Why you should upgrade to IE7

Firsly, I cant believe I'm actually having to write this post...IE7 has been available since 2006, IE6 came on the go in 2001...that's a LONG time ago in todays online world and IE8 is already available as a beta download so we can only assume that it'll be here prety soon....oh and the browser is free in case you were wondering.

So, why do I care which browser you are using? well, by trade I'm a web developer which basically means that I know a bit about how web browsers are rendering the websites that I and countless thousands of other competent web developers build for you.

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1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:36 PM - Categories: Ranting

What's wrong with twitter

For as long as I've used twitter, there's been something niggling me about it that I couldn't quite figure out, like most things of this nature, the problem was right there in front of my face.

Now, before I get into this, I need to note for the record that I love twitter. Of all the "social networks" that I've been exposed to, it's twitter that I'm hopelessly tuned to. I've had (and still do have a couple of these) facebook, bebo, plurk pownce, lastFM, coldfusioncommunity(of course) accounts but the difference is that whenever I boot up a computer, and I mean *every time* I get myself an interface to twitter, whether it's twhirl or the website itself, if I'm online, it's a given that I'm also on twitter and as such, I've made one or two observations about the service over the past 770(to date) "tweets".

I'm going to bypass the downtime completely, we're all aware of the problems, instead, I'm proceeding to a much more overlooked flaw. Now this "flaw" as I've called it wasn't always so, it's become one over time and by the evolution of how people use twitter, it's by no means anyones fault or anyones shortcoming, it probably couldn't have been seen coming, but I reckon (IMHO) that it's probably now worth addressing...hence this post. It's there on the interface every time you log into twitter, wrapped up in a simple h3 tag and it reads "What are you doing?" It is the absolute bedrock of what twitter was born on and grew up on but I argue that today, although it is still relevent, it's perhaps not telling the whole story.

Like many other twitter users, the service has become much much more than a simple question of what are you doing?, it's become a service for communication way more than that. I use twitter as a news feed, point of communication with clients, friends and mentors, means of finding out stuff and also, like a ton of other people, means to voice an opinion on one thing or another...therefore I move for the question to be changed to something like "What's on your mind?" or "What do you want them to know?" or something like that. I'm sure the massive twitter community will have other ideas about this and I'm interested to know what these would be so feel free to comment here.

right, thats tweet number 770, what can i do for 771....my twitter addiction is complete!

1 comments - Posted by mark at 12:46 AM - Categories: Ranting

IE8 not playing nice

I had been poking around the IE site for a couple of days and thought to myself this morning, I'm gonna install the beta, see if it's as good as it sounds. So, I installed IE8 beta 1 today. Had a brief look about, couple of interesting additions, not least of which is the new developer tools which would be helpfull if I didn't already have the web developer tool bar and firebug on firefox. There's the usual "lets add some web 2.0/social networking integration" which frankly, is handled on a much bigger and better scale by the flock browser or any number of browser plugins for firefox, but hey...this is IE and not a browser that I will personally use for much more than testing of client websites. My use of IE to date has been for that single purpose only, like a lot of others, I gave up using IE for general browsing with the invention of firefox some years ago. So...I found a little issue, this issue is probably only relevant to others who build and test websites on multiple versions of IE. I have a number of browsers installed, namely Firefox, Opera, IE6 and IE7 (this covers a broad enough base on my development machine to get by) and today, as I said, I installed the IE8 beta which promptly overwrote my IE7 install...no problem, I know that there's an "emulate IE7" button in there so I can switch between the new rendering engine and the IE7 engine...but then I tried opening my standalone IE6 browser and to my disgust, it wouldn't display any web pages...ok, I need a working IE6, so what to do, after poking about a bit more, I found (in the developer tools) an option to view the page you're looking at in not just the 2 modes I knew about but also in an additional "quirks mode" which emulates IE 5.5....erm...ok...where's the IE6 option? surely if they've gone to all this effort, they'd add "view as IE6"....apparently not....taking a quick gander over at the browser statistics chart to see if I was missing something, I realised that the only thing I was missing was firefox's growth...I mean wow! but anyway...like I thought, IE5.5 has a very small(1.5%) share of the market whereas IE6 is still up in the top 2(after firefox, much to my surprise!) so when creating "developer tools" and "view options", I would have thought that a view as IE6 option would have been pretty high on the agenda...maybe it's coming in a future release, that would allow me to stop using my standalone IE6 and run IE8, as it stands at this point in time, IE8 has been uninstalled and IE7 restored...poor show, although like I said, this will only be an irritation to people who build and test websites.

