It’s a beta product. Last time I remember any browser coming out with a public beta, it’s been used and trashed about just like Safari, except there weren’t people fighting back (for the product.) For some reason a buggy, non-standard browser is being catered to hand over fist, after everything every developer has had to go through for over 5 years.
“ALL browsers are buggy. This isn’t just like a browser from 1996, it’s like any other browser in 2003.” That’s exactly the problem. Every other browser in 2003 is buggy and sucks, yet Safari is starting from scratch in 2003 and only comes up to par with the current state of every other browser.
“Kottke’s argument is that it should do more to distinguish itself. Sure, that would be nice. Maybe it’ll happen in the next release. But Kottke’s hotly-disputed suggestions aren’t about fixing bugs, they’re about creating a whole new class of product that doesn’t exist.” I think what Jason and I are saying is their idea is short-sighted. They are the ever-innovative Apple, yet come out — in 2003 — with a run of the mill (at best?) web browser?
I can’t believe this kind of conversation is even happening. It’s a fucking buggy, non-standard-compliant browser. You have to treat it like it’s a browser from 1996, since we’re talking about how to hack around it/for it, and about all the mistakes that every other browser made before. How can people accept something like this from any new browser? How about if we just don’t use it, and it just might go away and make Apple realize that it’s bad — hell, even unnecessary? Is there something I’m not seeing here, something I’m missing?
Hah! I just put 2 and 2 together, and realized that if I was still at my previous job (as an art director and designer at a big interactive shop) that I would have been working on Movielink.com, the ill-fated attempt by Hollywood to deliver movies over the Internet. Funny! And now that I know the connection, it all makes sense why the back-end production blows real hard.
My previous theory was that it was purposely done shoddily, as a sort of fodder for the movie industry to give a quick “see, we tried, and it didn’t work, thus don’t need to go any further” excuse. Now I’m not so sure…
Random idea: Create an off-shoot of meetup where a collective of interested people and organizations pool together money and resources in the attempt to meet a pre-determined person, such as a celebrity, comic, or speaker. (For example: A web or publishing crowd who wants to meet with David Weinberger or Cory Doctorow in Des Moines, IA. His known “going rate” for an appearance might be something like $2000, in order to cover expenses and be “worth it”. Individuals interested in hearing him speak, as well as local organizations and chapters who might pitch in larger sums, donate to a pool in the hopes of “hiring” him. The interested party could approve of the meet at any point in the running tally, or wait until the amount reaches a certain dollar amount.)
I’m not sure why it amazes me, since it is inherent to the technology of aerial imagery, but I find it neat that the yard marker legend matches up exactly to the the size of the field in a football stadium.
Wow. Spending a day on the ol’ JAWS screen reader does wonders. It’s amazing what little tidbits of accessibility tweaks you can get, even from browsing sites you’ve built with aspirations of true accessibility.
Some unofficial suggestions:
Use emdashes ? not hyphens ? to pause in a sentence.
Hyphenated words are awkward, because the dash is read out loud.
If you use an icon to denote the type of link, don’t use brackets or parentheses in the ALT tag. It’s looks nicer in text browsers, but sucks in speech.
Using the same text for both the ALT tag and caption of a photo is awkward, because it reads the same thing twice in a row. Suggestions? Email me.
Use labels and link titles to their fullest extent.
Good grammar and punctuation is crucial, such as putting an apostrophe when referencing eras/decades (like the 1990’s.)
One modest browser proposal: Since linking to the home page via the logo is more a useful convention than a design standard ? or even an expected feature by users ? and the “Home” button in the browser is often used/confused by users trying to get the home page of the site, why not create a button in the browser that distinguishes the two? Have one button called “My Home”, which is the site the browser loads to by default, and a “Site Home” button which brings users to home of the web site being viewed. It could be specified by the developer in a meta tag, or default to the root of the domain if such a tag isn’t coded.
Don’t ask me why I think of these kinds of things, but here goes: Is it possible to statistically define the placement of a hit song on an album? This question leads other directions: Is it possible to use that statistic/formula to create a hit song? Will the placement of a song affect whether the band becomes a one-hit wonder?
Do you have any ideas? Any theories? How does the track order get selected for an album (which obviously may be different between the way a band and a studio producer picks them)? Does sandwiching bad songs in between hits (see: sitcoms) work? Does grouping songs give you a statistically better chance to have a hit? Email me.
Here are some (unreliable/unscientific) test results: For this week’s Billboard Hot 100, 9 (nine) out of the top 20 songs are Track 3 on their respective albums. Nine! Almost half! Five of the top 20 are Track 2, two are Track 1, and two are Track 10 (someone explain that one.) Interesting preliminary results.
So many questions, so much data to handle, so little time to write a paper on the subject, so little money to buy the data from Billboard…
I am really starting to appreciate today’s rappers and their use of words that have multiple meanings through slang, like the word “ice”. I’ve never heard the word “ice” used so much in my life. Some favorites: