Google Product Integration Fail

Friday, February 5th, 2010

So I went to view Google Ocean Showcase (which is supposed to be cool) in my default browser – Google Chrome. Unfortunately it failed. So did Google’s internal development team that should obviously be using their own browsers.

Lessons From a Failed Hard Drive and Failed Genius

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

So last week I had an unexpected problem with my MacBook Pro when it just stopped working… Uh oh:

I guessed based on what was going on that it was a problem with the hard drive and decided to schedule an appointment with the “Geniuses” at the Apple Store [Mistake 1].

I was running late due to an accident on the highway, so I politely called to say I’d be a few minutes late [Mistake 2], the nice woman I talked to said:

No problem, I booked you a backup appointment in case you can’t get here on time.

So I showed up about 5 or 10 minutes late for my appointment and I wasn’t listed as still having an appointment at that time, but instead for 2 or 3 hours later. I explained the situation and the “concierge” said they could still get me in at my original appointment time because the woman with an appointment before me wasn’t finished yet… Nor did her appointment finish for a while. So I sat there waiting patiently… fast forward a 1/2 hour and the “Genius” tells me that since I missed my appointment he would try to fit me in between his next appointment… Which of course, is wrong, because he was running 30 or 40 minutes late for my appointment. I explain the situation, he looks at my Mac and says:

I think it’s the hard drive

Umm, really, Genius, me too. Got anything to help confirm that suspicion?

Well I could try a boot DVD or drive?

That would be great since I’m here and all, and by this point I’ve been here about an hour. For the next hour or two he tries this to no avail, asks me if I brought the original Leopard install disk with me [mistake 3] and of course, I didn’t. He explains he can’t confirm it’s the hard drive without taking out the hard drive (?) and if I want the repair it’ll cost upwards of $300, at which point I said I’d be happy to do it myself.  My only real reason for bringing it in was to confirm it wasn’t a logic board or something worse, nevertheless, I left went to Best Buy and bought a new hard drive (after googling it myself since the Best Buy staff had no clue what size hard drive fits in a MacBook Pro).

I followed these great instructions on iFix for replacing my hard drive, and in the process fixed my loose bluetooth antenna and put it all back together.  

So I take the laptop to the office, install that boot DVD the goofball from the Apple Store told me about and tried to restore from my Time Machine backup that I had from about an hour before my Mac crashed, waited three and a half hours and… nothing.

Why? Well since I’m running Snow Leopard, I can’t restore from a Leopard install disk. Thanks again guy at Apple Store.

So after another 3 hours of booting from Snow Leopard install DVD, success, MacBook Pro is working, good as new (faster / bigger hard drive, better Wireless antenna).

What did I learn in this process? Well a few things:

• The Apple Store does not really employ geniuses
• It’s not that hard to fix items on a Mac yourself (if you are a techie)
• Time Machine alone makes a Mac worth the cost (my Vista laptop’s backup process – ugly and horribly slow)
• I’m still a Mac and now I’m faster.

Are mouseovers a thing of the past?

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Lately, I’ve been using jQuery and similar libraries whenever possible, instead of flash. Besides the fact that these libraries usually kick butt and make sites more usable and interactive, by not using flash these sites still work on phones.

I like this little garage door effect, and I’ve seen it on some sites and was thinking about using it for a new version of a site I’m working on (hint, it rhymes with smoke), but when reviewing it on the iphone, it occurred to me that it didn’t work^*.

Since the iPhone is a growing percentage of web audiences, and the long-rumored Apple table is supposedly about to be released, which will surely use a multi-touch interface, should developers stop using mouseover effects on normal sites (ie non web-apps)?

What do you think small dedicated reading audience of this blog^**?

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*Or at least not with a click, which defeats the cool UI experience
**Readership numbers are a pure guess, I’m too busy to go check google analytics at the moment.

Death to IE6

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

As I’ve pointed out twice (my plea to corporate America here & during a poll here), I’m on the bandwagon of those trying to kill IE6. As a web developer it hurts every time you’re forced to support it. It adds hours of frustrating wasted time to every project and as I point out in my plea to corporate America: It’s old, really old and full of holes.   I’ve gone as far as prompting IE6 visitors to this site to download an upgrade by use of a modal popup.

Now more than ever, this movement is gaining steam:

• There is now an article at Mashable about killing IE6
• News that Youtube will kill it’s support for IE6
• And Digg wanted to, but realized that the reason people use it is because they have no choice (locked down XP computers without being able to upgrade).

But by far the funniest of all I’ve seen yet is this – IE6ify any website. This tool will make the site look likes it being shown in IE6 (to a developer). Basically it breaks your page.  Enjoy the fun that I and so many have experienced trying to use CSS on IE6 in this replicator. (H/T to Logan)

Things I Do With My iPhone

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

So I had a typical Apple-hating response on Twitter to something I retweeted.

GaneshaXi’s response was basically: “My $50 phone is better and you’re a sheep for buying an iPhone”.

