Clazh » Web-Development

Microsoft We Screwed Up Windows Mobile, iPhone Competitor Silverlight Mobile 2010

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:51:44 +0000

I just returned from the round table discussion Microsoft MVPs and MVP Alumni had with S. Somasegar the Senior Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, at the Sheraton Hotel in Chennai. I was the first person to land there and the only one dressed up casually in a T-Shirt and Jeans not surprising since most of the MVPs had regular jobs or worked as developers for companies.

S. Somasegar VP at Microsoft

Its very rare to see an executive of such high level come down to meet with developers and mix and mingle with them. Its people like Somasegar who connect and engage with the community that increases the appeal Microsoft has as a Company and separates them from Apple or Google. A down to earth person he candidly answers all the questions that were fired at him.

He began by explaining Microsoft’s Vision and how they always plan and develop things which would be relevant 5 years down the line, the next version of .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, new features introduced the completely redesigned UI based on WPF for the IDE. Most of the discussion centered around .NET and the developer tools. But Missing from the whole talk was Windows Mobile. While I been a .NET developer for 3 years before I quit to become a freelancer, I was more interested in what Microsoft was doing with Silverlight and its Mobile Platform, and how they were looking to compete with the iPhone OS and Android Platform.

Yes We Screwed up with Windows Mobile

I pointed out Windows Mobile and the lack of innovation and stagnation with regards to features, User Experience, Design and interface his answer was extremely candid and frank. “Yes we screwed up Windows Mobile, and let it stagnant. In fact you are being very polite in pointing this out.” He went to say how the initial vision of Windows Mobile had been long term and well planned but along the way the lost the game.

Microsoft Secret Plans For Windows Mobile, Silverlight for Mobile

While he was very mum and secretive about what Microsoft had planned for Windows Mobile, he did let out that a few things about what Microsoft was doing for the mobile platform, they had revamped the whole Windows mobile team and rebooted the process similar to what they had done with Windows Longhorn. I see it more like a comparison of what happened with Windows Vista Vs Windows 7.

Some of the Key Points he made were.

Rebooted Windows mobile Strategy.
Brand New Windows Mobile Team
Microsoft is laying its bet on SilverLight
Silverlight for mobile will be the competitor for iPhone and Andriod.
Silverlight for Mobile will be announced at MIX 2010

Things Microsoft got wrong

They are too late in the game.
They are taking too long to come out with a competing product and keeping with the trends.
Billions spent on R&D hard to believe nothing concrete on the Mobile front has come out yet
Clear Disconnect between Microsoft Design team and products. Do they even have a Design R&D team?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software, Technology Tags: iPhone, Microsoft, Mobile, Software, Web-Development

10 Free Web Design Icons For Download, Used On This Web Site

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:32:28 +0000

I thought I would review and showcase some of the beautiful Icons that I made use of while designing this web site. I redesigned the site a week back and have made extensive use of various icons across the site. All the icons featured on this site are freely available for download and can be used for both commercial and personal use. Some of the icon designers require you to link back to their blog or web site. Using icons while designing your web site, blog or web application not only helps to increase the usability of the user interface by providing visual cues to the user, but also makes your design look more pleasing in terms of the look and feel. Its important that the Icons you use convey the right visual cue to the user. The iPhone is a great example of an application which makes extensive use of Icons. Computer users are very familiar with the use of icons especially the ones that they come across everyday in their day to day use. With the onslaught of so many social networking sites, each brand is now associated with their own colours, logos and icons. Some common examples are Apple, Windows, and Google.

Here are 9 + 1 Icon sets and collections that I used on this site and 1 bonus icon collection that I contemplated using for the design.

Social Network Icon Pack

Social Network Icon Pack By Komodo Media. These icons are really quite popular and have become common place. Designed by the awesome Rogie King. It contain a extensive list of icons in 16px and 32px for the most popular social networking sites on the internet. These 16px Icons are really crisp and sharp.

Social Networking Icons

Download the Social Network Icon pack

The Oxygen icon theme

An Open Source Icon Them, the Oxygen icon theme was initially started by David Vignoni, then a number of other designer joined in to create an Icon Theme for the KDE Desktop. The icons are a collection of different works from different designer. While there is no official download package you can download it from the Ubuntu repository.

