I started to download Safari 5 for mac to see what it would offer when I discovered that Senior Jobs started forgetting usability…

Oops.

Looking into the code it turns out that these are all different versions. So users are going to accidentally download the Snow Leopard version by default, because it’s not labeled properly.

The really sad thing is this page is still a giant table based layout nightmare. For Steve Jobs to be so adamant about standards and HTML5 they need to learn how to code first… Hell even for a tables based layout this is craptacular!

Apple has this great site they just opened, touting the glories of web standards. Yee-haw I say, a publicly facing, corporate campaign to push web standards and tear down the failures of the past… Oops, I was wrong:

The good news is that you can bypass their stupid JavaScript hack browser detection. Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher plugin and switch to Safari. Now you can get in. Some of the content works, but Apple cut corners when they developed this so only their standards based browsers will fully work. Other standards based browsers like Firefox, and Opera will only be able to see some of the effects.

This is what we must not conform to. If we want a truly standardized experience on the web, we must not let corporations drive it. Fight corporate skewing of open standards to improve their bottom line. Stop them from dictating the terms of our development platform to serve their ends. We must not let them start the browser wars again. A fractured inaccessible web is not tolerable anymore.

This is a direct parody of Steve Jobs letter about Flash.It is intended to be thought provoking, insightful, and inciting.

Being a Macintosh SE, iPhone, iPad, PowerMac, PowerBook, home built PC, Windows using web, Flash, print developer that has working in the training development, corporate marketing, and software development industries for too long… I couldn’t read Steve’s letter without calling BS. Read this with an open mind and consider the end user, not the corporations. I want Flash, my kids want Flash, why because some developer’s do amazing work on this platform and we should have access to it. Content is king. Enjoy…

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new proprietary, Mac only, Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years, hoping to keep them from helping Microsoft take our Design and Publishing customers from considering Windows as a viable platform. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience and I abandoned them, and Adobe was able to expand into the corporate market with their products, and deliver all their software to our Microsoft Windows competitors. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests because we can’t control what Adobe produces, or who their target customer is.

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As much as I’d like to get excited about the iPad I am trying to wait and see. Several times a year new gadgets are released and people go gaga over the potential they offer, rush out and purchase them, then lament the flaws they discover after using theses as yet untested devices.
As much as companies test their products it’s only in daily use that many flaws can be found. Repetitive daily tasks, various use cases, unusual routines, and mass usage all play out scenarios the manufacturers (and software developers) can’t even imagine. This is the elusive nature of humans and the tools we use.
So here’s the deal with me and the iPad. I want one but I don’t want to figure out all these issues for Apple. I know it will be a good product but I don’t know if it will be good for me. I have specific things I want it to do, but I’m as unique as the next person, and I can’t be sure that there was an engineer with my unique use patterns to play out all the flaws that this device will have for me. I’d love to have a portable sketchpad, movie watcher, note taker. But I don’t know if it will work as a sketchpad for me, it might. So I’ll wait and play and read and let the market solve these problems before I invest in this new technology.

The saddest news this month was the IE9 announcement. Microsoft came out of the closet and announced that IE9 would support standards. Whoo-hoo! Except…

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I don’t know about anyone else but I’m so excited about CSS 3 and web standards that I’m not even waiting for Microsoft to catch up. Heck four out of five of the most popular browsers on the market support CSS 3 so why wouldn’t I? The time it saves in producing sites is amazing. No more nested divs and sliced up images just to make rounded boxes. I’ve been using CSS for a few years now and can’t say enough good things about the results. My whole blog is built on standards. But since I’ve be employed at my present job I’ve neglected my own blog. It’s getting to be that time again and I’m getting the itch to redo this site ( and another site I started working on) in full HTML and CSS 3. So stay tuned, I’ve got big ideas running around in my head.

I was talking to a co-worker today and had a realization. HTML5 can never replace flash.

One of the primary goals of HTML and JavaScript is transparency, the accessibility to the code that drives the page. Exposing code so that others can learn from it. In fact this attribute is credited with the proliferation of the web. This poses a serious risk for some web content. If you produced a highly interactive, community driven game would you want you intelectual property (ip) exposed? Web sites don’t expose their business logic. No one expects Amazon to expose how they drive their shopping logic. If Poptropica, a popular game/community for kids, was produces in HTML and JavaScript anyone that visited your site could copy the code, modify it, republish it, and monetize that ip. Who would want that? So think twice before wishing that HTML5 should replace Flash.

I have started working with a new client for some web design work and they were reviewing my site to see my skills… When whammo, my menus are broken and they can’t get into my portfolio. I immediately open IE8 to see what is wrong and I don’t see anything weird.

That’s when I remember that I installed with compatability mode disabled by default. I turn it on and kablooey! my menus break.

So if you develop using standards put this meta tag in your document head. Or in the wordpress header file.

<meta http-equiv=“x-ua-compatible“ content=“IE=8“>

Now my menus work again, stupid Microsoft.

It’s out. I had to read about it in another blog to find out about it. It seems that version 2 isn’t an update to version 1.x… Because I wasn’t alerted that there was a new version.

So far so good. It’s UI has been reworked for better access to features, and there were a number of bug fixes. It allows for comment moderation and there is talk of push notification and commmenting on comments.

Keep up the good work.

Today I did a presentation on web design and design process to my daughters’ gate classes. It was an exciting opportunity to offer their classes some insight into the exciting world of design and learning new technologies.

So for any of the kids at Taylor Street Elementary reading this… I enjoyed speaking with you today, and look forward to learning with you again.