We are looking for a Support Guru – someone to assist customers in our Pro (commercial plugin) forums for our products (WPtouch Pro, WordTwit Pro and Piggy Pro). The Support Guru works along with our other support staff to provide excellent customer care, and help solve problems for customers using our products.

If you are a passionate, personable individual, who has experience with our products; is familiar with PHP, CSS, and JavaScript; and possesses a strong work ethic, we’d love to hear from you.

Visit our Current Jobs page for more information about the position and to apply.

About us

• BraveNewCode is an innovative company whose plugins have been downloaded and used by millions of individuals and businesses
• Our team members are currently spread out between Los Angeles, the Toronto and Vancouver areas in Canada, and even as far away as Argentina
• Everyone at BraveNewCode works remotely; we mostly collaborate using online tools and communications platforms, such as Skype
• We’ve helped organize several WordPress WordCamp conferences (including WordCamp Vancouver and WordCamp Whistler), and have attended and spoken at various conferences in the WordPress community and beyond

Support Sorcerer, Emilio Rivera

Next, the passionate and intelligent Emilio Rivera has also joined our team, using his extensive development background to help with our development and support. Chances are if you’ve requested support for WPtouch Pro, Emilio’s been there to help you out.

We wish to thank him for his contributions to our team and assistance to our customers, so this post is an official welcoming for this talented gentlemen, welcome to our team Emilio!

We haven’t had a chance to get together since then, so tomorrow we are both getting on planes and heading to the Mayan Riviera for a little working vacation. Truthfully, it costs us nearly $800 every time we go to see the other person, not including any meals or drinks. So, to pay $1,000 to go to a Mexican all-inclusive resort is just that much easier for us.

I’m actually in the process of giving up my life in Vancouver and am going to be traveling and working for a year, visiting WordPress and WPtouch users across the globe as I move. So, this trip is probably the last time I’ll get a chance to hang out with Dale until April, when I’ll be swinging through New York City for my birthday.

As Dale and I spend a lot of our day on the phone or iChat, working remotely is no obstacle to how BraveNewCode operates. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s an advantage, because I can field questions from time to time after Dale has gone to bed, and he can deal with the occasional issue before I wake up.

So, by tomorrow night Dale and I will both be enjoying a few beers in the Mayan Riviera, strategizing about what next year will bring for WPtouch, BraveNewCode, and a few other of the items we haven’t announced yet. Rest assured, it’s all exciting stuff, so a big thank you to all of our customers, friends, and long-time supporters.

Every once in awhile we like to share an overview of what’s been happening and what we’re up to— affectionately, our “state of the code” address of sorts.

WPtouch 1.9.19

While WPtouch Pro is our main focus, we still give love and attention to WPtouch 1.9, servicing it for bug fixes and feature additions to make it even better.

We just released version 1.9.19, and with it we’ve finally delivered true localization. We’ve included the .pot file in the new /lang folder, which can be used to create language .mo files to translate both the theme and the admin panel.

Submit your translation today to translation@wptouch.com, and we’ll review it for inclusion in a future release.

WPtouch Pro v2.0.9

WPtouch Pro 2.0.9

Notable new additions include better custom language translation handling, improvements in WordPress Multisite compatibility, and a new feature allowing WPtouch Pro to be disabled for selected URLs and pages.

We strongly recommend upgrading if you’re running any previous version of WPtouch Pro.
WPtouch Pro 2.0.9 will be available later today.

Upcoming: WPtouch Pro v2.1

We’ve begun work on the next major version of WPtouch Pro, which will deliver iPad support, child themes, and support for WordPress 3.0′s custom menus.

Many people have inquired as to what iPad support will be in 2.1, and we’d like to share a couple of thoughts about it.

First of all, iPad support will be opt-in. When you update to 2.1 you’ll be able to decide whether you want to enable iPad support or not. Some are happy with the way their sites look and work on iPad already, and for those people they won’t have to do anything.

For those who do want iPad support, they have a number of options related to what happens with iPad support, and we’ll undoubtedly add to those options over time.

There are already some solutions available for iPad theme stuff with WordPress. We could have shipped “support” for iPad very early on, by simply enabling the user agent and letting WPtouch be WPtouch on iPad. We didn’t for several reasons, but the most important is that we don’t think WPtouch as a theme concept is appropriate on a device like iPad.

Small, hand-held mobile devices are very different from tablet devices such as the iPad. And the iPad user interface, (while borrowing from the iPhone) has some dramatic differences, most notably the way in which vertical and horizontal views are handled in most apps.

So we’re hoping our solutions feel as natural, intuitive and enjoyable for users as possible. And because we don’t have to make the same kinds of compromises as we do with WPtouch (for device compatibility), we can do a few things that should enhance the web experience of a site using WPtouch Pro on iPad.

WPtouch Pro Affiliate Program

We recently launched a new Affiliate Program for customers of WPtouch Pro. Earn 20% on purchases of WPtouch Pro made through text or image advertisements on your website. Find out more ->

WordTwit

We’ve received lots of feedback over the past few months on our WordPress Twitter plugin, WordTwit. Ideas on how to make it better, and what people would like to see added to it have trickled in on our Forums, over Twitter, and here on the blog.

