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Latest Blog Entries (RSS)
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How Will the Web Fair with the Financial Crisis?
With the current state of the world economy, everyone is questioning the future of their market. I don't think that the world economy has entirely collapsed yet, as many people seem to assume. We are no where near Great Depression conditions, but it is still important to expect some financial hardships for most markets in the coming years. How will the Internet fair in the declining economy? Of course, this is a bit hard to predict, but I think that we can at least examine a few factors that shed some light on the future of the Internet.
One interesting bit of information I remember from American History class is that board games were very popular during the Great Depression because they were a cheap form of entertainment. The Internet also offers a lot of similar forms of relatively cheap entertainment. For example, for only $15 a month, someone can play World of Warcraft, a game that basically never ends and is constantly improving and changing. Tools like Facebook and MySpace are free ways to communicate that are much cheaper than cellphones and landlines. The Internet is full of free and cheap forms of entertainment. I think that the Internet will survive (and possibly thrive) simply because it offers so many affordable services and products. In the next few years, I imagine that expensive forms of entertainment will decline, like building pools and going on vacations. Things like watching movies at home, playing video games, and social networking will thrive because they are cheap.
Granted, the ad market might take a hit, which would negatively affect content websites. SitePoint posted a blog entry (external link) about the potential decline in online advertising. A decline in the ad market may eliminate a lot of smaller websites, but I don't think the big players will close down. They may not be as profitable, but I think they'll be able to weather the storm, as long as they are run efficiently.
Kevin Rose even considers this a good time to launch a company (external link) because there will be less competition in the market. There is some validity in his statement because anyone with some free time has the opportunity to make something big. Also, a lot of tech companies with deep pockets (like Apple and Microsoft) will have plenty of cash to invest and to innovate in the cheaper market.
I personally think that the Internet as a whole is going to fair well in the economic slowdown because it is a cheap form of entertainment. Some fat will be trimmed off of the Internet, but I think the Internet will still remain a growing, strong platform. Of course, I'm not a market specialist or a financial analyst, so feel free to share your opinions on this matter in the comments below!
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Are Resizable Layouts Dead?
I've noticed in the past few months that fewer and fewer websites have resizable layouts that can properly shrink for an 800x600 resolution. The few resizable layouts I've encountered will only shrink for an 1024x768 resolution, which I guess they assume is the most common monitor size now, and slightly expand for anything larger. It was only a few years ago that most websites catered to an 800x600 resolution! Now it seems the era of resizable layouts is dying out.
Resizable layouts are ultimately better for the user because they don't restrict their browsing experience by requiring them to expand their browser window to see all the content. It also improves accessibility for users who simply have smaller monitors and furthermore for users who don't realise there is a horizontal scrollbar. I don't see any reason not to have resizable layouts, except because of the fact that a fixed-width layout is 100% easier to code and to design. From what I understand, a significant number of web users (particularly those in developing nations) still have smaller monitors with a maximum resolution of 800x600. Are web designers just ignoring this in favour of an easier design process?
The trend of non-resizable layouts seems to correspond with the development of Web 2.0. Just a few years ago, resizable layouts seemed to be the "holy grail" of web design with most web designers aiming to have their layouts work across browsers and across screen sizes. Most non-resizable layouts would at least work in an 800x600 screen resolution too. Has this trend just entirely died out? Why are so many websites leaving smaller monitors in the dust? Plus, Web 2.0-style layouts are generally easier to make resizable!
Both MSN and Yahoo! require horizontal scrolling on their homepage in the 800x600 resolution. Luckily, most of Google's services are still resizable, but Google tends to sacrifice design for the sake of accessibility in more cases than Microsoft and Yahoo! do. Of course, I was devastated when SitePoint's latest design (external link) update didn't shrink for 800x600. Web design websites I figured would hold out for screen-resolution accessibility. The day Google's normal search pages don't resize for different screen resolutions will be a very, very sad day.
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Opera Mini Never Submitted to Apple
The New York Times' blogger Saul Hansell has reported a clarification about Opera and the iPhone. He went and further questioned Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Opera's chief executive, about Opera Mini and the iPhone for extra clarity:
Quotation by "Saul Hansell"
He [von Tetzchner] said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an "internal project" of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple's software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.
