subtleGradient

I Love Internet Explorer!

by Thomas Aylott Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:04:44 GMT

I just want to put this out there since so many people still seem to have a bad relationship with IE. We’ve all been burnt in the past :(

Meh

Those dark days should be well past us now. We all use Macs with Parallels. We all run Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 constantly while designing and developing our sites. Don’t you?

We’ve all pretty much figured out what can and cannot be done in IE, and how to easily get around the biggest problems.

But not just all that, there are actually some really compelling features that are only implemented in Internet Explorer.

Awesome Unique Features

Internet Explorer supports using javascript in your CSS. That’s right. You can define CSS rules using javascript in Internet Explorer!

And then there are the crazy Internet Explorer CSS filters. You can do silly stuff like blurring the main content when you open a lightboxy-thing, but only in Internet Explorer. I actually have that working over at the CrazyEgg overview page. I reinvented the wheel lightboxy thing with almost all CSS instead of javascript.

The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades!

There is virtually no area on the web where you have to support IE5 anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I can totally support IE5 if I absolutely have to. You just don’t have to do it anymore.

Internet Explorer 6 was released back in the dark ages. Who even uses Windows 2000 still? Let alone Windows 98. And for those few people that do, do you really care about them? It’s really much more worth your time to make your sites work perfectly in Safari and Opera. People who use Safari and Opera are more likely to be people with money.

Just look at the Market share for browsers. IE5 has 0.35% of the market. That’s well below Opera 9’s 0.65%. So, when thinking about supporting IE5, get right on that after you fully support Opera 9 and Safari. And it’s not like IE5’s market share is going up. Obviously you have to look at the browser share of your target market. Not all markets have the same browser share.

Now consider the fact that IE8 is going to come out eventually and you’ll be able to completely drop support for IE6 too! Ahh, that’ll be the day.

Slingshot around the sun would be faster

by Thomas Aylott Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:17:00 GMT

Ok, so you all now know that I’m in on the Slingshot beta now. They have asked me to be candid and blog about my experiences with developing for Slingshot, good or bad, in “real time.” So that is what I am doing…

I finally had the conference call with one of the developers at Magnetk and David Young ^{founder and CEO of Joyent} last Thursday. He originally confirmed the call for Wednesday. I emailed a number of times but didn’t hear anything until Thursday morning when they called. Five minutes early or 1,435 minutes late, you decide ;)

And then I was promised that I’d “revieve the code” by today (monday) and be able to start hacking around with Slingshot. Shockingly enough, I haven’t heard a peep from them.

Sofar, I’d say we’re off to a somewhat shakey start. Three weeks before the official launch of Slingshot and I don’t have access to the code or documentation.

I forget, is PST 3 hours or 27 hours behind EST?

I’m not an impatient person by any stretch. I’m just used to people doing what they say. Why would you voluntarilly commit to a time unless you’re absolutely certain that you can exceed it?

Slingshot is a real risk on their part. If they don’t handle this properly they run the risk of alienating their developers. And if there aren’t any people developing on their platform then it will shrivel up and die.

Obviously I don’t think that being a wee bit late a few times in a row is going to jinx you from the get go, but it is starting them out in the red. They’re already behind in my book. Time is money, baby! If you’re going to waste my time then I might think twice about setting myself up for it again.

You expect more from a for-profit business

I’ve been spending more and more of my time on open-source or open-standard¹ software over the last few years. In that environment you come to expect things to be late and have vast expanses of no forward development, bad communication with the development team, etc… It’s just the nature of the beast.

But when you try and make a closed-source for-profit business, I’m going to expect a little more out of you. You should provide your customers with some way to contact you. You should respond when they do contact you. You should be all in all a bit more professional.

Lately I’ve actually seen the exact opposite to be true.

Open souce developers all seem to be hanging out in IRC and in mailing lists and blogs and on IM and actually reading and responding to their email. Not to mention that if you ever have any problems with their code or desperately need to know how something is implemented you just have to pop open their source code and read or edit the stuff directly, skipping out the middle-man altogether.

Ok, now I’m just ranting like a maniac

Ok, that’s all extremely unfair to the poor Joyent Slingshot peoples here. They aren’t exactly Adobe or anything. And Slingshot isn’t exactly Adobe Apollo.

I’m sure they’ll get something to me tomorrow. And I’m sure it’ll be way less than 2000 minutes late. To be completely fair, it’ll still be Monday for another few hours. The last thing they need is my abuse :P They did have me agree to blog in “real time” though, so it’s their own fault.

Oi, i need some sleep.

Please forgive the rant my friendly internet peoples. Everything is all smiles and joy and the raindrops shall skitter away as does the dew when once it falls upon the stillness of the pond, or something like that…

UPDATE

It’s now 10:45pm EST Tuesday night… I haven’t hard a peep out of them since last Thursday. But I’m sure they’ll email me, any minute… now ... or not.

Apollo, here I come!

UPDATE2

Wednesday at ~1:30pm EST they emailed me back…

We found a big bug in unsync. We should have it fixed today.

Well, that’s probly good. Don’t want to have buggy stuff. I just wish they’d emailed me on monday to let me know I wasn’t going to get it that day.

UPDATE3

I finally got access to Slingshot today, Friday April 13 2007. The Windows version isn’t ready yet.

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¹ TextMate bundles are an “open-standard.” While the primary application that uses the bundles is for-profit and closed-source, the bundle file formats themselves are open and anyone can use them. See, for example The Power of Textmate on Windows

subtleGradient on Slingshot Beta

by Thomas Aylott Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:01:00 GMT

I was recently offered access into the Joyent Slingshot Beta

I’ll be discussing the details with David Young^CEO in a few minutes. Do you have any questions you’d like me to ask for you?

Obviously the most pressing question that most people seem to be wondering is how this puppy compares with FireFox 3 and Apollo alpha.

Well, I’m also looking into Apollo. I’ve done quite a bit of looking into the deets. I’ve already hacked on some local Apollo craziness.

Apollo is a way to run static web tech on your local machine. That means you have the ability to run HTML, Javascript and Flash. You’ll eventually be able to mix in some PDF in there too. Now, don’t get me wrong, Apollo is totally stinking awesome! But, I think a few of their best features are also their greatest faults. I’ll leave the Apollo rant for another article.

I haven’t really looked into Firefox 3 much more than running the alpha to compatibility test CrazyEgg. AFAIK FireFox 3 is just going to be FireFox 2 with some fancy offline capabilities and such. I also strongly feel that some of FireFox’s best features are also their worst. Again, more on that later.

So, that brings us back to Slingshot.
What’s the big difference?

Ruby! That’s the big difference. You’ll be able to write real desktop applications using Ruby On Rails! No installing a custom framework. No crazy custom application bundles. Not tied into a web browser as just another window or tab. Full blown web applications on your desktop using real binaries and junk!

That’s the promise at least. We’ll see how this stuff pans out in the end. I’m keeping my expectations really low so that I’m not disappointed.

_{I’ll be blogging about this thing as I use it.
So, expect more content from me soon.}