Though we haven’t said much publicly, we’ve been listening to everyone and have been working on adding several enhancements and new features to bring WordTwit up to version 3.0 with some powerful new additions. Stay tuned on the progress towards its 3.0 release, we’ll have new details available soon.

Site Revamp

A Sneak Peek At The New Forums

We hope everyone will enjoy the new site when we unveil the new digs. We’ll post some screenshots for feedback a little further down the road.

Thanks

We want to say thanks to all our WPtouch Pro customers, our users, friends, family and followers. It’s your support and interest in what we’re doing that keeps us motivated to do more.

Best,
The BraveNewCode Team

Today marks the 2nd anniversary of BraveNewCode, something we’re very happy to say. When we started out Duane and I had no idea how any of this would turn out, and its been a ride and a blur in the past few years, and all of it worth it!

When we started out working on web projects, our pet project at the time came from a one-off plugin we used on a MatthewGood.org site re-design which included a mobile theme for Apple’s iPhone.

It was what would become WPtouch.

Originally we just wanted a cool theme to show on Apple’s then new iPhone, and soon it became apparent that others were interested in it for their own sites. Both Duane and myself have always been WordPress fanatics, and we wanted to give back to the community that we loved so much, so we offered WPtouch and other plugins like WordTwit and Earth Hour to show some love while we worked on client website projects.

WPtouch has grown a lot and changed a lot since then, and so too has BraveNewCode. We’re better coders and designers. We use better tools and strive for higher achievements. With WPtouch Pro we wanted to take things to the next level and do some pretty awesome stuff, so we knew we’d have to charge a little to invest the kind of time and dedication we know the project deserves. So far the response has been positive, and we thank all our current customers for supporting us and the WPtouch project.

So with all of that said, as BraveNewCode turns 2 we’re offering a nice giveaway to mark it, and make a lucky someone out there happy with a shiny new iPod touch + a WPtouch Pro license… free!

The Contest

To mark our anniversary and celebrate the recent release of WPtouch Pro, we’re giving away a new iPod touch and a 5-Pack WPtouch Pro license!

The lucky winner of our contest will receive:

• One 3rd Generation 32GB Apple iPod touch ($329 CAD value)
• One WPtouch Pro 5-Pack License ($59 CAD value)

How To Enter

The contest has now ended.

Rules and Stuff:

• Makes it easy for users to choose from different themes and set them up quickly, for those who want an easy, fast mobile solution that looks and works great…
• While also providing a framework for those who want to customize themes, and even build their own from scratch

The two different paths are indeed very different, both from a user perspective and a coding perspective… ensuring both paths were well-designed was a feat.

We opted for a brand new admin panel to help solve some the issues we faced, and we think the combination of vertical/horizontal tabs for navigating the WPtouch settings alleviates our concerns.

There are also other great things about WPtouch 2.0, and we wanted to share a little more about what they are today.

The BraveNewCode Way

We pride ourselves and our business on providing quality. Quality means different things in different contexts, to different people, but to us it translates into our users and customers feeling knowing that they are working with something that’s had a great deal of thought, care, consideration and work put into it. They should feel confident (and if we’re lucky) even delighted to have it in their arsenal of tools that run their websites, business, etc.

Because there’s a paid version of 2.0 (we’ll be releasing this first, but indeed a free version will be released later as well) we wanted to ensure that the highest degree of quality we could muster was at the foundation of the work.

We do not take the growth of this plugin lightly. Since its become one of the most popular plugins for WordPress (was in the top spot just the other day, and downloaded over 700,000 times!) we’ve thought deeply about what it would mean to grow the plugin in a good way, extend its capabilities and the talents of WordPress as a publishing platform. It’s always tempting to want to throw a price tag on something like this that’s popular, but we’ve always felt that if WPtouch was going to have a paid version it would have to do more, much more.

As we move into an age where mobile internet usage is fast becoming as important (and maybe soon, more important) than desktop access, WPtouch has the potential to be something powerful for website owners to publish content for mobile visitors.

We put a fair amount of critical thought against the ideas we generate to discriminate which we want to act upon. Both Duane and myself are constantly generating new ideas and it’s a great asset as a small company to be able to creatively generate so much possibility. Though it can also be a lynch: we must filter these ideas, and determine which are valuable to act upon in an immediate manner and which should be shelved for ‘someday’.

And we don’t always agree, but I’d hate to have a partner whom did not carry a different vision. One of our strengths is looking at and approaching things differently, it’s something we work on all the time at improving and synthesizing.

So arriving at what WPtouch can become and how it should get there has been a journey lasting nearly a year, and that doesn’t include the time it’s taken building it.

Support

When WPtouch was a fairly small plugin, it wasn’t very hard to support it. But given the popularity of WPtouch and the growing user base, more users are looking for help and support. Right now there are two options: the community forums on WordPress.org and the Support Forums on this site.

While we drop by our free forums whenever we can to answer questions, often ongoing client commitments limit our availability on the forums. To that end, the paid version of WPtouch Pro will allow us to dedicate the time to provide full support in our forums for paid users, addressing issues in a timely, comprehensive manner. We’ll also be supplying supporting documentation based on the WPtouch codebase which will help developers and users who wish to make their own enhancements or customizations.

A New Hope

The most frequent areas of request for WPtouch are compatibility with other WordPress plugins, and having more theme customizability.