Hansell was the one to report originally about Apple rejecting Opera Mini, so I guess he got the story wrong. I figured it would be good to post about this article considering I posted a blog entry about it last week and the topic was brought up in the forums (external link). You can read the clarifying blog post (external link) yourself on New York Times' website.
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Obama Expected to Appoint a CTO
Before being elected as President, Obama promised that his new administration would embrace technology in order to incorporate citizens more into the democratic process. One way he plans to do this is to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (external link) (CTO) to his cabinet "to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century". Beware that this position will probably only be symbolic, but it's a step in the right direction.
There is a lot of speculation about whom Obama will appoint as CTO, but there is a good chance it will be a Washington outsider. You can read more about the specifics of Obama's "search" for a CTO on CNET (external link). I'm anxious to see who Obama seeks out myself, but there are still over seventy days until his inauguration, so I don't expect that anything will be announced soon.
On a side note, has anyone seen Obama's Change.gov (external link) website? He must have some brilliant web designers working for him because all his websites look absolutely stunning. Also, how did he get the change.gov domain?
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PunBB 1.3 Officially Released!
PunBB 1.3 has finally been officially released just today! This release brings tons of improvements from 1.2, particularly the new extension system. Here is a small list of improvements (from the official news post (external link)):
- Extension system based on hooking technique. One click extension installation, no need to modify forum's code anymore.
- Full UTF-8 support.
- More customisable styles, templating system.
- New layout: markup, CSS, language files updated, markup helper functions added.
- URL rewriting schemes, nice URL's built-in.
- Split/merge topics functionality.
- Multiple groups for moderators allowed.
- Searches are now case-insensitive, extern.php improved, more global, per-group and per-user options added.
- Certain "bad" characters are silently stripped out from the text input.
- Got rid of extras folder, README added.
- Hotifx system based on extension system for quick bugfixes.
Since the start of PunBB 1.3's development, the project has also undergone a change in ownership as Rickard Andersson (external link), the lead developer, moved on to new things. The code base has improved a lot as well, although I guess that isn't as exciting of an issue with the hook-based extension system.
Personally, I like the new default layout. It's much more slick than the old one and a nice facelift.
Lowter will probably upgrade our PunBB installation in the coming weeks, for anyone wondering. You can download (external link) the official release of PunBB 1.3 from the PunBB website.
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Increasing Productivity with Virtual Desktops
When you're designing a website you know how many windows you can have open: code editor, web browser(s), Photoshop, terminal window (for SVN or CVS), etc. You're desktop gets crowded! Sure, there are various windows management tools in every operating system, but when you have five or more windows open it still gets crowded. This problem is quickly solved by virtual desktops, which allow you to group sets of windows into their own "desktop".
Before I purchased my Macbook, I just dealt with one desktop, largely because I had two huge monitors (where overlap was uncommon), but also because there weren't many good virtual desktop solutions for OS X. However, I have finally started to use Spaces - a new feature of OS X Leopard - to organise my workspace environment and hence to increase my productivity. It's alleviated a lot of window searching and allows me to multitask a little bit more (which is something I try to avoid, but do nonetheless). Apple did a good job with Spaces because it's intuitive and integrated well with the rest of the operating system.
I wish they would have added a little icon on one of the function keys for Spaces, like they did for Expose and the Dashboard. Rather, the default keyboard shortcut is F8 and on a Mac laptop that's already assigned to the play/pause function, so you have to press the function key too. Only a minor annoyance, but they could've done better with that.
If you're not using OS X Leopard (which I assume is most of you), then here are a few other virtual desktop applications for Windows:
- Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP (external link)
- VirtuaWin (external link)
- Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager (external link)
- NVIDIA nView(only for certain NVIDIA cards) (external link)
GNOME and KDE have virtual desktop support built right into them, so you don't need anything extra! I hope that using virtual desktops helps to increase your productivity!
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Opera on the iPhone Soon?
Last week there were a number of reports on the Internet about Opera's mobile browser being rejected from Apple's iPhone App Store. To clarify, Apple apparently rejected Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile. I guess some people were confused (external link) and didn't realise that Opera has two mobile browsers. Apparently, Opera Mini was rejected because it was running a Java ME runtime on the iPhone, although this is only speculation. This of course violates the iPhone's SDK agreement. Still, if Opera were to redevelop Opera Mini using the C API, Apple would probably still reject the application because it directly competes with Safari.
