editor

I finally got a chance to do a little exploring. I took a ferry trip over to the Olympic Peninsula. This is the first day of that trip. More stuff from that area at HAIF's sister site, Pacific Northwest Architecture.

One note -- until I can figure out how to do a 12-hour new posts button, don't forget that HAIF:Now does fairly much the same thing. HAIF:Now

At least you don't have to get up at 5:00am to watch the matches live!

Be careful with installing some of the Android apps. I've read a couple of articles recently about apps that either aren't what they seem, or that aren't from the people you might think they are. One example given was bank apps that let you look at your accounts and pay bills, etc... Not all of them are actually made by the banks they claim to represent. In some cases there are three or four apps all claiming to be the "official" banking apps of a particular bank, yet none of them are. As with anything on the internet -- be careful to whom you give your information. That said, if you need a commercial-strength Twitter client, Hootsuite can't be beat. Though, it's not free. I think it's like $1.99 or something.

I find soccer as exciting as baseball. To me, both are excuses to go out and soak up the atmosphere more than watch the match. I went to a UEFA Cup match in Amsterdam in the 90's. That's about the extent of my professional soccer exposure. That said, has anyone noticed that the World Cup seems like it's HUGE business this year? At first I thought it was just because of my recent change in geography. Sounders FC (the Seattle MLS team) is MASSIVELY popular out here. I'm really surprised. Easily more popular than the Mariners. I thought it was just a local phenomenon, but then I saw that CNN and Microsoft both have World Cup tie-ins with Foursquare, and that there are viewing parties in stadia across the country. Am I imagining things, or is this really big this year? And if it is... why now?

Sneaky basterds. Thanks for catching that. I would have never noticed it. I think I fixed it. Hopefully it looks like this now: Well, not exactly. I changed it, but Facebook is still caching the old version. Hopefully it will update soonish.

Not that I've been able to find.

HINES ANNOUNCES PROMOTIONS IN HOUSTON (HOUSTON) - The Houston office of Hines, the international real estate firm, is pleased to announce the recent promotions of Jerry Lea and Mark Pojar in the firm's corporate office in Williams Tower. Jerry Lea has been promoted from Senior Vice President - Conceptual Construction to Executive Vice President - Conceptual Construction. Since joining Hines in 1981, Lea has been responsible for consultants selection and contract negotiation, budgeting, scheduling, management of consultants' designs, and contractor and subcontractor bidding and negotiations for 150 million square feet of commercial, office buildings, retail complexes, hotels, sports facilities, clean rooms, performing arts theaters and museums. Mark Pojar has been promoted from Pre-construction Manager to Vice President -Conceptual Construction. Pojar joined the firm in 2007 and since then, has been responsible for the MEP pre-construction services for projects including: Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America Inc. in Deerfield, IL; Dr. P. Phillips Performing Arts Center in Orlando, FL; Skyview Corporate Park and Horizon Center in Gurgaon, India; and the ASD project in São Paulo, Brazil. Prior to joining Hines, Pojar was an Engineering Manager with Alvine Engineering for eight years. While with that firm, he worked on numerous Hines projects such as Union Pacific Headquarters in Omaha, NE; One South Dearborn and 300 North LaSalle in Chicago; and 24th at Camelback II in Phoenix, AZ. Hines is a privately owned real estate firm involved in real estate investment, development and property management worldwide. The firm's historical and current portfolio of projects that are underway, completed, acquired and managed for third parties includes 1,111 properties representing more than 451 million square feet of office, residential, mixed-use, industrial, hotel, medical and sports facilities, as well as large, master-planned communities and land developments. With offices in more than 100 cities in 17 countries, and controlled assets valued at approximately $22.2 billion, Hines is one of the largest real estate organizations in the world.

There isn't a function in the control panel for such things. I could probably figure out how to do it directly through the database, but it would require a few hours that I really don't have.

