May 25, 2003
Where Be IE?
Slightly Bent: "Where are all the leaked screenshots and Information on the next version of Internet Explorer? Is there a next version?"
He brings up a good point that I've been think about a little recently. What is Microsoft going to do with IE? Actually, let's back up a bit. What has Microsoft done with IE in the last while? The answer is almost nothing. Their rendering engine still lacks a lot of CSS compliance and proper PNG support is laughable. Are they working on this? Will they ever? I think this is a real problem for the web. Microsoft has no incentive to develop IE further and come up with innovative features.
What does this mean for the web? Well, in the area of standards compliance it could be a really big issue. If 95% of the market can't render new cool things correctly because they are using an incompetent browser, then if you are a practical businessman you won't use that new technology. This could put a serious damper on development and adoption of new standards and technologies in the general public.
How do we get out of this rut? How can we give Microsoft a kick in the pants to develop more? I suppose alternative browser engines can gain adoption with the nerds, but how can the general public be informed? They don't care about their browsers, or CSS, or standards. All that a lot of them care about is checking their email and doing some surfing and IE provides that for them in as good a package as they know. They don't know that others might be better. This is the problem with everyone in the software industry competing with Microsoft (or Apple even) once they get a piece of software that works fine for them, they just don't care about anything else. They'll suffer through bugs and inconsistencies and other issues, and never even question if there are other alternatives.
May 03, 2003
The IE Blues
Mark points out a major crashing bug in the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows. When you visit a page like this test page it will crash IE and all other applications that embed the IE engine. The scary thing is how simple the code is:
<html>
<form>
<input type>
</form>
</html>
So now email virii only have to embed that HTML and it will bring down a bunch of windows applications. Fun!
April 23, 2003
TypePad
Today, Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type announced a hosting service named TypePad. It will use MT as it's weblogging software. This really sounds great. Blogger was essentially the only choice for those without a server who wanted to set up a weblog up until this point. Now Blogger has competition from Movable Type, which is, in my opinion, a much more advanced piece of software. Then again, Blogger now has google's finances behind it and as Brent warns, hosting can be difficult and can cause problems for a company.
Despite that, I'm very interested in TypePad and optimistic for its future development.
April 20, 2003
Dave Whiner?
Recently Dave Winer has been made some comments about CSS and his apparent dislike for it. He claims that it is broken and he has to support IE. Last time I checked, CSS works quite well in IE and it doesn't take that much work to figure it out. He's started complaining that designers are trying to get him to make a political statement by using CSS. Personally, I think he's already making a statement for Microsoft. He claims to be a XML guru, but he doesn't even understand the concept of seperating style from content. He's taken some heat from people around the web about these comments. some are more heated than others.
Mark Pilgrim brings up some good points in the form of a satire of Dave's original post. If someone said that RSS validation is a stupid idea and we should use any XML we wantk, Dave would likely disagree.
April 17, 2003
Browser Competition
Daring Fireball has a great article on competition in the browser market and how it is getting much better. This is especially true on the Mac platform where Camino, Safari and Mozilla are all very competent browsers. He mentions that the OmniGroup is going to base Omniweb 4.5 off Webcore (the Safari rendering engine).
April 05, 2003
Minotaur Builds
Builds of Minotaur, the new Mozilla mail client, have been released for OS X and Linux. I downloaded the windows build a few days ago. It seems pretty nice, but the OS X build is a little rough around the edges.
April 02, 2003
Mozilla Divorce!
Today, Mozilla.org announced a new roadmap. It is a big change for the direction of the Mozilla project. They are promising to split up the current Mozilla Application Suite into various applications. They will use what is now Phoenix as their default Browser along with Minotaur as their mail client. This is great for Mozilla. It will give them apps with nice easy interfaces that are smaller and leaner.
They also mention that this means Phoenix will now be built daily for OS X! Another OS X browser! Note that Camino will continue to be developed as well.
March 29, 2003
BlogShares
March 27, 2003
Gateway the Good!
I rarely praise boxy PC companies for their innovation and initiative to stand up to the big guys, but in this case I have to hand it to Gateway. They are launching a new advertising campaign that will educate consumers that they are allowed under "fair use" to rip their CDs to their computer and burn songs they own on other CDs for personal use. I have found that the RIAA is using the guise of piracy to try and stop any copying at all onto a computer, it's good that a computer company is standing up for the consumer's rights. From the article:
"Our concern is that some in the recording industry have created a real sense of ambiguity and confusion among consumers as a consequence of (the industry's) antipiracy efforts," said Gateway spokesman Brad Williams. "We agree that piracy is a major problem. But we're very concerned that consumers' fair use rights can be swept up and lost in the antipiracy debates."
What is it?
Dave Winer writes:
"Later today Macromedia will announce a new product, one I've been wanting for seven years. I'll wait until the press release runs before explaining why it is so important, why it will be controversial, and why the controversy won't matter."