Users want to see their favourite plugins work well with WPtouch, and want to be able to brand and customize WPtouch in ways that are not currently available to them without some form of fixed modification which will not survive plugin updates.

WPtouch 2.0 aims to take care of both of these concerns, and we think we’ve come up with some enterprising ways of doing so. There are a slew of other enhancements, changes, features and additions to 2.0, but we’re focusing this post on a couple of things which we know many users want to know about.

Other Plugins

It’s not sustainable for us to try and support the integration of thousands upon thousands of plugins available for WordPress. it’s also not going to work if we simply tell our users to ask developers of other plugins to find a way to make them work with our plugin without adding anything to WPtouch to make it easier to do so.

With 2.0 there’s an entirely new codebase, and with it Duane’s packed in a variety of ways that ensure WPtouch is pluggable, extensible and modifiable by WPtouch theme authors and plugin developers. We hope that with these changes plugin authors can quickly and easily add modified functionality to their plugins for WPtouch, or create entirely new plugins which can hook into and provide functionality for WPtouch itself and/or its themes. It’s a brave attempt from our side at solving one of the things we (and our users) have struggled with most.

It doesn’t mean we won’t build in some out-of-the-box support for various plugins, but it does mean we want other plugin developers to feel empowered to come up with solutions for their products when working with WPtouch, in much the same way they do for WordPress itself and desktop themes.

After all, WPtouch is now becoming a mobile theming platform, and less a plugin that will give your site a generic, Apple-esque mobile application appearance. Because of this, our focus will be on creating innovative themes that harness the power of the devices they’ll be shown on. We can’t both do that and find ways for these themes to work with every plugin out there. It’s not practical and it’s not reasonable for us. That said, wherever possible, we will work together with other developers to ensure they have the tools and information necessary to make their plugin(s) compatible with WPtouch.

New WPtouch Themes

WPtouch 2.0 ushers in a whole new theme mechanism which allows for theme switching in the admin. WPtouch 2.0 will ship with a few themes, and we plan on having many more down the road. When you install and activate WPtouch 2.0 you’ll now find an admin panel that defines a global vs. theme options ideology.

There are global WPtouch features and settings which apply to general setup and all themes, while a new active theme tab generated by themes themselves govern all the settings to do with that particular theme only.

We’ve worked hard to flesh out and distinguish what a theme needs to be able to do and access from what the plugin itself needs to govern and control. It’s been an exhausting process— ensuring that themes can be flexible while also having a foundation to build upon that saves themers time and energy building out their dream mobile site.

Custom Themes

We hope this new approach inspires others to create custom themes themselves, and we’ve set the stage with a new Skeleton theme (a theme template with the basic features, hooks and guts needed to start building out a custom theme). The Skeleton will start out as a theme that resembles the current 1.9 theme in many ways, and we’ll likely grow and expand upon the Skeleton over time, or have other Skeleton templates.

Down the road we can also see people wanting to share the themes they create with others, and that would be great to see. Our focus for now, however, will be ensuring that those wishing to endeavor to build a theme with WPtouch have the tools, guidance and support in doing so, and that begins with Skeleton.

Custom themes can do everything our own themes do, and of course go off in their own unique directions. In fact, we’re building all of our themes off the same Skeleton, too. Really nothing we’ve done or do is required from a theme standpoint, so creatively a themer can leverage our work and code, or roll 100% custom if they so choose.

When the WPtouch plugin is updated, all custom changes, settings, themes, etc., remain the same.

Any new features that can be taken advantage of will not affect or break a custom theme, or any theme, for the matter. Custom/user themes live outside WPtouch’s plugin directory, while separation between the global WPtouch admin settings and theme features ensures a smooth environment for custom work.

Themers can add new theme functionality provided by plugin updates easily if they want, or ignore the changes (they will most likely be added to the Skeleton and documented, and will be easy to see in action).

If capabilities are depreciated in favour of others at some point, they won’t be removed, so if you build a theme the day 2.0 is released it’ll always work with WPtouch. Wherever possible, we want those building and working with WPtouch to feel confident that they can do what they want to do without the fear that they’ll have their efforts quashed with subsequent releases.

Summary

To summarize: plugin features we add will not affect the functionality of a working theme, in much the same way that the core of WordPress adds functionality without breaking existing themes (for the most part, if they’re coded well).

Themes are user-selectable in the admin, and you can copy a theme to your custom folder to start editing its files if you so choose.

Support for 3rd party plugins will be handled not by direct plugin support, but rather through the ability to hook into WPtouch, and add/modify/remove a plugin’s functionality for better compatibility with WPtouch.

We may create modules that help perform some of this 3rd party functionality, but we’re hoping that developers themselves take to the streets themselves.

One More Thing…

Our WPtouch 2.0 themes will support web-app mode.

For iPhone/iPod touch visitors this means they can bookmark your website to their home-screen and your website will automatically be saved as a self-contained application which will run in fullscreen mode.

This means no address bar at the top of the screen, nor navigation bar at the bottom. Just your mobile site, in full and glorious view.

All posts, pages, comments, etc., are handled with Ajax. This means a super-fast and highly-optimized custom website experience for your website visitors, as native as one can get to a native application on the iPhone/iPod touch.