Oxygen Icon Theme

Download the Oxgen Icon Them Note: Download the Deb Package and use 7-zip to unzip and extract the contents.

iPhone style sidebar icons

These pretty Icons were created by Susumu Yoshida. I found it while hunting around for 16px Icons.

iPhone Toolbar Icons

Download the iPhone Style Sidebar Icons

The Crystal icon theme

Another Open source Icon theme created by Everaldo and a list of few other designers designed exclusively for Linux. These icons are very Popular and have been ported to Windows and the Mac too.

Crystal Icon Theme

Download the Crystal icon theme

Danish Royalty Free Icons

Create by the famous now retired Icon designer, Jonas Rask of Denmark, these are a list of Icons designed exclusively for the Web and for use in web applications.

Danish Royalty Free Icons

Download Danish Royalty Free Icons

Web Injection Icons

Web Injection Icons Designed by Jonatan Castro from Galicia, Spain. A small collections of web icons.

Web Injection Icons

Download the Web Injection Icons

Toolbar Icons Starter Kit

A small set of web Toolbar Icons, created by Kombine, contains about 45 Icons in the set.

Kombine Toolbar Icons Kit

Download the Toolbar Icons Starter Kit

Glyphish Icons for iPhone Applications

A collection of 130 icons for iPhone applications. Created by Joseph Wain. Has been used in a large number of popular iPhone Applications.

Glyphish iPhone Icons

Download the Glyphish Icons for iPhone Applications

DelliPack 1 & 2 Icons

A small set of generic web Icons created by Dellustrations.

Dellipack Icons

Download the Dellipack 1 & 2 Icons

MinIcons Set

Though I didn’t use any of these Icons to round of the number to 10 I included MinIcons Set by Asher Abbasi.

Mini Icons

Download the MinIcons Set

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Featured, Web-Design Tags: Download, Free, Icons, UX, Web-Design, Web-Development

Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta, New Features In IE8

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:20:43 +0000

Updated Post with more new under the hood features of IE 8.

In the recent news it was announced that IE 8 Passes the ACID 2 test and will render in standard mode by default. The folks at Neowin have managed to uncover links to Internet Explorer 8 Download page and also a list of upcoming features in IE 8.

Here is the link to download Internet explorer 8 beta 1 and a list of new features in IE 8.

Note: The download links currently don’t work try them later.

Below are the list of new features found in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Whats New For Users

Activities

Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

WebSlices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows^®Internet Explorer^® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Improved Phishing Filter

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

Whats New For Developer

Better AJAX Development

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer is offline.
Connectivity events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.
Six connections per host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked to a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimize their downloads based on a scriptable property.
XMLHTTPRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.

Cross-domain communication is an integral part of AJAX development and mashup Web applications. Internet Explorer 8 includes two features to help you build cross-domain communications that are safe and easy to implement:

With Cross-domain Request (XDR), developers can create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this request, called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure and fast.
Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.

DOM Core Improvements

Internet Explorer’s object model does not distinguish properties from attributes. This makes it impossible for a property (.href) to return a different value than an attribute (getAttribute(’href’)).
Core attribute operations are broken: Getters and setters behave inconsistently given certain parameters. An oft-cited example is getAttribute(’style’), which returns the style object rather than a string as expected.

Internet Explorer 8 fixes many of the cross-browser inconsistencies in these two areas. Specifically, the following bugs in core areas have been fixed:

Separate URL handing for properties and attributes such that relative URLs can be retrieved via an attribute and absolute URLs can be retrieved via a property.
Fix element’s attribute array modifiers—getAttribute, setAttribute, and removeAttribute have cross-browser compatible implementations.
Other attribute-related API fixes implemented.

Platform Performance Improvements

Internet Explorer 8 includes several changes that improve the performance of Web sites. These changes affect many Internet Explorer subsystems, including the HTML parser, CSS rule processing, markup-tree manipulation as well as the JScript garbage collector and runtime.

The majority of these changes will affect performance only, with little to no functional effect on most Web sites. However, they may expose aspects of Web sites that depend on the timing of operations or performance of the browser. In addition, those Web sites that unknowingly access objects after they are freed may find such access failing in Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8’s performance improvements affect each site loaded in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the chosen rendering mode.

Circular Memory Leak Mitigation

Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to memory management. These improvements mitigate memory leaks that were previously created by circular references between JScript objects and DOM objects.

This feature may affect the behavior of webpages that depend on garbage memory that, only as the result of a memory leak, existed in previous versions of Internet Explorer. In Internet Explorer 8, these pages will reference unallocated memory and generate a fault.

This feature affects each website displayed in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the site’s chosen rendering mode.

