Just yesterday, the 14th major release of the Ubuntu operating system was released into the world. One of the biggest new things in the Natty Narwhal release is the new Unity interface — which will be the default interface for the OS. I wanted to take a moment to record my initial thoughts on this new interface direction. This is not, then, a particularly in-depth or scientific analysis, but just a few thoughts on the new interface design that I wanted to share.

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UPDATE: the scrolling fix doesn’t now work, as of 2010-11-08. This appears to be a server-side change and unfortunately I am not aware of a solution. 🙁

I put together a short screencast on how to access Gmail’s new iPad interface on your Mac. If you’re a fan of Gmail’s web interface on the iPad and would like to use it on your desktop computer too, this is a cool trick.

The user agent you need to enter into Fluid is:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

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I have just released SleekTabs 0.2.1.

Nothing too exciting, unfortunately, just a bugfix release for a bug which would cause the ajax URLs of a tab not to work if they contained an extra ‘/’ character. This bug was a problem with a regular expression used to append a timestamp variable to the ajax URL (which itself is a fix for a bug with IE caching).

As always, you can download the script from the SleekTabs project page or from its home on PHP Classes.

It has been far too long since I first released SleekTabs, my PHP class which makes it easy to create tabs on your web page.

Finally, after a lot of doing not a lot, and some sporadic bursts of development, I’d like to introduce SleekTabs 0.2. First of all, I want to thank Richard Fitzgerald, who initially contacted me with an idea for this release’s main feature – caching, and has advised me on various things during its development and continues to help me with the project.

Now, let’s take a look at the main features of this release:

• Caching – if you so wish, you can enable caching, so multiple requests for the same tab are fetched from the user’s local cache, rather than resulting in another request to your server.
• IE bug fix – this release works around a bug in Internet Explorer that causes it to undesirably cache the tab results, by introducing a timestamp into the SleekTabs request URI.
• Overhauled example script – the index.php example script included has been completely reworked, fully documented and commented to explain how to implement SleekTabs in your site and how it works.

I really have to apologise for how long this has taken – it’s been literally months since the initial release and this release isn’t exactly groundbreaking. However, it is a step forward in SleekTabs’ evolution and makes the installation and integration process much clearer.

You can download SleekTabs from the project page here and give it a try for yourself. It is also available from PHP Classes. All genuine feedback is appreciated – and if you do use it on your site, thanks!

SleekTabs is licensed under a BSD style licence – see the headers in the files in the download for more information.