You can even define a loading image (the screenshot at the top of the page is just that!) that will show while your website fires up!

Launch Details, Beta

We haven’t finalized launch details or the beta release, but we’re getting closer everyday to be able to do so.

We would like to reveal some demos of the plugin in action, and announce release information soon. We’re excited about it all but first need a few more pieces to fall into place, so hang tight!

Pricing and other details will be a part of those announcements.

The best place to get sneak previews is to follow BraveNewCode on Twitter.

To be notified when WPtouch 2.0 will be available, visit WPtouch.com and use the sign-up form.

The hardest part about working together is the time zone difference between Dale and myself: I live out in British Columbia and Dale lives in Hamilton, Ontario. When I wake up in the morning, usually around 8am or so, Dale’s already been up and at ‘em for a few hours. Depending on what we have on our plate, Dale and I usually try and do an early morning call to sync up. If Dale hits me before I’ve had a coffee (or even a decaffeinated placebo), sometimes I’m sure I sound a little grumpy. But to his credit, Dale just pretends like I’m not.

Depending on how much food and drink I have in my apartment, I’ll sometimes work at home, or often I’ll head out to a coffee shop. When at home, I generally avoid my home office (I’ve never really been able to make it feel comfy), and usually find myself working on the dining room table. In the evenings I’ll often flip on the gas fireplace, plant my butt down on the couch, and code from there. While I have an iMac in my office, 90% of the work I do these days uses my Macbook Pro.

I go through cycles typically, usually a phase of quoting projects, followed by a phase of actively working on projects. Dale handles the majority of web design, and I handle the majority of web development. Over the years we have both rubbed off on each other, and I sometimes find myself doing a bit of design (at least from a CSS level), while Dale occasionally writes PHP and Javascript.

We generally receive between five and ten project inquiries every week via our quotation form, and due to our size and our availability, generally only can take on about one project a month. If you do the math, that means we unfortunately have to turn a lot of projects down. Some people would immediately say we should ramp up the business and hire more people, but Dale and I are both inclined to keep it small and personal, opting instead to focus on our existing clients and the projects we’re passionate about.

We both have cell phone plans that let us talk to each other whenever we want for free – given that we’re 4,500 kms apart, that’s a pretty nice feature to have. When we’re working on projects that involve the both of us, often we’ll fire up an audio chat with iChat and communicate that way. There was a period of time there when my internet at home was pretty dismal, and we sort of abandoned iChat for a while. But it seems to have been fixed, so I imagine we’ll pick that up again.

I have quite a few IM accounts, but whenever I’m working I tend to use my top secret mobile .me account which essentially only has Dale as an iChat contact. I found that people used to interrupt me all the time on my other accounts, so I decided not to use them. Tim Ferris, author of the Four Hour Work Week, isn’t a big fan of IM, and neither am I. I’ve found in a lot of big corporate jobs that people just shuffle virtual paperwork around via IM, simply passing the buck for all their problems. When I gave up IM at my last job during the day, I found that a lot of problems that people used to try to get me to solve were eventually solved on their own when I wasn’t immediately available. I look at that as a win-win. So I only have a chat program with Dale on it these days for when we’re working.

While we sometimes work late hours or weekends, for the most part Dale and I try to stick to a regular schedule. I spent most of my 20s working 60 hour work weeks, and the lack of a personal life is not only unhealthy, but generally makes one really miserable. So Dale and I work pretty hard to maintain a good balance. To that end, we are both big fans of automation and constantly try to remove inefficient processes from the company.

For example, a lot of the content on this site gets updated automatically. On the WPtouch page, all the plugin information gets updated the moment we push a new release to the WordPress repository. Even though that system is entirely managed using Subversion on WordPress.org, the data gets pulled into this site periodically which ultimately minimizes the amount of time we have to spend updating our site manually. That’s a philosophy we’ve carried over to all our client projects as well, and we routinely go out of our way to automate some aspects of content generation for them as well.

When I’m not pounding the keys and creating code, there’s a little lake near me that I usually disappear to. In the summer I usually end up camping there, and in the winter I often go up just for a stroll to clear my mind.

Dale’s passion outside of BraveNewCode is bass fishing, and he spends a lot of his downtime in the summer pitting himself against a legion of fish.

For the most part, the physical separation between Dale and I is hardly noticed in a normal work day. Even so, we do our best to meet up every few months, if for nothing other than a few pints. I was out in Hamilton, Ontario last month for Dale’s birthday, and Dale will be out to British Columbia in June for WordCamp Vancouver. If the weather starts turning for the worse, Dale and I will sometimes meet somewhere warm for a week of R & R and brainstorming, usually without much computer time. Last year we spent a week in Cancun and two weeks in Punta Cana, which is where we did most of the initial brainstorming around the soon to be released 2.0 version of WPtouch.

For the last few months, Dale and I have been busy designing and coding the next generation of our WPtouch mobile plugin. The new version is a 100% rewrite, complete with a framework which will allow people to build out mobiles themes. I think when it’s released most people will be extremely happy with the flexibility and ease of use of the new version. If you’re interested in WPtouch 2.0 Pro, make sure you sign up for notifications at WPtouch.com. We’ll also be occasionally updating people via our Twitter stream. If you like snappy one-liners, check out my Twitter stream or Dale’s stream.

