I haven't posted on this blog in months. I've been too busy. I've not had much to say. I didn't have the time. Take your pick. You'd be right on any of the above. But Oh, do I have something to say now! There is an infuriating little icon in my Windows Control Panel entitled "MobileMe Preferences". Funny thing. I didn't sign up for it. Never requested the software to be installed. So you can only imagine my consternation.
For the one or two people that may happen on this posting and wonder about my anger, let me enumerate.
1. This is an entirely new software which was sneaked onto my computer without my permission from a so-called reputable company as part of a software update.
2. Apple has done this before with their release of Safari - "The so called best browser on earth". Then again, what thing has been released by apple isn't "The best blah blah on earth?". That previous release had the entire tech blogosphere crying foul. That method undermines the entire software update system, because if I don't trust a company to only install updates of software I put in there before, I may shut down the update system, which is bad because I may disregard actual critical software updates that I need. - There was incessant outcry from the previous issue with Safari. You would think they would learn.
3. If Microsoft tried this tactic, they would incite so much anger and flame from people. Apple does this and somehow, it's less of a problem? I think not.
The ironic part of this whole fiasco is that MobileMe has turned out to be one of Apple's rather crappy releases of the past few years. Way to go Apple.
With Apple's market share slowly growing, if this is what we should be expecting from Apple, there are lots of reasons to be worried.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Friday, May 02, 2008
The Geek Sandwich
So, I was sitting in the subway on the ride home yesterday when I looked glanced to my right to spy on the book the lady beside me was reading and I noticed it was a book on Visual Basic. I smiled and turned away thinking to myself how often these days I've seen people on the train or bus reading a computing book - I saw a guy reading a book on Windows XP a couple of days before. I'm a programmer, I notice these things. Up until I looked to my left, it was a forgettable moment...
And then I looked to my left and saw the gentleman who just entered the train and sat beside me pull out a book on Battlestar Galactica. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I don't know if any one else gets it, but it was a funny moment.
In other news this week, Microsoft and Yahoo still don't know whether to make wedding plans and have a baby named Microhoo or throw "Your Mama" style insults back and forth. Good times.
Fantasy Interactive Fi, one of the top interactive website design firms has grown up today with the relaunch of their website and an what amounts to a rebranding of the company and it's goals. They are no longer all about Flash. They like Ajax and html too.
And then I looked to my left and saw the gentleman who just entered the train and sat beside me pull out a book on Battlestar Galactica. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I don't know if any one else gets it, but it was a funny moment.
In other news this week, Microsoft and Yahoo still don't know whether to make wedding plans and have a baby named Microhoo or throw "Your Mama" style insults back and forth. Good times.
Fantasy Interactive Fi, one of the top interactive website design firms has grown up today with the relaunch of their website and an what amounts to a rebranding of the company and it's goals. They are no longer all about Flash. They like Ajax and html too.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
On Microsoft taking over the web
Quite a bit has happend on the web since my last post. Among them in a nutshell,IE8 beta 1, Firefo3 beta 4, SXSW, MIX, AOL buys Bebo, The MPAA, RIAA and all other associated AAs are still crazy and self destructive, Apple finally release an SDK to the delight of many apple yuppies everywhere, I bit the twitter bug, Microsoft can't seem to give away enough software and oh yeah, let's not forget Microsoft wants Yahoo really bad.
But all that being said, I'm going to focus on only a couple of items that interest me.
To follow up on my last post, IE8 finally gets released as a beta a couple of weeks ago at MIX, microsoft's conference for all things web - designers and developers alike. In response to the outcry from the web development world, they decided to let IE8 default to rendering in standards compliant mode and instead forcing people who have coded their websites around IE8's eccentricities to do the work of updating their websites if they don't want them to break. For the most part, I'm happy about the move. Ask me in a year when the software goes RTM and I have to spend hours updating the templates on my older sites.
So far in testing, the browser seems to be a lot better with rendering to standards, although it's still got some work to do. I hesitate to criticize beta software as it is just that, a beta, so I'll leave it at that. Not much has changed as far as the interface is concerned. I'll post a more comprehensive overview when it's closer to release.
Staying on Microsoft, I'll say this much, when they decide to do things well, they do things well. Pundits and critics alike tend to like the MIX conference. I particularly like the fact that the presentations in audio and video formats are all available on the web right now for anyone to go and watch and or listen to. It's not quite the same as being there for the party itself, but you can still benefit from the content. Of particular note is the increased emphasis on designing and creating user experiences and not just producing software. I'll post more on that later.
