The third and final debate between the 2008 U.S. presidential nominees had just ended. Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama and Republican nominee Senator John McCain had just shaken hands moments before and turned away from each other, when Senator McCain suddenly lunged forward with his hands out in front of him and stuck out his tongue.

It appeared to me that McCain was reacting to moderator Bob Schieffer informing him that he was headed the wrong way off the stage, that he was not supposed to be following Senator Obama, but was supposed to be heading towards his own wife and family around the other side of the table.

In any case, when I saw McCain lunge and his hands start to come up I hit the shutter and made two frames before it was over. Some other photographers who were there expressed surprise when they saw my picture and said they had never seen it happen at all and asked when it had occurred. When I saw the television tape of it later on the news I too was surprised at how momentary and fast the move by Senator McCain was. Strangely enough Senator McCain again stuck his tongue out in a similar way 3-4 minutes later while standing between his wife Cindy and Senator Obama at the front of the stage, a moment captured by my colleague Shannon Stapleton and other wire service photographers in attendance and once again shown on national and international television.

The picture, as with all my pictures that night, was remotely edited by an editor off site, viewing my pictures as I shot them over the internet and working with other editors who processed and captioned the pictures along with photos from the other three Reuters photographers shooting the debate. This photo was just one of 40 of my pictures that were transmitted on the Reuters wire from this debate and one of more than 100 from our crew of photographers, which included Gary Hershorn, Shannon Stapleton, Jim Young and Carlos Barria.

By the time I got back to my hotel room that night people were already discussing the photo on the internet and by the next morning my email inbox was filling with messages about the picture. Some people complimented me on the photo while others strongly criticized both myself and Reuters for shooting and transmitting a news photo of a very public moment that had taken place in front of more than 60 million television viewers at the culmination of a major and historic public event.

It’s finally here, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! The long months of your tolerance and forbearance as you suffered through the inelegance of our hacked-together, leftover Crazyhorse interface are almost at an end. (Was it really that painful?)

This week at the Automattic team’s semi-annual offsite meeting (offsite since we have no office), the visuals you have been craving were finally created and approved. We hope you like them. Mad props to Matt Thomas and Andy Peatling for their visual talents. You can expect these designs to be extended to the rest of the 2.7 screens and implemented over the coming weeks.

So now that we finally nailed down the look, how’s it going to work? The menu system in particular has been the topic of discussion on the hackers and testers lists, so I thought I would take this opportunity to explain how we plan for it to work. As you know, one of the goals of 2.7 was to reduce the necessity to load new screens just to access sub-navigation menus; we wanted the most-used screens to be within a click or two at most. If you’ve been using the nightly builds, you got used to the arrow controls that allowed you to expand and contract the menus. Then you got used to the box-style with icons that not only opened and closed vertically, but could be minimized horizontally as well, leaving a remnant of icons to provide a kind of “advanced mode,” though you don’t need to be particularly advanced to use it. Now that we have real button styles (the icons are still placeholders, and we hope to have some new ones soonish), we’ve nailed down the menu functionality.

2.7 New Post Screen, Unfinished

Each section header has three parts: the icon on the left, the blue link text, and the area to the right where an expansion arrow appears on hover or in expanded state. You can see that the arrow is contained in a small segment of the header, similar to the way the favorites menu is structured. If you click on this segment, the menu will expand to show the choices in that section. Click again to close the menu. Click on the blue link text and you will go directly to the screen for the first choice in that section, where the section menu will be opened to show you the other section choices. Double-click on the section icon and the menu will close horizontally, leaving the icon list visible. In this state, hovering over the icons will display the menus for each section, so you’re still only a click away from most screens. Double-click on an icon when the menu is closed this way and it will take you to the first screen in that section. The small arrows attached to the dividing lines between menu groups will also act as open/close toggles for using the horizontal collapse/expand function.

This variety of ways of using the menu system aims to accommodate both power user and novice alike. Clicking on blue link text like normal will bring the expected result for the novice, while the advanced user has more options for navigation that allow a more customized experience. We hope you like this result as much as we do, and you can expect to see it implemented in Trunk soon.

The image below is the new Dashboard style, which I’ll save explaining for early next week, but hopefully the preview will get you excited for the new design.

2.7 Dashboard