6 comments - Posted by mark at 10:50 AM - Categories: Ranting

IE8 to play nicer

On hearing that Internet Explorer 8 was supporting standards better, I have to admit that that my initial reaction was "yeh yeh, of course they are...what's the catch?" and right enough there was a catch. As default, IE8 would be using the IE7 rendering engine and to use the new, better standards supporting IE8 engine, it would be neccessary to include a meta declaration in your document head to tell IE8 that you wanted to use it's shiny new rendering engine. In principle, I must admit that I like a part of this idea, being able to target a rendering engine for backwards compatibility seems to be a good idea to me....but there's the problem....for backwards compatibility it's a great idea(IMHO), problem is we're talking about a future rendering engine which will become a current rendering engine when IE8 is released, and I wasn't the only one who had a problem with this, seems that a lot of noise has been made by developers about this method being the wrong way round...surely the default rendering engine should be the most standards compliant one no?....well it appears that microsoft have had a little change of heart and I'm happy to say they've moved it around...IE8 will use the IE8 rendering engine by default and it will be possible to target pages at older rendering engines (IE7, IE6 etc) if needs be. Well done microsoft (you never thought you'd hear me say that did you? haha)

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:50 AM - Categories: General | Ranting

powerpoint dulness is no way to go

ok, so google has added "presentations" to it's online docs arsenal...good...a free service in my opinion is what powerpoint should be...lets face it, how many "presentations" built in powerpoint have you yawned your way through over the years? personally speaking, i've been bored and unimpressed many many times over.

So is a free online resource to create dullness really needed?...well...if its free, I suppose its ok, for too long, powerpoint has been the standard for people putting together a presentation...now i could understand this if powerpoint was a free product...but it isn't, people choose to use it for presentations and people like me...and probably you...get bored with the results. I am of the understanding that powerpoint was developed as a means for microsoft developers to share processes of how technologies they were building would flow...i may be wrong? and powerpoint has become the easy to use app for all manner of presentations to be shown.

Given what could be accomplished with director and nowadays...flash, if a corporate presentation is to be produced, why on earth would powerpoint be the chosen delivery method?...because its free?...nope...because its the most effective method?...nope...I'll tell you why...in my opinion, corporate bodies will use it because it's all they know to choose when faced with the "give a presentation" dilemma.

There is a false economy train of thought going on here, people think that they can put a powerpoint presentation together themselves, saving money...well...think about this, if a company director puts this together themselves, how long will it take them to produce a finished article worth looking at? and what is the hourly rate of that directors time? say, they get their office junior to do it...is that really the best solution to show their company in the best light?...no is the answer.

These kind of things are best done by specialists in multimedia utilising flash, after effects etc to produce useable and re-useable products with high production values to best show the company, product, service etc in the best light

so, thank you google for adding another product to your free apps, but I sincerely hope I'm not going to have to sit through a whole lot more dull transitions, aliased text and horrid images, video etc produced by people who's time is REALLY better spend concentrated on more focussed business development issues.

google has done a fantastic job in adding these apps but the problem may well be abuse of these new free tools...as a web developer, multi-media specialist, my job, I suppose is to advise and show our east coast interactive folio as a comparrison, as arrogant as this may sound....there will be no contest!

0 comments - Posted by mark at 12:26 AM - Categories: Ranting

Always On

I previously blogged about "code taking over" and have had some further thoughts/insight into this.

I am aware that some thoughts I have each day are well....a bit geeky to say the least, I look at a myriad of websites every day, usually to read about the subject I've searched for, only to discover that I'm actually thinking "how have they built that" or "thats a cool idea", so quite often, my attention has left the subject I was interested in in the first place and moved to dissecting the technical/design features of the particular website I'm looking at. Personally I think this can only be a good thing but I was interested to look back and see if I've always been this way or if it was purely down to being a developer.

