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.
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.
I’m aware that I’ve mentioned the Edinburgh Coffee Morning a few times in my blog before but have never really expanded on what it was.
Basically a loose affiliation of people from various professions gather on a Friday morning in Centotre to chat about social networks, Web 2.0 technologies and related topics before we scuttle off to our places of work. Web developers like myself, IT professionals geeks like Jamie Clague, marketing bods like Mike Coulter and Mark Gorman, teachers and educators like Ewan McIntosh and authors like Bill Coles (who has a book out: The Well-Tempered Clavier). You don’t have to be a web geek — all are welcome and it generally proves to be a thoroughly enjoyable and diverse start to the day.
I noticed earlier on that this October is one year since I started sporadically blogging. I thought I’d try and mess around with the monthly archive code to try and tidy the navigation up a little. I’d also have a peek under the hood to try and see if I could work it into my first WordPress plugin.
While browsing around investigating the finer details of plugin and theme development, I came across the pimping K2 theme which is now in place. Pretty much an upgrade to the classic Kubrick theme with styling abilities, nicer code and the Fam Fam Silk icon set.
My personal tweaks to the scheme will be coming along in the not so distant future along with a WordPress 2.3 upgrade and probably with a new style to boot.
I’m not talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (easy for me to say) but the brilliant just-out-of-beta text editor that my colleague introduced me to last week. It basically brings the power of TextMate to Windows. I’ve tried to switch from TextPad several times before but I’ve always been shackled by just how used to the keystrokes and shortcuts I’ve gotten over the years. True enough, you can alter the keystroke bindings in a lot of editors but one thing kept me returning to TextPad time and again: the context-sensitive transpose call invoked with Control-T.
I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.
It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!
I spent a little of this morning watching the iLife ’08 guided tour video and when I noticed the new “skimming” feature of iPhoto and iMovie I couldn’t help but feel like I’d seen it somewhere before. Then I realised that I had seen the style sheet genius Stu Nicholls use exactly this effect for pure CSS flick-book style animations at least two years ago. I never really found an occasion to use the technique myself but it seems to work well in the iLife examples I’ve seen.
Statistics are amazing. You can spin and bend them to your will (or the will of whoever is sponsoring your research). For instance, did you know that 75% of people constitute three-quarters of the population? It’s true I tell you!
After the guys at Opera announced that version 9.5 (Kestral) will have full CSS 3 selector support I ran a few tests to see how various Windows-based browsers compare:
- Firefox 2.0.0.4
43 selectors, 26 passed, 10 buggy and 7 unsupported (Passed 357 of 578 tests)
- IE 6
43 selectors, 10 passed, 1 buggy and 32 unsupported (Passed 276 of 578 tests)
- IE 7
43 selectors, 13 passed, 4 buggy and 26 unsupported (Passed 330 of 578 tests)
- Opera 9.21
43 selectors, 25 passed, 3 buggy and 15 unsupported (Passed 346 of 578 tests)
- Safari 3.0.1
43 selectors, 25 passed, 9 buggy and 9 unsupported (Passed 346 of 578 tests)
Safari and Opera were both blazingly fast. IE7 was painfully slow.
Notice that IE6 only had a single buggy result! The fact that is achieves this by simply not supporting anything is neither here nor there.
The times aren’t the only things changing around here either.
I moved to a new hosting company for my personal site over the weekend. After a lot of deliberating a eventually plumped for WebFaction over DreamHost due to worrying increase in dissatisfied feedback I’d been hearing lately.
I’ll get everything else imported and uploaded when I find time over the coming week once I’ve found my way around and had a nosey at some new toys available.
I posted about my software toolbox a while ago. Now I can see what I use and how I divide my time between applications both at home and work using Wakoopa. I can also read reviews and discover other great pieces of software that other people use.
It’s apparent that my workflow is a little disparate but things are looking up (on the Mac front at least) with Coda. One of my colleagues had been beta-testing this for a while and teasingly promising us “something fantastic” but giving nothing else away. Anyway, a few weeks ago it was released so I downloaded and installed for a play and it blew me away. It then totally nuked itself half-way through my demo period. I mean really fsked things up. I had to repair my hard drive for the first time ever (which scared me a little) and Automator won’t open anymore (although to be fair, I don’t know if this is related or not).
A new release of Coda has been made available which hopefully fixed whatever it was that caused my problem in the old version. It looks like I’ll may be using skEdit less and less.
