Category: computing

Steve Case to resign from AOL Time Warner

I surfed with Safari last night and I have to say I’m not impressed. On my TiBook (500mhz w/ 512mb), it took 5 seconds to launch. Mozilla takes 9 to bring up the first browser window, and I get more. Chimera only took 4, and provides most of the features of Mozilla. I’m not going to switch, because there’s nothing really new there. Steve touted the snapback button, and the improved bookmarks, which I don’t think are really all that great to begin with.

It’s not that it’s not good software. It does render pages quickly. It is nice to look at. But, it could be so much more. I’m not really happy having to worry about another browser, even though its rendering problems seem minor.

I picked up the MacWorld Keynote by Mr. Jobs in the middle while he was showing off iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. What just came to me while watching this is that Apple isn’t gunning for the workplace anymore. They’ve ceded that to Microsoft. They’ve created an amazing Lifestyle Suite of software. The collection of iApps is robust, and with the new features, I think the Mac’s killer app. We geeks can talk about the BSD underpinnings of OS X, the cool things we can do with things like Fink and the Apache webserver built in.

Yeah, and I just saw the part where he dropped the name on us: iLife. Yeah… Ummm… I called it?

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about the bundle and the new features in all three. PLUS, the predictions were wrong. You’ll be able to download iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie for free or go buy the bundle. Sweet.

Ummm, why did they go and build their own browser? Hopefully, it’s based on Gecko so we don’t have to worry about yet another browser’s quirks. It’s pretty funny how familiar the Safari toolbar is to the Windows AOL Client’s. I’m honestly not seeing anything too hot about Safari so far. The benchmarks looked good, but the features don’t look compelling enough to make enough people switch to make supporting it worthwhile. Also, Steve, please stop touting the Google integration. Big deal. There are Google bars for pretty much every browser out there that offer the same features. Hopefully, it won’t be another HotJava (Sun’s unbelievable horrible browser packaged with Solaris).

If you don’t own a Mac… consider it. I’m making the switch as we speak (it’s harder at work than at home, where the switch is already pretty much complete), and I’ve been extremely impressed.

Oh boy, my friend Jon linked to BlamBot – WOW. They have some of the coolest free fonts I’ve ever seen: clean, well done titling fonts. Sweet, sweet stuff.

Here are my completely baseless blogging/internet-related predictions for 2003:

• This year will sound the death knell for the Meme. All the cheap content creators (weekly impersonal questionaires and personality tests) will go out of style and people will be forced to actually post stuff that won’t be seen in a million other places.

• This year will see another giant explosion in the sheer number of people who blog. With the big ISP’s like AOL and MSN soon to be offering blogging platforms, there will be an exponential growth in daily content to read and/or ignore.

• As all these new folks come into the blogosphere (jeez, I hate that word), we’ll see a mass departure of the second and third generation bloggers who have now been blogging for a year or two now will either get bored or they’ll find they have nothing else to say.

• With all this new content, people will stop visiting sites directly. They’ll still go to the photoblogs, and design sites, but for text-only blogs, people will begin using an aggregator (like NetNewsWire). This will stymie the folks who want to start making money from their blogs as they’ll need to take into account the fact that people get to their content from another application.

• Major sites will start incorporating blogs as either an incentive for signing up, or as a way to build their brand (think Salon, only crappy – “Get Your Coke Blog Now!”). Oh, please spare us.

• Several high-profile bloggers will “sell out” and go corporate either through corporate sponsorship or incorporation into a larger site (like Slate or Salon), giving false hope to all of us marginally talented/interesting bloggers that someday we’ll hit it big through our blogs.

I’m feeling the stirrings of that design inspiration I’ve been seeking for the past couple months. I want to do something totally different. There are thousands of blogs out there, and lately, they all (rash generalization, there are those that don’t, and you know who they are) look alike. Mine looks like everyone else’s now, and it didn’t use to. Everyone has a white background with black text, a semi-interesting header (and a lot of people using photos of musicians or actors, which bothers me for some reason), a menu with the standard bloggy content (last X posts, blogroll, links to photos, etc – ummm, just like me), and sometimes a third column (because three column layouts were the big trend this year) containing often useless information. Some people resort to a fourth column with even more useless info which I don’t think they realize causes all kinds of problems in non-maximized browsers. See, it’s all the same. The problem is partly that there’s only so much you can do with bloggish information. You have your posts, comments, links, etc and there are only so many different ways to display them.

