Brian Fitzgerald

I had forgotten about this supported feature in Firefox 2 - microsummaries. It allows people to create bookmarks of your page that you can later change the titles of - live.

Christian Cantrell: Firefox 2 Live Titles

Mike Chambers has a set of training/introduction videos up on Lynda.

Apollo Alpha Preview - lynda.com Online Training Library ™

Adobe has released a public alpha of it’s upcoming Apollo development software / runtime. This looks to be an incredible technology with wild possibilities. With Apollo, HTML and Flex developers (among others) can write code as they usually do, but then have it compiled into a distributable application that people can run on their computers outside of a web browser. I really expect many cross-platform applications that are generally written in Java or even REALBasic to begin showing up in this environment instead.

Go ahead. Even if you don’t develop, you can grab the runtime and try out some of the sample applications.

Adobe Labs - Apollo

I hate taking photos with my camera phone as I know they aren’t going to look as good as a picture taken with a normal camera, but sometimes you need a shot and it’s all you got. Here’s some tips to make the best of your situation.

Digital Photography Weblog: 13 best tips for Improving CameraPhone Pictures

Looking for some ideas for that next site navigation you need to build. This article from Smashing Magazine displays a whole bunch of good-looking ones.

CSS-Based Navigation Menus: Modern Solutions | Smashing Magazine

In a story detailing how some Pokémon game will be the first to tie the Nintendo Wii and DS together, an upcoming schedule sets June 4th as the release date for the Nintendo DS web browser. I’m pretty excited to see how well this Opera browser runs on a DS compared to other available portable browsers.

AIGA has a current article titled Jack We Hardly Knew Ye. It tells the story of the creation of the Cingular and AT&T logos. The Cingular logo (orange X with a head) is of course on its way out as the AT&T brand takes over the new merged company. Its too bad. I think its one of the best logos out there today and really brings a fun and easy feeling to a phone company – which is not fun or easy.

Chris Pultz hit me with this incredible list of 53 CSS techniques. A couple of the methods listed here are duds, but most of them are fantastic. If you don’t do CSS yet, you should look through these to see what you’re missing. If you are on CSS, then get to using them!

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Mike Potter from Adobe demonstrates Apollo at FlashInTO.

Looks like Google has added some new tools for following backlinks on a site.

Read/Write Web has an article today on a web site genre I hadn’t considered before - event invitations. After taking a look, some of these sites could be a real help to anybody planning any kind of activity.

Macintosh users can now download the “WPF/E” beta from microsoft. This allows Macintosh users to play files created by Microsoft’s new “Flash Killer” application Sparkle. Once you have installed it, the plugin works with both Safari and Firefox. You can see examples of it’s use here (note the first video in the second example where they talk about the number of Macs that have been appearing in Redmond). This is exciting only because it offers hope that whatever development platform content developers use in the future, the mac should be able to display them all. I really hope that this doesn’t start pushing Flash out of the way too much, but I’d be happy just to see a lot less sites that say “Sorry, Microsoft Windows/Internet Explorer Only”.

The Google Operating System blog has found clues that Google may be working on a presentation application to go with it’s word processor and spreadsheet application. While Powerpoint is fine and Keynote is fantastic, I think that I would be very willing to give up the beautiful looking slides and transitions for something that was built into Google. Even if you didn’t use it to create and present your slideshows, one could always use it (I’m assuming) to upload your Powerpoint presentation for online storage and retrieval.

Zoho has released their new notebook application as a part of the zoho suite and it looks uh… sweet (I had to do that). Anyway, it’s just another example of the best applications moving to the web.

The New York Times reports Sony blaming profit slides on subsidizing the cost of the Playstation 3 too much. Selling consoles at a loss is nothing new. Sony and Microsoft have both done this knowing that it will establish market-share and that they will easily make up the difference in game sales. There’s more to this than just getting consumers hooked on Playstation. They are using the launch as a way to make Blue Ray the dominant next-generation disk storage. Right now, you would be doing pretty good to find a blue ray or HD-DVD player for $500 to $600. The playstation costs this and is an incredible gaming system and content delivery device as well. One could consider this to easily be a $1000 to $1200 system and it’s getting sold for half of that. Sony has done what they have always done in the last few years, cram as much sony-universe stuff as they can at people when they have the opportunity. The PS3 could have been every bit as revolutionary as a gaming platform without the blue ray drive and actually hit a decent price. I’m actually surprised that on startup you don’t get a commercial and opportunity to purchase and download whatever crap Mariah Carey has puked out lately.

I’m working today on designs for the next www.lps.org and this morning trying to establish a target width. To get started, I’m examining some of the best sites on the web to see what width they are using. Here’s what I’m finding.

    * ESPN, MLB, NFL: 990px     * New York Times: 973px     * ABC News: 770px     * ABC: 803px     * Cnet (including drop-shadow): 990px     * Washington Times: 980px     * Apple: 781px     * UNL (including drop-shadow): 1000px     * NBC: 971px     * CBS: 977px

So that’s what we’re seeing on the web. How does that match up against the traffic we see at Lincoln Public Schools? Here’s our visitor resolution breakdown (timeframe is 8/1/06 - 1/29/07), provided by Google Analytics:

I’m kind of depressed to see this chart. In my dreams most people are at 1280x1024 but we see it coming in here at 5%. Even if we lump all of the 1280ish and larger resolutions, we come to 20%. So, in general 65% of our traffic is at 1024 x 768 with the remaining 35% being split about 2/3 larger and 1/3 smaller.

