Rubénerd!

A few observant readers have noticed Rubénerd has a new theme. Gosh!

Almost!

If you've been reading my ramblings for many years, you may recognise it! This theme is a rehash of the one I used for a few months in 2005, but with a cleaned up stylesheet. I also modularised all the the inline PHP I wrote, and wrapped up most of WordPress's API calls so I'm hoping it'll be more portable. *shudder*, PHP!

The irony is, at the time I didn't know much CSS, so the design was simple and basic. Now I consider simple and basic a feature not a liability, because its minimalistic :D. Its the reason why I love Apple hardware, and why if I were into sports cars I'd have an Audi TT. I don't care that it has a tiny engine and is apparently a girly car, its cute and minimalistic and awesome. But I digress.

There's a financial benefit too! My previous themes were 512KB, 434KB and 262KB, and this one is only 70. It may look silly to quibble over tiny kilobyte differences, but with several hundred unique visits an hour they add up pretty quickly. Like a boss. At some point I'll upload screenshots of these old ones, if only to remove all doubt that I made the right decision to be a developer/system designer and not a graphic designer ;).

So far most of the feedback I've received has been positive, with a couple of resoundingly negative ones. Oh well, se a vida é.

If you log into Wikipedia, there's a link in the top right corner that lets you try their new beta user interface. Don't know how long has it been there, I've never seen it before now.

I think the new theme does look classier despite being slightly less efficient with screen real estate. It also introduces an interesting new per-user "book" feature which you can add articles to.

UPDATE: It seems this book feature has been made available for general use in the sidebar not just for people participating in the beta.

I wonder if this new theme and new features will be made available for other MediaWiki installs? That be schweeet :D

Yes I only just posted this picture in a previous post talking about Debian, but I just have to come out and say purple and violet are some of the greatest colours in the world. That's okay to admit, isn't it?

I haven't had much time to theme this Gnome desktop yet, and heaven knows I'm not a Nurie, but I think the Crux icons and Unity GTK+ theme with 65% transparency in menu bars and Terminal windows for a purplish Mac OS X look is pretty swish.

Even with full composting on a heavy desktop environment like Gnome the system is still able to fly on my ThinkPad X40 which was built four years ago. That's something Windows 7 can barely pull off on similar hardware let alone Vista.

The background image is of course the awesome Senjougahara Hitagi from Bakemonogatari which I've been reviewing here. Interestingly enough if you do an image search for Senjougahara Hitagi on The Googles one of my posts is currently the third result on the first page. Apparently her fan club is small!

In response to Google Reader's altered interface that made it much more difficult to use, I've reluctantly started using Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser on my MacBook Pro again. My opinion that Camino is the single greatest Mac browser on the planet remains unchanged, but for the time being I need a browser that has Greasemonkey or other user scriptable capabilities so I can keep using Reader.

Having really only used the Firefox 3.x series lightly in the past, moving over to it now made my appreciate how un-Mac like the interface has become and how much extra screen real estate it takes up without any discernible extra functionality when compared to Safari or Camino with UnifyCamino. Fortunately Firefox is skinnable, so I figured I could make it look more like a Mac app and reclaim some screen real estate. Unfortunately there were so many different Mac-like skins in Mozilla.org's Add-on database I didn't know where to start!

ASIDE: I never thought I'd use the words "fortunately" and "skinnable" in the same sentence! It seems with Gmail, Google Reader and Firefox I'm using their skinning features to return them to a previous state when they were far more usable. It's kind of ironic when you think about.

After installing and uninstalling theme after theme (after theme after theme...), I narrowed down what I consider to be the best authentic looking Mac themes to this handful here.

Default Firefox 3.x theme

I figured I'd put the default Safari and default Firefox 3.x theme here for comparison.

GrApple Yummy Blue and Graphite

These themes by Aronnax from TakeBackTheWeb.org are perfect: they reclaim veritable swaths of screen real estate (say what?) and they make Firefox look Safari and Mac like. The Firefox team needs to include this as the default theme.

GrApple Delicious Blue and Graphite

Variations on the above themes with more traditional Mac tabs. I prefer the above because they're smaller and look more modern, but you may Think Different.

Camifox for 3.1b1 and for 3.0.x

This theme uses the same gorgeous colours and icons of Camino, though it takes up a bit more screen real estate. It certainly is tempting though :)