And on that note, it’s back to PHP land for me. Next update from me will probably be around the time WPtouch 2.0 Pro is released. Until then.

BraveNewCode Support Forums 2.0

We’ve launched our brand-new Support Forums today, the long-awaited redux for our previous forums which we took offline late last year.

Significant effort went into the new forums, as we re-built them from scratch on bbPress 1.0.2. We’ve added lots of little details to hopefully make our forum experience easy and intuitive for our users, such as: Simple, clear uncluttered views of topics and forums, helpful hints and reminders for publishing topics and replies, Ajax publishing for topics and replies, Ajax favourites and tagging, and much more.

We’ve also added a Bug Reporter Tool available in the forums (available for registered members), for easy filing of those types of issues which we can’t offer a fix for in the forums but can log and track and hopefully resolve in upcoming releases.

BNCID

What’s a BNCID? Simply put it’s an account you create that will hopefully make doing things BNC-related super simple. It’s one account that we’ve planned out to:

• Make comments on the blog under your BNCID username
• Start topics and reply to topics in the forums
• Manage product licenses for any products we may release in the future
• Gain access to special promotions, offers, discounts, etc
• Manage your e-mail subscriptions to blog posts
• … and more!

We’re still building things out for the BNCID accounts, including the account page itself where all the managing of account details and features will take place. Eventually a BNCID holder will have this single page that will let them manage all account features and see blog/forum activity.

It’s something that we really haven’t seen done with WordPress yet that we really think is a must when you build a large, diverse website with several account features such as what we have planned for BNC.

So head on over to the forums and take a look around!
We hope you enjoy them!

~The BNC Team

Website Features

When we started re-architecting this site, one of the crucial aspects during development was that it had to be easy for us to manage. Being only a two person company, we could easily spend a good portion of every week managing and maintaining our website and internet presence. While we wanted a fully functional website, we also didn’t want to be a slave to the maintenance of it.

So to that end here is a brief description of some of the cooler features that are under the hood here.

Flickr Driven Portfolios

If you head over to our porfolio or our product pages, you’ll see we’ve added a lot more information. One area that we’ve beefed up is the product and portfolio image galleries. In the past, we manually added the images using the WordPress system, and while that worked, it wasn’t very fast or efficient. On this new site, we’ve tied all the image galleries into Flickr, so they are completely managed and updated using Flickr and associated tools such as Flickr uploader. All the titles and descriptions for each image come from Flickr as well, and given Flickr’s AJAX content editing interface, it is a real snap to edit content on each of the images.

Remote Plugin Information

Most of our plugins are updated every week or so, and keeping our website up to date with regards to the changes in each version used to be time consuming. On our last website, we finally started pulling some information in from the content on WordPress.org, and have enhanced that even further with this version. On all our plugin pages the download links, change log, last time the product was updated, and associated file sizes are all updated remotely from information over at WordPress.org. From our side, as soon as we check in a new plugin version on the WordPress plugin repository, the associated information will automatically update itself on BraveNewCode.com.

Enhanced Fonts

It’s a real shame that the Internet has essentially been limited to only a handful of web-safe fonts. While there are various technologies that allow the use of additional fonts, we finally came across one that we wanted to try on BraveNewCode: Cufón. As you can see, most of the headings are now in a dynamically generated font called Steinem. We felt that this font added to the look and feel of our website, and fit in well with the spirit behind the content.

jQuery Love

You’ll find sprinkles of jQuery effects and ajax around the site (for example the nice tooltips that pop up on download buttons), all of which was added to make navigation easier and to add some UI gloss to the website.

Jenga: More Than Just A Game

We had a little fun updating the content in a few areas, as evidenced by our spiffy new page talking about our website design and development practices. While we take pride in the work we do, we also like having fun while doing it.

Support Forums

We know that many of our plugin users have been aching for support while the support forums have been down. We apologize again, but it’s the only way we can truly complete our client work, continue to develop our plugins, and finish the overhaul to the forums themselves.

Still More To Do

Not everything is completed with the site revamp, and we’ll be adding more in the coming weeks ahead. Enhancements to the blog, portfolio and product areas, as well as the addition of user accounts here at BraveNewCode.

The New Frontier

We still have a lot to roll out in the next few months here at BraveNewCode, but our new website was a pretty big bullet point on our to-do list, and we’re happy to finally cross it off and share the end result with everyone. By all means, drop us a comment and let us know what you think. Look forward to some more great stuff from The BraveNewCode team in the near future. Happy surfing!

This week Dale’s making the trek out to my part of the world for the weekend, and hopefully the sun will stay out a while longer for us. Unfortunately due to the back-to-back trips, Dale was unable to attend WordCamp Portland, which was a really good time (lots of people loved our WPtouch plugin, and the video Stephen Fry did for us). But hopefully there will be a few beers flowing (some of which was donating via the WPtouch Beer Fund).

Today is also another really special day — today is day 1 of BraveNewCode’s second year, which sort of makes it BraveNewCode’s birthday I guess. Hard to believe Dale and I have been officially “at it” for a year now. Looking back a year ago, Dale had incorporated the company while doing a few small projects, and I was still stuck doing the daily grind in Vancouver. Sometime in the fall I jumped on board, lending a bit of development experience here and there where I could.

