I've been on hiatus because of the holla-holla-daze, but I managed to put up an first version wcml xml template. Gabriel Jeffrey provided and is hosting free comment software for web loggers. Patrick Curry and I thought it would be cool to have that data in xml format. Theoretically, it could then be used with any web comments such as uigui or blogback. (Blogback is closed to the public because of over-hosting I believe.)
The people at CHMAN are really doing some amazingly original things with web media. They've released another episode of Banja, an online high-bandwidth flash game. Once again, it's fantastic work. If you play make sure you check out the functionality of Banja's jukebox. Sort by record label! *drool*... Occasionally, I'll get lost but chalk it up to the cultural barrier I guess. Those crazy Europeans. (j/k)
Yay! Dan Steinman, the creator of the original DynAPI, finally removed his open call for freelance work. Someone must've hired him. Also, Zeldman and the others at the WASP are taking a leave of absence. And finally, I just have to remind everyone how lovely W3 Schools is. They keep adding more and more free web lessons. We just can't learn it fast enough.
I posted another web experiment today. Class changing with JavaScript in order to change a pseudo-class property along with it. Say whuh..? Maybe viewing it will do a better job of explaining my meaning.
A guy at work pointed me in the direction of a program called Intava Gravity Pro. It's a WYSIWYG editor designed specifically for wireless markup previewing. Gravity Pro has several emulators built in for wireless browsers such as Palm and various mobile phones. Here's a screenshot of the program interface. Very cool.
I haven't coded any WAP in over a year, but I wouldn't mind getting back into it if the phone companies would settle down and agree on some standards. My argument against it has been the same for a long time. Most web technologies were developed and advanced by thinkers and developers genuinely interested in advancing the technology. The development of WAP and WML however, was mainly pushed by corporate marketing teams as a ploy to sell more phones. This left a huge mess of markup with no firm standards and hundreds of wireless devices with ridiculously unusable interfaces. I'm not saying it's all bad, I'm just saying it's going to take a lot of dedicated work from die-hard proponents to clean it up before it will be usable on a broader scale. I think the only common usage is by financial institutions for information like stock quotes and the bandwidth is still too thin for much of anything else. Apparently, a lot of people agree that WAP still sucks.
From sfear, my partner in crime: digitally confusing people in the first degree.
wow. this is hot. those quotes at the end are funny: "devoid of law"...
I spent most of today working on the site. I rearranged the grouping of certain pages and added a few. If you're looking for the sitemap or my résumé, they are in the about cookiecrook section. I also added customization functionality though it is in a beta stage and may require a bit more work. Feel free to email me any suggestions you may have.
Tim Ziegler, an former co-worker of mine at notHarvard, has a PHP Tutorial up on WebMonkey. Thanks to Erick for the link via consolejockey.
In other ALA News, Nick Finck has resigned as co-producer in order to concentrate on his own webzine, DigitalWeb. Don't fail to check out the fantastic illustration style by contributor, Drew Europeo.
A List Apart has a fantastic new story entitled, Why don't you code for Netscape? Apparently, some reader took the time to state: As a web designer, it's important to me that my site not only look good in both browsers, but that all readers will see the same design and formatting.
without taking the time to realize that there are more two browsers (notice the comment about "both browsers") and without reading the explanation available on the site.
I really didn't want to make a whole post about Windows XP, but I had to respond to Patrick and Gabe's comments. There are advanced user settings and you can edit the registry the same way as in 2000. Gabe is right, you can set everything back to the way it is in Windows 2000, but I thought I'd try some of the new user interface features out. All of these are customizable so you can set the features to classic or xp mode, but most of them have more granular customization settings, too. I took some screen shots for demo purposes but beware they might be kinda large.
The first thing of mention is the task bar. It has a new customizable system tray allowing you to display or hide certain items or you can choose to "Only show when active." Also, when you have many programs open, instead of making a huge list of unreadable buttons (like the Windows 2000 taskbar), it allows you to group similar tasks.
The start menu has some nice changes too. You can add a menu alias to ANY folder (not just Programs and Documents) and more and more it looks like the Mac Apple Menu. You can also set it to highlight newly installed programs. This comes in handy for me because it tips me off when programs have been installed under my nose. When you install Netscape, for example, it trys to sneak in Net2Phone and AOL. With the new programs highlighted, I can easily spot and uninstall them.
More accessibility features come standard in XP, too. I recently discovered that the Magnifier and Narrator are also available in Windows 2000, but you have to explicitly choose them when you install the OS. Narrator is a simple screen reading program; Magnifier simply magnifies a portion of the screen. You can change the magnification level and a few other options. Buttons and scrollbars are resizable, too. I have good vision so I set mine to the smallest setting. Funny, that looks like a Mac interface, too!
Ok, it's open to discussion again. Don't hate me because I dig a Microsoft product. But remember, I have the last word. Bah!
Final Cut Pro 3 came out yesterday for MacOS 9 and MacOS X. Obviously I haven't used it yet, but version 2 is my favorite non-linear editor to date so look for good things from this one.
Also, I've been using Windows XP at work this week. I've still a little nervous about the supposed privacy issues, but I really love the user interface. I reserve the right to change my mind but I've very pleased with it for now. Go Microsoft............ er... hmm.......... I never thought I'd say that... Maybe I should say, "Go WinXP UI design team"... Yeah, that sounds better.
I just noticed that Opera 6 came out last week. Apparently they've fixed several CSS bugs though I still don't think it's up to par with Mozilla. A new feature of note is "quick preferences", allowing you to do things like enable/disable javascript and cookies very quickly [F12]. You can also use "quick preferences" to identify the http request as another browser such as MSIE or Netscape. Opera 6 also claims to have the Shockwave Flash player integrated, but I had trouble getting it to work.
Gabe says he thinks it's "ugly." I might agree with that for the default "scribble" theme, though they do have have other ones available. A couple of them mimic the Mozilla (NS6) theme and the Macintosh Aqua theme. All things considered, the browser is definately worth checking out.
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