Starving Hungry Web Designers

I'm hungover, and it's here: Alcoholix.

This is a service to help you find local bars and pubs in your area, and the people who frequent them. It's a specialised search service, as well as a content provider for sites like Upcoming.org.

Stay tuned over the coming weekends as I drunkenly roll out new features



See more progress on: Become an Alcoholix

Right now the price of fuel in Australia is climbing. It's going to keep climbing. LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net outlines why this is happening, and why it's going to keep happening. This, as a matter of fact, as been scaring the bejesus out of me.

I'm not taking it passively.

I'm looking at an E-Bike (About A$1,200, electric powered, goes fast without the petrol vroom vroom), and maybe a trailer.

In the spirit of anarchy, Barry Minster has some good ideas.
But not a good website.

If any readers want to help them launch their new site, which is "coming soon", with a half decent design and perhaps a nice open source CMS, go pester them. 'Cause, lets face it: the veterans are more than capable of doing the fighting, but the internet shouldn't be something they have to struggle for.

Also, if you aren't debunking paranoid fantasy about 43things, you haven't lived.

Surreal.

Over in my other blog, I've been experimenting with a neat little server side trick that amps up data entry several fold.

It works around the drag and drop idea, using hyperlinks to convey information. That's smart! It ties in with using RDF to describe remote URLs, and lets the user get loads of results into forms without typing a thing.

It works better than the humble checkbox, because checkboxes are such small click targets, and it eliminates a lot of the problems with typos: the only data the user manipulates is already provided by the system.

There's also my rant on useable lists that don't frustrate.

Finally: Chrissie is maturing as a designer, check out some of her work. Clean, sexy, and most of all... good!

I just wandered across the W3C's cheat sheet for fonts, always handy to have at hand.

Additionally, I've been in love with this particular design.

Yeah, now I've bothered to find out what it is, I'm going to (ab)use the small-caps font-variant property.

ZDNet has an article on the closing arguments of Kazaagate. A few other articles are out there, but... I didn't like em - on the side of the entertainment companies, you see.

I hope that the judge sees past the obvious shiftyness and supports the technology based arguments... but I'm worried they won't.

Opera's own Håkon Wium Lie (that version is prettier than the more recent one) has thrown down the gauntlet with the Acid2 test.

Let's hope this works out better than previous efforts and actually has an effect.

The unwashed masses are great. In the above comment thread, we see a hapless slashdotter chiming in with his two cents, unaware he's arguing with Asa Dotzler. Sadly, the jig is up when someone notices.

Poor unwashed ignorant masses!

Two rendering engines should make this browser worth looking at.
It's got a stylish theme which looks very plastic and candy wrapped, and certainly looks impressive. However, to use the interface, it's hard. They've made some basic mistakes - Icons for functions I'm not used to which are meaningless. For instance, there's a person's head and "01010" underneath it. Apparently, this is a "passcard". It doesn't look like a photo ID in the slightest - I don't associate it with an identity manager at all.

Another annoyance that blares out at me: pages that finish loading are brought into focus. I don't realise new windows are spawned (ok, that's pretty slick), but it's a disadvantage to me as it fails to act like a normal windows application - I get lost in finding my way about.
Another oddity - the reason every windows application has the toolbars in the same place is because the user is used to them - located on the right and too close to the close/minimize/maximize buttons for comfort we find Netscape's menu. The "RSS" button obscures the URL, which is unfortunate, and most of the rest of the UI looks a bit blockish - looking at my own XUL aint pretty, I can tell you that.

On :hover's with toolbar buttons has a bug that needs addressing, the images to the left & right aren't dealt with very well.

The "1 2 3 4 5" buttons in my linkbar area aren't descriptive of their function in the slightest. The lower status bar is extremely underutilised - firefox demonstrated to me that it could have a function purpose as a container, but netscape has ignored that, instead opting for high clutter in the upper area.

Aside from these behavioural differences, it's a Fox in Sheep's clothing. The IE engine can be invoked in the stupidest situations (Do you want to render this page with IE? No, you stupid browser, it's XUL, disable this!).

I don't think Firefox's marketshare is threatened by this browser. I think Opera will be safe too. It will drag some away from the Big Blue E and that's a good thing - but it won't be many people.

Also, this has the added benefits of outside eyes looking at Mozilla code, thus increasing the chance of bugs being found and fixed.

I think most of the issues with plugins stem from the RDF manifest stating "I work in firefox X to XX" and Netscape IDs as something different.

Another good feature: Big, blaring box of "Internet Explorer is rubbish" when switching the rendering engine... hurrah.

It's available for Download.