I downloaded around with the first beta of new Firefox browser last week and have to say that I’m impressed by the updates already. Memory usage, once the bane of my browsing experience has been vastly improved. Take a look at this screen grab of my task manager. Guess where I got bored of Firefox hogging 700,000K of my memory and ended the process?
Cocoa widgets played a big part in me installing Bon Echo (which is the Mac Intel optimised version of Firefox 2) but now with Firefox 3 Mozilla are giving us native form controls themselves.
Look-and-feel is one thing but for a web developer at a design agency more important than this and the memory usage is the support of standards. Firefox now follows the lead of both Opera and Safari and passes the ACID2 test. ICC color profiles are now fully supported (again, a good few months after Safari) although the not enabled on default installs. You can switch it on using the special about:config URL of Firefox (you can safely ignore the cute warning message for this), changing the gfx.color_management.enabled setting to true and restarting. You can see the color profile support in action at color.org.
Published on
November 25, 2007 in
Hardware.
Maybe this is the verb Amazon wants to replace “reading”. I’m not convinced that they’ll succeed. The Kindle is the new e-book reader from Amazon and one of the topics of conversation at last Friday’s ECM. Coupling the high price of this device with the notion of paying for content from blogs and news sites that you can ordinarily access for free on the Internet and also paying once more to load content that you already own makes this device a non-starter as far as I’m concerned.
Initial cost and content pricing aside, I find the aesthetics simply fugly. Which is suprirsing surprising considering the background of the employees of Lab126. Former employees of Palm and Apple run the start-up but looking at the Kindle design I can’t help but wonder why they are ex-employees of Palm and Apple.
So the Kindle has sold out almost immediately. This comes as no surprise to me as pretty much anything that has an ounce of hype behind it does so. This is usually due to under-stocking to create a false impression and lets the marketing department release the good news to the newswires.
However I think the biggest failing of the Kindle is the fact that it isn’t a plain old-fashioned book. I love a good gadget as much as the next geek but the whole concept of e-books is actually lost on me and is something I feel tries to address a non-existent problem.
Published on
November 21, 2007 in
Software.
After a lot of waiting, feature pruning, a few false dawns and a good deal of hype, Microsoft Vista was launched with much fanfare at the start of this year. Indeed more fireworks were used in the French launch than were used to celebrate the new millennium. Before the official release Vista’s DRM and security specifications were being referred to as the longest suicide note in history despite clever security improvements like ASLR.
(Microsoft security may well be an oxymoron. It is a much ridiculed aspect of the company and their software but did it really deserve a spot on the list of 2007 worst jobs in science?)
Continue reading ‘So, how is Vista doing?’
I’ve followed the iPhone since the Steve demoed it at MacWorld back in January. I thought that I knew pretty much everything about it but after using it for a week I’ve discovered a couple of things that I didn’t know. Not good things either. Don’t get me wrong, I still absolutely love it and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a game changing device. Seeing several friends crowd around last Friday evening and start streaming YouTube videos, browsing the Internet and playing music without any need of a hint proved just how intuitively clean and simple the interface is.
Continue reading ‘More Apple goodness’
I’ve been using Leopard for three weeks now and while I am finding it an improvement from 10.4 (Tiger) there have been (and still are) some issues. In the past I’ve waited for a couple of updates to be released from Apple. However in this case I was one of the early adopters (or Beta testers as we’re sometime referred to).
Continue reading ‘Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’
Facebooks new advertising features are not only annoying me I’d probably say there are huge privacy implications too. I’m far from being the only one to be peeved by this. Zuckerberg was apparently confused as to why people would be concerned about the privacy implications during the press conference. It has become apparent that Facebook isn’t the best at privacy.The introduction of the news feed feature sometime ago was met with some amount of fury. At the very least listen to the same feedback as before and extend the preference sliders and let me turn down the noise for these new ads.I’m definitely not going to use it but if, for some strange reason, you’re interested in which brands and products I’m passionate about, here’s my list (in no particular order):
- Apple
- Crumpler bags
- Herman Miller chairs
- Mont Blanc pens
- Specialized
- Sennheiser headphones
- JBL speakers
- Moleskine notebooks
- Aga
- Wusthoff knives
- Sony Bravia televisions
- Bombay Sapphire gin
If I feel something is jaw-droppingly awesome, performs brilliantly, is better than a competing product or just has some fantastic marketing behind it then I’m much more likely to tell my friends about it myself by traditional word-of-mouth.
While I’m venting my spleen I may as well get this off my chest.
Extranyms: the frickin pointless repetition of the final word that constitutes an acronym. Like when people refer to ATM machines, PIN numbers, RAM memory, SOLAG gloves or the HIV virus.
Several people have lain claim to independently coming up with this word. I thought of it also but toyed with the idea of calling them “redundanyms” for a while before finding out that it wasn’t just me who was annoyed by their increasing usage. Others were calling them extranyms and I eventually decided I preferred this.
This has been an annoyance for a while now but I’ve finally snapped after seeing the iPhone posters in the window of the O2 shop on Princes Street.
I was a little confused at the timing of the launch (6:02pm) and put it down to either some arcane regulation about opening times or allowing Apple to get the jump on their own carrier for some egotistical reason or other.
Then TUAW pointed it out to me (while also delivering the brilliant news that “unlimited” does now in fact mean unlimited — well done for listening to the furore). 6:02pm. O2. Frickin lame.
“Zero” is not and never has been pronounced the same as “Oh” but most people (including the nice 1471 lady) will persist in using the latter when reading out a phone number. Even James bloody Bond says “double oh seven” and as far as I can recall only Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice calls him zero zero.
For a change the second one isn’t “off”.
I was speaking to my colleague in Tokyo last week and realised that while “[Good] morning” was accurate for me it wasn’t for him. Likewise, “[Good] afternoon” wasn’t the correct salutation either. Therefore I started off with “Morternoon” which he grokked immediately. He didn’t respond with “Aftering” though which I found mildly disappointing.
A quick search would suggest I’m not the first to think of this so I can’t quite claim this as my own neologism.
We’ve all encountered a captcha before (although you may not have known at the time). The “enter this obfuscated text in this form field” device that is supposed to stop automatic creation of user accounts or prevent comment spam postings by web robots.
That’s all well and good (unless you require an accessible version — many do not offer an audio alternative). However I’ve never come across them while simply trying to search Google.
I was trying to search for the keywords “php submit post” to get some references for some code I was writing and having trouble with. Everything was fine after entering the captcha but it seems that this only appears sporadically.