What the people in those posts were talking about is the "Show me all new content since my last visit" feature which is available in your settings. When we upgraded to HD4, initially that was replaced with "Show me all content that I have not read." This was confusing for many HAIFers who were used to clicking on View New Posts and expecting "Show me all new content since my last visit." But with the change in HD4, clicking that button not only returned "Show me all content that I have not read," it also marked everything in that list as read. So when people had viewed one thread from View New Posts, and returned to View New Posts expecting to see the rest of the threads they had not clicked on, they only saw one or two that had been updated while they were reading the previous thread since everything was marked read. HAIFers weren't the only people burned by this change, so that's why we have both options now. Agoraphoria used to run the old HAIF software, before I killed it back in January. There is no hour-based function in Agoraphoria's View New Posts feature. It only looks like 12- or 24- hours because that's how long it had been since your last visit to HAIF. Again, I will try to add a 12- and 24-hour post button, but I'm not sure if it's possible. Certain functions (like rep) require heavy AJAX and other technologies that do not work equally well (or at all) across all mobile platforms, so they don't exist in the mobile version. Glad to hear it works on your Storm. I know that a lot of non-iPhone users had trouble with the previous mobile output. It would be great if everyone (mobile and otherwise) could post screenshots of HAIF in this thread so I can see how it looks on various machines and make sure all of the output is formatted correctly. Patience. The blues will change, but be refined over time to give it more contrast (especially in forms). The quotes have been given to Brijonmang to do. Yes. Click "Last Post." On some threads there is also the option to see the first post in that thread that you haven't read yet.

It's not entirely new. But it is vastly improved. Before, the only thing it did was allow you to log in to HAIF with your Facebook account. Now it has many more Facebook-related functions, as listed earlier in this thread. For those of you wondering why you would want to log in to HAIF with your Facebook or Twitter account, there are two reasons: 1 - If you don't already have a HAIF account, you don't have to come up with a whole new set of names and passwords to remember. 2 - If you already have a HAIF account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Facebook or Twitter logo. You don't have to enter a name and password.

There are posts in this section that you have not read. You have read all the posts in this section. This thread is closed. This is a poll thread that has posts you haven't seen. This is a poll thread that you have already seen everything in. This thread has been moved. This is an announcement. A big thanks to Highway6 for putting those together for us. He's got a few others he's still working on. Also thanks to Brijonmang who is also working on some HAIF icons for us. I look forward to seeing those in action as well.

It is now possible to "Like" a thread, if you have a Facebook account. This works even if you haven't linked your Facebook and HAIF accounts.

For what it's worth, the new HAIF is much snappier on my wife's netbook, too -- a measly eeePC 701: 900 MHz Celeron with 512 megs of RAM and 3 gigs of storage.

It's not in the profile, it's in the individual post. Click on the ugly lime green number thingy. Retroactive? I didn't expect that. I guess that means the forum has been tracking those clicks all along. I think certain users are going to have a busy night.

You can now customize your profile page somewhat. For example, I added a Houston skyline to the background of mine:

Members may now give up to 5,000 positive reputation points in a 24 hour period. Members may now give up to 5 negative reputation points in a 24 hour period. Members may now see who reped them.

You may have noticed that in the last upgrade, and in this one, the PM system is more like a private thread than an e-mail system. You may now invite up to 100 people to participate in a PM. Happy chatting. You may now store up to 2,000 PMs.

They'll likely change in time. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't believe the system tracked who ranked whom before. Or if it did, I don't know about it. We'll see what happens. Interesting, since the new system is moving the same amount of data (and possibly a little more) than the previous version. I think the simplified layout helps older browsers. This is also a possibility, but I like being able to do positive ratings. Sometimes I want to show that I agree with or appreciate something someone wrote, but I'm too lazy to write a full reply, so the + is useful for that. It's also a good substitute for the "me too!" posts that can clog internet fora. There might be a way to do this. I'll look into it. Not going to happen. People here have already demonstrated that they can't behave themselves if these things are anonymous. In short... Poor guy's been dancing for almost a decade now. I think it's time to give him a rest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym8D0EELSZ4&feature=player_embedded There's big stuff coming to the mobile version. I hope.

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to figure out how to do that, but I'll give it a shot. It's coming. New and improved. Now everyone will be able to see WHO modded you into oblivion. I suspect a little accountability will go a long way.

Don't get too excited there. I still have some tweaking to do. There are certain items which have disappeared that I'm still obligated to put back in once I find a way.

Do you mean mark a single thread read with a single click, or do you mean click something to cause a thread to never show up in your unread threads list ever again? Yeah, the default icons are really fugly. They look like they're straight out of the internet's mid-90's Playskool era. Fortunately, Highway6 is taking a stab at making some replacement icons for us. Hopefully we'll see what he comes up with by the end of the week.

People have long requested the ability to preview a topic without actually going into the topic, itself. All of the implementations I've seen to date have been really ugly and obnoxious, with windows popping up all over the screen. Really brutal. Now it is possible to do that on HAIF -- but it's been implemented in a civilized manner. When you hover your mouse over a thread title, there is an icon with a green arrow. Click it and the preview appears. I think this is a pretty good compromise.