I’m typing this in via the new iPhone-native WordPress app- and it’s damn impressive so far. No dashboard, minimal features, but it does exactly what I need it to right now- add and edit posts. And that helps me use the iPhone for exactly what I’d hoped I could- untethering me from desk and laptop for a change. F$@kin’ awesome.

I’ve been working pretty heavily since my paternity leave ran out exactly a month ago, and despite working from home a day or two a week since, can’t say that I’ve had nearly as much 1:1:1 time with Des and Devin as I did then. Given he was pretty much an adorable little red-haired lump of clay at that time, a lot’s changed since then.

And I’m basically writing this post in admiration for the work my wife’s put in since then. The reason it’s delayed is that I haven’t been able to see the fruits of her labor until now. Now sure, I’ve helped indirectly with most all of these items, but she’s the one that really put the hours in, and it’s very obvious now.

• Vocabulary: although Devin’s got about 6 words he uses regularly now (Mom, Dad, Cat, Ball, Baby, and of course No), he’s got at least 25 signs that he uses even more frequently, and I’m only just starting to realize it. My friend Julie extolled the virtues of teaching babies sign language early, and although I was always on board philosophically, it’s one of those parental tasks that takes a LONG time to glean results. When Devin busted his first sign on me a couple months ago (Milk), it came out of the blue, but was absolutely, positively communication. Since then, he’s been springing out with a few new ones every week, and starting to put them together into ‘micro-sentences’ (i.e. more + food + please). The part that’s blowing me away right now is the fact that he’d been using many of his new signs for a while before we realized it. Fine motor skills and precision are not a 1-year old’s strong suit, so many of the signs he was taught came back to us in a slightly modified if not exaggerated form. However, now that he knows it’s an effective way to ‘talk’ with us, he makes sure to let us know when he’s telling us something and we’re not getting it. If Des wasn’t so consistent in always using signs for key words along with her verbal communication, I’m reasonably sure he wouldn’t be so overflowing in ’speech’ right now. It’s just plain awesome!
• Fine Motor Skills: I’m pretty much the ‘read a story’ guy, and the ‘crawl around and chase each other’ guy. I made a comment to Des a few months back that I was wondering when he’d finally start using his stacking blocks and such, and she started setting two parts of the day aside (without me realizing it) to play with him in that regard. When she opens a bottle, she hands him the cap and lets him put it back on. When she needs something picked up from the floor, she asks him to please get it for her, and he’s all over it. I didn’t realize how well this was working until today, when he picked up a water bottle cap I dropped, got mad when I didn’t put it back on, and then proceeded to pick it back up from the end table and place it solidly on my water bottle. This is now manifesting itself with him actually cleaning up after himself, and placing toys back in the basket when he’s done playing. Again, amazing. The real-world tasks have apparently not just strengthened his motor skills, but his independence and responsibility, as he often now follows after US and picks things up that have been left behind.

I suppose I’m writing this as I feel a bit like an absent dad in parts of the process, but am now incredibly impressed with how well Des’ work and parenting has paid off while I’ve been bringing home the mortgage payment. The pivotal moment was today when he was making odd gestures at me and I had to be told that he was actually talking to me - in this particular case telling me about his stuffed bear, and I just thought he was scratching his chest.

Looks like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and appreciation to give. This really is a learning experience for everyone involved, and one I’m humbled daily to be a part of.

Hells yeah, OmniFocus for the iPhone will be location-aware by default, and should sync beautifully with OmniFocus back on the home office machine. Desktop OmniFocus is a masterpiece, but now it’s officially become legendary with a tightly-integrated parallel mobile version. What’s not to love?

[Read more at: The Omni Group - OmniFocus for iPhone and iPod touch]

It’s great to see innovative developers start to think about location-awareness with the newly announced iPhone 3G and not just on a superficial, fluffy level. Now if I’ve added a task to pick up more transmission fluid, I can see all the auto stores close to where I’m standing, and get a map/directions to them. It could theoretically know when I’m at home, and show me my home tasks specifically.

OmniGroup software tends to be a little on the spendy side, but I can attest that the attention to detail they put into each bit is worth every cent they charge. I was on the early betas of OmniFocus and it was amazing to see how quickly they iterated the software and with the care they did so- I can only imagine how slick it’ll be to finally carry my tasks with me on the iPhone and really use the hardware for it’s strengths, not just scan a basic list with a hacked OSX-to-touch quickie software port. Whatever it costs, I’ll be lining up at the App Store to get my copy of OmniFocus iPhone as soon as it hits the streets. W00t!

