Author: Pat Skinner

I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.

Categories
Design Technical Web Design

And just like that, everyone wins

The year is 2005. The web has become commonplace, and people are ready for more dynamic content in their browsing experience. The ensuing battle of AJAX and Flash is fought tooth and nail. Macromedia Macrodobe claims 98% penetration of the Flash client on web-enabled computers, and even if that sounds decidedly optimistic AJAX likely has a level near that. The competition only becomes greater and greater for Web 2.0 apps, and everyone has the potential to benefit.

So. Check out this cool Flash revamped version of popular Earth mapping software du jour (currently Google Maps and MSN Earth). Decide for yourself who’s going to win the upcoming battle. I’d normally say Flash, but it’s had more than a few years headstart and hasn’t receieved nearly the attention from “serious” coders that AJAX has displayed of late. Possibly it’s only hype, or maybe it’s because there exists no Linux version of the Flash builder…or, possibly, ActionScript sucks a little too much. I still wistfully remember wasting 3 hours in a row debugging array code because the ActionScript interpreter wouldn’t display an error message. It stumped 3 labbies.

Categories
Facts Of Life

No, it’s C, A, T. Just read some books already!

[Captain Obvious]
There aren’t too many things more immediately and absolutely damning to one’s credibility than misspellings in their otherwise perfect text. When my seniors hypothetically ask me how to spell remedial words, I hypothetically feel pretty embarrassed for them.

Nitpicky? Sure, they’d certainly say so. But while it might be demanding for such folk, perfect spelling and grammar are esoteric goals all communicators (which means nearly everyone) need to strive for.
[/Captain Obvious]

Categories
General

Files, anyone?

These guys are part owned by Google, which is perhaps unsurprising judging by the liberal interface borrowing. My browser equated Chinese characters to unicode squares/question marks, so one link stood out in particular: “MP3.” And yes, every name I tried had more than a few results hidden away in someone’s web server.

The RIAA can’t even begin to touch overseas servers…and apart from scare tactic lawsuits in the US nothing seems to be working for them.

Categories
Visit This Site

It’s funny because it’s true

Click.

And much hilarity ensued.

Categories
Humor

Isn’t “Mighty Mouse” already copyrighted?

This is too funny. It’s just like the internal iPod speaker, which makes nary a noise but that scrolling click (or if you’re adventerous a startling little squawk in devmode).

Mighty Mouse Internal Speaker?

The two buttons (FINALLY), touch sensitivity, and the scroll ball are all decent additions. (wouldn’t quite call the scroll ball an innovation seeing as the whole “scroll from mouse” idea was borrowed from Microsoft). I wonder, though, how effective a ball is versus a tiltable wheel you can hold down, seeing as fingers tend to be much longer than wide.

The only criticism I would mention is that customization is only available under Tiger. This is the Safari 10.2->10.3 fiasco all over again. It seems forced obsolescence is worth the negative PR for Apple. As much as I love Apple’s design this is up there in the list of most irritating things a company can do to its loyal users. There is absolutely no reason why Apple couldn’t have supported older versions of Mac OS X. Cue an upstart shareware developer?