Here’s my first round of comments on the new iPhone software:
A couple of days ago I finally checked out my current site on my PC at work. Sure, I could have tried IE7 through the magic of Fusion, but I don’t have my History of Internet Explorer VM on my MacBook Pro. I like their products as much as the next geek, but seriously — where the hell is my snapshot manager?
Anyway, my website. I learned something important when I looked at it in both IE6 and IE7. Okay, I learned two things. First, the background was more peculiar in IE7 than IE6. Strangely, the background was doing what it was supposed to in IE6. In IE7, on the other hand, the entire page flipped from the main background to the footer background whenever the top pixel of the footer was above a certain point.
Second, the color was wrong. If your monitor’s color reproduction matches the one I have at work, the simple, light green gradient is gone, and The History of Human Nausea expressed as a 182 byte PNG takes its place. Otherwise, things looked okay. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to switch to colors that degrade gracefully or just declare certain monitors as too lousy to bother with. I’ll probably fix the IE7 issue though. Eventually.
extensions.checkCompatibility to get me through until
they’re all flagged to work properly again.In an earlier draft I was going to put some witty joke in here about lawyers being out of control. I finally came to my senses — obvious jokes aren’t jokes at all, they’re just annoying. Now, if only I had an intro to put here that I didn’t think was stupid:
You shall, in your sole discretion, avoid the excessive use of the Online Game so as not to disturb your healthy and sound life. KONAMI will not be liable for any social, mental, physical damages caused by the excessive use of the Online Game. Any troubles and/or conflict of interests among the users of the Online Game shall be resolved among such parties and KONAMI does not assume any liability or responsibility regarding such troubles and/or conflict of interests.
That was all in the first half of the EULA Scroll Box From Hell™. The second half, which was cheerfully titled “BASIC TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF KONAMI ID”, had four sections. These sections were called, and I swear I’m not making this up, Chapters. At what point, exactly, does your life go so wrong that you could write multiple chapters of legal restrictions, attach it to a game, and think this was a good idea?
Aside from the normal messing around with my style sheets, I added an early version of a Pepper I’m working on this week. I had a QuickTime checker in there before, but it was triggering the information bar in IE. Sure, “works in IE” isn’t exactly my driving concern here, but still. Let me know if you see any new1 errors, warnings, or lost goats wandering around my website.
Speaking of IE, I haven’t looked at my latest style sheets in IE, so the whole place could be an unintelligible mess for all I know. Visually, I mean. You know — for different reasons than it usually is.
…or are “still seeing old” for that matter. ↩
More random tinkering with my website:
Found another one:
One of my problems with Leopard has been that the way I use Finder stopped working. I set it to “Always open folders in a new window” and hold down option when I want to close the window I start from. This is actually different from the behavior with that preference off — when you open a new window, it has the saved view settings for that folder. When you navigate to a new folder in an existing window, the view settings from the old folder remain. With Leoopard, holding down option merely reverses the state of that preference. A day or two ago I thought I should try all the modifier combinations to be sure they just didn’t hide it on me, rather than get rid of it…and I quickly found it. Hold down control and option, instead of just option, while hitting command-down or whatever and you get the old (just holding option) behavior.
Lighting Up
I sort of “went dark” this week. I was in Los Angeles for a few exhibits we worked on for the LA Auto Show. We flew out Monday and returned Friday. At some point on Tuesday, I was definitely caught up in NetNewsWire for iPhone. By Friday morning it had been at least a couple of days.
Today, I started with over 3,700 items to read.
Here are my options on how to deal with this:
You could certainly argue that gathering that many items in a few days clearly indicates #3 be applied immediately,2 I’m starting out with #1 interleaved with the rest of my life because its the least destructive. More to come.
Some of it certainly qualifies as news. A lot of it doesn’t. ↩
…and I’d be somewhat inclined to agree ↩