Tim Davies sans vowels

At first glance Im sure many people will assume this book is just a collection of all the tweets the author originally tweeted. I wont be the first to admit I assumed the exact same thing.

However. This book is much more than a few funny one liners from an a sharp witty old man. No. This book also contains the story of growing up in an average home, except you’re living with a high class comedian for a father, a comedian who doesn’t even know it yet.

This book is full of family stories, truly hilarious and emotionally deep anecdotes that make it fantastic read. Every time the author recalls an upsetting memory he instantly brings a smile to your face, with the quick wit of his hilarious father.

I read this book in less than a few days. Not because its length, theres plenty here to read. It was more the fact I couldn’t put the damned thing down.

A fantastic insight into our own family lives through the somewhat more dramatic and caricature like life of another.

I recently scoured the internet in the search of the “perfect framework for me”. I work in web design and development so spend a lot of my time either designing or building web applications and decided it was time to look into the different ways I could approach doing so.

I started by researching what big web apps where written in, and the results where as I expected. The big three where; Rails (a web environment written in Ruby), Django (a python web environment) and the most obvious PHP. Although I know PHP thoroughly I decided to take a chance and see if I could learn the other two. The results where. Well, unfortunate.

I began with Rails. I’d looked into Ruby before, and quite liked the idea of Rails so dove right in. At first I was quite amused with being able to have Rails scaffold my controllers, In English that means produce a basic Model, View and Controller from a database table etc. Scaffolding was great for the first 5 minutes, and then you begin to realise that, sure Rails is being clever and trying to guess what I want but 90% of the time it’s guessing wrong. Rails had become to frustrating to spend any more time on. On with the show!

Next on the agenda was Django. I had heard good things about Django especially its built in web app admin controller. Then once again you realise its a lot of generating scripts. Another major let down was the lack of hosting support for DJango. I spent all of 10 minutes with Django, and unfortunately it was 10 minutes wasted. I should have spent more time looking into Django however as we already know I was on a mission to find myself a web development environment! Time was of the essence.

After another 5 minute flurry with Rails I went sulking back to PHP. PHP is a great language to be writing web apps in, after all its what it was made for. But PHP on its own lacks the MVC architectures and module based power that came with Rails and Django. What I needed was PHP with a framework!

Working in web development means when sitting in the office at work I get to over hear the names of all sorts of frameworks and libraries being thrown around the office between the developers. The name that came straight to mind was Kohana.

Kohana is the base framework being a lot of the magic done in our office. I went ahead and checked out a copy from their Git repository and stuck it on my server. There it was already configured. The language heavily documented. A framework for someone like me. A framework that didn’t do things for you but allowed you to do anything with its powerful ORM and great auth, database and core modules. It even has an HMVC architecture. Kohana is the high class whore of the web environment world. Letting you do whatever you wish with it without complaint or disconcerting error throwing. Within ten minutes I had built a blog app with admin controls. I felt empowered without the feeling of being babied that Rails gave me.

In short this post is more about my oppinions and lack of effort spent learning new things. However I’m sure there are many more web developers digging around for a great applications environment and if you ask me, I’d suggest Kohana PHP.

For those who don’t know Twiba (pronounced Twee ber) is an iPhone twitter client with a sexy UI and extra goodness from software magicians YummyCocoa LTD. I recently decided we’d hold off on release and focus heavily on developing the application to be compatible with the new iPhone 4, and iOS 4.

What I’d really like is user input. It seems many iPhone apps on the market seem to lack several features, and many users continue to keep switching from one to the other. After all twitter is a user experience and I’d like Twiba to be your app of choice. How do I plan to achieve that? By asking for your user input! Simply comment below, email me or speak to me on AIM and give me some features you REALLY want in a twitter client on the iPhone! Literally any idea is welcome! (however we shan’t be altering the UI sorry!)

I also plan on releasing an Alpha of twiba in the coming weeks without UI implemented so I can squish any current bugs! Again if you’d like in comment bellow or email me!

Thats is for this state of the union address. I’ve been Tim Davies and thank you for reading!

A few weeks ago I purchased an iPad along with many other thousands of people. It’s everything i expected and more. Its always in my hands. What I didn’t expect the iPad to do was change my reading habits.

I was never a big reader. Parents would buy me books when I was younger. I would then just watch the films and pretend I had read these books. When I studied English literature I obviously had to read books, but I didn’t enjoy reading them. Now when i bought my iPad one of the first things I did was check out what this iBooks was all about. Ever since doing so I’ve not stopped reading. I no longer have the hastle of having to carry a book around with me. I don’t have to find a book mark to remember my page or worry about breaking my books spine. I never have to spend hours reading books in a hot crowded book store. iBooks does it all for me.

I’m now forever reading and actually enjoying myself. More people are enjoying books. Yet another success story for Apple’s iPad.