My first jump back in time was to my days as a graphic designer where I used to irritate friends and family by commenting on the colour/font usage on a menu or bus shelter advert or flyer....or whatever. Now, to be honest, I still find myself doing this, only these days, I tend to keep it to myself...makes for a more enjoyable night out for everyone else who's with me!... but rest assured, when I'm out for dinner with you, I'll be silently critiquing the menu design, when someone hands me a flyer or I pick one up and you catch me staring at it...you now know what is running through my mind.

My second jump back in time is to when I briefly worked as an Instrument Technician dealing with pressure and temperature gauges, I found I had a whole new interest in what the current atmospheric pressure was and what effect it would have on the weather for example, and also I checked the pressure of my car tyres a lot more and moaned that the pressure gauge wasn't even on the same scale of accuracy as the super expensive gauges I calibrated at work.

My third jump back in time goes way way back to my childhood when I was "king of lego", I remember specifically looking for things to build out of lego for when I got home...I also remember looking at what my friends had built and using some of their ideas to build new super fancier models!

So I can only come to the conclusion that yes...I have always been like this, I tend to throw myself into what I am doing and fail to switch off. This must be a common trait for developers in particular as pretty much every one I know will be toying with some new technology, building some test application or researching something in the background. I also know that going to the pub can quickly become a full on discussion about what we could do with flex, ajax or some other current buzzword. Many people can get out of bed in the morning, go to work, come home and do something else...not me...and I know I'm not alone in this! I'm definitely not the first to coin the phrase "always on" but I think it suits us perfectly...so, enough of this time wasting...back to the code!

1 comments - Posted by mark at 1:55 PM - Categories: General | Ranting

How to look stupid and wet (or just get a plumber)

Sunday...day of rest and all that...not for me! I needed to get some shiny new aqua panel up on my bathroom wall which required the removal and re-fitting of a radiator...yes you all know what's coming next...why I'm even still writing this post is more to do with certain readers of my blog who think my life has become boring recently...you know who you are Paul, so sit tight and enjoy my misfortune!

Armed with a cheapo shifting spanner, a basin, some towels and the old "if you can do flash you can do anything" resolve passed down to me by Mr Jack Keenan, I climbed the stairs of my house to scope out the job in hand, this was going to be easy (ahem)... So, back downstairs for for a cup of tea because that's what the experts do isn't it? (I was really getting into this now!) next up was the mighty switching off of the water and draining of the hot water system, so I informed Kat that she'd need to fill the kettle (nothing was happening without a lot of tea today) and a couple of pans with water in case this took longer than expected. "right, waters off", time to venture back upstairs.

First things first, I had no idea what I was doing, so I just tried loosening things in a random order until it worked (I thought this was sensible at the time...sigh..) hmmm, so the big connection turned out to be a no-goer, I turned my attention to the two smaller pipes coming up through the floor...uh oh...the water started pissing out all over the floor...nooooooooooooooooo!! but never the less, "there cant be that much water" so I carried on. At this stage my knees had just become soaked and I'd taken skin off of my knuckles on a couple of occasions, but "nobody likes a quitter" so on I went. I now had the radiator disconnected and proceeded to take it off its wall brackets inadvertently tipping it up on its end so all the rest of the water could get out....doh!

Now I had my radiator propped up against the wall, the water had stopped gushing out and I was feeling pretty triumphant...until I went downstairs (for more tea) and to my horror was met with a rather unimpressed girlfriend, mother and future mother in law (funny how they're all always there to see you fail!)

"MARK...THERE'S WATER COMING THROUGH THE ROOF" was the start of the helpful solutions I didn't particularly want to hear as I stood, cheapo shifter in hand, being dripped on, looking stupid.

Anyway..."there cant be that much water, I'll just let it drip" I thought...finally turning out to be right when an hour later the dripping stopped and nobody had slipped at the bottom of the stairs injuring themselves.

Turns out that its far easier to reconnect the thing, about 15 minutes on my knees trying to line pipes up without breaking anything and I was done...until Kat tried to close the bathroom door and I realised that my earlier fannying about with "the big connection" had left it squint..."pass me my cheapo shifter, I'll have this fixed in no time".

So, the moral of the story? just because you have a house, it doesn't mean you know how to fix it...get a plumber!

3 comments - Posted by mark at 3:13 PM - Categories: Ranting