There are other ways to do things. I honestly believe someone will do something completely original with a blog in the next year that everyone will copy (poorly in most cases). So, what’s my inspiritation? Which sites inspire me? Here’s the list, and why:

• Jeffrey Zeldman: Everyone knows who Zeldman is. If you don’t, you probably haven’t been playing in the design/web-building arena very long. I love his most recent redesign for his decision to use a middle-o’-the-spectrum color in a not-too-dark shade, and then use text that’s really not that much brighter. It works better than any of my attempts at the same thing. If you’re interested in design at all, start a new habit and read his site daily.

• k10k: Their semi-recent redesign shows you CAN do four columns well. It’s not a blog, but the right-hand column is semi-bloggish. Also, it’s a great place when you need to feel inspired. The links in the News section are a wealth of designatory goodness.

• Six Apart: From the folks who brought you Movable Type, it’s just a great subtle design job (as is Movable Type). I love the subtle background image in the top header. They also perfectly balanced the padding between page elements. Nice, clean, professional (not that I’ll use any of those, because I’m D: None of the Above).

• Daring Fireball: Minimalist, grey, usually things I hate. But, there’s something that really works about the design of this site. The spacing between that spartan logo and the beginning of the content is just great. I love the warmth of the grey background. Just groovy.

Now, I’m not planning on using any elements from these sites, but all of them have given me ideas and spurred me to think about different things I can do with this site. I may not do any of them here where you can see them, but I’ll get around to it (another reason I love OS X – I have Movable Type and a copy of this site running in my local copy of Apache).

There are many kinds of people who end up working software development. I’ve been writing code for half a decade now and I’ve discovered that there are only a few general categories people fall into. There are strengths and weaknesses in each category, and you’ll be able to tell which category I think I fall into when you read them:

• The Doer: This person has a way of becoming a single point of failure. They’re always in the middle of things, and are the person you go to when something has to get done right and quickly. They adapt well to changing requirements. They may be a little anti-social and have other odd habits, but they are forgivable by the volume of work produced. The one thing the Doer doesn’t do well is document things. The Doer sucks at documentating because they’re always writing code and “doing”. It’s always best to pair the Doer with the Librarian.

• The Talker: This person never seems to get things done, but loves to talk about everything. This person will talk about a product like they actually know it, and will be extremely vocal in meetings, but when it comes time to write actual code, the Talker is nowhere to be found.

• The Laurel-Sitter: This person probably used to be the Doer, but now they’re tired of doing and want to spend their time telling other people how to do their job and never turning out anything of their own.

• The Geek: This person is so into new technology and using it that they often miss the obvious (although not as exciting) solution. They’re sometimes hard to corral into doing their job because they’re always out hopping from bleeding edge to bleeding edge instead of writing the code they’re supposed to. They’re great to have around when you’re brainstorming on a new project or problem because they often know a little about a lot of different technologies and can point you in interesting directions. But, they often spend a lot of time in experimentation that they should use writing code they know will work.

• The Droid: The Droid will do what he’s told, and usually does solid work, but can’t be counted on to always find the best solution to a problem. They’re not someone to go to with those wacky problems. They frequently try to apply the same solution to every problem, even when it doesn’t apply.

• The Professor: The Professor is somewhere between the Talker and the Laurel-Sitter. The Professor loves to talk about standards, conventions, rules and how they would do things. The Professor’s problems lie one of two areas. Either the Professor spends so much time thinking about tabs vs. spaces or the number of comments he should put in his code that he forgets to write anything. Or, the Professor has never actually written anything using these rules, and their code is extremely messy. The Professor will deny this, but of course you know it’s true.

• The Inquisitor: This is the guy who makes your meetings more fun. He asks the either impossible or ridiculous question that make people sweat or giggle. They’re good to have around for entertainment sake, but the Inquisitor usually has a little too much of the Professor in him to be useful when actually writing code.

• The Lump: No one is ever sure what the Lump does, what their role is or why they’re still around. Either the Lump is a legacy system or someone’s relative. The Lump always finds a way to get out of work. They like to procrastinate until the job doesn’t gone, or someone has to jump in at the last second and do it for them. The Lump is entertaining in normal circumstances, but under a deadline crunch, the Lump is likely to discover that no one will talk to him anymore.

• The Librarian: This is the person you let handle all your documentation. They’re usually OK in the coding department, but never much beyond the Droid. They do put great comments in their code. My favorite use of the Librarian is to send them to meetings and make them take notes, write requirements documents and run post-mortems. Librarians usually have amazing recall when it comes to facts and meetings, and are a great asset to have on a team.

I’m sure there are some I’ve missed… anyone? Any guesses as to which one I am?