David Emery Online

Prepare to flee

A simple, short thought today:

What if this is the end of the world?

Now, I don’t for a minute think that it is; in fact, the reverse is true – not only is it not the end of the world, but I don’t think any of this record-braking flooding is anything out of the ordinary. Sure, it hasn’t happened like this for 50 years, but so what? A big flood, based on a certain amount of meteorological coincidences, once every 50 years or so seems fairly reasonable to me.

Anyway.

I have a hunch that if the world has an end, in the traditional sense, it would be somewhat like this. No big, calamitous wave of water; no wall of flame circling the globe and certainly no clichéd horse men. There’s no way they won’t have got bored by now and jacked in the apocalypse trade; it just doesn’t make business sense.

Yes, a slow and gradual end is the most viable option.

First, some minor floods here and there. Then, another week or so later some more. And it keeps raining. No-one notices until it hits London, though, and by that point the rest of the UK is...

Friday Links XXIII

Truck Festival postponed – well, that’s my weekend plans ruined.

In Pics: Berkshire Floods – hmmm, maybe Al Gore was right all along…

Scholastic Loses It Over Harry Potter/BitTorent Story – the book industry have been pretty lucky so far as they haven’t really had to contend with internet piracy. This is just the beginning for them; as soon as we have a decent ebook reader (an iPhone, maybe?) they’re going to have major problems.

ChickSpeak.com: A Wordpress MU Based Social Network – interesting solution to the “how to easily build a social network” problem. It does sound a little hacky to me, though.

YouTube: Now With Customizable Player – a step in the right direction, but only seems to let you show videos from a channel (as opposed to a single video) and is oddly oversized.

Why the heck does New York have steam pipes, anyway? – steam pipes, surprisingly enough, seem to be a pretty neat solution to a range of problems.

iPhone Fonts – no Futura: bastards. Although I disagree with what he says about Arial vs Helvetica; don’t get me wrong, I strongly dislike Arial, but so many sites use it that it has to...

Mobile Web Standards

Jeff Croft, who now works at Blue Flavor that has just released Leaflets, a iPhone launcher application, has posted a very interesting question on his blog:

“If the Apple SDK for iPhone development was Cocoa, rather than HTML/CSS/JS, would you still find it horribly offensive that the apps were made only for iPhone?”

This refers to the large backlash in the web standards world against the ever-larger amount of iPhone-only applications that are being produced at the moment. The issue – at its heart – is that we’ve all been trying to move away from only developing for one browser, and all the problems that brings, and instead focusing on web standards and cross-browser compatibility.

In other words, we don’t want another Internet Explorer situation, where a significant amount of web sites only work in IE.

The flip side is, though, that most – if not all – iPhone apps are using web standards, although they may be ones that both Firefox and IE don’t support yet. Which then means, I guess, that the issue is really about the interface design and user experience of iPhone apps; almost all of them try to replicate the native interface and hence provide...

Maximise Vs Zoom

I normally have a great deal of respect for Jeff Atwood, who writes over at codinghorror.com; while he has an obvious and open Windows/PC bias what he writes is usually very insightful.

His latest post, however, is not:

The Non-Maximizing Maximize Button

He has sadly made the one true internet argument mistake: what I use is best, because it is; what you use is worse, because it’s different.

He is of course talking about the difference between Mac OS X’s Zoom button (the green one) and Window’s Maximise button, the conflict arising as actually they’re two totally different buttons with different behaviours which happen to be placed in similar places on a window’s title bar. On the Mac, the Zoom button toggles between making the window as big as it needs to be to fit its content, and changing back to what it was before (or at least it should – more on that later) whereas the Windows Maximise toggles between full screen and its original size.

Both have their upsides and downsides, which are mentioned in the Coding Horror piece, but only just before this wondrous paragraph:

Here’s where I think this argument starts to break down in a big way. Dealing with...

Design to finished

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a work update – mostly because at work my work (my work work) has been almost entirely internal business system that will never see public eyes. However, over the weekend I managed to squeeze in some other work (my home work):

thecaspianlabel.com

It’s a simple little site for Caspian, a small London based label. I’ll be honest, there aren’t as yet any massively notable features – it is, as per normal, all based upon Textpattern which is now up to version 4.0.5, slightly allaying fears that it may have stagnated. That being said, it’s still a fairly feature anaemic release and from initial poking around it doesn’t seem to do anything too exciting. I’d really love a good admin interface redesign, for example – the yellow can be a bit tiring.