By around October, Dale and I were doing quite a bit of business with BraveNewCode, to the point where I really felt like I had two jobs — one was my day job in Vancouver, and one was BraveNewCode, which I typically worked on in the evenings and on weekends. I’ll not lie and say it wasn’t hard sometimes — I remember a few times where I was completely burnt out from lack of sleep, but I knew that Dale and I were working on something pretty amazing.

Around December it finally looked like we had enough work on the horizon such that I could quit my day job in Vancouver and join BraveNewCode full time. January 15th was my last full day of work, and on January 18th I moved back to my home town, a little picturesque farming community about an hour from Vancouver, to work on BraveNewCode full time.

It’s been about five months since then, and things are only looking better. At WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg announced three of the top WordPress plugins, two of which were developed here at BraveNewCode — not bad for a company that was only 11 months old! We’re definitely grateful for everyone’s support, and promise a lot of great things still yet to come from BraveNewCode.

So today, while you people in Canada crack a few beers in celebration of Canada (or whatever other festivity of yours warrants a few drinks), Dale and I will probably be tossing a few back in celebration of our first year of business. So happy birthday Canada, and happy birthday BraveNewCode!

What’s New In Design

We’ve softened up the design and also made the layout a little thinner- some who visited on 1024×768 desktops will likely enjoy the change, as the site won’t seem so disproportionately large to them. We’ve polished, refined & changed the fonts in a few places, and overall have reduced their sizes for proportionality’s sake.

Those viewing the site in Mozilla-based (Camino, Firefox) and Webkit-based (Safari, Shiira) will notice some additional features and qualities in the design. As a general rule we support the very highest in web standards and new functionalities in browsers, so we’ve opted for more work with things like rounded corners using CSS not images, and when Internet Explorer gets its act together (read catches up to where everyone else is at) we’ll add its advanced support as well.

What’s New In Development

Duane has added an incredible functional and unique Portfolio package together, which takes advantage of custom Ajax & jQuery javascript to accomplish the heavy lifting.

One neat thing about it is that from any individual portfolio client’s page (Jessie farrell, for example) you can browse the whole portfolio, just as you can on the landing page itself. This is also a good thing for Search Engine Optimization reasons, and something we routinely make sure we consider and include where needed for our client projects.

WPtouch 1.8: Coming Soon

We’ve also been hard at work on WPtouch 1.8, the next update to our popular WordPress mobile plugin. The update will offer a couple significant new features, along with solving some bugs that cropped up in the 1.7.x series. Look for it out in the next couple days.

If you’ve downloaded 1.7-1.7.4, please update to 1.7.5 to fix the issues identified post-release.

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who posted in the comments, left us tweets and mailed in to report on the state of WPtouch 1.6 and the kinds of bugs they experienced & features they’d like to see— your feedback is invaluable to us.

We’re driving hard toward the big 2.0 release, which will see some remarkable changes, including (finally) localization for international users and themes. WPtouch 2.0 will ship with 3 default themes to choose from, to further customize your site’s appearance on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android and soon, Blackberry Storm.

We’ll also be adding a small documentation guide for aspiring designers and developers to work on their own WPtouch themes, which we’ll index and provide for download for free on the website. To stimulate some growth here, we’ll be having a contest with some good prizes for those who create some stellar themes. It’ll be a great time for WPtouch users the world over.

WPtouch 1.7.5

We considered issuing a small maintenance release to fix a couple of missed bugs with 1.6, but instead decided to hold off as they weren’t widespread and turn our focus to continuing to add features alongside solving pesky issues.

Below is the complete changelog for 1.7.5:

• Added option to do GZIP compression
• Added ability to choose if WPtouch or regular version of your site is shown first
• Fixed WP login/out button bugs
• Added login/out auto-detect for WP 2.7 or pre-WP 2.7 sites
• Fixed loading path issue that caused drop-down menu button to fail
• Added choice between alphabetical or page order sorting of the drop down menu
• Added clock icon
• Minor admin fixes & changes (+ better Mozilla browser support)
• Fixes for categories drop-down menu (now shows post #’s)
• Automatic detection & support for Peter’s anti-spam plugin
• Built-in support for Adsense in posts
• Moved Stats tracking box beside Advertising Options
• Better WordPress version support detection
• More refined image auto-sizing with WP added images & galleries in posts / pages
• Fix for WordPress shortcodes appearing in excerpts
• Changed how WPtouch shows switch links
• Auto-adjusting width/height for MobileSafari plugin objects (YouTube, Quicktime)
• 1.7.1: Fixed re-direct bug when viewing default theme from mobile device
• 1.7.2: Fixed missing Android support
• 1.7.3: Fixed broken login link on some installations
• 1.7.4: Fixed a warning that occurred when multiple gzip handlers were enabled

Download

Feel free to head on over to the WPtouch page to download the new version, or use the auto-update mechanism in your WordPress admin to install it. As always, we love to hear feedback from our users, and will continue to add new features and functionality going forward.

What’s Next?

We’re working on better Android support, built-in tie-in with WordTwit & twitter, localization, themes & more. Stay tuned.

