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Sure, I turn my back for a few hours and actually do some work, and what do I get for it? I’m behind the times. Cool stuff announced at Macworld. Things that I care about:

• Apple’s Safari browser is nice, if a bit rough around the edges (it is beta, hey). I love the toolbar button for submitting bugs. Too, it seems to correctly implement Digest Authentication, unlike certain other browsers. As you’d expect, Mark Pilgrim has some good notes and a page for Safari information for web designers.
• Apple’s X11 distribution. And they actually wrote, “This one goes to 11.” Tee hee. (huh?) I wonder what this will mean for OpenOffice/NeoOffice. I’m figuring either not much, since we already have decent rootless X11, or a whole heckuva lot. There are already some comments up on the Fink site.
• Final Cut Express. I was just talking with Jim yesterday about his desire for better video editing than iMovie offers (especially handling audio tracks) but being unwilling to shell out $1000. Maybe this will fit the bill.
• Keynote looks great, especially as I seem to be doing more and more presenting, but if I can get a functional OpenOffice then I’ll be fine.

Checky is a Mozilla plugin for checking a page with a variety of validators and services. You can check using just one service, or configure the agent to use several at once. Validate your XHTML, CSS, and RSS, and check accessibility through one convenient interface. I love this thing.

These are the browser-based web development tools I now use on a daily basis:

• Checky.
• CSS, HTML, and DOM sidebar tabs.
• DOM inspector (see grayrest’s tutorial).
• JavaScript debugger (see the Venkman tutorial).
• liorean’s ViewStyles.

All but ViewStyles are Mozilla-based. If you’re a web developer and are not using Mozilla, you’re missing out.

Of course, I’d also like to know what I’m missing. Dangit, I really need to set up comments.

I broke a bunch of stuff on this site a couple days ago and am slowly getting around to fixing it. Today it’s the RSS feed. How’s that for a lunchtime project.

After vacillating between the different RSS versions, I finally settled on RSS 2.0. While Mark Pilgrim’s arguments for 2.0 in “In praise of evolvable formats” are compelling, in the end it pretty much came down to a gut feeling: I like what’s been done in RSS 2.0. RSS 1.0 introduced greater complexity than I think is necessary for what I want to do.

Now I just can’t wait to see what happens in NetNewsWire. I’m curious whether it will display the <description> or <content:encoded>, or whether I can set that in the preferences. Dang, I wish I had my iBook with me.

While I was at it, I also upgraded to the latest Movable Type. About damn time.

Next up…spiffing up the blogroll.

I’ve got some changes in the works, but the most immediate and probably most important is that I’ve finally got off my duff and added permalinks.

Get it while you can, this is good stuff: The Glass Wall.

Until either my webhost or my bosses ask me to take it down, here is a document detailing the design process behind the BBC homepage. The research methods and synthesis they went through is pretty interesting, and hopefully some of the process, artifacts and outcomes documented might be useful for web design practitioners. I’ll feedback any comments to the design team involved.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, so I decided to try something new. Here goes:

• Get in shape. What this really means is exercise more. What that really means is exercise, period.
• Relax. For a while there I was actually quite good at taking moments in the day to just be. I need to do that more. It makes me a better person.
• Give Java another chance. I mean, what the hell.
• Stop teasing the Ruby fiend at work.

Peace.

When you want peanut butter toast and you’re all out of crunchy peanut butter, but you do have that very, very large container of creamy PB, which is quite disappointing because you really don’t like creamy, but hey you’ve got that bag of walnuts so you chop up a half-handful and sprinkle it on the creamy peanut butter you decided to put on your toast anyway, cuz hey why not, don’t be all that surprised when it isn’t as satisfying as the real thing.

Still, better than creamy peanut butter. Ugh.

I’ve been working with a student intern lately, sort of showing him the ropes while at the same time picking his brain about what’s covered in his curriculum. It’s interesting (and somewhat disheartening) to see the disconnect between what I consider essential and what’s actually being taught; although to be fair, I think that his is not strictly speaking a web development curriculum. More on this later.

At one point early on, we had a long chat in which I tried to convey my strong conviction that any web developer or designer worth their salt should be more than passingly familiar with basic web standards like XHTML and CSS, and of course accessibility.

Considering how often I’ve been having this conversation lately, I started putting together a list of resources I consider essential, to serve as both introductory material and a handy reference. Working on the list has been a valuable experience: it’s really driven home how important it is to have a solid foundation in these basic, core competencies, and how often I mistakenly assume that everyone shares this common base. (It’s also helped me clean out my bookmarks.)

No sooner had I begun work than Mark Newhouse started writing about these very things in his blog, then combined the separate posts into a tidy little article on Real World Style: A Three-Legged Stool.

So there it is. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Well, almost. Neil Gaiman writes that a “young lady named Anneli in Sweden” wrote him a fan letter:

The address she wrote on the front of the envelope was “The author Neil Gaiman. Lives in a big house of uncertain location in Minnesota USA”. On the 20th of November the United States Postal Service delivered that letter to me, care of DreamHaven Books, 912 W Lake St, Minneapolis MN 55408.

The bit in italics is from one of Gaiman’s books. Dreamhaven is a local science fiction/fantasy/comic book store that deals quite a bit with Mr. Gaiman, including creating a rather ugly online store dedicated to his books ‘n’ such. For someone at the post office to have made this connection is quite remarkable.

Either that, or Neil Gaiman is indeed Santa Claus.

A sales rep at Books24x7.com convinced someone at work to do a free trial of their online book service, and somehow I ended up in the test group. Since I already subscribe to Safari and am familiar with this type of service, I figured I’d have something to say. And sure enough… My informal evaluation follows:

Books24x7 is a good idea, something that I would probably use were it not for the fact that it doesn’t include the books that I consider the standard references in the technologies that I work with now or am likely to work with soon. Looking through those areas, I’m generally disheartened by the selection. As a quick glace at my bookshelf will attest, most of the definitive books in the areas in which I work are published by O’Reilly. They are completely absent from Books24x7, as are some other important publishers.

New Riders is thankfully included in both services.

Before you settle on this service, I suggest that you at least take a look at a competing online book service: Safari. Created by O’Reilly, it obviously includes their books, but also offers a wide selection from publishers — including many also offered through Books24x7.

I’ve been subscribing to Safari for a while now and am happy with it. I use it for reference while working, to review a book to decide whether to buy a print edition, and to learn new things — often in a hurry.

Safari’s service is basically the same as Books24x7: complete text and images, bookmarks, annotations, full-text search, etc., and have a similar interface. Two major differences:

1. In Safari there is a limit to the number of books you can access at any one time. For instance, I subscribe at the 5-book level. When I put a book in my bookshelf, it has to stay there for at least a month. Once I’ve reached the maximum number of books in my collection, that’s it until the month is over or I buy a higher-level subscription (which I can do on a temporary basis). From what I can tell, Books24x7 doesn’t have this limit, which is pretty nice. On the other hand, so far the limit has not been a problem for me: I subscribe at the 5-book level because that’s all I ever need.

   Then again, I spend a hell of a lot of money on books.

2. The quality of books offered by Safari is much, much better.

Whether Safari is a better fit for ITS, I don’t know. It’s at least worth looking at before making a decision. Would I use Books24x7? No: I already have something that’s a better fit for me.

On the other hand, I will use it to read Microsoft ASP.NET Step by Step. Because I confess to having seen some things that make me curious.