High

25. April 2006, 20:59 | Computing

You may have read the latest post on the Safari Development blog on High DPI web sites. It’s a great proposal – we certainly need some way of allowing web sites to work well on high DPI devices; don’t forget that these proposals will aid printed sites as well, meaning that outputting hi quality print documents from a web based system may finally be possible.

Of course, what is being proposed could almost certainly be achieved – to a certain extent – using javascript to scale the page elements either based on the browser width or a user preference. We can even dynamically load in higher res images based on the current size of the image in the browser.

Also, this article almost guaranties that we’ll get a resolution independent UI in Mac OS X Leopard – why would they be working on this tech if we weren’t? I’m also sticking to my guns and going to reiterate my belief that we’ll get a system wide interface overhaul at the same time. Aqua itself is now getting pretty long in the tooth, and for resolution independence Apple are going to have to redo all the resources anyway. There’s also the possibility that Apple will move to using vectors in the interface – which wouldn’t suit Aqua’s pseudo realism, but would suit the general direction Apple are going with iTunes and the iLife suite.

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Sorry

25. April 2006, 08:52 |

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday; I was caught in post moving house cleaning, which took a lot longer then I thought it would…

More later.

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Where art thou?

21. April 2006, 22:47 | Other

Above is St Ives in Cornwall, England, which is roughly where I was over the last week.

Wasn’t quite as hot as it looks like it should be from that pic, though…

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Daring

20. April 2006, 22:47 | Computing

I’m back.

I hope you all missed me.

So, let me see… what have I missed? Remarkably little, really. Google have finally launched Google Calendar, and by all accounts it’s a type a google launch, as opposed to a type b; i.e. it’s good, like Gmail, not bad, like Google Page Creator.

I think the two most interesting stories of the last week are blogging based – the image to the right may give away the first one:

John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, has given up his day job to concentrate full time on writing the mac/geek/computing site.

Bravo! Well done! Go give him money!

He’s one of the best “pundits” out there – very rarely does he write a word I disagree with, and I think it’s incredibly brave of him to go chase the dream in such a public fashion.

The utter flip side to the Daring Fireball story is what’s going on on Scoble’s Blog – Robert Scoble, Microsoft blogger and normally a reasonable read (after you filter out the Microsoft propaganda), has now got someone else writing his blog for him.

What?

The whole situation is mighty odd, and I find the whole “guest blogging” thing strange whatever blog it’s on, but coming from someone like Scoble, who’s normally pretty darn savvy when it comes to blogging etiquette it’s almost worrying. I don’t think guest blogging is officially rude yet, but it really should be – certainly frowned upon, at the very least. It severely damages the inherent trust you have with your reader, which is only amplified when RSS comes into play.I subscribed to Scoble’s feed, which hence implies I want to read post’s by him. If I wanted to read post’s by someone else, I would subscribe to their feed instead.

If I put my cynicism hat on for a minute, I’d say that Scoble may have got a little sick of blogging – if you look at some of his latest posts you’ll see what I mean – and needed to take a break, but wasn’t allowed by his Microsoft superiors to leave his blog fallow for a week. Certainly Robert’s blog has done an incredible amount to boost Microsoft’s credibility in recent times, so I think this theory bares more weight then most Microsoft conspiracy theories do.

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Disclosure

11. April 2006, 21:30 | Other

I’m sure you all read my post yesterday on Be Your Own Pet, and how great they are.

In the interests of full disclosure, I feel I must point out that I work for there record label. Which puts me at a tricky little conundrum. I was a big Be Your Own Pet fan before I started working for there label, and even if I wasn’t working there I would still have bought the album, still gone to the gig on Saturday and still recommended the album.

Which is why I didn’t put a disclaimer on the last post.

But the thing is, I know that the sales of the album have been slightly lacklustre, and I really want people to hear the album – so hence no disclaimer, as obviously it takes the shine off any recommendation.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who goes through small moral dilemmas like this when posting on their blog, and I’m really not sure the best course of action.

For you, the reader, I’m sure the choice is easy – the truth, please; disclaimer and all. We want to make our minds up on our own, aided by all the facts, if that’s not too much trouble.

Twist it around, though, and look at it from my view (and the view of anybody else writing about something they love from a biased viewpoint); I love Be Your Own Pet, as a fan, and want them to do as well as possible, and hence I’m going to write about them on my blog. Do I voluntarily devalue my opinion? Do I trust my readers to be able to understand when I’m influenced by my employer and when I’m not? I’d like to think that I’m not ever a company mouth piece, but whether I can adequately convey that In my writing is a whole other question.

Of course, in the modern online world you don’t need to just listen to me and take my word for it. We’ve got places like Technorati and MetaCritic that let you figure out if people agree with me.

Does that help with the full disclosure issue? Maybe. At least you know if I’m really lying.

– - –

I’m going to be away for the next week or so; posting is liable to be at the best sporadic, and at the worst non-existant.

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Byop

10. April 2006, 21:21 | Music

Be Your Own Pet.

Go buy their album NOW!

No, seriously.

It’s really, really good. Really good.

On Saturday they rocked out a bowling alley.

A bowling alley.

How can you not want to hear a band that plays bowling alleys?

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Late

7. April 2006, 21:29 | Music

At work we’ve just launched a mini-site for The Late Cord

Nothing too flash, just trying to get the music out there, basically.

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Patant Lunacy

6. April 2006, 22:38 | Computing

Dear United States of America,

Could you please sort out your patent system, as in this day and age it effects us all as well.

Thanks in advance,

The Rest of the World

Some of you may have read about this already, but it’s an issue I think really isn’t getting enough press:

From April 11th, any ActiveX component in a web page displayed in Internet Explorer – including Flash movies, Quicktime, Real Player etc – will require the user to click first to activate before it’ll run.

The best write up about it, with pictures, can be found here on Robert Nyman’s blog.

It’s all due to silly patent rubbish, but will have an effect on every single web developer out there; any page that embeds an object will require rewriting to use javascript to embed the object instead, which gets round the new patch. If you’ve got javascript turned off, sorry – you probably can’t use flash or quicktime anymore; I imagine almost all Flash etc will be embedded using javascript, and you’ll be lucky if people provide a non javascript fall back.

In many ways I think it’s a slight shame there is a work around – if you did have to click to activate all ActiveX components in IE it would surely both drive people to Firefox and reduce the amount of Flash rubbish we have to put up with.

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Wintel

5. April 2006, 14:20 | Computing

If you haven’t seen it already:

Apple Boot Camp

Lets you install Windows XP on your intel mac.

Wow.

Also, Apple hasn’t missed its chance for a bit of humour, from the Boot Camp page:

...Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means itÕll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world…

...Once youÕve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (ThatÕs the ÒaltÓ key for you longtime Windows users.)...

...A printer for the instructions (YouÕll want to print them before installing Windows, really.)...

It’s a Public Beta at the moment, an will ship as a final version in 10.5. I think it’s very interesting that Apple is getting into these waters – I think Apple may finally be going after some market share…

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Questions First

4. April 2006, 21:20 | Other

Ok, so my post yesterday did sound quite a lot like Mr Godin.

I admit it.

But I think we can all learn something from Seth, and it’s something very simple really. Something every child does, that most adults forget:

Ask questions.

About everything. Little ones. Big ones. “Why doesn’t it work that way?”. “Why not do it like this?”. That sort of thing.

The corollary to that is quite simple; once you’ve asked the question you then have to do one thing:

Think.

It’s amazing how many times people forget to think. Always a bit of a downfall, I find.

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