So there I was, working on my computer as usual, when I had a sudden inspiration as I recognized the arrangement of some application icons in the OS X Dock:

My first thought was “Hey, that’s fun! I wonder how many letter icons there are to build words in the dock. There could be an app for that.”

That was the moment Iconscrabble was born.

Unfortunately, I’m not a pioneer with this idea. Somebody put iPhone app icons in alphabetical order as a nice effect. Also, Mario Georgiou had the idea of designing an Adobe Icon Scrabble using the two-lettered app icons from the Creative Suite in 2006.

But no concept combined this idea in an art project that also incorporates informational value.

Warning: Tech Content

An hour after my initial idea, I had cobbled together a small PHP script that generates a composite image from single icon files and a given word. Every icon has its letter equivalent mapped in an associative array and the script uses GDlib to stitch the single icons together.

A central concept also includes the possibility to cover two letters e.g. by an Adobe application icon (like “Ps” from Photoshop). The webapp basically checks from the longest possible word fragment down to a single character and randomly decides which parts are used to render the composite.

The first simple script was extended with a user input field as well as a database backend to save the generated images. A unique permalink is assigned to each image so a composite can be saved or shared on the Internet. The implementation was done with CakePHP – my framework of choice when it comes to database-driven projects of this size.

Discovering new apps

A great side effect of the database support was the fact that every icon and logo could hold a name, description and URL of the service or brand associated with it. The concept was quickly adopted to implement an informational value for the user — Icons that are linked to the specific company, and tooltips that show you the brand behind the logo.

What users are scrabbling

In 10 days of uptime, 5.351 icon composites were generated. The top 3 entries are Love, Hello and I love you, followed by the most common swearwords and raunchy terms on the Internet. However, most people just seem to feed their name to the generator which brings forward the obvious application of using an iconscrabbled name as doorplate.

I hope you like the arty and diffuse approach of Iconscrabble. We’re looking for letter-based icons from computer-related brands and companies all the time. If you’d like to help us, I’d suggest submitting your recommendations or comments via the Leave Feedback tab on the app’s site.

Because Versions officially released it’s Beta today, I dug out this draft that had been unpublished for a long time (It was intended to be published in addition to the Versions Beta announcement one year ago):

This list represents three very popular graphical user interfaces for the Subversion client svn. The applications help developers to manage their repositories without being a bash or shell champion. Feel free to leave a comment in case I forgot an essential tool.

Read the full entry "Subversion Interfaces on Mac OS X"

Alekc provides a simple but stunningly fast Last.fm wallpaper generator that fetches your favourite album covers and stitches them to an impressive wallpaper.

After choosing a resolution of your choice it could look something like the following image – a collage of my favorite albums for the last 3 months:

During your life with a computer lots of precious data piles up: Digital photos, essays, homework, projects or any kind of computer files. Now I’m telling nothing new when I begin with: Backups are important!

Read the full entry "Open Source Network Backup Solutions"

Mozilla just released Operator, a very promising microformat detection extension for Firefox that demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.

In creating Operator [...] goals were to create something that was useful to microformat developers as well as users looking to explore microformats. As such, the Operator Toolbar can be displayed in two modes: Microformats mode and Actions mode.

If you’ve not heard of Microformats yet: Those are simple markup structures that allow expression of semantics in an (X)HTML web page, making it easier to read for machines and easier to built for authors because of the adaption to standards.

Two keyboard shortcuts in Firefox 2 on OS X really annoy me — one of them used in the extension LiveHTTP Headers:

Shift + 7

Whenever I want to type an URL with http:// I can’t type a standard slash, because this brings up the Firefox search bar at the bottom of the browser window. When did they build in that one?

Option + L

This key combination is supposed to print the @-character (mostly important to type E-Mail adresses). Unfortunately the extension LiveHTTPHeaders — an extension to visualize the traffic under the hood — uses this shortcut to bring up the Live Headers Sidebar.

There are already many complaints in the suggestions area — the first reporting of this issue even was in March 2005. This plugin is really useful and absolutely cool, no question. But should it be that hard to change the shortcut keys in the code or implement a user-defined one?

These misused shortcuts give an extra bonus on annoyance when filling out web-forms, because that’s where you usually type in an E-Mail or Web adress (using slashes and the at-symbol).

Any suggestions on how to “repair” this?