On the other side of the country, sleeping soundly at the time when Dale gets up, is me. I live in a little town called Chilliwack in British Columbia, a quaint little village lovingly nestled between a bunch of mountains. I recently moved from Vancouver, simply because I found it hard to justify paying the high prices of rent when I was simply going to be working from home. Plus, the scenery around here is breathtaking, and I thought it would be good inspiration for both BraveNewCode and some of my photography.

Strangely enough, BraveNewCode is composed of two individuals who haven’t really spent a lot of time together in real-life. I first met Dale while working on Matthew Good’s website years ago, and since then we’ve obviously become really great friends. That being said, some people are still surprised that we’ve only hung out in person four or five times since we first started working together. But given how easy it is to chat online via iChat, it’s something that neither of us really thinks about at this point any more, and something that will undoubtedly change going forward.

Given that we’re still a young company and that Dale and I both utilize a lot of various technology during a typical day, we wanted to share with everyone some of the tools we use and relate some of our experiences so far.

The Hardware

Like most web companies these days, we exclusively use Apple computers. Each of us has a relatively new iMac computer to use when we’re in our home office spaces. In addition, we both have top-of-the-line Macbook Pros that we use when traveling or heading down to the nearest watering hole to do a bit of work.

For cellular phones, Dale and I both have Apple iPhones, which when coupled with our Mobile Me accounts, further enhances our productivity. Recently we also set up BusyCal, which allows us to synchronize our calendars together. The combination of Mobile Me and BusyCal also allows us to have shared work calendars that can be updated from our mobile phones, making it easy to modify or add events while on the road.

The Software

For design, Dale uses Adobe Photoshop CS4. I have a copy of it around as well, but mostly so that I can look at stuff Dale produces. For development purposes, we use a variety of different tools. Our FTP program of choice is Transmit — it’s simple to use and the FTP server list can be synchronized with Mobile ME. In terms of editors, we both primarily use Smultron 2 for editing code, and in terms of revision control, we use subversion for all of our code.

Invoicing and Time Tracking

For invoicing, we use Freshbooks. Freshbooks is a comprehensive invoicing, ticketing and time tracking service that I’ve been using for my photography invoices for the last few years. When I climbed onboard with BraveNewCode, I set us up with a company Freshbooks account. For the most part, it makes managing clients, estimates and invoices fairly hassle-free. The only complaint we really have is that it doesn’t natively integrate with any of our other Mac tools.

Dale and I don’t really spend a lot of effort tracking our time. Given that we’re still a small company, we both have a pretty good idea of where our time is going. That being said, we’ve had a few clients with business processes that required some form of time tracking on our side, so we’ve been forced to do it occasionally. For that, we’ve been using Freshbooks as well.

Collaboration

Given that Dale and I are separated by nearly 5,000 kms, we obviously rely heavily on various communications tools. When we’re out an about, we can simply call each other on our cell phones. I have a special plan through Rogers Wireless here in Canada that allows me to call certain people whenever I like with no additional charge. Since Dale is on that list, I can call him at any time of the day and no incur any charges, which is ideal in a business settings.

But without a doubt, the workhorse for our entire operation is Apple’s iChat. During a typical day, Dale and I usually have iChat going about 80% of the time, almost always in a two-way audio chat. We occasionally bounce on or off to make phone calls or to do a few errands, but mostly when we’re working we’re actively collaborating over iChat. Given that many of our clients have iChat as well, we often do interactive video chats between Dale, myself and our clients.

Pay Yourself First

The term “pay yourself first” is a personal investment strategy that many people use to help save money. Dale and I have implemented that same philosophy with BraveNewCode right from day 1. With all income we receive from clients, we automatically take 25% off the top and put it aside for company expenses and growth. All our legal expenses, computer purchases, travel expenses, cell phone bills and various other expenses related to our day to day operations come out of that account. Despite our purchases (which have been necessary, but not excessive), that pool has slowly been growing over time, which gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of events we can attend, or projects we can take on. It’s also allowed us to stop worrying about any of our equipment or short-term expenses, as we know we routinely put aside enough to account for any catastrophic failures of hardware or any unexpected travel expenses (such as me having to head out to see Dale on short notice).

Keep Evolving

Dale and I are constantly adjusting the tools we use, either by tossing things that aren’t working, or testing things we think may save us some time. We’re careful not to let the tools interfere with our job, and the moment something starts being more work than the value it’s adding, we toss it out the window. So far, things are going great for BraveNewCode, and we hope to share with everyone some of the cool things we’ve been working on these last few months.

We’ll continually share some of our internal stories here, but feel free to drop a comment or two with anything you’ve been doing that’s working particularly well.

Our Clients

We’ve been working on some exciting client projects like the recent re-launch of jaygrandin.com, home of popular internet podcaster and video publisher Jay Grandin. We’ve got several more client sites to launch in the coming weeks which we’re both proud of and excited about, and will share on our website.

WPtouch

We’ve worked hard on making our free & open-source WPtouch WordPress plugin even better, by shaving off size, speeding up load times, and hardening its compatibility with other plugins and different WordPress environments with the release of WPtouch 1.4 a few weeks ago. WPtouch is simply one of the most elegant, carefully considered and refined plugins in WordPress history. Don’t just take our word for it: we’ve been receiving heaps of praise around the globe, and making “best of” posts around the web like here and here and here.