Sounds interesting. I wonder what it could be? Maybe something to do with Flash.
March 14, 2003
Starting A Blog
Erik over at NSLog has posted a great article with tips about starting up a weblog. It's a really great read and it is really useful. I used his tip about archive paths in Movable Type.
March 07, 2003
Mozilla Article
Mozilla.org's Mitchell Baker has posted an article about Browser innovation and their future. One part deals with Safari and Camino:
"In addition to the Mozilla-based browsers, Apple has recently launched its own browser for Mac OS X, known as Safari. It may be that the majority of Mac end users will end up using Safari because it comes with the OS, just as many people end up using IE because it comes with the Windows distribution. Some see this as traumatic or as a mark of doom. But the Mozilla project understands that almost everyone in the US market (and a substantial percentage of the international market) receives Internet Explorer when they acquire a computer, and our job is to provide an alternative. We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser, but providing an alternative to an OS-sponsored browser is nothing new to us. The key goal of the Mozilla project is to help keep content on the web open and help keep access to that content from being controlled by a single source. Apple's decision to ship a browser based on an open source rendering engine, with a focus on standards compliance, is a good thing for the big picture goal"
This is a good attitude they are taking. I've seen some people around the Mozillazine forums and even other developers taking a reall negative attitude about it (often because they are anti-apple trolls anyways). The big thing here is that both Safari and Camino are great browsers using great open source engines (kHTML and Gecko). IE will be eliminated on the Mac platform and the majority of people will start using open source rendering engines.
March 05, 2003
Hyatt's Tabs
Dave Hyatt writes about tabbed browsing. Here's just the beginning:
"I've seen a lot of comments in various Mac forums where people have claimed that "Dave Hyatt said he doesn't like tabbed browsing!" or "Dave Hyatt hates tabbed browsing!" I find these posts perplexing, because I never said any such thing, and of course the opposite is true. I love tabbed browsing. I implemented tabbrowser in the Mozilla trunk. I implemented tabbed browsing in Chimera. I implemented the version used in Phoenix. Given how many times I've implemented it, I'm amazed that people would think that I am not a tabbed browsing devotee"
This is interesting. Its kind of a tip off about tabbed browsing in Safari. I'm sure Dave's opinions would have some influence or he wouldn't say an opinion like this on tabbed browsing then have it implemented a different way by the other Safari engineers. That would make itl ook like they don't have a common goal. Most of this has already come to pass with the cough hypothetical v62. One thing I really want in tabbed browsing is opening tabs from other apps such as Mail or NetNewsWire. I can't stand having a bunch of windows open when I open things from either of those programs. That is one of the reasons why I use the freshly re-named, Camino
February 28, 2003
Patent Problems
There's a great article on Wired about how software patents suck. It's an interview with Ralph Nader. Here's a quote I really enjoyed:
Q: The system must be working for someone. Who benefits?
A: The system protects two groups: software companies with weak products who use patents to harass competitors, and patent lawyers. The ease of getting patents makes it economically attractive to abuse the system in a number of unpleasant ways. People obtain patents and then ask businesses to pay licensing fees that are cheaper than the cost of mounting a legal defense. Also, firms are wary of investing in new products for fear they will be ambushed by an infring
Very true. What kind of idiots work in the patent officies anyways? Do they have any clue about the patents they are granting? Or are they just corrupt?
February 26, 2003
Magnetic Poetry
diveintomark.org presents Magnetic Poetry in your browser! Time to waste some time.
February 25, 2003
Heh
I couldn't have said it better myself.
PerversionTracker reviews Opera.
February 22, 2003
Google and Blogger
Wired: Why Did Google Want Blogger?
Good insight.
February 16, 2003
Google Blogs
Google has bought Pyra, the makers of Blogger. It will be interesting to see how this changes things for weblogs and personal publishing in general.
February 12, 2003
Chimera Name
Mike Pinkerton confirms that Chimera 0.7 wont ship until it has a new name. There are legal issues with the Chimera name due to an old unix browser being called the same thing. I remember reading that it was Hyatt who named it. Did he not do a google search for the name before?
Anyways, Mike says that its hard to get a name that is cool and can get through the Netscape legal department. Their two names up for consideration right now are Camino and iVoyage. Personally they don't do anything for me, and Mike says he gets laughed at when saying the name might be Camino. I really hope they don't use iVoyage. We don't need people outside of Apple using the iNames more. It seems every second peice of software for OS X is an iSomething. Enough with the "i"! Even Apple is moving away from that naming convention with Safari. Surely something cool like that can get through the legal department.
Or they could just go with the suggestion in the minutes of a Mozilla.org meeting and name it "C******" (this would only be temporary so they could get a release out).
Whatever happens I just want a name that doesn't suck and some new releases!
Hmmm
The newest build of Chimera that I'm using has a bug displaying this page. All other browsers I try display it properly. This appears to be a new bug.
February 10, 2003
The BBC
The BBC wants you! Cool idea.
