Lee Jordan .org.uk

Noticed the increase in Windows XP adverts on TV recently? The last major version of Windows for consumers lauched in 2001. Six years is a long time to wait for an upgrade.

Ballmer Says Microsoft Pushing Back Vista, Again

Having brought the new PC and having it have Windows XP on it isn’t too bad I guess. There are some things that I miss from KDE though, one of which was a funky tool that lets you run small desktop toys and information applications and integrate them to the desktop. I need a TV tuner so I can record TV shows on the PC. Oh I do use the computer for web development too you know

A view of my desktop, with the Yahoo! Widgets in action. The winamp skin is highly cool the speakers on the interface vibrate with the music. Click for a closer look.

So I found Yahoo! Widgets which are very closely aligned to the MacOS X look and feel. What I have is a functional desktop that rather than be cluttered with icons, is filled with a value added experience.

These little applications are brillient, I have a picture frame that loops round a directory showing my digital photos, there are weather reports that closely match what’s actually happening outside. Resource watchers, RSS readers, funky clocks, calendars, radio streamers, and a niffy plugin that after 5 minutes of inactivity darkens the screen before the screen saver gets chance to kick in, handy at night for falling asleep to wireless music with.

Hehe, I’m just playing with Flock, a new web browser that pulls together various Firefox extensions that allow you to do things like interact with your blog and your flickr photo account, read RSS feeds and so forth.Flock is based around the idea of the web as a social medium and Flock has a lot […]

This man is over gassped. News everyone : A whole raft of CSS hacks are about to be wiped out, oh the Jedis are going to feel this one. I must say this opens my eyes, oh the cats out of the bag now! I just brought a CSS hacks book after getting fed up with Microsofts non compliance.

Yo! What’s the dealio : * html body and html > body and many a beloved hack we all use to show different CSS to IE6 are gonna be gone in IE7. Need I say the reason for this hack in the first place was to address serious flaws in IE, so although this is gonna be painful I’m gonna have to drop hacks from my daily work in light of the future release of IE7. Let’s hope Microsoft do the right thing by the web development community and lets hope they don’t create more problems than they fix.

We get to a serious issue I highlighted ages ago .. IE7 will have very little market share, in fact Firefox may have more users than IE7 so for the next 10 years this news to the industry is almost a non-event. We are still stuck with IE6, please someone help us!

A lesson learned : Do things properly in the first place!
*eats his own words*

“We’re starting to see the first round of sites and pages breaking due to the CSS fixes we have made. We would like to ask your help in cleaning up existing CSS hacks in your pages for IE7. It is has been our policy since IE6 that under quirks doctype we will not make any behavioral changes” Source

I have to go now, to collect moon rocks …. peace Al Gore. Also you stink! I’ll give you a pear drop if you can comment using Futurama quotes only!

Two things I have come across in my recent musings on user experience of websites in relation to printing web pages and subscribing to RSS feeds, both bits of functionality have been around for a long time, both leave a lot to be desired on the usability front.

What do you mean subscribe? Does that cost money?
I’ve been reading discussion ranging from clicking the orange button and getting garbbled text right up to “you mean I need to download something to read these things?”. General gist of it is that a feed link should be something that a user clicks and the browser handles that as if it would a mailto: link. Using a combination of XSLT and CSS can catch users that click that orange icon and explian further why this techonlogy is of benefit.

Printable versions
Conclusions range from using a “print this page” button and switching the style sheet to show the print.css on screen before printing, or replacing the “print this page” link with a javascript call to the function Print(); which in any case is the same as selecting print from the file menu and thus not showing a user a print preview. It is lack of browser functionality again that has lead us to this situation and I personally can see the same fragmentation heading for mass take up of Syndication feeds such as RSS.

Click here for more on this subject that not too many people are worried about right now, but as these become more of an issue we hopefully should start seeing solutions to these most basic problems.

Oh yes I have found the joy of RSS feeds on my mobile.
In other news Les Batersby got beaten up by Status Quo

RSS brings the web to you, in small easy to scan chunks of info.

