13 Oct 2005
I mean, they really employ geeks. One of their IE staffers, Dave Massy, had a baby (well, I presume his significant other did) and posted about it amidst announcing the release of the IE Developers toolbar. Notably, the baby reference was fleetingly thrown in there whilst, of course, the focus was on the birth of the toolbar!
Yeah yeah, I know, it’s an MSDN blog not a personal one, but still. Struck me as a little… odd. You’ve just had a baby! Be excited about that, not a piece of software! ;-)
12 Oct 2005
Just finished hacking together bits of the rejuvenated gallery. I’ve ditched Photostack, finally, because it had a few too many quirks and also because I nagged Ben enough to get all the features it had into cat-scan. Resultingly, it’s now powered by that.
Permalinks will still work thanks to .htaccess magic, but feeds won’t (yet). The only new content up there is a Godspell photo album from earlier this year that I didn’t get to scan until a month or two ago.
More to come soon (including working RSS and Atom feeds), but I need to get to bed, so not tonight. Enjoy.
12 Oct 2005
Note to self:
It might be worth considering doing something about this blog’s appearance in IE, in light of traffic from that creeping towards the 60% mark.
“It is the masses, the majority–this infernal compact majority–that poisons the sources of our moral life and infects the ground we stand on.”
– Dr Stockmann, An Enemy of the People, IV
Or, you know, this infernal compact majority that, by their choice of browser, poisons our CSS with hacks and conditionally-commented stylesheets. Or alternatively, our markup… the ground the web stands on.
11 Oct 2005
[21:28:33] Sphinx^: how does one spell eletist?
[21:28:40] Josh: elitist
[21:28:46] Sphinx^: aHA!
[21:29:07] Josh: or dyu want it with the grave (or is it acute, i can never remember) e?
[21:29:21] Josh: élitist
[21:29:35] Josh: it goes that way, whatever that is
[21:29:48] Sphinx^: i much rather my friends undead… err not dead
Not terribly well marked up, might fix later.
11 Oct 2005
The article “R.I.P. WYSIWYG – Results-Oriented UI Coming” published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column yesterday (maybe today, depending on timezones… I discovered it now, and it’s the 11th here) provides an interesting insight into the changes to Office 12. I’m actually really excited about the release of this software, because it promises to change the face of word processing interfaces, as well as anticipated type quality (for the better, I hope!), and set a benchmark for the rest of the world to aspire to.
OpenOffice.org is, put simply, a poor clone. It doesn’t offer anything particularly innovative, it doesn’t do anything particularly better — with the exception of the formats it uses and its inbuilt PDF and SWF export capability (though these exports are often pretty poor in quality) — but it is free as in speech/beer.
There is, to my knowledge, little in the way of real competition to Office products… perhaps with the exception of iWork to, what, four percent of the computer market?
Hopefully this paradigm shift in the way Office approaches content will mean the proliferation of more applications capable of embracing and extending — with full interoperability — Microsoft’s product. I say this because, at present, any application trying to read Word documents has to kludge around its format (this is true of Word as well… its interoperability with prior versions of the same software is notoriously poor).
Hopefully, a renewed focus on the semantic integrity of documents will enable greater file exchange between platforms (ha ha, as if?) — and also result in a greater ubiquity of sensible user interfaces, that make it manifestly more difficult for users to spend an hour typing for every three hours formatting.
Goodness knows the corporate style guide people are going to want to hug Microsoft when this one comes out. Hopefully it’ll deliver.