Today seems all about ownage. NPD market data for the console gaming industry was released for April, and it’s rather fascinating to slice up. Despite Microsoft’s skewed insistence that the Xbox 360 is “uniquely positioned” to “win the generation battle”, it was smacked down in NPD metrics by the Nintendo Wii (1st place), the Nintendo DS (2nd place) and the … get this … Sony PSP (Playstation Portable) making a strong third-place showing. That’s right - the 360 didn’t even pull the bronze medal this month.

Most of the problem is that Microsoft still seems to try and play number parity with the Wii and Playstation 3, yet was released almost a year before both. I can understand why they want to downplay the numbers, as it’s easy to get ahead with a 12-month headstart. However, the Wii is close to closing on the 360’s “lead”, so I’m not sure the Microsoft sandbagging is going to hold much longer.

Right-wing gasbag Kevin James gets his ass handed to him on Hardball by Chris Matthews. Wow. And over a pretty simple question for anyone who’s taken high school history, too. Note to James - might want to actually have facts to back up your yelling with, cause volume clearly does not equal brains.

Got the warning message 2 weeks ago that my California driver’s license was going to expire in about a month, but I wasn’t going to get off easy with a mail-in renewal this time. An actual DMV visit was mandatory, for the fingerprint/photo drill and of course to soak me for some cash.

If you’re anything like me, this spells disaster.

I’ve NEVER been in and out of a DMV in less than 2 hours for something like this (at least since moving to the Bay Area where everything’s busy), so the thought of carving said chunk of time out of a rather insurmountable daytime schedule wasn’t particularly thrilling. Then I saw the note at the bottom- I could set an appointment online! God bless them Intertubes. I visited their form, made a few clicks, and had an appointment set for 2pm the following Wednesday- i.e. today. After the confirmation message was displayed, I realized that I was still going to have to go to the Oakland DMV and probably sit around for an ungodly span of time just to get waited on, so have been dreading today all week. Particularly because this week has been an absolutely freakin’ insane one at work.

I’m shocked. My fears were totally unfounded.

I waited for about 3 minutes to ‘check in’ at the front desk, and things seemed like they were headed in a Southward direction almost immediately when my name wasn’t on the appointment list, a multi-page behemoth in 8-pt Helvetica the bored desk clerk listlessly scanned thru at least three times until I saw an odd entry on the third page that didn’t seem like a name - ASP. Come to think of it, they did build that server app in ASP (Active Server Pages), so WTF. I had her check the confirmation number, and sure enough- it was mine. Gleeful at not being shunned at the gate, I took my number and sat alongside all the other bored-looking patrons in the waiting area with a prime view of the Keno-esque queue monitor so I wouldn’t miss my number being called.

My ass was in the seat for about as long as it took me to fire up my Kindle and read the next paragraph in the book I’ve been devouring (Small Favor) before my number was flashing full screen above me. Much to the chagrin of my fellow wait-ees, I walked up to desk 10, handed them my form and 25 bucks, they sent me to desk 24 for a picture and thumbprint, and I was back in the Audi before I even knew what hit me, new temporary license in hand. I hit the freeway home and checked the clock as I set the parking brake- 2:25 pm.

I left the house at 1:50. That’s 35 minutes, door-to-door, for a DMV appointment. May not be a record for you, but it’s easily halving my next best time, which to me- is one amazing feat. I may just have to renew my faith in public services at some point here, cause I sure as f@#k didn’t see that coming. With the time I saved, I could still read the rest of that chapter in the sanctity of my own home, grab a quick bite from the fridge, and get back on the clock before my belated lunch hour expired.

Now THAT’S what a DMV appointment should be like. I’m impressed.

Although it’s long been rumored, today the news was officially delivered- GoLive will no longer be sold as of today (April 28th, 2008), and the focus will shift to Dreamweaver long-term for Adobe’s professional web design & development customers. This is news that I’m reasonably certain most GoLive users saw coming as far back as the CS3 launch- when Dreamweaver replaced GoLive in the Creative Suite packages - but it’s good to finally have an official word on the matter. GoLive (versions 5, 6, CS2 and 9) customers can take advantage of a $199 cross-grade special (same price as a Dreamweaver upgrade, basically) to pick up Dreamweaver CS3, which means there’ll be a lot of GoLive customers considering Dreamweaver now.

