Sidenote
I could write 2,000 words about why I hate Flash, why its bad, why people should stop using it etc, but instead I’ll tell you what its good for. It’s good for things like Shut up woman get on my horse, and the occasional video player. That’s all. And once Firefox allow for a format other than ‘ogg’ to be used for HTML5 video then Flash video can go off and die as well.
Yes I’m ignoring Microsoft, they probably can’t even spell HTML5 (or progress), think about it, they obviously didn’t like Flash so they made Silverlight which as far as I can tell is the same if not worse than Flash (not that I can say that with any experience because I refuse to install the SIlverlight plugin)
Sidenote
It’s widely believed that we will finally see an Apple tablet of some description revealed later this week, since plenty of other people have already covered in a fair amount of detail the speculation around the technical specs of such a device, I’m going to keep this simple.
What might the event reveal? Some (unlikely) possibilities
- The ‘tablet’ will be just like all the fan-made mockups we’ve seen in the past couple of years.
- The ‘tablet’ will be completely different to everything people have dreamed up over the past couple of years - remember how wrong all those iPhone mockups were prior to the reveal of the original iPhone
- The ‘tablet’ probably won’t be available with a docking LED display or add-on keyboard as Tim Van Damme hopes but it sure would be awesome if it did.
- The ‘tablet’ will run the iPhoneOS just on a bigger screen (unlikely)
- The ‘tablet’ will run full OS X, or an optimised version for the ‘lesser’ hardware
- The ‘tablet’ will run a “new” OS which will still have OS X as the base, but with a new (awesome) UI
- The next gen iPhone hardware will be previewed (unlikely)
- The iPhone 4.0 software will be previewed (maybe)
- The MacBook Pro line will get an update with new Core i5/i7 processors etc
- An LED cinema display in a size other than 24-inch
- Or… we’ll all be disappointed when there is no ‘tablet’ announcement, no iPhone 4.0 announcement, no MBP update - instead Apple announce that they’re moving more into the software side of things and that their first product will be a direct competitor for Photoshop.
Sidenote
WordPress 2.9 compatibility, fixes a few minor style bugs, adds options for custom menu width, menu positioning (fixed or absolute) and show/hide menu icons. More info here or download from the WordPress plugin directory here.
Sidenote
It feels like I’ve been working on it forever (since early December 2008 in fact), but I’ve finally released it into the wild, just head over to http://hahlo.com. There a still a few more things I’m going to add/tweak, but I’m going to take a little bit of a break first and sort out some other things… like that update to Fluency Admin that I “promised” months ago.
Sidenote
I was sick all of last week, and have spent all my free time so far this week working on finishing Hahlo4 for it’s September 9 release. But I would like to share a couple of redesigns that went live in the last week. Matt Brett launched the latest incarnation of his blog/portfolio, similar dark brown/chocolate colour scheme as previous designs, but with a rejigged layout - very nice, as usual. And Tim Van Damme launched the redesign of his blog, Maxvoltar, lots of nice things in this one including the use of @font-face, the jQuery ‘masonry’ plugin for the positioning on the notes on the homepage, and on individual entries theres a magic static sidebar that appears from underneath the header as you scroll down. Very cool.
Sidenote
Apparently FOX need no help in this department, according to this story FOX are recasting all the main characters for the series revival next year. They’ve apparently put out casting calls for new voice actors for Fry, Leela, Bender, the Professor, Zoidberg, Zapp Brannigan, Kif and Mom. Lame. Ok, so who’s still excited about Futuramas return?
LinkQuote
Jeffrey Zeldman: Unprofessional Trumps Dispassion
There are people who are so professional that they can work on something they don’t care about, and I always feel somewhat unprofessional because I can’t do that.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Working on something I don’t care about, that sounds like the last 10 months of my life.
Sidenote
When I woke this morning I was greeted by a feed reader full of mostly “bad” reviews for Transformers 2. I’m not seeing it until tonight, but I have doubts that I’ll class it as “bad” once I’ve seen it. Why? I hear you ask. Well because unlike the “professional movie reviewers”, who I suspect go into every movie expecting to see the next ‘Schindler’s List’ only to discover the next ‘Police Academy 7’, I’m not searching for an enthralling storyline, or a thrilling plot. I just want to see big shiny robots blowing shit up. And that’s what Michael Bay is good at. I see no problems. Roll out.
Sidenote
So, yesterday Facebook finally gave users the ability to choose a vanity url for their profile, no longer do you need to remember facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890 instead you get to pick a username and have facebook.com/myusername, just like every single other social networking tool in existence. They give you a set of default alternatives to pick, things like dean.robinson or deanrobinson etc, or you can choose you own, I chose deanjrobinson. They also say once you’ve picked it you can’t change it, which I guess is fair. What is odd though is that facebook.com/deanjrobinson is the same as facebook.com/dean.j.robinson is the same as facebook.com/dea.njrob.inson is the same as facebook.com/d.e.a.n.j.r.o.b.i.n.s.o.n etc etc… So the question is, what’s the point in giving users the option to include a period/full stop in their ‘username’ if it just gets ignored anyway, seems like an unnecessary level of confusion to me.
