Over the past few days I’ve noticed a number of people posting pictures of their new Apple products over on Twitter.

Seriously.

Not some rumored Tablet or 4G iPhone, but regular laptops and iMacs…

My Twitter stream has had such amazing revelations as…

“WOO HOO! My new Macbook just arrived!”

“About to open it up, pics to follow…”

“WOW, the box has an Apple logo on it!”

“Wondering if I should video this and upload to YouTube instead…”

All that sort of nonsense.

Seriously, I ask you, who really gives a shit?

Obviously people do. They even comment on these tweets!

“With you all the way Bro!”

Absolutely incredible.

There are people out there who want to see other people opening their Apple products.

Well, this post is dedicated to all you Apple lovers out there…

Today I walked (remember that?) down to my local store and bought a new box of Marlboro cigarettes!

I decided that all of you Apple fans out there would love to see me opening them.

Why?

Simple…

I’m opening them on top of… yes you’ve guessed it… my MacBook Air!

WOO HOO!

Yes, you heard it right. I’m risking small pieces of tobacco wedged in between those flat square keyboard buttons you all love.

It’s a bold sacrifice but I’ve never seen anyone do this on the Internet before… Wish me luck!

Opening a packet of Marlboro Lights

Hold onto your trousers people, here are the pics (taken with my iPhone no less!) of my new packet of Marlboro Lights…

Marlboro Lights without the ribbon.

That’s it, I’ve started, I can’t go back now… I wish I had of bought 2.. just to keep 1 in perfect condition!!!

WOO HOO!

The lid is opened and I have a card inside!

Now I know how Charlie must have felt opening that bar of chocolate!

The silver seal is broken.

Holy crap!!!

There must be 20 cigarettes inside this box behind that card.

Can’t wait to remove that card and read every last word it says.

This is soooooooooo awesome dudes…

Card Removed, card removed!

Hold on, I need the toilet, I can barely contain myself here… Back in a moment…

Gonna take the card and read it on the toilet!!! VIVI LA MUSICA !!!!

They’re opened. Phew…

Now ready to smoke and (possibly) violate my warranty with Apple.

Many long hours of coding ahead now… Without needing to return to the store for more!

Note: It’s not all good. I had to walk to the store and pick these up myself. Hugely disappointed that UPS wouldn’t deliver a single pack. If only Apple did cigarette delivery…hold on, anyone know an app for that?

Disclaimer: I use a MacBook Air and program iPhones so I obviously like what Apple build and release. But seriously people, watching you open your latest toy is about as useful as watching me open a packet of cigarettes.

Happy coding and remember, if Bob Ross were a coder, there’d be no bugs… just happy little accidents ;)

CSS3 is going to bring some major improvements to User Experience (UX) on the Web.

I find a bit of general background research helps before deciding on the look and feel of a new site.

After a quick 30 minutes looking at what information is out there, here is a small round up of what I found…

W3.org, CSS3.com and CSS3.info should provide you everything you need to know about CSS3.

If you like sifting through a massive list of resources, Web Appers has 70 of them for both CSS3 and HTML5.

The awesome Web Designer Depot has a nice article highlighting enhancements that you can use right now.

Like those neat little CSS tricks designers add to their sites? Check out CSS Tricks.

Want to see some cool examples? Welcome 2 the Sky neatly explains how you can bring the latest features into your design. Noupe also has some exciting functions and features.

Twitter

There is a fantastic little bot called @css3watcher that you can follow for bot related CSS3 links appearing in your Twitter stream.

With regular updates through @css3gallery, the UK has a nice CSS3 gallery for you to refer to.

If you like cheat sheets, Smashing Magazine has one (a few months old) for CSS3

It is very easy to start following links after links after links of the myriad of galleries and showcase sites out there.

I decided to call it a day as I don’t have more time available now to look any further.

What I do have now is a decent CSS3 knowledge base to see which UX features I’d like to integrate into my new site.

