« March 2006 Entries »

Patents v. Microsoft

I told myself I’d never mention the name again on this site, but it’s come to this. Microsoft has (temporarily?) caved on the Eolas patent dispute, and issued a warning to web developers everywhere: the Internet Explorer plugin architecture is going to get an unwelcome downgrade, and you need to change your pages now to avoid causing user experience problems down the road. You’ve got two months.

Who’s affected? Well, do you use the <object> element? Then, potentially, you are. Sites that embed PDF, Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, or RealPlayer files will all get hit by this.

What happens? The page loads, but the controls are disabled by default. In order to activate them, the user must click on them first.

Bad for advertisers? Yep. Bad for CMS/eCommerce vendors that rely on ActiveX controls? Yep. Bad for media sites? You bet. Bad for Adobe? Of course.

Really, there’s no good side here. Except that you’ve got two months to fix your sites. Like you didn’t have anything better to do anyway. Enjoy.

(Ethan Marcotte has some history and technical details about this issue from 2003, if you need to play catch-up.)

(And I should be clear: this is Microsoft’s response to litigation brought on by an opportunistic third party, it’s not an arbitrary decision on their part to make your life worse.)

Comments Closed (57) | posted to Browsers, Technology, The Industry

VOIP Disconnect

I have to admit, it took me a while to understand the voice over IP trend (think Skype, Vonage, or iChat AV for that matter), mainly because it has never actually worked for me. Turns out, that was all my fault.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (33) | posted to Technology

IE7: Details

A bit late posting this due to travel, but I had a chance to sit down with Markus Mielke of the IE team and find out what precisely we can expect of rendering updates in IE7. It’s likely that any praise of Internet Explorer will still be controversial for now, but it’s well-earned. Hear me out.

The latest beta preview release of IE7, the one that came out in association with this conference, is expected to be more or less the final revision to the rendering engine. What exists now is as feature-complete as it will get, so expect no more CSS or major bug fixes past this point for IE7.

They’re not 100% there yet, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but there are two important take-aways here. First, IE7 is not the end of the road. This is the first big step, but they expect to make many more. Second, now is the time to start fixing your sites. Grab the latest version, and test against it; if your site breaks in it (as this one does), you can expect that will remain true after IE7 final is released. It’s time to start the surgery. It’ll hurt. But hopefully, the rest of this post will convince you and me both that it won’t be so bad.

In the Explorer Exposed section on Position is Everything, there’s a big list of bugs exclusive to IE running down the left hand side of the page. With one exception, consider that entire list fixed. The exception is the escaping floats bug, which apparently will take a major code re-architecturing that they simply couldn’t do in IE7; it’ll come in a later release.

The big sexy stuff is of course, transparent PNGs, :hover on any element, and fixed positioning. They’ve even gone so far as to create a code demo of these in action, which is actually a Zen Garden design. Seriously. If you were in Markus’ Wednesday morning session you probably saw it. But I’m not sure if it’ll make it to the actual site or not since — (chuckle) — it would have to be made to work in IE6.

What else? They’ve started implementing CSS3 selectors. How about pixel-unit text scaling? Problem solved! Font sizing is deprecated, wait until you see the new full-page zoom. It’s like zooming in on a PDF. Your absolutely positioned text will no longer scale out of its block, since the block scales equally as well. It’s a designer’s dream. I’m a bit concerned about how the user will view this change, but that remains to be seen.

I still harbour just as much ill will toward IE6 as ever, like many of you. And I’m pretty sure a lot of the IE team understands that sentiment. So while being excited about IE7 might seem contradictory to my past stance on the browser, it’s because I simply see the potential. This first step is a big one. It’s not enough yet, but it’s significant enough that I know the next step afterward is going to be exactly what we wanted, and likely a bunch more.

As I said to Markus, at one point in time they had the best browser on the market; given the sheer momentum I uncovered at this conference, I could very well see it happening again. IE8: the new Firefox? Hmm.

Comments Closed (50) | posted to Browsers, CSS

MIX06

Things you might not have expected to read on this site: I hung out with the Internet Explorer team, and they’re fun people.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (29) | posted to Browsers, Software, Technology

Mac vs. Intel vs. Adobe

So here’s where we’re at on announced MacIntel computers right now: we’ve got the MacBook Pro, the Mac mini, and the iMacIntel.

Does anyone spot a trend? Neither do I. The releases are happening in seemingly completely random order, without much concern to the traditional consumer and pro lines. So Apple’s charging away at the transition, regardless of the lineup. Great.

