It’s been a good week for trying new things here at decaf HQ; the first of which being Mozilla 1.5 Release Candidate 2. Nothing really exciting, given that I’m a Camino man, but it has prompted me to investigate the wealth of options available to web developers using the <link rel="foo" title="bar" href="http://example.com" /> markup in the page <head>. As you may well know, Mozilla and Opera offer a little thing they like to call the ‘Site Navigation Bar’, a row of buttons set in the browser’s UI that take advantage of the aforementioned <link /> tags and offer a convenient means to navigate a web site.
As part of the ongoing experiment in web development that this site claims to be, I have begun implementing the necessary <link /> tags to make decaffeinated.org a friendlier (and more accessible) place to navigate.Try the individual entry archives, you can step forward and backward through individual entries chronologically, you can go right back to the start, or forward to the most recent entry. You can come back to the front page, or go ‘up’ (in the URL hierarchy, at least) to the ‘daily’ archives. It’s fun, fun, fun. Expect further implementation every time I get bored.
Posted by Chris Clark on October 1, 2003 at 12:05 AM
- CNet News.com
- Adobe Reader seems to be one of those software programs everybody knows but doesn’t necessarily love. Is it going to get better in areas like loading times?
- Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen
- One of the challenges we’ve had with the Adobe Reader is that we’ve tried to accommodate more and more capabilities—the ability to handle more dynamic content such as moving images, still images and slide shows and to incorporate XML data—and we haven’t been as efficient as we probably could have been and would like to be. You’ll see that addressed in the next release of Acrobat and Adobe Reader. The goal right now is to significantly reduce the launch time.
- CNet
- Any concerns about competition from Macromedia’s FlashPaper format?
- Chizen
- When I look at what Macromedia has done with FlashPaper, it’s very similar to the approach we took with PDF 10 years ago. It’s about reliable viewing and reliable printing.
- CNet
- And documents loading in a second or two.
- Chizen
- Yeah, you can ding us for that. But I also believe that people want more than just reliable viewing and printing. We learned that from 10 years of experience. They want an intelligent document. They want a document that can be displayed on any device and interacted with on any device. They want a document that can handle the XML data. While we need to continue to be efficient in the way we do viewing and printing—and you’ve pointed out an area where we intend to improve—I do believe that customers expect more from the documents.
So… Adobe’s CEO willfully admits that Acrobat is bloated, slow and unwieldy; though the bloat is justified because they have ten years of experience with this shit, they know what the people want. He knows that PDF is the de–facto standard for document transfer on the ‘net. He knows that every member of the Mac OS X installed user base is furthering Adobe’s cause, though they probably don’t use Acrobat at all, it’s the PDF that matters. Most of all, he knows his tower will be very difficult to topple. It makes me wish I were a CEO; after all, I have twenty years experience in being a smug, arrogant bastard.
Posted by Chris Clark on October 1, 2003 at 12:41 AM
Giles Turnbull gives us all a glancing insight into the minds of some of our favorite fellow Mac users by examining what’s on their dock. Jumping on the bandwagon (and in the interests of egomaniacry, of course), here’s what’s on my dock.
Like Jason’s, my dock is positioned along the bottom edge of the screen. I have to share his sentiments that as a Windows refugee, the bottom edge makes sense; anywhere else seems foreign. The bottom edge becomes even more favorable when you consider the greater space available; most screens are wider than they are tall, meaning the icons don’t suffer from ‘too–damn–small–itis’ when you have a lot of them. My dock is also transparent, thanks to the good folks at Unsanity, but that’s just an aesthetic preference.
At any and all times, I’m running 15 applications (up two applications from just a couple of weeks ago): Finder, Camino, Mail, Proteus, iTunes, iCal, Address Book, System Preferences, Kung–Log, NetNewsWire, Transmit, Speed Download 2, Terminal, Sherlock, and SubEthaEdit. While several of those are probably unnecessary (Address Book, for instance, doesn’t see much use. Likewise, Sherlock is only ever invoked because it saves me from using a browser to visit dictionary.com or Google’s language tools), it keeps me warm at night to think they’re there whenever I need them; at the ready.
The other apps —Project Builder, Interface Builder, iMovie, iPhoto, and Photoshop Elements 2.0— are my ‘occasional use’ applications. They’re also kinda heavy on the memory usage, so they’re not left running indefinitely. Finally, there’s an URL pointing to the latest Camino nightly build, and then there’s the Trash.
Simple as that.
Posted by Chris Clark on October 1, 2003 at 2:30 PM
