David Emery Online

Browser Fashion

Yet again, I’ve switched browsers; from Safari back to OmniWeb now that the 5.5 “Sneaky Peaks” are available. OmniWeb 5.5 is great – so much faster then 5.1, due to the use of the latest version of WebKit (which Safari is based on).

Now of course, I can’t just use a browser – what what be fun about that? I’ve got to do at least a little customisation. In 5.5, Omni have made a slight interface modification to use the 10.4 unified look (as seen in Mail.app et al), but I don’t think they’ve gone quite far enough. So, if you haven’t noticed in the pic above I’ve altered the address bar – which is normally shiny, old-school aqua blue – to use a shiny, Mail.app style grey bar instead.

If you would like the same look, download this file: omniweblocationbar.zip

Next (after backing up your OmniWeb), open up the OmniWeb package by right/ctrl clicking on the icon and choosing “Show Package Contents” and copy the files in the zip file to the Contents->Resources folder. Then re-launch OmniWeb to see the new look.

Of course, this doesn’t really go far enough – I’d really like...

Textpattern and iCal

Today, you get a little how to for creating iCal compatible calendars from Textpattern. This is most useful if you use Textpattern to store events, and really useful if you use it to store gigs in, like The Rogers Sisters Website does. The following requires a bit of textpattern knowledge (of various txp: tags and the like), but I’m going to try and make it as clear as possible.

Just for a bit of background, the gigs on the Rogers Sisters site are stored as articles in a section called “gigs”, with the venue and place as the article title, any further description (like who’s supporting) in the body, and the gig date as the posted date.

Then to display the gigs you simply use an article_custom tag, with the date set to future like this:

<txp:article_custom form="gig" time="future" section="gigs" sortdir="asc" limit="25" />

Now, on to the calendar! To start with, the file format that iCal uses is called .ics, and is used by several other calendar programs so hopefully this should work with any .ics compatible program. The key piece of information that makes this all fairly straightforward is that .ics is a...

Questions

Question 1:

You’re a musician. You want to get your music out to as many people as possible, and making a buck or two in the process would be nice as well.

Would you accept – instead of the normal risk based, sales model recording contract – a sponsorship deal from a big company (say, Nike or Google) which gets you the same amount as you’d get from selling 250,000 records?

Oh, I forgot to mention the record company gives away the music for free.

Question 2:

You want to put out a record. Why do you even need a label? You could disseminate your music digitally with next to no cost, so what do you benefit from using a record label?
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Work is quite fun at the moment.

Width Stats

I know I keep on banging on about it, but it’s important.

Yes, flexible width sites again (sorry about that).

I’ve noticed in the aftermath of this year’s css reboot that there’s been quite a ground swell of negativity aimed at the abundance of very wide sites. Simon Collison has posted a very illuminating post on his blog, CollyLogic, which has some actual statistics on window width sizes, which is obviously very useful for this debate.

I don’t think there’s anything too surprising in these stats; if you design for 1024px wide and greater, your going to be irritating about 20-30% of your users. Do you really want 30% of your users to have horizontal scrollbars?

It’s all A List Apart’s of course; they’re influential enough that even if they do something as short sighted fixed width, wide layout people will still copy them.

“A List Apart does it, so it must be ok.”

I’m still all about fluid widths; almost every site – bar quick half day jobs – I’ve made in the last 9-10 months has been fluid. I’m still not hugely keen on the variable fixed width solution like what CollyLogic uses, with a shifting right column, as I’m not...

Search and Width

Two things.

Firstly, Google has officially jumped the shark. It’s quite a sad fall – we all used to really like Google; they were different; they were nice.

But now…

The prompt is of course Google’s bitter whining about the default search box in Internet Explorer being set to MSN Search. They’re claiming that users should have a choice on first startup of IE to allow them to change it. It’s all about “user choice” of course, not that millions of people will start using MSN Search because of it.

I think it’s quite incredible that Google have the nerve to even suggest this – firstly the user experience would be awfull but I don’t quite understand why they think that anyone would take their side on this. Obviously, most people are more enamoured with Google then Microsoft, but I think it’s only fair that Microsoft use their own search engine in their browser.

Of course, we don’t hear Google complaining about the lack of “user choice” in Firefox and Safari, which both default to Google in their search field…

Secondly, I’m quite disappointed with this years Reboot. Some of the designs are really quite lovely – Jeff Crofts in particular – but...

XPowerStationPlayBox

Nintendo have announced that the name of their forthcoming console – previously codenamed Revolution – is Wii.

Wii

Pronounced we.

I’m not sure if I can think of any company in the world that would be audacious enough to name their forthcoming product Wii; if you compare it to its competitors, Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, it really stands out (in fact, both of those names are pretty awful).

I think that while obviously in some quarters – particular teenage American ones – the name sounds ridiculous, in time I think it will really work. It’s also worth remembering that teenage boys is not who Nintendo is really targeting with Wii – it’s after the true mass market, one that’s mostly untouched by Sony and Microsoft. Look at the success of Nintendogs on the DS, for example (which has sold something like 2 Million copies).

It all comes down to a larger trend for poor names; Microsoft is particularly good at taking good codenames, and then ditching them at the last minute (witness Origami turning to UMPC, and Monad turning to PowerShell), and the corporate world at large is really no better. Even Apple succumbs...

Happy Birthday

Whoops.

My blog celebrated its 1 year anniversary on the 18th April.

And I didn’t even notice.

It’s been a fun year, and I’ve learnt a huge amount, and gained a huge amount from blogging.

Here’s to another year!

BBC 2.0

I’m glad I waited for Ben’s post on the BBC’s Creative Future announcement – I was beginning to really worry that the BBC was going off the rails.

If you only read the MediaGuardian story, it makes it sound very much like the BBC is going to transform it’s current web site into a MySpace clone.

Don’t get me started on MySpace.

MySpace’s success is purely by accident, not by design; they just happened to be in the right place at the right time with – just about – enough features. The many, many attempts to clone MySpace, and to use it as the basis for an overarching online strategy are flawed at best, and are really an online attempt at business suicide.

So I’m glad that’s not what the BBC are doing.

What the BBC seem to be doing, and it really needs to be applauded in a corporation their size, is completely rethinking the way they work and integrating online completely with the rest of their business. I think it’s staggering that the BBC has actually managed to realise this, and has started down the path. We all know in tech circles that TV and radio as we know it obviously...

High

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...

Sorry

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.