If you think I’ve missed out on some quality CSS3 information, why not post the links in my comments below…

I wanted to post it here. I also wanted to start posting over at CloudMixer.com

CloudMixer won this time round.

You can find the article here.

Happy coding and remember, if Bob Ross were a coder, there’d be no bugs… just happy little accidents ;)

So far so good… Like the rest of Twitter’s interface, the options are well laid out and become visible only when required.

What surprised me most (and pretty ingenious of Twitter to introduce this) was how the retweet appears.

If I understand correctly, what this means is that Twitter will allow you to see the original tweet.

No matter how many times it has been retweeted!

As each person retweets, what you see in your stream will NOT be the user you follow, but the actual user who wrote the tweet.

If you look closely, you can see who has retweeted the link (in this case Retweeted by Hillel) so you can source the retweet.

How will this affect Twitter?

Immediately, you probably wont see much difference.

It will take a while for developers to catch up with the Twitter API and integrate this feature.

In the long run? Quite a huge difference me thinks. Let me explain…

Let’s say you follow a user who retweets a lot (I’m sure we’ve all got a few in our Twitter streams).

Their image (or personal brand) appears multiple times in your stream and you become to recognise them from their image before you read their tweet.

You learn to recognise them as a user who shares a lot of valuable information. Why else would you be following them?

With the new Retweet functionality, these user images (or personal brands) could become very weak or diluted over time.

They are still sending you quality tweets of information, but you may not even be aware it is them who is sending it!

What then?

At present, people acknowledge the source of their tweet. They use a RT @user or (via @user) in their tweet.

As respectful as this is, it is still their image or personal brand you see in your stream.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter users ignored the retweet function in order to keep their brand awareness alive.

This would be a huge shame. The whole point of this new functionality is ‘transparency’, to help point to the original source of the tweet.

As always, only time will tell…

I’ve a few coding posts to choose from but I couldn’t decide which one to go with. I really wanted something that would give a good hint to the flavour of the posts on this blog.

Then the hotel owner’s dog started barking and his wife began screaming something in Spanish… “Mofeta!, Mofeta!”

I quickly turned to the direction of the dogs and wife to ask what was wrong. More importantly, what the hell is a “Mofeta”?

“Skunk!” she replied in English. “The dogs, they have a skunk!”

Within seconds, the hotel owner ran over to his dogs, desperately trying to separate them from whatever it was they had in their mouths.

Next thing you know, the skunk had managed to break free and jump into the swimming pool. It was too dark to see much of what was happening and it was all over within a matter of seconds.

The owner grabbed his net and fished the skunk out of the swimming pool. Upon closer inspection it turned out not to be a skunk, but an armadillo. A badly injured one at that.

The dogs had managed to get their teeth into his back. He had a few deep bites but other than that, looked OK.

We made sure the dogs were out of harm’s way and let the armadillo back into the rainforest.

He would live to see another day. He would also make a guest appearance on the programmers hotel website.

This post has nothing to do with coding, other than it all happened while I was writing code for this blog.

All sorts of things can happen to you when you are coding outside of the normal office environment, from imaginary skunks to injured armadillos.

So it is with this post, that I say welcome to the Programmers Hotel…

Happy coding and remember, if Bob Ross were a coder, there’d be no bugs… just happy little accidents ;)

I’d like to introduce you to Charles Bukowski, one of my favourite authors.

If I could write as well as he did, this blog would be a lot more interesting to those outside the world of coding…

As I can’t, I’ll be blogging about website (PHP, Javascript, jQuery, CSS, MySQL) and iPhone (Cocoa Touch, Objective-C) code development, with a splash of traveling and life working on the Internet.

My first iPhone app is a few weeks away from completion. I’d like to share my experiences and thoughts about iPhone development and Apple’s app store.

Happy coding and remember, if Bob Ross were a coder, there’d be no bugs… just happy little accidents ;)