Podcasting wouldn’t really have been as easy to interface with without RSS and the future of videocasting or the future of the movBlog (Lee Jordan 2005 .. I herby claim my stake on the term MovBlog) is gonna feature some form of RSS enabled push idea, hopefully in combination with BitTorrent and not in Opera, but rather in Firefox and IE as default.

As a sidenote, Google : “Results 21 - 30 of about 137 for MovBlog” … 137, most of them don’t work and yeah so I didn’t invent the term movBlog, I can easily see this being the next big thing in the blogosphere, if it doesn’t end up costing £4.76 to post a location based video taken on your mobile phone, geotaged and displayable on Google Maps of course,.

A recent glance at the ZDNET news shows a disturbing yet hillarious slant on the pointless IE vs Firefox debate :

Subscribe or Download

Download MP3 (14M - 112kbits Stereo | 17:45)
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show notes

Music :

• Illumination Audio - Music Podcasting
• David Ford - A Song For The Road
• Julia Harris - Silence

Building a website that caters for everyones needs is a little more tricky than you’d imagine. Making sure your code is easy to maintain is essential in any project, making sure your design degrades in any situation on any browser with as little imapct on the visual layout is another thing to bear in mind. Designing web layouts involves a certain element of magic, trickery and thought that isn’t very obvious to your end user, but makes all the difference.

Here’s a thought, wrapping a list of links in a ul li structure enables screen readers to read out aloud how many links are contained in a section of links!

Books:

• Bulletproof Web Design
• CSS Hacks and Filters
• Don’t Make Me Think

Mmmmmm, sexy. Pricey and low on storage but oh so sexy. An iPod, what’s one of them? The latest offering from iRiver is really innovative, breaking new ground in portable audio players this tiny wonder combines Video and Flash capabilities into a device that is controlled by touch.

I’m thinking this would be wonderful to have in the car, cradles can be brought so I could stach this near the gear stick somewhere or even near centre dash, and keep it updated with new albums, the latest screenshots of things like … the UV index map of the UK or screen grabs of gTraffic.info for my area. It wouldn’t only be for me, the family in the back could view the latest digital camera shots for example on a long journey, front passenger could kick back and watch a movie.

Small wonder : User interface is touch screen

Naughty 0d2, stupid HMV!

So yeah: “HMV takes on Apple in online music”, but hmmm Apple computers are being denied access to the service ….. “However, they are not compatible with Apple’s iPod, the most popular digital music player.” …. way to go, and the award for short sighted online retailer of the month goes to … HMV

HMV are to launch a digital download service, don’t count on buying anything though unless you use Windows and IE6. Erm yeah I’m sorry you erm can’t get on this bus because well you are wearing the wrong shoes, we only allow people with black plimsols who have the latest version of soul. I could easily deny you access to my site because you are using IE, but that’s wrong so I won’t. As it is if you use IE you don’t see my Melanoma ribbon, but that’s becase IE screws up the page with it there

I sent this email to HMV’s customer service department to raise the issue as a customer and not a geek :

“I have the technology installed to use your new download service, but because my configuration doesn’t meet your requirements I am being turned away and thus not even being allowed to use the service.

I’d hope that you would look at supporting more secure web browsers such as Opera and the Mozilla range of browsers, these can be accessed on a variety of computing platforms such as Microsoft Windows and are less vunerable to security threats and ID theft.

Could you kindly look into the issue and get back to me when you think such a denial of service would be removed, so as to let myself and others use what I’m sure to be a valuable service. I’m a loyal HMV customer and look upon this unfortunate event as a reason to seek service from your competitors, online or offline due to customer satisfaction, I sincerly hope that this matter can be resolved.

Best wishes
Lee Jordan”

“We don’t expect the iPod to retain the market share it has today for very much longer while it remains incompatible with the rest of the market” Will someone slap this guy around the face with a kipper or something … both Apple’s way and the HMV way lock people into one format. Like I said … CD’s all the way baby, wait till you see what’s gonna happen with your monitor when you upgrade to the next version of Windows, now really is the time to switch.