We certainly didn’t invent this dynamic motion thing here at Broke Ass. There’s definitely a name or two of companies out there in the industry doing the same thing we’re talking about, but the difference is they’re not providing it to the little guy.

Also, the forums over at OnePress are starting to get some activity now that I fixed a permissions issue for registered users. Be sure to hop on those to get involved or speak your mind.

I’ve been to Amazon.com so many times, but today I noticed something that really struck me funny. Because I’m still logged into the site from a previous session, they greeted me (like any well planned website should.) However, there exists this precarious link “Not Sean?” In this case, if I clicked my name, the site would log me out of my account. Why? In the web world, my account username, as a link, should be a link that takes me to my profile page. On the other hand, if the link included the word “Not” and read “Not Sean?” then I would expect the site to trigger the action intended for a user who is not Sean, which would be to log me out.

Bad design pattern? Some would call this a nit-pick but I believe in the world of usability, it’s about getting all these little things right and following convention. In other words, don’t surprise the user and trick them into logging themselves out.

No more wrestling with content management systems.

Through my years of creating and running web sites, I’ve run the gamut of content management systems. From hacking up Greymatter to adopting WordPress in its earlier stages (version 1.5) to coding my own from scratch, I have spent a lot of time working with these types of systems. After a while, you really start to identify the weaknesses and long for certain functionality to make creating a site easier and your everyday publishing workflow stronger. Then, you throw in this monkey wrench: How do I integrate my site with a forum (or bulletin board) system? That is not so easy. Today, there are many sites out on the net that use a forum system in conjunction with their content; however, in most cases, it feels disconnected. We needed a solution. Here’s where OnePress Community comes in. We, at PushButton Labs, have been building the solution to the aforementioned issues of establishing professional presentation, enhancing publishing workflow, and providing community integration.

Built on top of WordPress.

Let’s face it, WordPress sits as the king of the self-publishing platforms available to site owners. The system serves as a great starting point to building your site, but we wanted to take it further. With OnePress, we have harnessed the expansive capabilities of WordPress by building an easy to use, easy to customize theme framework. This framework sits on top of WordPress and provides numerous improvements and added functionality. Think of it not just as a theme or plug-in, but instead as an uber add-on for WordPress that opens up the platform’s potential as a content management system and beyond.

What OnePress can do for you.

OnePress has a large number of features that, together, make up the framework’s power. With features such as a fully widgetized layout, impressive featured posts widgets, a drag and drop layout selector, sidebar widget copying and pasting, and login/presentation integration with the phpBB forum system, it’s now easier than ever to build a professional community site with a workflow that makes sense! It takes advantage of new functionality in WordPress version 2.7, intended for child theme inheritance, allowing you to easily create themes that draw from OnePress. In building this framework, we solved many common WordPress complaints and made it easy for you to customize your site and publish your content the way you want.

Our goal was focused–enable the average blogger to create a professional site containing the functionality of the web’s most powerful content sites (such as ESPN.com or The Wall Street Journal) and provide the ability for a forum system to be integrated into that site.

Read the official introduction of the OnePress Theme Framework and download for free from the official site, onepresscommunity.com.

OnePress Community is a free theme framework for WordPress licensed under GPL.

The Problem. Gamma correction is a feature of .png files that is supposed to benefit the user in that when the image file is rendered, the application handling the render is to interpret data stored in the .png file and adjust its display accordingly. This is also inherently the issue. With the latest round of browsers, this gamma information is discarded, except in Internet Explorer. Because of this, what you end up with is the scenario in which CSS colors do not correctly match those colors in the image. This is due to the fact that the gamma is being corrected on the image but not on the CSS.

The Solution. After doing some searching, I found an application, called PNGGauntlet, that actually optimizes .png files and strips the gamma information out of the file, causing each browser to render the image the same.

Here’s my example in which I was working with a gradient background PNG that ends in a green color that is to be picked up and continued by the CSS background-color attribute. Note the darkness of the background image in the Internet Explorer example before using PNGGauntlet. Once I optimized the background graphic with my new tool, the colors matched up great in all my test browsers.

Further Exploration: Browser Gamma-Consistency Test, The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”

With a lot of languages, the checks and balances I speak of might be something as straightforward as a compiler. If your code doesn’t compile, you obviously have some issues to which you need to tend. If your role as a developer is in a more institutional setting your code may be subject to a gauntlet of hungry QA engineers, waiting to slap bug slips on your forehead as if you were some sort of heathenish criminal for submitting anything other than flawless code to their domain. While these are both tried and true extremes of probing your semi-colon drenched labors for faulty wiring, as a web developer, I feel we deal with a much more villainous system—multiple web browsers.

If you’ve ever spent any time around a web developer at all, you know what I’m talking about. Get within feet from their office or sit across the coffee shop from their squatting location and you’ll continually hear the phrases “I $@#%* love Microsoft”, “#@$! you Internet Explorer”, and my personal favorite “You’ve got to be kidding me, that’s obviously cached somehow.” And while it’s awfully painful to spend a couple of hours writing your latest piece of JavaScript, only to have IE6 bash it down like a kid at the fair playing the whack-a-mole game, it’s also enlightening; and let’s face it, it keeps us honest.

Case in point. I was working earlier today on a piece of code to handle some visual effects for a OnePress widget. Seeing the end of my task in sight, I decided against retooling my methods that I had so carefully crafted months ago and went down the path of twisting some of my properties to quickly accomplish the task. F5. Firefox works. Perfect. Now for a quick test in Internet Explorer and I’m on my way to the coffee refill station. “#@$! you Internet Explorer!!!”

I let out a nice sigh, the kind I’m sure Rick gets a little restless of hearing when I enter this land of frustration… But after a few minutes of staring at my work and dreading having to go back to square one, I decided that there was indeed a better way to approach my task. I blasted away on my code for the next ten or fifteen minutes, thinking that I may need to break for caffeine sooner than later, but I really wanted to push through. Finally, Ctrl+S and VOILA! I had correctly implemented my ideas and it felt good. I had accomplished my task the right way and all of my test browsers agreed.

Now here’s an awesome case of this system checks and balances pushing me to get things accomplished the way they should’ve been from the get go. Had Internet Explorer not sqwaked at me so violently, I probably would have committed my code, although 100% functional, not completely optimal. At times like this it feels good to have the competency to regroup and make another go at it. I looked at Rick and said, “Man, we web developers really do have a system of checks and balances to go through; but it totally works.”

Building for the web can be tough. Building for web browser can be tough. And that’s why good code prevails. Especially when working with JavaScript, shortcuts are a terrible idea. When you start messing around with DOM element styles and other items that could potentially be browser specific, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. If you find yourself going down that road, take a quick stretch and think about the other paths. Keep your mind set on making it through the browser gauntlet with what will eventually be the most robust solution.

It’s great to be working with such a strong team of professionals, all masters in their primary trades and beyond.

Founding partner, Jeff Tunnell, has formally announced the start up over as his blog, Make It Big In Games.  Tim Aste has also written up a brief account of what went into getting the site launched.

The official Push Button Labs website, as well as this site, are built on top of the OnePress Community theme built for WordPress.  We are currently in the early stages of getting it out the door, so more to come on that later.

Anyways, lots of exciting things around the corner for our company, so you’ll have to stay tuned to hear more about our interests in Open Source, Flash, and WordPress.

Make great products with people that we want to work with, and have fun doing it!

To learn more about the Push Button Labs team, you can read the company’s biographies here.