HTML Improvements and ACID2

HTML uses elements to represent both structure and meaning in a document. To help developers take full advantage of the elements that HTML 4 offers, and to better provide the semantic meaning intended by Web author, Internet Explorer 8 has upgraded support of the following presentational elements:

The P element: Represents a logical paragraph.
The OBJECT element: May represent any object including images.

Through improved support of these HTML elements, Web developers may build more expressive and accessible HTML markup.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software, Technology Tags: Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards, Windows

Yes WordPress Is Blog Not A CMS Get Over It

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:48:18 +0000

I’ll repeat it WordPress is not a CMS, its a Blog. Its a different issue that it is flexible enough to be used as a CMS. The reason I am using it is because I want a blog not a CMS and I love it because because its the best Blogging software out there. If you want a example of CMS Software then checkout Joomla or Drupal I fail to see what all the brouhaha is about. So we have a small time competing product built on Microsoft technology marketing itself as better than WordPress anything wrong with that? pointing to C-NET, the New York Times, Ford as examples is inaccurate, they use WordPress mostly for their blogs and do you think they are running the default WordPress setup? The codebase might be WordPress but they would have hired a bunch of developers to modify WordPress and extend it. I read through Graffiti’s marketing pitch and I don’t find anything overtly offensive or controversial with regard to WordPress.

Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform and better tools. So for developers familiar with ASP.NET its full power and capability are available to you.

Those are the words from their site. They don’t seem to bashing PHP directly or too much.

I particularly like the comment below by Ian

Hello folks, greetings from “the dark side”!

I have never tried WordPress but at first glance it appears to be fond of MySQL and PHP, both of which make my stomach turn.

Are you suggesting that I should migrate across to an unfamiliar platform in deference to using a solution which runs on my favoured “stack” of Windows, SQL Server, and ASP.NET? Or are you just taking issue with their advertising message? Iâ€™m not being facetious or rhetorical, Iâ€™m genuinely curious.
Personally speaking, I have found this early beta release of Graffiti to be an excellent CMS platform and more than adequate for my requirements of a personal blogging platform on the MS stack.

Best wishes,
Ian

So would anyone like to point out to me how PHP is technically better than ASP.NET. Both Technologies have there advantages and disadvantages. The only reason why ASP.NET seems to be gets bashed is because it made by Microsoft.

Itâ€™s not about what platform you prefer to use (Iâ€™d rather slit my wrists than use IIS, ASP.NET, or SQL Server, for example), but about your approach to how to sell your product. The majority or websites on the â€˜net today run on Linux boxes, usually running PHP and MySQL (or some other database solution and scripting methodology running on a *nix box of some sort), so to dismiss that vast amount of installed user bases and developers so simply and simply to state that one solution is better than another is to miss the whole point entirely.

Otto needs a reality check

Its not a religion people its just technologies. Shame on Matt for linking to a complete non-issue. WordPress is good at what it does but it can’t be everthing, there will always be people marketing themselves as better than WordPress.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Open Source, Programming, Web-Development, Wordpress

Upgraded To WordPress 2.3

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:46:40 +0000

I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 I was reluctant to upgrade since I was using a lot of features and functions from the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin in my theme. Today I sat and cleaned up my theme code and tested it out. If you come across any bugs let me know. Do you any of you have any suggestion to which Plugin I should use for tag management? Two features in WordPress 2.3 that I really love are the Automatic Plugin Upgrade Advisor and Canonical URLS. I’ll be polishing and upgrading the site and my free themes in the coming days.

BDV-17067-BDV

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Wordpress Tags: Download, Web-Design, Web-Development

My Web Design Got Ripped

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:32:57 +0000

I got a mail from someone named Charles that my Blog Design had been ripped. I wrote it off as hoax, but for a second I was scared that my site might have got hacked or hijacked like David Airey site recently. (Please help him by supporting him in his fight against the domain squatter).

hey just a heads up, your site got ripped. Its out in the world wide web now.

In the evening while catching up with my RSS feeds I noticed a bunch of strange links showing up in Technorati and I found a bunch of sites using my theme. Unfortunately for the ripper I am not upset, why you ask? I was going to release the theme this Christmas as a free download but was waiting for the WordPress.com guys to launch the Wordpress marketplace. Since my theme had been approved to be listed on it when it opens up, I was asked not to make it available for download till they launched. Its been almost a month and the Wordpress.com guys haven’t got back to me yet. The theme would have made a really good Christmas and New year gift since a huge number of people had requested and begged me to release it. If you guys can be a little more patient I’ll make it available right after the market place launches.

