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My living room just got a little less pathetic with the addition of my new iPod HiFi. Now at least there’s something to do while you’re in there, aside from looking at a depressingly empty bookshelf in a depressingly empty living room. I haven’t had the chance to really try it out, but I played a few tunes off my iPod and it sounded pretty good. It was actually a lot lighter than I thought, and the box comes with a handle so you can carry it around in there if you want as well. Unfortunately I have to buy an audio cable tomorrow to hook it up to my Airport Express which is what I really want to do so I can control it through AirTunes. The best part is that the arrival date on my order status said July 6th originally, which hopefully means that my Macbook (slated for a July 10th arrival) will also come early.

This post was probably a long time coming, and now a little late, but I just haven’t had the time to put it up with all that’s been going on. I graduated around a month ago and moved up to Cupertino two weeks after that. Graduation was OK, but I preferred fountain jumping the night before. For those of you not lucky enough to be Trojans, it’s tradition to jump into all of the fountains at USC when you graduate. So here I am with the Paris crowd shortly prior to getting soaked:

My new apartment is pretty nice and only about two blocks away from Apple so I can walk to work every day. As soon as I get the gallery up and running I’ll post some pictures of the inside, although it’s still pretty empty.

Lately the iTunes Music Store has been adding some really extraordinary TV Shows that I thought I’d never get a chance to own. The first of these was STELLA only a few months ago. My friends and I love this show since it is simply hilarious, but unfortunately it hasn’t become as popular as it deserves to be. This usually means (aside from cancellation of the show) that the DVD release is eternally delayed. With the iTMS however, I suppose there’s really nothing stopping Comedy Central from putting it out there, since it’s probably not very expensive to do so, and there aren’t very many unfavorable consequences if it doesn’t sell well. Similarly, another great show that was just added last week is Cheap Seats. If you love sports, MST3K, or… spelling I guess… then you’re going to LOVE Cheap Seats! Here’s hoping Apple continues this excellent trend!

I think we’ve all come to terms with the fact that the web is full of awful looking pages. In fact, I think most of us will agree that most the pages out there are in fact terrible. This isn’t surprising of course, as the web was designed to let everyone in, and I’m sure if we could inspect everyone’s room most wouldn’t exactly be up to par with the latest interior design trends either. However, I’ve recently been encountering an interesting phenomenon, one that I thought died out with the 90’s: those that qualify themselves as the design elite in the physical world actually inhabit the bottom rung when it comes to the web. I’m speaking of course of clothing designers. That’s right, the same people that stick their noses up at you for not wearing such-and-such^® brand jeans are completely incapable of making a decent web page. It’s as if they’re getting the same child laborers that stitch together their clothing in Malaysia for 2 cents an hour to make their web pages. But at least then they’ed have an excuse! But no, these are obviously EXPENSIVE designs. They reek of too much money spent. As I mentioned earlier, this was an embarrassing trend of the mid-90s, when even technology juggernauts cared more about how much Flash was on their pages than how easy it was to actually *purchase* something. Now, whenever I reach a web site that is just completely disgusting in design, I usually fire them an email and forget about it, but one site in particular really just stood out for me this week: lacoste.com (notice how I put their URL on here but went out of my way to not actually link them, consider this a favor).

Let’s take a look at how this beast manages to fall apart completely, and hopefully learn something in the process. I hinted to the first no-no above: Flash. I think this dead horse has been beaten enough, but to reiterate: no way to go back, unnecessary need for plugins, too much loading, and of course, no way to save a link to anywhere. So unless you’re writing some sort of app or game, don’t use it.

Now this one still amazes me. When you initially enter their website, your browser window is expanded to full screen. First off, you shouldn’t be messing around with a user’s window like that, because now every new window I open will be ridiculously large. It’s just rude. Your website should be designed to fit whatever space you have. Of course, this is a little difficult when you’re using Flash (see above). But fine, you have a BIG page, you want to make sure I get the FULL experience. Alright. So what could possibly require this much space? FULL SIZE images of their clothing? FULL SCREEN movies of people using their products? No: a 950×695 Flash widget. Now, if you know the thing is 950×695, why are you making the window full screen? Is all that beige surrounding it just essential to the marketing? Or are the people working on this using 8 year old monitors where 950×695 really does need to be full screened? And now, for your viewing pleasure, a graphical analysis:

Moving on after this initial disaster, we now attempt to find a desired item of clothing. The logical thing to do would be to provide a spotlight-inspired instant search. I might type “men’s”, “pants”, and “spring” and start seeing some serious results start to pop up. I could then click some columns and organize as I saw fit. But this of course would be too easy, and not artsy at all! So instead, we are presented with a number of hierarchal menus. Want to see ALL pants at once? Too bad, you have to see things in the order they want you to see things. I can’t complain too much in this department I suppose since it’s something that very few people have figured out, so this isn’t something I can say is uniquely terrible to this web site. However, once we get to the clothing, we do see something… “novel”. Most sites let you see the clothes. Lacoste seems to think it’s much more important to show you the models however. Now, if I was trying to buy the people in these photos this would be great, but I’m trying to buy that pair of pants that homie is wearing there. Clicking on the clothing on the people doesn’t improve things either, you are just now presented with a bunch of ugly text. That’s right, you don’t get to see the front and back of t-shirts or anything crazy like that, just a somewhat technical description and a bunch of serial numbers for the item. So basically, all you get to see is how that particular pair of pants or t-shirt looks like when you’re jumping up and down, and that’s it. The rest is left up to the imagination:

All this, coupled with annoying background music was just too much for this soul.

