Akra’s DevNotes

As I mentioned a while ago, I'm now using a MacBook Pro. All is going well, and I like Mail.app's search and data detectors very much. There are some niggles though that I miss from Thunderbird. My top 3 are:

* GPG integration (Thunderbird's Enigmail)
* Mail.app's insistence on attached PDFs and images inline
* Filing mails to arbitrary folders using the keyboard (Thunderbird's nostalgy)

It turns out that there are solutions to all three issues for OS X's Mail.app:

* GPGMail from Sente. (Not for Leopard, yet though)
* Mail Attachments Iconizer from Lokiware
* MsgFiler from tow.

I had found GPGMail a while ago and I"m looking forward to the Leopard release. In the meantime, I am getting by using the Services->GPG menu. I only learnt about the other two by accident.

Lokiware is sponsoring the Daring Fireball RSS feed this week and John Gruber's write up about this event, pointed at Dan Frakes’s Macworld article which not only persuaded me to download Mail Attachments Iconizer also mentioned MsgFiler too.

I've bought both! Clearly sponsoring DF's RSS feed is worthwhile :)

Now, I'm trying to decide if I should buy Yojimbo…

Zend Framework 1.5 has now been released to mark the occasion I have significantly updated my Zend Framework Tutorial! The tutorial was first released on 16th August 2006 and was written against version 0.1 of Zend Framework and had one major revision to bring in support for the ViewRenderer component.

The new tutorial produces exactly the same application as before, but now uses the new 1.5 goodies of Zend_Form and Zend_Layout, so you can see how these key components fit into a Zend Framework MVC application.

As always, when you find bugs and typos, please let me know and I'll fix them!

On Tuesday, PHPWM had a meeting at PSL Connect's offices where Darren Beale talked about Symfony.

I took a few pictures and have stuck them up on Flickr. I should have taken my other lens though as the 50mm isn't wide enough for taking pictures in room!

It was a very good talk that covered the basics of Symfony and what it can do. At the start, Darren asked us which frameworks we use and pretty much everyone used a different one! He then went though how Symfony worked and we got to see some code in action too. It was a nice step up from Ian's talk at the PHP UK Conference.

Afterwards we had a drink down the pub which was good :)

One thing I get asked a lot about at work is site stats. Usually, the client wants to know how many visitors they get on any other day along with other data such as where the visitors came from and which search terms they may have used.

So far, I've used Google Analytics and PHPMyVisites JS based logging along with Analog on the logs themselves. I've also experimented with Mint on one site.

Generally, I've found that Analytics requires lots of drilling down to find anything, PHPMyVisites can be a little simplistic (though it is getting more features with each release) and Mint doesn't provide enough history.

Are there better solutions out that that are cost-effective for relatively small clients?

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

From Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8.

This is good news all round. It's nice to see that Microsoft have listened to the comments surrounding their original intention to make IE8 render like IE7 by default. Well done!

The PHP UK Conference in London is over for another year and this year's event was another evolutionary improvement on last year's. It was held in Inmarsat's conference facilities in the City of London. There were two conference rooms in use: a 300 seat main auditorium and a smaller 75 seat second room. There were also a large social area for food, drinks and networking. I thought it worked really well, kudos to Paul Morgan and the rest of PHPLondon for the organisation.

Lunch!

The day kicked off with a talk by Ivo Jansch on "Enterprise PHP". Ivo is an engaging speaker and talked about designing and building PHP applications with a more structured approach for long term benefits. After the break, the conference split into two tracks with Scott MacVicar & Mike Sullivan talking about their development experiences and Stefan Esser talking about security. I have to admit that I missed both these talks as I was talking too much with Lorna and Kathryn at the PHPWomen stand. I've been "talking" with Lorna on IRC and via blogs for a little while now, and it was great to meet her in person along with Kevin, her better half. They had t-shirts which were snapped up and I got one of the last ones and it wasn't even lunchtime. (I hope my donation at least covered its cost!) Here's a picture Dave the codemonkey and an elePHPant wearing a phpwomen t-shirt:

PHPWomen t-shirts

Lunch was excellent too (Beef Stroganof for me) and I caught up with the PHP West Midlands people. We have a meeting in couple of weeks on 11th March, by the way. After lunch Marcus Bointon talked about mail whilst Scott MacVicar talked about SQLite3. Again, I managed to miss this slot, but I understand that both were well received and covered their subject well. The next slot in the main room was the Frameworks comparison with Ian Christian (Symfony), Toby Beresford (CodeIgniter) and myself (Zend Framework). We each had 20 minutes to present a bit about our framework and then there was a Q&A session afterwards. I thought it went okay. I was very nervous whilst speaking and so talked too fast. Fortunately, I had enough slides to cover and finished at the 20 minute mark. Ian and Toby gave very different talks but both covered their respective frameworks strengths. I thought that the Q&A went well and none of us embarrassed ourselves which was nice!

Whilst we were speaking, Zoe Slattery gave a talk on testing PHP and then Anthony Phillips talked about IBM's Project Zero. I wanted to see both of these, so I'm looking forward to the MP3s that the conference will be providing. The conference was wrapped up by Derick Rethans who talked about how PHP and usage of PHP has changed since he first started working with the language. It was funny and informative and it was interesting that pretty much all the questions afterwards were on testing.

All in all it was a great conference and I'm looking forward to next year's.