Also, regarding Microsoft, the company has expressed a sincere determined interest in buying Yahoo. And they are not taking no for an answer. All signs point to this deal going down one way or the other as Yahoo hasn't exactly being doing very well recently. The stock is down and can't get up. With Microsoft offering to scoop up the company in an all cash 44 billion transaction, the stock holders are chomping at the bit to get this to happen.
I'm not sure I'm going to like this merger. I like Yahoo as a company. It's style, it's outlook and the way it relates to it's customers. Microsoft is in many ways an overbearing behemoth that can't let go of what it used to be - an old style software company. Granted, Microsoft is working very hard to change that and to their credit, they are doing a lot better. 'Open source' or more accurately "Less restrictive source", which used to be the enemy is now very much a present part of Microsoft's recent offerings.
Still, there is the very large possiblity of Yahoo suffocating under this Merger, especially with all the current management and talent vowing to flee if the merger happens. Yahoo, for the most part is all about open. In terms of services and software. As a developer, I love that. In simple terms, Microsoft despite its may efforts is still not. Might Yahoo be the arbiter of change at Microsoft? It's possible, but me thinks, unlikely.
J.T
But all that being said, I'm going to focus on only a couple of items that interest me.
To follow up on my last post, IE8 finally gets released as a beta a couple of weeks ago at MIX, microsoft's conference for all things web - designers and developers alike. In response to the outcry from the web development world, they decided to let IE8 default to rendering in standards compliant mode and instead forcing people who have coded their websites around IE8's eccentricities to do the work of updating their websites if they don't want them to break. For the most part, I'm happy about the move. Ask me in a year when the software goes RTM and I have to spend hours updating the templates on my older sites.
So far in testing, the browser seems to be a lot better with rendering to standards, although it's still got some work to do. I hesitate to criticize beta software as it is just that, a beta, so I'll leave it at that. Not much has changed as far as the interface is concerned. I'll post a more comprehensive overview when it's closer to release.
Staying on Microsoft, I'll say this much, when they decide to do things well, they do things well. Pundits and critics alike tend to like the MIX conference. I particularly like the fact that the presentations in audio and video formats are all available on the web right now for anyone to go and watch and or listen to. It's not quite the same as being there for the party itself, but you can still benefit from the content. Of particular note is the increased emphasis on designing and creating user experiences and not just producing software. I'll post more on that later.
Also, regarding Microsoft, the company has expressed a sincere determined interest in buying Yahoo. And they are not taking no for an answer. All signs point to this deal going down one way or the other as Yahoo hasn't exactly being doing very well recently. The stock is down and can't get up. With Microsoft offering to scoop up the company in an all cash 44 billion transaction, the stock holders are chomping at the bit to get this to happen.
I'm not sure I'm going to like this merger. I like Yahoo as a company. It's style, it's outlook and the way it relates to it's customers. Microsoft is in many ways an overbearing behemoth that can't let go of what it used to be - an old style software company. Granted, Microsoft is working very hard to change that and to their credit, they are doing a lot better. 'Open source' or more accurately "Less restrictive source", which used to be the enemy is now very much a present part of Microsoft's recent offerings.
Still, there is the very large possiblity of Yahoo suffocating under this Merger, especially with all the current management and talent vowing to flee if the merger happens. Yahoo, for the most part is all about open. In terms of services and software. As a developer, I love that. In simple terms, Microsoft despite its may efforts is still not. Might Yahoo be the arbiter of change at Microsoft? It's possible, but me thinks, unlikely.
J.T
Monday, February 04, 2008
Two parts Intrigue, one part hi-larious
In the course of my day, these things intrigued me. I thought I'd share and post here for the record.
Intriguing
Improv-everywhere
http://www.improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
In Car Karaoke
http://www.youtube.com/v/vjmZjr8a2K8
Recycled Heat - Sort Of
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/08/crematorium_plan/
'nough said
Intriguing
Improv-everywhere
http://www.improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
In Car Karaoke
http://www.youtube.com/v/vjmZjr8a2K8
Recycled Heat - Sort Of
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/08/crematorium_plan/
'nough said
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Standards or Bust!
Short of going into a room filled with apple fan boys/girls and dropping a flamer like "Apple products are wildly overrated" (which they are), very few other things have generated a controversy in the developer community so intense as that triggered by Microsoft's announcement of the IE8 Standards compliant mode switch. Anybody who questions how passionately web developers feel about standards mode and it's side effects only need to see the responses to Jeffery Zeldman's post on the issue (234 at the time of this post. Yes, that's right; Two hundred and thirty four).
If you haven't read or heard about the story, here is the basic breakdown of it. In Microsoft's efforts to work towards standards compliance in their new browser, they announced last week that developers who wish to enable standards compliant mode in IE will have to add the following meta tag to their code at the top of the page.