Looks like Safari is using it’s own implementation of text fields now as opposed to embedding standard ones. The result is pretty impressive, with the ability to make your textfields completely customizable as well as apparently decreasing the load time of pages. I personally can not wait until this makes it into shipping versions. Of particular interest though is how they’re implemented. They are simply anonymous contenteditable divs, so theoretically everything we needed to pull this off “by hand” was more or less there already. I’ll update in a little while with a few “spoofing” tests to see if we can get similar text fields for current Safari users working using one or two divs and some javascript glue.

They’ve also posted some sample code to give them a run through, and while cool, I think more than ever we now need these CSS attributes implemented:

{
style-protection: turn-off-if-gaudy-or-just-plain-ugly;
}

and of course:

{
style-protection: turn-off-if-gaudy-or-just-plain-ugly-unless-im-trying-to-be-ironic;
}

I went ahead and updated my build of WebKit last night to give them a test drive and I was having a few problems with text fields receiving and losing focus. I just updated again this morning on a different computer though, and everything seems to be working alright, so it would appear as if this bug got fixed. I’ll probably give it a more thorough investigation later tonight and file a bug report if necessary.

I found an interesting piece via Kawasaki regarding the dangers of fanatacism and loyalty entitled “Spread Firefox, but don’t be a fanatic,” posted by none other than… the SpreadFirefox team! Now, I’m going to temporarily assume that this is not another “look we’re the bigger more respectful party” required post which both Firefox and Internet Explorer have been trading off in some attempt to make this whole browser wars renewal thing less ugly, and actually take this thing at face value.

The gist of the post is to say that you should only continue using Firefox, or any particular program for that matter, until you find something better, and that you should not have any particular loyalty to the company that makes the program, just the program itself. Now, having often been accused of being loyal to a certain fruit company myself, I’ve had to deal with this familiar issue of whether loyalty is productive or destructive before, and I feel that this article doesn’t properly cover the other side of loyalty.

Let me begin by saying that I agree that you should not be particularly loyal to a program or company just because it happens to be the one you use, or even worse, for no particular reason at all, but I do whole heartedly disagree with the idea that there is some sort of clear distinction between the program and the creator of the program, and that they should somehow be analyzed completely separately from eachother. When I decide to use a particular program, I do in fact take the makers into consideration, and I will sometimes stick with a slightly worse product because I am “loyal” to it’s creators. The reason behind this is that while one program may be better than another currently, knowing the culture of the creators is an important heuristic in establishing the future potential of said program. For example, I began using Firefox early on, in the “Beta” stages. While Firefox may not have necessarily been the best at that point, since I knew the company was founded in the principles of Open Source, I could pretty much assume that many of the problems I was experiencing would surely, and quickly, be solved. In fact, I could choose to voice my problems to the community, and even take part in their solution. However, had I chosen to use a closed source browser, bug fixes would probably be a mystery to me. Thus, I am often “loyal” to the open source community, or companies that employ open source techniques, because I appreciate the way the development of the program is conducted.

This leads to another highly important point, which is that loyalty is actually crucial at the inception stages of many such open source programs. If we were to really take Spreadfirefox’s advice, most of us should have dropped Firefox until it reached 1.0. Sure, the core developers might have eventually gotten it there, but without all those loyal customers that were loyal more to the “idea” of Firefox than the actual program itself, bugs would have taken much longer to find, and development in general would have been much slower. So its easy to point at the firefox fanatics now and label them as detrimental to the community, but lets not forget that they were an essential part of the process.

Now, I don’t want to get too sidetracked here because this is not a discussion of Open Source, but loyalty to external and abstract program influences. Returning to the subject at hand, Spreadfirefox went on to suggest to its users that if IE ever did overtake Firefox in features or functionality then we should in fact switch to it, displaying our unbiased and logically based decision making. I for one disagree with this 100%. Here is another example of where understanding company culture, and by extension being loyal to that culture, can serve to tell you about the future of a program. I was a Netscape user up until 4.7 and then switched to IE 4. IE 5 then rolled around and then… nothing. Once Microsoft considered it had won, browser development was declared “complete” and that was the end of Internet Explorer. Basically, they burned us, the customers. This is reason enough for me to never switch back to Internet Explorer. I don’t want to use a program that may one day never again receive an update. It happened to me once, and I don’t want to become dependent on the program and have it happen to me again. Sure, in the browser world it may not be so bad, but imagine becoming very familiar with a program such as Photoshop and having this happen. If you knew Adobe had a past of simply stopping development when they considered the “photo-editing wars” or something over would you use their products? I wouldn’t. Because it means I would have to eventually switch again. I made a choice back in the NN vs IE days to go with IE because it WAS a better browser, but it lead to me having to switch paradigms several times afterwards. Similarly, it was a destructive decision to the community. Had we all known that switching to IE would have lead to a 4 year period of browser stagnation, I’m sure a lot of us would have decided to “stupidly” remain loyal to Netscape, and maybe we could have had tabs 4 years ago, not now.

My 2 cents.