afongen

We’re watching Dark City. Never understood why no one else liked this movie as much as we did. It’s every bit as inventive as The Matrix and has some great performances. But it never caught on. Seriously, I sometimes think that Kiara and I are the only ones who have ever seen this movie.

And Mozilla 0.9.7 has been released. New stuff that grabbed my attention:

• the DOM Inspector is now available in all full builds (until now, it wasn’t available for the Mac. This is a slick little tool that I’ve found myself using all the time.
• longdesc support on images. Excellent accessibility bonus.
• Digest authentication support. This is considerably more secure way to restrict access to certain directories or files on a web server than the heretofore popular Basic Authentication (which passes usernames and password in the clear). Internet Explorer has supported this for some time. I honestly didn’t realize that Mozilla didn’t.
• Fine-grained JavaScript control. Now you can disable those annoying pop-up and pop-under windows through the GUI instead of having to edit text files.

There are of course other good additions, this is just what excited me. Mozilla continues to be an excellent browser, and (as the DOM Inspector demonstrates) a good foundation for browser-based applications. It has excellent standards support, becomes more and more user-friendly (with things like tabbed windows and pop-up killers), and so far as we know doesn’t open up your whole computer to attack. If you haven’t yet, I recommend giving it a shot. If you’re a web developer, you really have to.

In Mac browser news today, Opera has released version 5.0 beta 5 for the Mac of their super-fast browser. Not as standards-compliant as I’d have hoped, and still with tiny, tiny fonts, but still one fine web browser. Too, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 is out for Mac Classic (pre-OS X).

Mozilla 0.9.7 builds should be out around Friday.

Design Rant. Excellent. This is one of those core, foundational articles that I wish everyone involved in production of a web site would read.

I spent some time this weekend trying to install LinuxPPC on my Mac again. After a number of failed attempts and a bit of research, I determined that although it’s possible to install it alongside MacOS9 and OS X, it’s more trouble than it’s worth right now. I’ve got another box to put it on. To make up for it, though, I found a few cool things coming this week:

• The next MacGimp CD is shipping. The Gimp on OS X? Yum.
• Apple’s shipping their updated development tools on CD. A CD came with OS X, but not with the 10.1 upgrade. They were available as a download only, which sucks for those of us without a broadband connection. Now I can get the CD and start compiling software again. And I should really get back into using Java. OS X is a great platform for Java development.
• Fog Creek’s released CityDesk, desktop web content management software for Windows. I have high hopes for this at work, where we’ve been facing the fact that we just need something better. Dreamweaver is an excellent tool but is a bit too much in the hands of the people who handle our 30+ department web sites. They shouldn’t have to worry about things like web standards, accessibility, image optimizing, and so on. It’s far more work than it should be for people who have other things to do in their jobs. We’ve been looking at browser-based content management systems (using, say, either Zope or ColdFusion), but I’m no longer convinced that’s the best thing for us. Since most of the site content originates in Microsoft Office products, I’m inclined to use something like HTML Transit, which converts Office docs and manages the site. Sorta. Thing is, the version of Transit we own is getting old and is a real pain to work with. So I want to at least look at CityDesk. I have great faith in Joel Spolsky and company to produce top-notch software.

I read this email from KPMG (whose site looks like hell in Mozilla, BTW) with great amusement and some of the distress that it seems to have caused in others. When I was working on the MnSCU HR web site, we wanted to link to the retirement service providers. Makes sense, we figured it was a bit of good customer service for our employees. First I contacted the webmasters for each of the vendors to check if there were a preferred URL. Most got back to me right away, sometimes with better URLs than I had come up with.

MetLife‘s response, however, was to forward my message to their legal department, which indicated that they required that we sign a hyperlinking agreement. Unbelievable. The agreement was to last for a period of one year and specify exactly which pages would have links to their site.

Naturally I asked for a copy of the agreement. I mean, how couldn’t I? I was dying to see this thing. However, at that point the communication from MetLife stopped. Perhaps it was all a hoax, I don’t know. Still, to this day there is no link to MetLife on the HR site. Although in a way I suppose it’s playing into their hands, I didn’t feel it necessary to reward that sort of nonsense, even with something as trivial as a hyperlink, and apparently no one’s bothered to change the page since.

I don’t know how I missed this one before, especially since it’s linked to from a number of sites I frequent, but I just discovered BrainJar. I only wish that I’d seen it earlier this weekend instead of about 45 minutes ago.

Then again, perhaps it’s best that I didn’t spend the whole weekend in front of a computer.

More or less for kicks, I’ve added a bit of code here to raise the browser bar a little. The link to the style sheet is added using DOM methods as the page loads, so unless the browser supports the DOM methods in question, the page code defines no styles. So far as I know, this means Mozilla/Netscape 6. It may be that it works on IE5.5+ on Windows; I won’t know until I make it into work on Monday.

No, there’s no compelling reason to do this. My first thought was that it’d be a handy way to weed out browsers that can’t handle CSS layouts, reasoning that any browser that can handle the DOM will have at least reasonable support for CSS positioning. This would leave me free to ignore older and annoying browsers like Netscape 4, whose fledgling CSS support might render the page illegible. But then it just became something that I thought would be fun to play with.

I spent several hours trying to make this work in IE5 Mac, but couldn’t figure it out. Either I’m missing something entirely, or it can’t be done. IE adds the style sheets to the collection of LINKs but doesn’t display them. Frustrating. Then again, as long as I’m doing something as arbitrary as this, why should I care? If the DOM support isn’t there, it isn’t there.

Still. Grrr…

I finally got around to upgrading to OS X 10.1 yesterday, and wow what an improvement! Menus are faster (i.e. actually responsive!), as are screen updates. I no longer feel quite like I’m pushing at the limits of my machine, which was the impression that 10.0.x left me with.

Beyond performance, there were only a couple things keeping me from adopting OS X full-time:

• Email. Apple’s email client isn’t bad, but it’s not really what I want. I couldn’t configure it enough to my liking. Using PGP with it was a real pain, too. On OS 9, I’m using Entourage (what Outlook Express became with MS Office 2001), and I have to say that it’s excellent…but I was having trouble sending and receiving mail unless I booted into OS 9. No good. With the download of Mozilla for OS X, which I can use as an email client, I’m set. I’ve been toying with the idea of switching to Mozilla for mail anyway. Something I might reconsider when Office X is released.
• Office suite, especially a word processor. AppleWorks sucks. I really can’t stand it. Since I rarely have to use a word processor, I’m willing to use Office 2001 in Classic mode. Kiara, on the other hand, uses Word and Excel every day. Now, if there were an OS X port of OpenOffice available for us to use, I’d be all over it and I’m sure Kiara would, too. But it’s not ready yet. I might give OpenOSX Office a shot — it includes such open source faves as AbiWord and Gnumeric (hmmm, I’m not sure that I’d call AbiWord a fave) — but I think I’ll pass. In the meantime, we’ll just have to be patient, or maybe break down and shell out the few hundred bucks for an upgrade to Office v.X.
• PGP. I could compile GPG, or maybe even PGP, if need be, but it would be pretty hard to give up the GUI. What with NAI looking to sell off PGP, I don’t foresee an OS X port anytime soon. So I suffer.

Hrm, I guess the only thing holding me back was email. And performance. Now that those are squared away, more or less, I’m going with OS X full-time.

The new Star Wars full-length trailer, “Forbidden Love,” is out. If you were one of those who caught a midnight showing of Harry Potter, though, you probably know that.