After spending the last few months hacking away at the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), I’ve figured out how to do a few things that are pretty much undocumented. The YUI TabView component, specifically, is a pretty slick control with a very lightweight structure and simple, elegant markup. On the other hand, customizing a TabView instance can be a little daunting for anyone who hasn’t spent a lot of time mucking with relatively elaborate CSS.

Since I spent a while digging away on this topic the other night, and didn’t come across anything useful as a how-to after searching for a half hour, I thought I’d post a quick how-to / tutorial for anyone trying to get rounded corners going for their TabView implementation. Hopefully it’ll save you a little aggravation. :)

The Demo

Try out the YUI TabView rounded corners demo.

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Don’t you love a good generic Internet Explorer error message? That big red X bubble always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Especially when it pops up every time I open a new IE browser window. Ugh.

I’ve been using Nick Denton’s Kinja as my RSS feed reader of choice for the last two years or so. It’s my start page for IE (yes, I’m running IE6 at work for development purposes, along with Firefox 2, Safari 3, and Opera, as well as IE7 on my laptop and Safari on my iPhone — working in web development sucks sometimes); in Firefox, I use my del.icio.us bookmarks as a start page.

Kinja’s concept is pretty simple. To quote their about page,

Kinja is a weblog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.

Considering the fact that their blog hasn’t been updated since February of 2006, I think it’s safe to say that no one over at Gawker has any serious interest in maintaining the site on a regular basis. This is somewhat disappointing, since the digest form is a very nice way to read a sampling of blog posts updated regularly. What it boils down to is that I use the digest as my main RSS reader, but I completely ignore the rest of the site, and the digest form of reading feeds really appeals to me. I have a limited attention span when it comes to reading blog posts, and I have a large OPML file of over 250 blogs that I keep track off and on.

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So I got a Pownce invite in my email this morning. I signed up, created an account, mucked around a little bit to see how it worked, and of course, downloaded the desktop client. I hate Twitter, so I wasn’t planning on sitting around using the web interface to Pownce either. I already run MSN Messenger, and running yet another IM-style client is a pain, but it’s still better than refreshing a browser window all day long. I’d rather just have it sit in my system tray and remain logged in while I’m online.

Anyhow, I installed the Adobe AIR-based desktop client, appropriately designated Pownce Alpha 2. Well, I couldn’t even get past the sign-on screen. Why? Because I get a Windows XP memory reference error every time I load it, without fail, after about five seconds of sitting at the login screen.

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Just a quick update on my comments about the Symbian S60 3rd Edition dashboard — also known as the ”Active Standby” screen — that I mentioned in my previous post:

Quite accidentally, I’ve discovered that I can accomplish the effect I had intended in my complaints about the lack of customization of the Active Standby display (see screenshot at right.) I realized the other day that using the memo field of the calendar application causes the dashboard to display as many independent tasks as I want. Of course, from a usability perspective, the way I’ve done it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since to-do tasks due today are really what I’m trying to show, and not memos. But if it works, I’ll use it, even if it doesn’t jive with how I’d usually use a calendaring app.

For what it’s worth, the memo field syncs nicely with “all-day events” in Google Calendar, if you happen to sync to it instead of something like Microsoft Outlook (I use Goosync to do this, in case you were wondering; it’s free for basic service, or pay if you want more advanced sync features.)

As you may remember from my previous post, I picked up a Nokia N73 (Music Edition) smartphone on my trip to Thailand a couple of months ago. I’ve been getting used to it since, and I only have a couple of gripes about it thus far. The main thing would be the response time of the menu system, which I understand has something to do with the delay the operating system seems to have in place for handling shortcut keys (this is my assumption, not anything I’ve read anywhere.) I haven’t dug around enough to see if there’s some way of reducing the sluggishness (maybe there’s some kind of hard-coded delay?), but I have one other issue that I’m pretty sure I’d need some kind of plugin to cope with.

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