I could understand Apple rejecting Opera Mobile, but Opera Mini isn't a full-fledged web browser at all, like Safari, but rather a "mini" browser. With Opera Mini, webpages are sent through Opera's servers and processed into a smaller file format before being sent to Opera Mini. This method puts most of the rendering job on Opera's servers, which allows Opera Mini to work well on older mobile phones and to reduce bandwidth usage drastically. Overall, it is a severely limited Internet experience, especially in comparison to Safari. The target market of Opera Mini is different from that of Safari.
Hopefully, Opera will devote more resources to getting Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to run on the iPhone properly and then push Apple to accept them as applications. I would really like to see both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile on the iPhone in the near future. When the App Store was released, I expected that eventually Opera Mobile would be ported to the iPhone because it is the most powerful mobile browser on the market. However, Apple's recent anti-competitive practices are making me sceptical of the iPhone as a development platform. Please! I want Opera on my iPhone!
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Windows 7 Pre-beta Leaks onto Bittorrent
CNET's News.com is reporting about Windows 7 having quickly leaked onto Bittorrent sites (external link), such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova:
Quotation by "CNET News.com"
The pre-beta version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system released to developers at the Professional Developers Conference has already made it onto prominent BitTorrent sites, where thousands of enthusiasts around the world are currently downloading it.
Windows 7 leaking out onto Bittorrent is no surprise at all, it happens with everything nowadays. It would be nice if Microsoft just gave out the pre-releases for public scrutiny, sort of opening up the development process more.
I hope that Microsoft learnt a thing or two from Windows Vista, which was largely a failure. Whilst most of the bugs and the issues have been ironed out by now, Vista's launch was nonetheless an utter failure. I don't know too much about Microsoft's planned improvements for Windows 7, but it seems to be mainly under-the-hood bits from what I hear (much like OS X Snow Leopard). It would be nice to see a lot of the features that were originally meant to be in Windows Vista, but scrapped to meet the release date (WinFS anyone?).
I actually feel excited about Windows 7 because I think that Microsoft has learnt a lot from releasing Vista. It's also an opportunity for all the cool stuff originally in Windows Longhorn to debut finally in Windows 7. Even at the worst, it'll at least bring some improvements to Mac OS X through competition.
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WordPress' Plugin Platform Rocks!
Many of my client projects have utilised WordPress (external link) as the foundation for each website. This is usually the client's choice because they don't want to pay for an entire custom CMS, no matter how much I push for it (because I find it the best solution in most cases). Hence, I have to find ways to build off of WordPress in order to meet the client's specifications. Luckily, the WordPress development team has made one of the best plugin platforms I have ever worked with.
Creating new plugins and modifying existing plugins for WordPress are extremely easy. There are tons of hooks built into the platform so your code can easily integrate into WordPress without having to modify WordPress' actual source code. Also, there are already hundreds of WordPress plugins that take only a few minutes to install. WordPress' plugin platform and plugin repository make building a customised version of WordPress a snap.
PunBB (external link) 1.3 has a plugin platform similar to that of WordPress, although it is still in development. I cannot wait until an official, stable release of PunBB 1.3 is released, because then I can migrate a lot of the modifications made to Lowter's PunBB installation to plugins. Development of PunBB 1.3 seems to be pretty slow, but it's a huge improvement all around, not just with the plugin platform.
Anyhow, I just wanted to give props to WordPress' great plugin platform! It's made my life a lot easier numerous times!
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Code Syntax Debates in the Programming World
There are a number of code-syntax debates in the world of programming. Everyone has the common goal of establishing some sort of code-syntax standard so developers can easily work on each others' code, but everyone disagrees on exactly what the standard should be. Some programming languages, like Python, have largely solved this problem by enforcing a specific syntax on developers. However, these syntax debates still exist in many programming communities, such as the PHP developer community, as PHP gives developers a lot of syntax freedom. I thought it would be interesting to see what Lowter members thought about some of the longstanding code syntax debates:
- Indentation style (K&R, Allman, BSD KNF, Whitesmiths, GNU, etc.)
- VariableName, variableName, variablename, or variable_name?
- Spacing around parentheses
- One letter variable naming
- Allowing coding shortcuts and shorthand methods
You can read about all sorts of programming styles (external link) on Wikipedia, but what I've listed here seems to be the differences I most encounter personally. Although the code-syntax debate doesn't look to have an end in the near future, please comment which syntax you support in the comments below!
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