the turtle speaks

Apple PR posted a letter discussing their solution for the reception issues some have been having with iPhone 4. I’ll be interested to see if, once the fix has been applied, users are concerned with the lower-reported (though, apparently more accurate) reception.

An article on Macgasm discusses how to keep your Safari 5 Extensions synced between your Macs. While this is a nice solution, symbolic links and the excellent, free Dropbox (referral link if you don’t have it) provide a cleaner, transparent solution.

A Flickr photoset of Apple’s HTML5 Showcase on a Newton’s 15-year-old browser.

The fact that these pages are viewable on something so old is a strong argument for both accessibility and semantic markup. Flash and other binary-based resources can’t claim this (of course). This bodes well not just for accessibility and flexible design, but also on future-proof web content; a win for everyone.

It may just be me, but Safari 4.0.5 (released yesterday) is not using nearly as much memory as prior versions. Perhaps Top Sites was to blame more than I thought. Here’s to hoping it continues to improve. I think the experience of Safari is still superior to other Mac browsers, but not for a hug performance hit.

Should I Flash for a website?

I recently had a coworker ask for articles/rationale for not using Flash for a website. While nothing here is original, the hope is to provide a quick, basic summary of reasons why Flash may not be a good choice for website content. Some issues with Flash:

A few thoughts from Apple’s announcements are underwhelming

NOT EVEN Apple messiah Steve Jobs could be bothered to get out of bed for the fruit-themed company’s announcements at its World Wide Developers Conference yesterday.

(Bias disclosure: I’ve been a Mac user for over 20 years and am an AAPL shareholder. I do not claim to be dispassionate about this :-)

So the iPad has come out, and the questions have begun: Is there a place for it in the average computer user’s life? Isn’t it just a big iPod touch? Why doesn’t it do X?

I was writing a small Rails app for work to allow faculty and students to sign up for various events. So I had a Signup model :has_many timeslots that :has_many people. I needed to retrieve the email addresses for people that had signed up for timeslots after a certain time (i.e. all the people that had registered for a timeslot after Saturday at 10:00). Since the timeslots may not be in chronological order, I couldn’t find timeslots by a timeslot id.

Gustavo Duarte has an excellent article on the joys of programming. He notes “Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.” and he’s right.

Another reason to like the Mac community is this comparison of Safari and Firefox 3 rendering styles. The fact that there are people that care this much about title bar gradients shows why Mac community’s emphasis on look and feel contribute to the overall user experience.