If they feel that their page will stay standards compliant regardless of future versions of the browser they can instead use this
In my opinion, clunky hack that it is, I think it is a move in the right direction. Having experienced the repeated frustration of fixing my current websites to display correctly in IE6, (most times leading to ungentlemanly utterances) it gives me some kind of relief to know that the next version will make my life a lot easier. With a simple tweak. And there, my good readers is where the problem lies. The tweak.
The standards compliant idealists prefer that IE8 render by default in standards compliant mode and instead should revert back to 'quirks' mode when the tag is added to a page. In essence, opt in to use the previous display engines which worked horribly, but will keep your currently badly coded page displaying correctly. In their opinion, if the day after Microsoft releases IE8, half the world's websites suddenly went all wonky, and the 'developers' who created these pages come to realize that it is because of bad coding techniques, they will be motivated to learn how to code correctly and fix their pages. They wouldn't be called idealists if they didn't think as such. Then of course, there is the minor fact that they feel they would be once again bowing to Microsoft in using this tag. Rewarding bad behavior if you will.
The realists or pragmatists, of which I am one realize that a good majority of the world's web pages out there aredesigned created by people who 'save as' web page from inside Microsoft Word and other related software; Who still think that designing layouts using tables is the best thing since sliced bread. I know, because I'm revising a series of about 10 different websites created like that at the moment. And then of course, there is the abundance of corporate websites out there still being fed to the public from old, expensive content management systems. Standards compliant evangelizing isn't something new. And while there is a learning curve, it doesn't take a massive amount of effort to learn CSS. Far from it. Tutorials for CSS abound all over the web. I know. I learned CSS sometime in 1998, 10 years ago. And yet, with ALL these different resources abundantly available on the web for ALL this time, we still have to deal with terribly coded websites. And here's the bitter truth. Outside the tight knit developer community, most people don't know or care about standards. They just want to create a web page and be done with it.
Here is the bottom line. Many people, designers and developers in particular want Microsoft to get their act together and finally deliver a standards compliant browser. IE is currently the most prevalent browser on the web today (around 56% as of Dec 2007 according to these stats) which means that as much as we may want it, Microsoft cannot be irresponsible about how they deploy software. Those saying "Well, they were irresponsible in designing it this way in the first place" are right, but doing two wrong things won't make things right. It's a cliche, but it's no less true.
To be quite honest, I also consider that at some point Microsoft has to make a clean break a la OS9/OSX Apple style and leave those who want to program things the old way behind. But that being said this is step in the right direction. A clunky one, granted, but a good one.
If you haven't read or heard about the story, here is the basic breakdown of it. In Microsoft's efforts to work towards standards compliance in their new browser, they announced last week that developers who wish to enable standards compliant mode in IE will have to add the following meta tag to their code at the top of the page.
meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"Essentially, that tag tells IE8 to render the rest of the page as close to standards mode as it currently supports.
If they feel that their page will stay standards compliant regardless of future versions of the browser they can instead use this
meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"
In my opinion, clunky hack that it is, I think it is a move in the right direction. Having experienced the repeated frustration of fixing my current websites to display correctly in IE6, (most times leading to ungentlemanly utterances) it gives me some kind of relief to know that the next version will make my life a lot easier. With a simple tweak. And there, my good readers is where the problem lies. The tweak.
The standards compliant idealists prefer that IE8 render by default in standards compliant mode and instead should revert back to 'quirks' mode when the tag is added to a page. In essence, opt in to use the previous display engines which worked horribly, but will keep your currently badly coded page displaying correctly. In their opinion, if the day after Microsoft releases IE8, half the world's websites suddenly went all wonky, and the 'developers' who created these pages come to realize that it is because of bad coding techniques, they will be motivated to learn how to code correctly and fix their pages. They wouldn't be called idealists if they didn't think as such. Then of course, there is the minor fact that they feel they would be once again bowing to Microsoft in using this tag. Rewarding bad behavior if you will.
The realists or pragmatists, of which I am one realize that a good majority of the world's web pages out there are
Here is the bottom line. Many people, designers and developers in particular want Microsoft to get their act together and finally deliver a standards compliant browser. IE is currently the most prevalent browser on the web today (around 56% as of Dec 2007 according to these stats) which means that as much as we may want it, Microsoft cannot be irresponsible about how they deploy software. Those saying "Well, they were irresponsible in designing it this way in the first place" are right, but doing two wrong things won't make things right. It's a cliche, but it's no less true.
To be quite honest, I also consider that at some point Microsoft has to make a clean break a la OS9/OSX Apple style and leave those who want to program things the old way behind. But that being said this is step in the right direction. A clunky one, granted, but a good one.
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