Category: Internet

Catching up on recent news:

• Apple Releases iTunes 4 (purchase songs for $.99 ea.), new iPod (lighter, thinner, backlit buttons)
• QuickTime 6.2 (downloading/installing now, review later)
• The web browser celebrates 10 years (via Zeldman)

More coming…

Here’s where I’m taking this site, for those of you who might care to read:

The content here at SB is going to become more focused. Less personal drivel, and more attention to the following topics: CSS, web design, usability, MovableType, Apple/Mac OS.

That should keep things moving around here, and make for easier reading.

I’m also going to add an RSS feed, even though Zeldman doesn’t seem to be all that thrilled. Of course, I use an instant publishing tool rather than rolling my own code for each post (heck, I hand-wrote all the (X)HTML and CSS, what more do you want?), so it shouldn’t be hard to get it working. If you’re interested, leave a comment.

Yesterday, Ben and Mena Trott, creators of MovableType and principals of Six Apart, announced TypePad, a new centralized/hosted blogging tool, based on MovableType and its related technology/APIs.

The blogging community is moving onward and upward — with Google’s high-profile purchase of Blogger, and now this next move by Six Apart (Ben and Mena have a few more items up their sleeves for the coming months with regards to MovableType Pro), blogging is taking on a stronger stance in the web community at large. It’s not just for geeks any more (OK, so it hasn’t been “just for geeks” for a while now, but it sounded good).

Also, MovableType fans everywhere will no longer be able to refer simply to “Ben and Mena”, since Six Apart has officially hired their first employee: Anil Dash. From now on (until the next employee, that is) it’s “Ben, Mena and Anil.”

Congrats you guys! Keep up the good work!

I’m pleased to announce the addition of a new author to web-graphics.com: Me.

I made my first post this afternoon (regarding the new version of Safari), and I hope to become a worthy contributor to the site. Just to have my name on the short list of authors (some of the brightest minds on the web today, in my opinion) is an honor, so I will do my darndest to make it worthwhile.

If you’ve never visited, check it out today. I’ve also added the site to the list of links on the right.

Dave Hyatt posted a query regarding the default text size in Safari, Apple’s new web browser (currently in beta). I posted my suggestions in the comments for his post, but I thought I would mirror them here for your reading pleasure:

It seems a lot of the comments posted thus far are personal preference, which is not (in my opinion) the issue at hand here. If a user wants to change the default font size setting, it should be easy to do so (in that regard, placing the -/+ buttons in the tool bar by default would be a terrific idea), however, a user’s personal preference should not necessarily be taken into account for the default setting.

From a developer’s point of view, I agree that adopting the “standard” used by other major browsers on the Mac OS and other platforms is a good idea. It makes life much easier for web developers, since we can rest assured that we will not have to create a separate set of CSS font rules just to accomodate Safari users. Also, since many Mac-based web developers are likely to use Safari as their primary browser, having the output mimic that of the other target browsers we develop for is a very useful feature.

From a user’s point of view, I have to view many sites every day which are developed on other platforms, and a high percentage of those sites are built with a certain target font size in mind. Hence the number of comments regarding very small text on certain sites built with PC users in mind (read: WinIE). I applaud your team’s current efforts to mimic many of the functioning behaviors of WinIE, since it would be naive of anyone to ignor the strong hold WinIE has on the worldwide browser market. Many PC developers will never specifically target Safari, or any other Mac browser, and others are not likely to go out of their way to test a site on Safari to make sure it is usable, legible, readable, etc., so a strong case can be built in favor of making the Mac/Safari browsing experience as good as possible by reducing the number of rendering differences between WinIE and Safari.

Safari is already my browser of choice (except for a few of my firm’s sites that still have rendering problems only on Safari — see http://evergladesgateway.com/ for a recent example) but there is always room for improvement, and improving the overall user and developer experience is the way to make Safari not just the best Mac browser, but the best browser on any platform.