Of course, any mild Textpattern bashing needs to come with the caveat that it’s still my #1 choice for putting a simple CMS-powered site together, and was the key ingredient in managing to get the Caspian site from design to finished in about 3 hours. Maybe at some point I’ll have enough time not to have to turn sites around in a...

Friday Links XXII

New Gran Turismo 5 trailer confirms Ferrari included – Oh for crying out loud – do I need to get a PS3 as well?

Four Player Co-op in Halo 3 Confirmed by Microsoft VP Jeff Bell – I’m not a fan of playing competitive online games – I just don’t find it fun being repeatedly killed by someone on the internet – but the idea of 4 player co-op Halo sounds amazing.

The Killer Music Rental Device – I think the Sonos – ignoring the high price – is a great home music device. However, portable music is what really matters – I do the vast majority of my listening on my iPod, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Build Your Own Spitfire Plane from a $263,000 Kit – wow!

New MySpace Feature Broken on Launch Day – way to go guys; you can’t even manage to rip off Facebook properly!

On PHP – every server I have access to that has PHP has both 4 and 5 available. I prefer 5, but really – and I guess this is the problem – there’s not that...

Bumblebee Suit

Ok, today I’m afraid I’m just far to tired to post anything particularly coherent. Apologies.

Instead, have a watch of this trailer for Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii:

It looks amazing – he’s got a bumble bee suit! With little wings and antenna! I also really love the free form, back to basic nature of the platforming as well. If it wasn’t for GTA IV this would easily be my most anticipated game for a long time.

Sadly, GTA is out in October for the Xbox 360 and PS3, and Mario is out Q4 for the Wii.

Why is that bad?

I don’t have either a Xbox 360, PS3 or a Wii. My wallet is scared…

Curse of the gecko

Gecko, the underlying rendering engine that powers Firefox, seems to be cursed at the moment. Well, maybe cursed is going a little far but two things have caught my eye this week that use it and and seem to be loosing their way:

New URL highlighting feature in FireFox 3 aims to make phishing harder

The all new Flock website

Flock first, as it’s easiest: what on earth have they done to their website? Not only is it truly awful, but the site they had before was pretty good and didn’t even need redesigning. Flock the browser as a concept I’ve always found a little redundant – why do I need something that lets me blog or post to Flickr on my browser, when I can just go to my blog’s admin page or Flickr.com in said browser instead?

They used to have quite a few very smart people on board (Chris Messina amongst many others), and when they did I was always under the impression that while the whole concept might be slightly flawed, they could well come up with some interesting innovations that other browser vendors could use. Sadly, all those smart people have left and I think this...

Books and music

Firstly, if you’re one of the two people left in the western world that hasn’t read Freakonomics yet, stop reading this and go buy it now.

Finished it yet?

Good – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You’ll now appreciate, like the rest of us, what good writers S. Levitt and S. Dubner are and hence then also appreciate what a great thing it is that they have a blog. Today’s windfall from their tree of blog-y goodness is this little gem:

If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?

The answer of course, is no.

Actually, I think the answer would be something much more akin to “No f***ing way, are you out of your mind? We’d let people have all our content for free? What’s in it for us?”. As Dubner raises though, you’d be hard pressed to find someone that dislikes libraries although to be perfectly frank they’re of ever more irrelevant (or at least of niche interest) – I certainly haven’t been in one since University.

Naturally this post got me thinking; the music industry is facing this problem head on, but they don’t get a choice in it. The library, public sharing...

Death of the desktop

Ok, I don’t normally do this but I’m feeling snarky today:

iPhone’s AJAX SDK: No, thank you.

Sucks to be you, Will.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of the Shipley but he’s just plain wrong on this one – sure, it would be nice to have a full iPhone SDK (and I guess we’ll get one soon enough) but that’s not to say what we’ve got is quite as bad as he makes out.

What I’m not willing to do is starting programming in AJAX, as Steve so gleefully announced we should do at the (non-nondisclosured) WWDC keynote this year.

Of course, AJAX isn’t a programming language it’s a fashionable buzzword but we’ll let that one pass.

But Apple has tried to tell us developers we can immediately make and (presumably) sell web-based applications for the iPhone, while ignoring that none of us are set up to run apps off of giant web servers (whose power and bandwidth must scale based on the number of customers we’d have), nor to program in JavaScript, nor to do the recurring online billing we’d have to do to pay for these servers (and store our customer’s data).

I’m sure no-one has ever had to solve these problems....