As an example of how consistency helps users, think about the mobile phone. Let’s consider these two phones:

Ericsson T610

Apple iPhone

As an iPhone user I have no issue using either of these phones, but, if I hand my grandmother both of these phones she is comfortable using the Ericsson, while with the iPhone there is no such comfort level. Despite the fact that she never grew up with cell phones (or even cordless phones) the Ericsson is consistent the phones she knows.

Sorry for that rather long example, back to my original point. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that before you go crafting a “sexy” new user interface convention that you think is cool, think about the platform, think about the other applications and what they’re doing, if there is one think about the HIG (Apple has one for the Mac and I believe there is one for the iPhone, but I’m having difficulty tracking it down.

Above: example of several interface styles in used in Windows XP.

As with many of my projects the source code is fully available, I’m exposing this one via an SVN service called beanstalk. This is not generalized code, it’s the exact code (except the database info) that’s on gemerit.com.

So if you’d to like to improve it or add some stuff to the main branch, just give me a shout and I’ll set you up with an account.

The big problem with this assumption is that it assumes we’ve all been making broken sites just for IE, which as you can tell if you use IE on my site, many of us do not. Sure the IE has the largest usage percentage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s demographic that’s worth caring about, hell here at bonta-kun.net our biggest browser is Firefox (43%), followed by IE (42%), with Safari in third (8%). The other arrogant assumption it makes is that you have time and the knowledge to go to every single one of your pages and add this meta tag to their header.

The best argument in favor of this is done by Aaron Gustafson of A List Apart (brilliant web design site). The primary ground his argument sits on is the idea that all browsers would use this meta tag to target specific browser versions to ensure that pages are rendered with the engine they were built for (neglect the fact that this would require a really flexible rendering engine or a pool of different rendering engines). The primary problems with this argument are:it assumes we care about the layout of old content (unlikely we probably only care about the content) and that doctypes are useless. Doctypes were designed to lock your page into a set of standards and that gives the browser the rules to play by, it’s much cleaner than this browser engine targetting non-sense.

I found an excellent blog post that sums up most of my points much better than I have so far here. The writer is a little more worked up over the matter than me, but his points are valid.

I found an awesome compilation of IE8 version targeting shortly after posting this article.

C#

• Anonymous Types: cool, almost javascript like, I say almost because you can’t return them from a function or otherwise get them out of the scope of a single function.
• Static Type Inference: lazy man’s variable declarations, again, as they are now, not much use.
• Extension Mehods: awesome, the ability to extend functions (and I believe properties) to built in classes is extremely powerful and useful in a practical way. I’m looking forward to using this feature
• LINQ : A new way to deal with databases. The automatic database mapping and a cleaner look for building SQL queries, honestly I doubt this is going to change much, but it’s not a half bad feature.
• WPF : The big deal for me, hardware accelerated GUI comes to Windows (at last, after mac and linux).Expression seems to be pretty cool, the dedicated app for building interfaces (similar to mac’s interface builder), will hopefully drastically improve the appearance and form of Windows apps.

Other Observations

• Windows developers LOVE IntelliSense , something I didn’t expect since I usually leave it disabled. I got the impression that may of the developers couldn’t envision a world where you would program without it.
• Silverlight is a big deal at Microsoft and people seem to be getting genuinely excited about it, i still think Adobe’s dominance with Flash is too strong to challenge at this point, unless they’re willing to commit to decades of loss to get it’s acceptance up (like the Xbox project).

Tulsa Tech Fest was a blast and great opportunity to learn more about Microsoft platform development and the communities around them. Plus it’s hard to argue with a free conference with free food.

Update: sorry for all the edits, I’m experimenting with a beta version of ecto.

Upsides (there are tons, this is a brief list)

• The iPhone is an excellent PDA, phone, and iPod. In fact it’s better than any dedicated device that I’ve ever used.
• The internet seems pretty fast even over edge (depends on area and signal strength).
• The browser is truly amazing, it’s a full fledged browser, and it’s incredible to be able to look up anything on any website at any time. It’s something that easy to underestimate until you get used to having it.
• Moving around the iPhone is incredibly responsive, vastly more so than any other phone I’ve used in recent years.

Downsides

• No picture messaging.
• Safari crashes more than I would like.
• Turning the iPhone sideways while in iPod mode switches to coverflow for all albums, despite what’s in your playlist. In my opinion it should only show the albums in the playlist.
• Selecting video podcasts from the podcasts section only plays the audio, through video it works just fine though.
• The price is pretty discouraging (and depressing).

Just in case someone else was needing the ability to discern the difference between objects, arrays, and other data types in Javascript.

Oh look the only way to get 3rd party apps on the iPhone is to run then as widgets in Safari, oh wait on a totally on related note look Safari just got ported over to Windows. This would be an unlikely coincidence.

Nerf Quest

The only this that’ll be visible as part of a work as progress is this blog, which I will try to switch back and forth. Everything else will be developed separate of where it’s currently in use.

UPDATE 1: it appears I am almost done updating the gallery and chat to match the overall style. The only thing after that is the blog (which is by far going to the hardest to do).

UPDATE 2: so far it looks like everything has been converted over, not everything is feature complete, but that is what is done from here on out, polish and features.

The code for this is provided below, it is provided as is with no documentation. At the moment I’m trying to track down the original site for the player I’m using so that i can check the conditions of the license. There are 3 files in the archive (podcast.php, index.php and embed.php)

• podcast.php is the library that finds the most recent podcast entry and sets it to $fileURL.
• index.php redirects the user to the file’s location.
• embed.php generates a player and the location it is not particularly interesting.

podcast.zip

UPDATE: the newer version of the flash player that I’m using is actually supporting RSS as a playlist type, so that makes this script not incredibly useful anymore. Although upon further testing I discovered it does not support linking to external RSS feeds so it seems my PHP may still be of some use, plus honestly the new version is quite ugly.

Flash MP3 Player Website

my twitter

A sidenote: you’ve probably noticed we’ve moved back to an older theme, it’s a theme I still like a lot due to it’s simplicity and it’s a theme I’ve invested a significant amount of time in customizing it.

Update: after 3 days with no power or heat (other than the local Panera Bread) we’re back in good shape.

Update: I am totally in love with these products and I’m hoping to find a job and setup in time to afford the iPhone, despite my fear of first generation apple products.