Except for those of us who want to buy new technology right now. See, Adobe has seemingly committed to not porting existing software (meaning both CS2 and Studio 8 here, remember) to MacIntel. Instead we’re going to have to wait for the next versions, which, given the current product cycle, means we’ve got a year or two to wait it out.

Yes, you can run the existing software in emulation mode, but it ain’t quick. It’s hard to justify shelling out now for a speed decrease, when the actual benefits won’t kick in for another year or more.

Here’s the big dilemma for Mac-based creative professionals looking for new gear at the moment: buy a G5-based system now and get the speed boost for the short term, thus facing obsolesence in a few year’s time. Or, buy an Intel-based system now, take a short-term speed hit, and be assured that your system will live on well after the transition is finished.

Of course, with the PowerMacs you don’t even have the choice, the Intel versions haven’t been announced yet. And there’s another variable: you’d need to stick it out until they arrive, and buy then. Anyone needing new gear right away is going to get stuck with a very tough choice.

I’d been thinking about a PowerMac lately myself, but this issue made the decision a lot harder. I was all set to pick up a quad-core G5 at some point in the very near future, until I started seeing the Intel benchmarks. I had assumed the G5’s would still out-pace the Intel chips for the first generation or two, but it sounds like the new chips are way faster already when running Universal binaries. So that doesn’t help the matter.

Right now, I can’t see any way to personally justify buying a G5 PowerMac. It’s a lot of money for something guaranteed to be obsolete within a few years. At the same time, I can’t really justify laying out the same amount of cash for a system guaranteed to chug away for the next year or more. So PowerMacs just don’t make sense until Adobe’s on board.

I realized that, just as Apple is in the middle of a transition, I guess I’ll have to be as well. So I ended buying a 20” iMac G5. It’s cheap, it’s got a nice big screen, and even with the stock 512MB of RAM (which will get maxed out in short order) it’s already running circles around my Powerbook.

When it makes more sense to jump into the world of MacIntel, I’ll do it. But a week in, I’m not regretting this move one bit. I can always sell it when it’s time to move on, but I already suspect it’ll be hard to get rid of.

Word of advice though: if you’re thinking along the same lines, go and get one yesterday. It seems Apple is putting them to bed rather quickly, to the point where mine may have come from the very last shipment of iMac G5’s to the local Mac outlet.

Comments Closed (63) | posted to Software, Technology

Randoms

A few random tidbits from around the web this week:

Feeling Random?

Take pictures of people at SXSW. Lots of them. Upload them to Flickr. Wait. If the random person of the day happens to be in your photo, both you and they win an iPod nano. That’s it? That’s it. Brought to you by those fine folks at WestCiv.

Veerle’s blog now 2.0

Holy moly, that’s a hell of a redesign. Hats off!

Layout Gala

One common markup format, 40 different CSS layouts. Creating a new CSS-based site? Start here. Every time.

Windows Live Local Virtual Earth Technology Preview Enoughsyllablesalready? Edition

Not sure if I’ve said it on here before, but I really loved Microsoft’s response to Google Maps. Now this new one, despite being buggy and obviously not a final product of any sort, is just totally mind-blowing.

The IE7 MIX 06 Release

Okay, this is a bit of a shocker. Look at the IE7b2TechPreview screenshots (the IE7 beta that came out last month, that is) vs. the upcoming IE7 beta release later this month. What the…? I mean, bloody fantastic, but how in the world did they go from the middle to the bottom in only a month?

Though Microsoft has obviously gotten a bit better at communicating with the developer community, I’m still waiting for any sort of public roadmap about what we can actually expect of the final release. Which, if the random sources on Google can predict properly, appears to be some time this summer. At least things are looking up.

I’ll be plunging head-first into Microsoft land later this month, and plan to live-blog as much as I can from the conference. I’ll tell you what I find out.

Designing Against a Degrading Experience

I didn’t expect to be so Microsoft-heavy today. But anyway. Checking in with Jensen Harris’ Office UI blog once again, he’s posted a fascinating article about the longer-term cruft buildup Office users frequently struggle with, and how they’ve chosen to expressly design against that experience in the upcoming version.

This isn’t something web sites have to deal with yet, but when feature creep and user customization start becoming issues, this will be one to refer back to.

I Know HTML

The greatest T-shirt ever for a web designer of the male persuasion.

Comments Closed (16) | posted to Design, Ephemeral, Events, Technology