A piece of information that I haven’t provided yet is the current size of the site, which is 897 pixels. This means that for the past couple of years, I have already been in excess of what a 800 x 600 screen can display. I am going to work on the assumption that as we improve computers in the district that this number will continue to fall. I think that a site can establish some visual credibility simply by exhibiting traits of sites that have credibility. If many solid sites work at 990 pixels, simply using that width can piggyback on their success subliminally.

So I think that’s where I’m going. I’m going to shoot for 990 pixels. For those that can not display this width, it is only 100 pixels larger than what I was doing before. For others, I think that it will be a forward-looking design that will provide room for a lot of flexibility in content delivery.

An update to my Wii last night gave me the new Wii News Channel. Some thoughts:

The Good

• The interface is clean and easy to read
• I like how it shows you on a very nice map where the story is from.
• The animation when you change text sizes is cool
• It does a real neat effect where as you zoom out on the globe, the stories stack up so you can see where the most news (biggest pile) is.
• It is SO easy to navigate with the wii remote

The Not-So-Good

• The news is provided by a two-year contract with the Associated Press. It seems strange to be reading news created for print on your TV. While there are photos with some stories, there is no audio or video.
• It is slow to load. While the wii weather channel front page at least tells you the current conditions without the need to actually load the channel, the news front page tells you nothing. A nice feature would be a list of new stories so you could then decide to load it.
• Many of the stories have URLs in them. The Wii has a web browser. Seems like a click would take to you the address? Nope.

Now I wonder what is next for Nintendo. They said that the weather and news were coming, now they are here. What is there to look forward to now (besides the final version of the wii browser) -- and Duck Hunt!

Here’s a demo of the channel from YouTube:

This is kind of old (as evidenced by the model of iPod shown) but its spot-on. The side with the man listening to headphones against a red background looks similar to the Zune packaging.

This article on the O’Reilly Radar credits the TiVo with forcing cable companies to demand better equipment/interfaces from those that produce their set-top boxes.

I think that a similar effect may be the best thing that will come from the release of the iPhone. While phones in other parts of the world, especially southeast asia, have seen dramatic improvements, phones in the united states have seen few interface improvements in recent years. As consumers and carriers see what Apple is doing, they will start to demand better interfaces. Motorola, Nokia and others will have little choice but to adopt interfaces based on more dynamic technology such as Flash to compete.

Here’s an article at read/write web with good information about some current web 2.0 e-learning products.

We signed on with Netflix last summer sometime. During the time that we have been members, its been embarrassing how few movies we have watched for what we have paid in membership fees. Except viewing the Ken Burns baseball documentary (which I really enjoyed), I think we could have bought the movies that we watched for nearly the same price that we paid in membership dues.

Today, Netflix announced that they will begin offering downloadable movies. This is really one feature that I had been waiting for. I figured that if anybody could do this well, that Netflix would be able to. There have been rumors in the past of them partnering with someone like Tivo to provide a direct-to-tv experience from two companies that demonstrate that they understand customers. The details of the download feature were very disappointing. It will be to computers, not to televisions and will be for windows only. Sounds to me like just another movielink/amazon unbox product.

It feels right now like there are two solid options for incorporating internet media into your home entertainment center: xbox 360 and apple tv. Of these two, only apple tv supports independent media such as podcasts.

Cyberduck - the free ftp client for macintosh has been updated to 2.7.2

I’ve been telling friends and family for a week that I didn’t have today (Martin Luther King Jr. Day) off. I was pretty surprised when I drove by the parking lot at the office this morning and found it to be empty. I went to one of the coffee shops I frequent and checked the calendar and sure enough, the office is closed today.

It’s been a nice chance to catch up on some news. I might head over to Target and pick up the new WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

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Chris Pederick has updated the invaluable web developer toolbar for Firefox and Flock to version 1.1.

iPod Observer: Analyst is Skeptical of Apple TV

I’m not saying that Apple TV is going to be a big hit. I really don’t know. I do think that this analyst is missing the point. The Jupiter analyst doesn’t see the point of such a device when one can get the content over the air or via cable/satellite. I think that the iTunes store coupled with Apple TV causes one to question the need for shelling out $50 to $100 or more each month on cable or satellite. How many shows can one really watch? I’ve counted up the shows that my family watches and there are really only five. They are all available on iTunes. If I purchase a season pass to all of them, that averages out to around $14/month over a year for commercial-free, on-demand entertainment. The savings, just from moving from Time Warner’s basic-plus package would be almost $450 a year - easily covering the cost of the Apple TV.

I’m just saying I guess that Apple is not looking to supplement cable/satellite. They are looking to supplant it. They only thing this solution is missing is the ability to watch live events such as sports, but it can display streaming video and I think that it would be perfectly capable of displaying it once Apple starts to deliver it. The telephone companies have had to face the awkward situation of providing DSL to customers that use it to get their telephone service from other sources like Vonage. The cable companies may soon have the same scenario as they provide internet to customers that then get their TV programming from another source.

Looks like a bright future to me.