Currently since I haven’t released the theme it is copyrighted and using it without my permission is illegal. I will be releasing it under a GPL licence after which you are free to do whatever you wish with the theme.

As a side note can you help my friend Kanak his comments seem to be going into the spam queue any solutions?

A belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 42 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Web-Design, Wordpress Tags: Templates, Web-Design, Web-Development

IE 8 Is Going To Kick Every Browsers Butt

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:57:20 +0000

Damn just when I was going to do a blog post predicting that the reason why Microsoft is so quiet about IE 8 is because they want to surprise everyone and I was right. This is going to make Opera look really bad. The IE blog latest post says that IE 8 has passed the ACID2 Test. I predict that other than ACID2 the IE team has a bunch of other tricks up their sleeves. Opera forced them to play one of their Aces. In case you don’t know what ACID2 is.

Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The Web Standards Project (WaSP). It has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that web designers would like to use. These features are part of existing standards but havenâ€™t been interoperably supported by major browsers. Acid2 tries to change this by challenging browsers to render Acid2 correctly before shipping.

Acid2 is a complex web page. It uses features that are not in common use yet, because of lack of support, and it crams many tests into one page. The aim has been to make it simple for developers and users to check if a browser passes the test. If it does, the smiley face on the left will appear. If something is wrong, the face will be distorted and/or shown partly in red.

Here are a couple of things I predict about IE 8.

A Much faster rendering engine for Both JavaScript and Web Pages.
Cooler, Skinnable and Better User Interface.
Better Extensibility like Firefox.
Will use lesser memory.
More Security Features.

This comment on DIGG says it all.

Wow, a story about Microsoft and Internet Explorrer and most all of the comments in here are positive? I Never thought I’d see that!

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software, Web-Design Tags: Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards

Opera Sucks, At Least Some People Have Sense

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:47:36 +0000

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft. If you don’t thrash talk about Microsoft or IE you are not considered a Uber Web Geek. Opera took upon it self to sue Microsoft by complaining to the European Commission and force them to follow web standards. And its the lamest thing they could do. At least some people have sense and are not taking sides.

Today we have taken a stand. Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. We believe that Microsoft has harmed Web standards by refusing to support them; Microsoft often participates in creating Web standards, promoting them, and even promising to implement them. Despite their talent, however, they refuse to support Web standards correctly. For example, Internet Explorer is the only modern Web browser that does not support Acid2.

Sure IE 7 doesn’t have the best support for Web Standards but at least Microsoft is trying. Hey I am web designer and I hate IE. But lets not forget that IE was at one time the most advanced and sophisticated Browser heck IE was the first to implement the concept of AJAX.

The XMLHttpRequest concept was originally developed by Microsoft as part of Outlook Web Access 2000, as a server side API call. At the time, it was not a standards-based web client feature; however, de facto support for it was implemented by many major web browsers. The Microsoft implementation is called XMLHTTP. It has been available since the introduction of Internet Explorer 5.0[5] and is accessible via JScript, VBScript and other scripting languages supported by IE browsers.

I like it how Peter-Paul Koch, puts it.

Nonetheless, I have to point out the potentially disastrous consequences of “asking the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.”

Opera is begging a political body to take control of web standards.

Also I find Eric Meyers Response pretty awesome.

Look, the time to file this motion and make this appeal was in 2005, when Internet Explorer had been dead in the water for years and it was genuinely holding back web design. Then thereâ€™d have been a case to make. When IE7 came out in late 2006, it wasnâ€™t a great leap forward for web development, but it did bring IE more or less in line with where browsers were at the timeâ€”which was, frankly, a pretty large leap. After all, they were doing five years of catch-up with a pretty small team. Now we have IE8 in development, and there is a real chance that it could push standards support forward in a significant way.

Its pretty clear Opera has a clear conflict of interest.

As has been widely reported, software developer Opera, has filed an antitrust complaint with the EU to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to carry alternative browsers pre-installed on Windows. What has not yet been discussed is the devastating and destabilizing effect that this will undoubtably have on the development of future CSS.

Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors. Instead the new CSS Working Group should consist of people, including some who already serve on the group, who are committed to seeing the development of CSS3 succeed because that is central to the success of our profession. This new group need not start from scratch, but should instead build uponn the significant advances and hard work of the current CSS Working Group.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Software, Web-Design Tags: Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards

Prism and XUL Could Have Been A Silverlight And Adobe AIR Killer

Arpit Jacob — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:46:56 +0000

Rich Internet Application are the future of Web Based Applications and we have seen a number of competing technologies come up in the last year namely Silverlight, Adobe AIR and Prism. In the future we will see a tighter integration between desktop applications and the web. I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between XUL, Silverlight and And Adobe AIR. A few common similarities that I immediately noticed are.

All of them use a some form of Proprietary XML (A super set of HTML) to define the User Interface.
The emphasis on the use of existing Web technologies like DOM, JavaScript and CSS.
Cross Platform. (Silverlight for Linux called Moonlight is under development and Adobe AIR will run on Linux once version 1.0 is out)

Some people like to point out that XAML is a ripoff of XUL. I don’t fully agree with them, but I am sure Microsoft did borrow some ideas from XUL, but that’s technology my friend, ideas are meant to be copied if someone can do it better then they deserve to win.

One thing that differentiates Silverlight and Adobe AIR from XUL is that both of them come with a runtime engine based on their own advanced Proprietary technology and programming languages i.e. .NET and Flash which greatly enhances their capabilities. And this is where both Silverlight and AIR beat Prism /XUL hands down.

Its interesting to see that Mozilla is pushing Prism as an answer to Silverlight and Adobe AIR. I frankly feel its a rather poor attempt since I don’t see much difference between FireFox and Prism, i.e, Prism is just a stripped down version of FireFox.

XUL had a very good chance at taking a shot at Silverlight and AIR long before they had even come out. XUL, Canvas and SVG could have made a really powerful combination.

Some of the key reasons why XUL fails to compete

Lack of proper documentation Examples.
No marketing.
No advanced programming capabilities.
Inability to package as a Offline desktop Application.
A Good IDE. (You can’t expect Web Developers to waste time programming in Notepad)

Out of the three I feel Adobe AIR holds a lot of promise, Silverlight is too tied in to Microsoft own platform and they don’t seem committed to making it work on Linux (if they were they would have developed it they selves instead of giving off the work to Miguel de Icaza and the Mono developers) also it is not possible to native develop desktop applications. Prism/XUL is too raw and unfocused to be considered a worthy competitor.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Open Source, Technology Tags: Programming, Silverlight, Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards

WordPress To Launch Theme Marketplace, All Themes To be GPL

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:29:38 +0000

About 4 weeks back I was contacted by Toni Schneider CEO of Automattic. Automattic was thinking of launching a WordPress Theme marketplace for WordPress.com. At that time they wanted to keep to it under wraps. Now Matt himself has confirmed this.

I thought it was an excellent idea especially to give exposure to WordPress theme designers. But there was one confusion i.e. wanted all the themes to be GPL. Below is my response to this. I didn’t get any response to my feedback. Not sure if it has something to with the fact that I objected to a GPL for Premium themes.

We’re thinking of making it a requirement that the themes be original (never published before), GPL licensed (to help other designers and keep the copyright issues simple) and not have any credit links (since they are paid). Any thoughts on that?

How can a theme be premium and GPL at the same time? Once it is GPL everyone has access to it for free. If its free why buy it? I wouldn’t sell a Premium theme with a GPL licence. Also if I am correct you mentioned that the theme is CSS based i.e. using the SANDBOX Theme. Which means It is very easy to grab the CSS source code hence It just doesn’t make sense to GPL the theme.
Credit links need to be shown irrespective of whether the theme is free or premium. Not only is it the right thing to do this is the way most Freelance designers get more clients and spread the word about themselves, it also acts as a copyright.

A comment from malan and a post from Matt blog got me rethinking.

blah! this will KILL any and all free WP themes. great job WordPress.

From Matt’s blog.

Beyond the obvious guidelines of browser compatibility and general not-sucking, weâ€™ll require submissions be original, link-free, not published before, and GPL-licensed. (That also means that all themes in the marketplace will be available FREE to WordPress.org users. That may force some to switch from .com to .org, but thatâ€™s fine.)

I was in the process of releasing my current Theme “Azure Sky” as a free theme. But I had seconds thought of releasing it as a paid theme since I had put so much time and effort into it. I think if I release the theme on WordPress.com it solves both my problems i.e. I get paid for it and it also get to release it for free for WordPress.org i.e. people hosting WordPress themselves.

I am think I am willing to experiment and see how this marketplace works out. As long as the effort that I put into a theme is compensated for.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Design, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Templates, Web-Design, Web-Development