There’s been a lot of speculation on if and when this would happen - and if so, why - so I wanted to at least give a little perspective on this from my vantage point - as a long-time Dreamweaver team member - on two of the main concerns I’ve heard around Dreamweaver taking the helm of our web design products.

Lack of Competition

Ever since the Macromedia acquisition, I’ve heard the pretty regular concern that Adobe’s competitors were systematically being eliminated, leaving the competitive landscape around our products bleak and quite frankly - non-competitive. Honestly, I couldn’t see that more differently - competitors are all around if you care to look for them- from lightweight web design/development apps like Coda, CSSEdit and others, to full-blown IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. For design-centric web developers, apps like Freeway and the reasonably-newer Expression Web are viable options. GoLive was a worthy competitor, but lately we’ve even more competing tools to consider as we build out Dreamweaver’s roadmap, not less. That can only be a good thing for the competitive web design landscape - and Dreamweaver’s future within it - in my opinion.

Coders vs Designers

Web design has increasingly become a more technical discipline over the years, and Dreamweaver’s secret to success was always to follow what the pro web designers were doing on a project and workflow basis, and enable that within our tools. We occasionally hear criticism that Dreamweaver isn’t ‘WYSIWYG enough’, or needs to support more drag-and-drop features and get away from the code. But that’s not what the pro web design market has been telling us - web design is not like print design, or even Flash design. When was the last time you needed to hack your InDesign files to print correctly on that one, finicky printer? Web browsers are OUR printers, and they sure as heck don’t always play as nicely with one another- let alone render the same way even on the best of days. Visual tools can get you 90% of the way there with the current browser landscape- but that remaining 10% of your headache is almost always code-based- a browser hack inserted into the stylesheet or perhaps some judicious markup-juggling to get that layout working correctly. And when this bites you, you absolutely, positively, have to have access to your code. Plain and simple. Sure, a lot of print designers have become accustomed to GoLive’s more visual model, but at the end of the day Dreamweaver has to serve it’s primary market - professional web designers and developers - and the market spoke quite loudly on that subject years ago. We’re just following their lead, honestly.

But I’m sure there’s lots of good ideas to consider now too, do you have favorite GoLive features that you’d like the DW team to consider going forward? If so, please use our bug/wish list form here to send them in for consideration (always the most direct path to getting a request into the teams here, FYI):

http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

So What’s Next?

This will undoubtedly be a period of transition as there’s a lot of GoLive users who are now considering Dreamweaver, and we’d like to make sure that your transition’s a smooth one. I strongly recommend checking out the resources we’ve made available at the following URL:

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/switch

These include:

• The GoLive to Dreamweaver migration extension - helping you convert the structure of your legacy sites to a format that can be imported and managed by Dreamweaver.
• GoLive to Dreamweaver Site Migration guide - written by GoLive experts Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo.
• Training Video from Lynda.com - giving tips and tricks for getting up to speed quickly with Dreamweaver, including the migration process

Indeed, there’s a lot of areas of difference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, but hopefully these bits of info will help you make the most sense of them quickly.

For the Dreamweaver team, we’ve already seen many of the GoLive engineers join our ranks, who are all contributing quite a bit to the next release of Dreamweaver already. It’s been a pretty smooth transition internally, and is resulting in one amazing team. However, I realize that this news may be much more upsetting to you, but sincerely hope that the the transition is as painless as possible. Let us know how we can help?

Wow. Amazing.

So, I’m going to attempt to ingest all my Movable Type entries directly into WordPress 2.5, and hope for the best. My understanding is that tags will be a pain, but the rest should be relatively straightforward (knock wood).

I love my MT, but have to admit the dynamic/PHP nature of WordPress’ siren song has pulled me in for a closer look. Let’s see where this all goes?

Update: so far it seems OK, but I’m still getting random 404s/errors when clicking into individual post pages, and unfortunately the tags did not transfer, as I’d feared. 9 years of tagging down the drain is a bit hard to swallow, honestly- that may end up being a deal-breaker honestly. If you stumble across this site - and post - please feel free to bang around a bit, and let me know if you see any other weirdnesses (aside from the dismal default template I’ve got applied right now)?