January 31, 2003
NetNewsWire Categories
This is another test. NetNewsWire doesn't seem to be picking up my new categories.
Update: After removing and adding the weblog it works again.
January 29, 2003
Opera Whiners
CNET has an article that Opera wants to abandon the Mac platform because of Safari. It sounds like they are just giving up here. A bunch of whiners if you ask me. Their product isn't very good on the mac and people don't use it now either. Maybe if they made a good mac app that is up to par with others (Chimera, Safari, Omniweb) they could compete. It seems like they are just using Apple as a scapegoat for their own problems.
The part that is really crazy is that they have given Apple the offer of their engine to replace kHTML in Safari. Why would Apple do that? They have just made kHTML good why would they switch now. Thats crazy. It seems like they are saying "Apple, pay us and use our product or we're leaving". What a bunch of sore losers.
January 27, 2003
Category Test
I'm testing multiple categories from NetNewsWire Pro.
Apple Office?
This interesting article talks about a new Apple word processor to challenge Microsoft Word. I really hope this happens, especially if they get get full .doc computability. They announced Keynote, their presentation software, at Macworld. It looks like a direct competitor to PowerPoint. I hope they compete with the others as well.
January 26, 2003
NetNewsWire Pro
I'm testing a post from NetNewsWire Pro.
Update, it looks like it worked. I can edit all old posts and assign categories. Pretty cool. It works nicely with the RSS reader part as well.
Microsoft Marketing
Well Microsoft's marketing department sure is good. Remember Palladium - Microsoft's 'secure' computing initiative that would essentially give them control of our applications and files on our computer? Well for some reason they decided that name wasn't suitable for such an over-bearing and over-controlling technology that is a big over-reaction. No, they didn't call it something appropriate like "Operation Overlord" or "Operation Enduring Lack of Freedom" or maybe "1984". No, Microsoft isn't that clever. Instead of all the cool names they could have choose (hell, Palladium was even mildly cool) they choose a buzzword filled sentance. Yes thats right their new code name is... ready for it... this will blow you away... "next-generation secure computing base."
Whoa, I don't know about anyone else but that codename really knocked my socks off. Not only is it stylish, but its so darn catchy! Doesn't it just roll off your tongue! And look at that innovation! Microsoft has innovated with the first eleven syllable code name in computing history! Thank god they won their "right to innovate" in the case against the US Justice Department or else we wouldn't see such amazing nomenclature.
Lets go through the amazing words that make up this amazing name.
Next-Generation: Well, this is really two words hyphenated together, but its still pretty cool. I guess it is suppose to make people think that their technology is that of the future, kind of like people giving 110% effort. I just think of Star Trek.
Secure: Well thats what they want you to believe. All the little consumers will willingly pay their money and have their lives taken over by Microsoft and the RIAA for the sake of their security. In reality the only security Microsoft cares about is how secure their profit flow is.
Computing: Not much to say here. Obviously it is a computing thing. Microsoft makes computer products don't they?
Base: So Microsoft is going to be the base of my computer? This tells me that they are going to have control over anything that goes on top of the base.
OK, now that I've met my sarcasm quota for the night I can be serious. What are they thinking? Their marketing department should really be fired. Not to mention the fact that Palladium (I'm still going to call it that) is far from secure. In the CNET article there is a quote by an employee in "Microsoft's Windows Trusted Platform Technologies Group" (another great name!!!) where he says essentially that they wanted to change the name because it was tarnished by controversy. Well thats smart, except this name will still be tarnished by controversy since they haven't made any attempt to fix the problems.
Congratulations Microsoft on creating the worst code name ever!
In other news a worm that infects Microsoft's SQL server is still worming its way around the net wreaking havoc as it goes. Monopolies suck.
January 24, 2003
Are We Doomed?
Wired: " Kasparov, the chess grandmaster beaten in a match by computer Deep Blue six years ago, said Thursday he is proud to represent humanity in the latest battle of man vs. machine."
Is chess really the best game in which to test artificial intelligence? It seems that if a computer is given enough time it could predict every possible situation and could thus win every time. A real test of intelligence and capabilities would be in a kind of real world scenerio where humans use their intuitions and simply react. In a real world situation the human brain doesn't go through all the available possibilities then pick the best one. Automatically we rule out a lot of them then decide on the best.
January 23, 2003
Rosen To Leave
The New York Times reports that Hilary Rosen, the head of the RIAA is going to step down. I don't know if this is good or bad thing. Probably some one else like her will just take her place.
January 22, 2003
The RIAA Is At It Again
As Wired reports, The RIAA now wants to make ISPs accountable for their customers trading music. That's crazy.
One good point in the article comes from anonymous "industry official":
"It's horrible. Anything we can do that's effective will seriously annoy our customers," said one industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"I think we might need to stop fighting fire with fire and figure out something new to do, or we will end up with lots of ex-customers who swap files just out of spite."
At least someone in there has a brain.
January 20, 2003
test4
