Google Did MSIE6 Never Forget

I received an interesting email from Google Apps support the other day. Here's a choice snippet:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

It seems the final push for web standards adoption will be not by developers, but by developers who create killer applications that use them. Strikes me as being another case of implementation being worth more than ideas.

Why The iPad Won't Support Adobe Flash

One of my chief complaints about the iPhone deals with the lack of Flash support. Of course, the iPad will inherit the same basic restrictions as the iPhone.

It is easy to blame everything on one side of the problem: Apple's TOS (Terms of Service) strictly forbid 90% of Flash's best abilities, while Adobe seems to be dragging their feet on producing a version that adheres to Apple's TOS.

Strictly speaking, the iPhone (and presumably the iPad) TOS states that no application can launch another application, or provide an API for use by other applications. It's a bit more complicated than that, but then if you wanted complicated, you should go read the TOS yourself ;-)

Because Adobe Flash is pretty much the second coming of Christ, it can do everything that the iPhone wants to keep sacred. Flash has become the next best thing to a portable operating system in that it can easily accommodate a full-size application in the same way that an operating system such as Windows or MAC OS can do. Provided of course that you have the RAM available to handle the interpretations.

One reason that the iPhone has become so popular has to be the availability of the App Store. It allows iPhone owners to download and install paid and free applications over the air. Those applications however have to pass a battery of inspections and tests to prove that they do not break Apple's TOS.

If a full version, or even the so-called "Lite" version provided to Windows Mobile owners is allowed onto the iPhone, you can say "Bye-Bye" to Apple's stranglehold on the iPhone. Anyone with a computer and internet access would be able to construct their very own applications in Flash, post them to a website and then access it at will.

Now, Apple may be pretending that locking up the iPhone with such a strict TOS is meant to protect the operating system from viruses (yeah, supposed to be 'viri' but my spellcheck disagrees!) and root hacks, such as those that plague Windows systems worldwide. The truth is, they are making a killing off of the App Store and that was the plan from the beginning.

On the other hand, it took Adobe a while but they did manage to come up with a "Lite" version of Flash that could run on the very RAM-restrictive Windows Mobile phones. It seems that they are dragging their feet when it comes to producing a version that would work on the iPhone as well.

I can't really blame Adobe here, after all they would have to basically chain their beautiful application to the floor and beat it with rubber hoses in order to satisfy the imperialistic folks at Apple.

The only version of Flash that could pass the Apple TOS would be #fail. The restrictions would prevent it from working on your favorite sites, including game sites not just your favorite pr0n site.

The iPhone owners would then take out their rage and frustrations on Adobe and not the innocent-looking Apple crew, since Adobe would be the one providing them with the app to begin with. Could you image the emails and phone calls that Adobe would receive when 90% of the Flash-enabled sites showed only restrictive warnings and not the Internet Goodness that everyone would expect?

Everything I've read and watched about the iPad seems to be leaning in the same direction as the iPhone. The iPad will be able to access the App Store and run the same applications as the iPhone.

With 1G of RAM, expect some "iPad-Only" versions of your favorite apps to be rolling off the assembly line soon.

Just don't expect Flash. Ever.

2mil File Sharing Judgment Slashed

In 2007, Jaimme Thomas was found guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay a whopping $222,0009(US) fine. That's like $1.3 Million (US) in today's money ;-)

Mrs. Thomas' defensive arguments were quite possibly the lamest in the history of defense; She claimed to have no idea it was happening and blamed it on her wireless router being open. This argument fell through as soon as the prosecution showed that the files were shared using her favorite username using Kazaa.

Soon after the judgment, Mrs. Thomas was granted a re-trial due to an error in instructions given to the jury. The second trial was Big Fail when compared to the earlier Lil' Whoops. The defendant was ordered to instead pay $1.92 Million (US), which means that (without taking inflation into consideration) Mrs. Thomas would be forced to pay $1.00 (US) a day for the next 2 million days, or 5,618 years. Assuming she lived that long.

Today we learned that her judgment has been slashed to a much more reasonable amount of $54,000 (US). For sharing 24 songs. Okay, so Capitol Records was only prosecuting for 24 of the over 1,000 songs she shared. That was awful nice of them, right?