So instead of taking the old internet advice of “Don’t Feed the Troll“, I decided to make a ‘just-for-fun’ list of things I do (regularly) with my iPhone:

1. Make and receive calls (duh, it’s a phone).
2. Send and receive text messages.
3. Send and receive emails (and using IMAP, so my MacBook Pro email shows if I’ve read them or not).
4. Update contacts and calendar without synching (via the magic of mobileMe).  So if I add, edit or delete a contact or calendar item on my Mac or on my iPhone, the other one receives an update.
5. Take pictures, send pictures to this blog, facebook, twitpic, etc.
6. View twitter, write tweets, respond to tweets, etc using Tweetie.
7. Update all of my chosen social sites (Facebook, this blog, typepad, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, etc) with Ping.FM using Pingle.
8. Review and accept / reject comments on this blog and on Spoken Whirred using the WordPress app.
9. Listen to music, buy new music, create playlists (while still being able to accept calls during the middle of a song, very useful when I’m out on a long bike ride).
10. Check baseball scores and listen to MLB radio (via MLB app).
11. Check my fantasy baseball daily stats and update my team (via CBSSportsLine app).
12. Surf the Web (mostly stltoday.com/sports and vivaelbirdos).
13. Read the Bible.
14. Read eBooks.
15. Watch full length movies, usually on a plane (currently on my iPhone is Iron Man, which I’ve watched like 50 times).
16. Listen to my favorite music from Pandora.com (via their free app).
17. Check the weather, view radar and view The Weather Channel forecast, using their app.
18. Get turn by turn directions and if lost find out where the heck I am.
19. Skype IM to friends (and sometimes calls).
20. Take notes.
21. Browse and view YouTube videos. Usually to show off something I’ve posted up there about Gabe.
22. Search for something (usually a store location) while driving using voice activated search (Google app).
23. Remote control Keynote presentations running on my Mac without using a mouse.
24. Remote control iTunes on my Mac during parties (choose next song, pause, start, etc).
25. Check in on Brightkite, view who’s around me, etc.
26. Surf Wikis.
27. Check nutritional information about food I’m eating.
28. Track sports scores (using a couple different apps).
29. Check the status of FedEx shipments.
30. Look up words in the dictionary.
31. Play checkers when I’m waiting in line at Disney World.
32. Check facebook messages, view friends status, etc using Facebook app.
33. Use a calculator for tips, change, etc.
34. Choose shows to record on my DirecTV when I’m away from home (use this mostly for Cardinals games).
35. Set and snooze alarm clock (usually when out of town).

I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting, but I think you get the gist. When I make a tongue-in-cheek comment about my phone being superior, it’s not because I’m a sheep. It’s because it is.  I’m a tech guy (a former full-time software developer) who uses his phone for everything. I’ve had two Windows Mobile phones, they were fine, but not this good. I’ve also had a couple palm based phones (Treos), again, not this good.  And I’m sure your blackberry could do half this stuff, maybe more.  But again not this well. Because I haven’t even mentioned the intuitive touch screen yet (the one every other device is trying to copy without breaking apple’s patents) or the fact that it completely replaced my iPod.

Even better than all of this is that when the phone starts to get outdated, they just update the OS software so it can do more, unlike Microsoft who won’t update their mobile OS to carriers, because the carriers want people to buy a new phone.

Do you block or support IE6?

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8 and recent campaigns to block IE6, kill IE6 and end IE6 (this one is even by a .Net magazine), and pleas by countless bloggers (like this one here by me) have people finally relented and either installed a new browser or started supporting IE7 in their corporate environment?

Well…there was 1.6% drop of market share in April 2009 from 17.0% to 15.4%, but unfortunately 15.4% of users is still a significant percentage (see all stats here).

So this begs the question. Web developers – are you helping bring about the demise of IE6? Are you allowed to at your business / corporate environment?  My answer is yes and no. I don’t support it here, I use the pop-up, and I don’t support it on our spoken whirred blog. But I do degrade using hacks for IE6 on Spoke’s main site.  Love to hear your comments about this as well.

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Cufon – An Alternative to SIFR?

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Cufon looks promising:

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

I like these ideas and I’m going to test it out on a site soon. I’ll probably do so here, before I attempt this on Spoke’s site (which is comprised of SIFR).

The two things I like about Cufon (and SIFR for that matter):

• The ability to use fonts regardless of them being installed on the web machine (less images)
• Easily degrade to specified fonts (instead of your site not working on a mobile client like an iphone).

One thing that has bothered me throughout the examples of Cufon is double-clicking on a paragraph of text doesn’t just highlight the text, it highlights the text near it as well.  Like this picture I snapped of highlighted text, it messes up just a bit. Something to work on, but if it degrades gracefully and works without flash installed, this would be an annoyance and nothing more. It looks promising.

My ‘Time’ Wishlist

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Do you have any geeky / creative things you’d do if only had the time and the money time?

The idea for this post came about when I was setting up this blog.  For once, I had the time and the need to build a WordPress site (we’ll be migrating our Spoken Whirred blog to WordPress and I needed a site to test with).

 Cross one of the ole geek checklist.

1. Setup a wordpress site

What’s left on my geek checklist? Let’s see (off the top of my head):

2. Build a web site / application in Ruby on Rails
3. Build a facebook application
4. Use Objective C or Cocoa (for a Mac app or iPhone) – (This one is totally unrealistic, because I’ll never have this much time)
5. Use more jQuery / AJAX
6. Help bring about the destruction of IE6.

Another wish list I have applies to more creative tasks:

1. Take a photography class
2. Learn how to use Illustrator better
3. Actually use tags on my stock photo library so I can easily refer to them.
4. Learn another movie making software (besides iMovie)
5. Actually have the time to make some movies of Gabe.

What’s on your wish list?  Would any of these apply?  Should I store this list on 37things so I can keep track of these?