New BraveNewCode Design

We’ve also been exploring the development of a new design for this website, which we hope get out in the coming week or so as well.

As the fall sets in we’re tightening our belts and rolling up our sleeves!

Best,
~Dale Mugford

Since releasing WPtouch 1.0 a few months ago, we have received countless emails, 358 368 comments or pingbacks, and over 14,000 downloads. Given the admiration for WordPress that everyone here at BraveNewCode shares, we’re extremely proud of the accomplishment, and thank everyone for their support.

WPtouch 1.0 represents hundreds of hours of work on a development side, with a large number of hours also spent testing on Matt’s site and on various other test configurations we have. With each release, we have meticulously tested each version against various releases of WordPress, and against several server configurations to ensure functionality for all of our users. For a small three person team, we’re very happy with the end result and the exposure WPtouch has brought to BraveNewCode and to WordPress on the iPhone. Leo Laporte recently gave WPtouch a favorable recommendation, as well as Tod Maffin from the CBC. We appreciate the exposure, and will reiterate how committed we are to ensuring that the WordPress iPhone experience is revolutionary.

This last weekend Dale and I put most of the finishing touches on WPtouch 2.0. While it’s similar in functionality to the 1.0 releases, we’ve incorporated a lot of big changes that many of our users have requested. To name a few:

• Additional configuration options in the administration panel
• Integration will several third party plugins
• Additional javascript optimizations for faster loading times
• Full internationalization (i.e. language) support
• Support for mobile m.domainname.com names
• Full theming support, so users can create their own themes, and download new themes from BraveNewCode
• Default inclusion of several extra themes for added user customization

In addition, once the 2.0 release is in the hands of our users, Dale and I have plans to do a full administration interface as well, allowing full functionality and administrative control from an iPhone.

We’re also extremely pleased to announce that WPtouch 2.0 will be offered in several premium varieties as well. For those of you who are using WPtouch 1.0 that are completely happy with the features, rest assured that we’ll continue with a free version as well. But for those of you who want to stay at the cutting edge with the iPhone, we’re going to offer premium versions for commercial and non-commercial usage. These versions will have enhanced features, will automatically allow you to receive unlimited lifetime updates, and give users access to priority product support.

While we’re still playing with the price-points, we believe that we will offer a version for sites that are primarily non-commercial in nature, and a version for sites that are commercial in nature. With regards to the commercial version, we will also be incorporating Google Adsense into WPtouch.

For those of you who think the iPhone and WPtouch are a fad, I would offer the following; In March of this year, Google released data regarding internet searches. The data was so controversial in fact, that Google asked its engineers to process the data again. In the end, Google showed that 50x as many web searches were made with the iPhone than all the other smart phones combined. As a grand total, that number represented approximately 0.5% of the entire internet search market (including PCs), which for a relatively new mobile device, is absolutely unprecedented.

Since that time, Apple has released the iPhone 3G and has gained increased market share. We fully expect that mobile searches and internet surfing are going to continue to explode. With that in mind, we feel that spending a few bucks for an enhanced iPhone experience, complete with support, lifetime updates, and priority addition of new features, is well worth the expense. As we’ve shown with WPtouch 1.0, we’re absolutely committed to new features, a great iPhone experience, and maintaining our position on the cutting edge (as evidenced by the magnitude of releases we’ve done). We’re hoping every one of you will support our WPtouch 2.0 endeavors in the future, and we look forward to pushing WordPress to the extreme on the iPhone with each new release.

All the best,
BraveNewCode

When we do so, we hope that anyone who endeavors to do a really kick-ass translation in thier language will send us the .po/.mo files they’ve created (wptouch@bravenewcode.com) so that others can enjoy the same.

We’re also baking other minor fixes, additions, and changes into the mix. As always the full list of changes will be included in the changelog which you’ll find at the bottom of the WPtouch page.

We will be writing more about our WPtouch 2.0 roadmap in the weeks ahead, and hopefully you users out there can provide some feedback and suggestions when we release a public beta of it.

We’ve had over 5,000 downloads of WPtouch in its first month, recieved heaps of praise, and become the premiere iPhone & iPod touch WP theme enhancement plugin on the web, something we’re extremely proud of.

So with that in mind we’d like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who has helped to make both BraveNewCode and WPtouch a success so far this year.

We’ve got some aggressive plans to move WPtouch into unheard-of realms for the WP community, as well as other projects that will tie into it, but be cool all on their own. The one roadmap we can talk about is WPtouch, being that it’s a GPL project.

WHO SAID LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING?

WPtouch’s design was meant to mimic an Apple-like application look, and function in similar ways. The easy logic there was that it would be a cool achievement to totally transform a blog/website into looking like an app, and functioning like one where possible. With the use of Ajax in certain places alongside some Scriptaculous effects, I think we archived it for the most part.

But there quickly became the reality that even though we’d built custom, flexible style into the theme, it would be awesome if users were able to come up with their own themes for it, as well (plus we have notions of coming up with more official themes as well).

CAN WE SAY THEMING FOR THE WIN?

Themes made by users, easily selectable in the admin, with the possibility of us hosting them here on the site, in an easily user upload/download way. So that’s what we’ll be working on going forward with WPtouch, as well as a few other tweaks and changes to shore up the 1.0 line.