sherwin’s posterous

Microsoft Won't go Webkit. The World Must Act!

A bit of disappointing news this weekend. Having to design sites that work nicely across all browsers is indeed a bitch. I'm constantly reminded of this fact as I finish putting a page, satisfied that it looks right on Firefox and Opera. After hours of coding and recoding so that everything will be pixel perfect, I am brought back down to earth and on to my knees by the guy next to me who invariably says: "Have you tested it on IE?" The next sequence of events is one that is probably familiar to developers all around the world who struggle to come to terms with the buggy rendering engine. IE7 (dare I say it?) has actually fixed some of these issues and made IE somewhat easier to work with. Unfortunately there are still some discrepancies that could be fixed if they went on board with Webkit. Having been exposed to webkit somewhat while developing for the iPhone, I must say that it's extremely robust and a joy to work with. Maybe it will take a concerted step by developers the world over to discourage users who insist on using IE and get them on to some of the alternatives. That way Microsoft will be forced into the fold. It certainly looks like they won't be obliging us with a WebKit based browser if people ask nicely, and IE users the world over are complicit in the ridiculousness of their persisting with using their flawed engine. Besides, who's ever heard of a bloodless revolution? via Techcrunch

5 Quick Tips for Building iPhone Sites

Developing for the iPhone / iPod Touch is quite easy because you're only developing for one platform and only 2 variations of resolutions. Having recently started developing for the said platform, I had to trawl through tons of blogs, resource sites and source code to get find out what I need to start work. This is a list of stuff I've found useful or would have found useful to know before starting, and yet sometimes still need reminding about.

Obama Sums Up Election 2008: Poll's Closed

Cartrider

This is something I would like to build as a weekend project if it wasn't illegal to steal shopping trolleys. Would be fun to ride this down a steep hill.

The New Wordpress 2.7 Dashboard

I love Wordpress. I've been using if for various work related projects for the past 2 years, and I've always been especially impressed with the Dashboard. It's so bright and clean and easy to use, but what has always struck me the most is its extensibility and stability. I've always been amazed at how it's so full of functionality and yet easily incorporates additional components from plugins with the greatest of ease. I've always attributed this to the fact that the horizontal nav bar allows for a greater number of options to be displayed that can follow on to the line below. From the screenshots, it would seem that WP 2.7's dash now makes use of a vertical nav bar using an accordion style list. I love accordions. They're great for organising large amounts of information, so properly applied an accordion could mean access to all sorts of sub menus in one neat interface. So now that Wordpress has an accordion interface, my 2 loves have come together to form what may be one super package. I can't wait to see it. Oh, and there's a lovely stats graph as well. I love graphs even more than accordions. Link

Interesting Mobile Interfaces - Designed by a 16 year old no less.

The recent proliferation of touch screen based phones has sparked a design arms race with various manufacturers trying to out-cool each other.

Because the interface has replaced buttons, the software user interface is no longer separate from the physical design of the phone. This kind of mobile interface design brings a whole new challenge for interface designers to try and come up with innovative and beautiful interfaces that continue to be novel and yet easy to pick up and use.

Seunghyun Kim, a 16 year old Korean designed these amazing interfaces. You might see them on your next phones...

Photosynthesis

Designed to be docked on a tree like device.

Palin gets punk'd!!

httpv://au.youtube.com/watch?v=kwzgF0s3Dzg The internet really changes things... From the greatest circus on earth: Palin gets what's coming.

NO digital

Narrative laden documentary photography from the streets of Japan so rich you can smell the fumes. NO digital

Saturday Morning Hip Hop

Not really a fan of the genre, but I caught these 2 gems on Rage.

Roots Manuva - Witness the Fitness

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3waF0o9rt3w

Pharcyde - Drop

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co3qMdkucM0

GMail Account = OpenID. Good News! Or is it......

As an avid user of Google services, I've always found my GMail account to be very handy. If you're like me and use Gmail first thing in the morning and more or less last thing before bedtime, you'll come to realise that it's hard to forget the password. Yesterday night I signed up for Nuconomy Insights, a new analytics package with a pretty fantastic wordpress plugin. When I registered, I was given a password with a randomly generated string something like &*(69789yiuh#. That would clearly be the most secure sort of password, but it's not the sort of password you can generate for each and every site you register to and try and remember. This morning as I went through all my social media sites, I realised that more often than not, I use simple passwords that I can remember. This of course is for the sake of convenience, but then there are also possibly security implications. I've had trouble in the past signing in to my Flickr account (actually it happened to me again this morning), probably due to a problem on their end, but when that happened to me I was quite sure that my account was compromised. At the start I was told I couldn't sign in, which over time let me sign in, but redirected me to the Yahoo.com.au page, and slowly progressed to allow me to get into my Flickr account. Sure it's just Flickr, but my blood ran a little cold, because my Flickr account is full of stuff collected of a few years. Coming across the news that my GMail account has suddenly become more than just a GMail account got me thinking: While it's convenient to have one ID to rule them all, sometimes the price to pay for such convenience is vigilance. In the past, it was secure enough to have various passwords for various websites, but with one superkey, the compartmentalised nature of websites is slowly being broken down. If and when someone gets hold of your passwords, that could mean the compromise of more than one of your online services. I'm going to change my GMail password today. News via Techcrunch