I am pleased to announce that my latest, and 20th, WordPress plugin is Simple Content Reveal.

Simple Content Reveal allows you to easily hide and reveal WordPress content, whether it be in the sidebar or in a post or page.

To see it in action, cast your eyes to the sidebar on the right where various sections are hidden by default. Click on their heading to reveal them!

And, at the bottom of each post, comments are shown by default (but can be clicked on to hide them), whereas pingbacks and trackbacks are hidden.

I’m particularly proud of this plugin because of how well it works without relying on complex JavaScript.

As always, if you have any queries add a comment to my blog and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Steve Jobs doesn’t like Flash. That’s patently clear.

He blames most Mac crashes on Flash and, I have to say, since Firefox starting sandboxing plugins I’ve seen regular reported Flash crashes.

However, a lot – a lot – of high profile websites use Flash, mainly to render video. Steve’s answer to this is HTML 5 – a new version of HTML that is being supported more and more by the browsers. And HTML includes video capability. Great – no more Flash.

Except his argument is flawed.

1. HTML 5 is still a draft standard and is liable, probably for a good few years yet, to change.
2. Flash does more than just play video and HTML 5 doesn’t support a lot of what it can do.
3. Although HTML 5 allows video, it doesn’t force you to use a particular format. And, as usually happens, a “war” is going on between competing formats – with 3 formats being particularly strong. Where most browsers are plumping for the 2 royalty free options (after all browsers are given away free), Apple has only added the commercial version to Safari and, so far, that appears to be the less popular. Each site will have to re-encode their videos for a different format other than Flash – are they really going to do it for 3 other formats?
4. HTML 5 video can’t do everything that Flash video can – it is unable to display video fullscreen and there are content protection issues.

Many have speculated that Job’s dislike of Flash mainly comes down to the fact that, unlike pretty much every other aspect of the iPhone, Apple can’t control it. Even apps, written by others, have to be checked and authorised by Apple, after being written on Apple development tools.

Which makes their choice of video format look odd, as it’s a third party commercial product. But then, they would have even less control over the two open formats.  iTunes and Quicktime already use this format and besides, one of the other formats is being championed by Google.

By insisting that Apple products do not use Flash but instead force their particular video format on the masses that buy them they are, in effect, almost guaranteeing themselves success longer term. Or are they? Can the other browsers support a commercial video format which they will have to pay for.

And, at the same time, sites are going to be reluctant to recode all their video until a format is clearly successful.

But, it’s good to see Steve is taking it on the chin as he always does. After a blogger contacted him about supporting the alternative, open formats, Steves reply was “a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other open source codecs now”.

Nice.

Today, T-Mobile finally announced that Android 2.1 (Eclair) was available for G2 Touch (AKA HTC Hero) owners.

If you’ve not received your “pre-upgrade” update already, you’ll need to do this – it makes various small changes in readiness for the Eclair update.

To get this, wind your clock on by a month and switch off wi-fi (it needs the data connection for the upgrade to be detected). It only takes a couple of minutes and doesn’t cause any data loss.

Once you have that, you can either wait for Eclair to be pushed out to your phone or go and get it manually. To do the latter, go into Menu -> Settings -> About Phone and you should now have an option to check for software updates. Go into this and follow all prompts.

Now, the Android update can cause data lose, although I found it to be minimal. I’d recommend backing up all your data – I used MyBackup Pro to backup all data and applications to my SD card, which I then copied into my Netbook.

The update takes a few minutes and, even when it appears to have rebooted, you might find that behind your lock screen is an HTC update running. Once this is done I found my date and time was incorrect and that my home screens had been reset – if you saved your layout as a “Theme” (which I hadn’t done) then I’m guessing you can easily restore it.

And that’s it.

From what I can tell the visible changes are minimal (even more so – animations are turned off by default, so you’ll need to switch them on for the full impact) – the main change is the improvement in speed. And, boy, is it noticeable.

Other than that, the biggest change to users will be the apps in the Marketplace that will now be available – Google Earth, IMDB, Google Goggles, Talk To Me, amongst many others.

Smaller changes include an improved Gmail App, a new pinch feature for viewing all the home screens and a Desk Clock app.