option to provide a link to our own demo prevents us from displaying our themes as they are meant to be used.

For now if you want high quality themes, it’s off to Google, WP ZOOM, Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Blog Perfume, Bust A Theme or any number of hundreds of authors sites that offer great WordPress themes for free. Until wordpress.org changes a few things expect to find more of the same-old-same-old.

Let me preface this post with the fact that I am not an iPhone App reviewer, and I didn’t take the time to check out every possible option for every function I needed. These are the iPhone Apps I bought for the purposes listed below. If you have another App that does the same something better, let me know in the comments section.

For IRC: Rooms
One way I stay constantly connected to my developers is through IRC. If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that if you need IRC on your iPhone, you need Rooms.

For FTP: FTP On The Go
As far as an FTP client for the iPhone, FTP On The Go is pretty much your only choice. At $9.99 it’s on the upper end of the price spectrum, but well worth it in my opinion. Manage multiple FTP accounts: download, edit and upload. My only complaint with this app is the built-in text editor: There is (currently) no option to turn off word-wrapping which means any structure you have to your markup is useless and it makes editing files more dubious than it already is.

For VNC: Mocha VNC
Just the look on peoples faces when you log into your PC from your iPhone is worth it alone. I can’t count the number of times Mocha VNC has saved me from having to travel home to grab a file, get a piece of info or start a download so it’s ready when I get home. I use RealVNC on my PC’s and no-ip to make sure I can access my desktop and notebook at all times.

For SSH: TouchTerm
It’s SSH for the iPhone. Nuff said.

For File Sharing: Discover or AirSharing
The idea behind both these apps is to allow you to use your iPhone as a wireless thumb drive, and they both work fairly well. Discover is free and a good option. AirSharing offers a few more features for $4.99 and is worth the money. There are quite a few apps in this arena though, and I’d be interested to hear what apps others have used.

For PC Control: AirMouse
This one’s just plain cool and convenient if you like to hook your PC up to your TV or Projector and site back on the couch without a keyboard and mouse. Once set up, you can use your iPhone as a touchpad and keyboard to control your PC(s). It makes web browsing from the couch much more accessible. There is a 3d Mouse option, but it’s gimmicky and hardly useful. Regardless, this is one cool App.

Bonus: FoxMarks
I use the FoxMarks FireFox plugin to keep my bookmarks and passwords synchronized between my desktop and notebook, so it would make sense that I’d like the bookmarks on my iPhone kept up-to-date too. Unfortunately the one app that tries to do this, doesn’t do it very well. FoxMarks however, has an iphone specific site that works quite well for viewing your bookmarks. From your iPhone, go to http://my.foxmarks.com/ and add the bookmark to your home screen. Easy peasy.

Got an iPhone App to add to the list? Let me know about it below.

I’ve been wanting to make a simple script that was entirely self-contained for a while now, but I haven’t been sure on exactly what I wanted to do. Something I’ve done more times than I care to count is write code that reads a directory and displays the files in some form or fashion. It’s something I know inside and out so I figured why not make a directory listing script that uses icons to represent individual file types and embed those images into the script itself. So I started coding.

A few hours later I had an embarrassingly polished script I felt deserved it’s own page. I’ve commented the code as thoroughly as possible, but if you have any questions please ask below.

Project Page: Greg-J.com/phpdl
Demo URL: PHPDL
Download: phpdl.zip

Warning: If this post sounds much more sinical than usual, it’s because the lack of attention this particular area of software has received from the OS community is unacceptable and half-arsed attempts make it all the more frustrating.

While I’m intrigued with the possibilities a social network script built on WordPress MU could potentially offer, I find the overall goal and ambition of the BuddyPress project completely underwhelming. A FOSS social network sounds great - since a decent open source solution for social networks simply doesn’t exist yet (note: the one that had the most chance was phpizabi, but the project died over a year ago. Probably because it’s complete crap) - but I’m failing to see the point of BuddyPress. If I’m going to start a social network with even a mediocre feature set, BuddyPress isn’t going go get me there.

I’m going to hold off final judgment until 1.0 ships, but at this point I’m less enthused than I was when I first found I’d be able to make a social network with BuddyPress.

Criticism is no good unless it’s constructive, but there isn’t enough of the project finished for me to go there. I know all to well how much can change between a day before release and release do, so when you’re as far out as they are from a final product there’s conjecture. My advice at this point would simply be “focus on making the site more interactive”.

I’ll check in when they launch along with every other blogger in the world and set up a test site. I’m mostly looking forward to releasing a free buddypress theme (it’ll exist when the theme exists) based on a social network design I’ve had finished for a while now though. I may begin work on it before completion actually, so stay tuned.

So this is kind of cool. SkeletonCMS has been included on OpenSourceCMS.com.

I’ll definitely have to spend some time to flesh it out, but since it’s an official OSS project, those of you who would like to contribute to the Skeleton flat file CMS please leave me a message.

You know when you start off reading your morning feeds and happen to click on a link, then another, then you have no idea how you got to the site you ended up at but you’re glad you did? Such is the case with todays afternoon dose of rss for me and it landed me on everystockphoto.com. This site is awesome. Think iStockPhoto without the i - that is if i somehow stood for “costs money”…

I’m a big fan of rss. I’ve probably racked up about 100 hours in developing test sites and services in the past two months that are based on rss. I’m guessing the people behind everystockphoto.com feel the same way because that’s how this site works. See, they don’t actually host these images. They’re (presumably) getting feeds from many different sites that offer photos with royalty free licensing - such as Flickr, stock.xchg and a slew of other sites I’ve never heard of - and creating the worlds largest free photo database. Needless to say, it’s awesome.

I’m not offended easily nor do I find anything offensive about the naked human body. Most of us creative types aren’t. But if you are, careful what you search for. Tons of naked people from tasteful black and whites to dongtastic (awesome word, no?) snapshots of naked buddies in the surf grace the pages. This probably isn’t worth the mention but putting naked people in the title got a lot of you to click the link so I owed it to you.

I’d love to round this out with a half dozen or so more free sites, but the community at MySpacePros.com has spent the last year doing that for us. If you want the most comprehensive list of designer resources check out the Design Resources thread at MSP.