Assuming they actually see any of the $54,000 from Mrs. Thomas (in the US you can't declare court judgments as part of a bankruptcy), that should pay for the first two hours of the trial.

The RIAA claims that it's not about the money, it's all about teaching people that it's wrong to steal music. Also that the makers of Kazaa are a bunch of backstabbing ass-kissers who rolled over the first time anyone threatened them with possible legal action.

It looks as if the Intraweb is quickly becoming a hostile environment for those folks with 2.3 million BFFs who asked for a copy of The Rolling Stone's "Satisfaction".

When Capitol vs Thomas began, most of us pirates were ecstatic that someone would finally stand up to the behemoth and prove once and for all that file sharing itself is not illegal or even morally questionable. We were all sitting around our favorite forums and speculating on the hundreds of ingenious arguments that Mrs. Thomas' legal team would come up with.

Needless to say, we were all stunned when we discovered that the jury was made up of the only twelve people in the entire United States who had never heard of a router, let alone a wireless one. Then, to make things worse, we were further stunned when the copyright laws that were designed to protect the public from fakes (check wikipedia for "The real McCoy") was turned against the consumers it was designed by and for.

Today, the music industry is in for some bad times ahead. Sales are down and people are losing their jobs. The RIAA blames it on file sharers, since they believe that most of the world is busy stealing their music instead of buying it. If only they realized that this is actually a by-product of their attack on the very hand that feeds them, perhaps they could turn this thing around before it destroys the Internet.

Mrs. Thomas has declared her intention to continue to appeal, hoping to get the judgment down to a reasonable amount. Perhaps two or three packs of Depends for the RIAA board might do the trick.

A Link, a Rant, and a Prediction, part 1 of 4

Patrick of kalzumeus.com has written an excellent analysis of why application developers are shifting towards web development. I highly recommend it:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/

His analysis of the difficulties involved in traditional code maintenance ring particularly true with my own past experience doing technical support for a niche point-of-sale vendor. I won't go into too many specifics, but in my opinion, the programmers and support representatives at the company should have shifted their focus towards documentation and usability instead of focusing on their aging, 16-bit software working with Windows and Citrix.

I think this article can be taken as an indication towards a part of a larger trend towards network-based computing. For years, I've been saying that we're heading back this way, what with this whole "internet thing." Naturally, my friends dismissed me as a crank, and left me in the corner with my Pop Rocks and NES. My insistence that mainframe UNIX was ahead of its time fell on deaf ears, but no longer thanks to the internet!

<P> Fight

I have a draft post regarding my experience with the Ruby on Rails site, but I am fighting the Blogger web-based UI as I try to add images. Blogger puts everything in SPAN tags for no good reason, then adds empty spans as spacers. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a sectional DIV that contains the style, and P tags which inheirit. I find myself missing LiveJournal's "simple" HTML.

In the future, I may move back to hosted TextPattern or WordPress, but I chose Blogger because I don't have to deal with style, code, or hosting issues. It's also as free as LiveJournal, but allows for AdSense.

Mobile Firefox (Fennec)

I just tried (and crashed) FireFox Mobile Fennecwhatever. While it clearly imitates the iPhone's mobile safari, I am glad the Mozilla foundation is embracing the mobile market. I believe that the personal computer as an internet access terminal is reaching its peak and is approaching a decline in favor of netbooks, iPhones, Kindles, and whatever Newton-ish device Apple resurrects that everyone else imitates.

With Google Chrome injecting actual competition into the market, it will be an interesting year in browsers. The Mozilla Project has been pretty stagnant as of late, and I've been halfway expecting the announcement of Mozilla ShadowCat, a lightweight version of Firefox, that runs on the Iguana engine. Like Camino, but for Windows.

Welcome To "Your Design Sucks" Formerly 200found.com

This blog is my sounding board of my rants and raves about design. Herein, I will criticize poor design, and showcase examples of good design.


When I say "design," I am not referring to exclusively web design. The line between software and the web are blurring, likewise between the web and print advertising, and marketing in general. As such, I will not differentiate here. White space is important in every aspect of our lives. Usability makes or breaks products and websites, alike.


I hope you get some value out of this.