Spot on zinger by Gruber:

I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)

To keep your bookmarks and RSS feed favicons looking shiny, I changed the onpaws.com favicon again. I was getting tired of the crusty current one which I made on a whim one day:

Passable at 64×64, but it always looked crummy at the more commonly seen 16×16:

After becoming intimately reacquainted with the various ways to disable Photoshop’s on by default selections and fill anti aliasing, I started with a 16×16 canvas this time, using the pencil tool and as per usual keeping the background transparent. This was a candidate:

But I’m happy with this new one for now- it retains the motif of circle + ‘p’ descender from onpaws -> op.

What do you think?

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.

Aimfight.com was posted at Slashdot today. The site is a simple incarnation of social networking visualization, and represents another emergence of this untapped field. Compared to the extensive amounts of web research, social networking isn’t nearly as explored, likely because the two markets are thoroughly different.
In the world of Internet-life, email represents real mail, where friends’ messages and junk mail both arrive in your inbox. The web is harder to model, but suffice it to say that Amazon and eBay are like physical stores, just with exceedingly large stockrooms. Chatting, therefore, is most similar to a telephone conversation. It’s between two people, and you can’t just call anyone without knowing their screenname/phone number first.

This inherent privacy is largely the reason social networking is still so unexplored. It’s a tough sell to ask people for their buddy list for “research,” just like its hard to get a copy of someone’s address book – for “research” or not. Imagine a future where Amazon customer representatives send you IMs like telemarketers. Spam has no place in the chat room’s hallowed walls!

So I’ve been working at my summer job. Similar to most reasonable people, I like telemarketing about as much as Marmite (that is to say, not very much at all). However, I do get to work on their website code, which is currently absolutely abysmal. Things like the same stylesheet declared twice or unused inline styles in every page is quite sloppy, so it’s been satisfying cleaning things out. The only irritating aspect of the job is the awful fonts and dated layout which I’m supposed to live with. I’m not allowed to change the page layout because it’s “been approved” by the high ups. Blech.

Of course this means I’m replacing all the yucky table code with CSS. Don’t tell anyone, they won’t notice I’ve been coding the layout because it will look exactly the same, but now pass W3 validation. I hope I can fudge that layout rule at least a little bit though, the navigation bar I made for the top is about 100x nicer than that awful splotchy Goosebumps font.

P.S. If you ever come across an opportunity to use a PCI video card with an already-installed AGP card, save yourself three hours of Googling and hand wringing. Set the PCI card to be the “Primary” in the BIOS and everything will just work. Kind of like a Mac.
[nerd quotient: fulfilled]

JavaScript has certainly come a long way.

In between the innumerable midterms I’ve had in the past two weeks I’ve been learning a bunch of web technologies, including PHP, MySQL, and CSS. A cool trend I’ve noticed has been the consistencies between all of these languages and things I have already learned. PHP has classes and functions, just like Java/C++, and CSS has a very straightforward, logical structure. Programming is definitely a difficult skill in general, but things like this help.

Since my first major project idea is unacceptable to CSH, my second idea is happaning instead. Simply stated, it’s going to be a Major Project database where people can log in and edit the projects they own or view a list of upcoming projects. I hope its up to par in time…its already taken forever and a day so far just to learn the skills necessary.

I had a lot of homework to catch up with this weekend. Instead of doing that, I learned a lot about the new hotness that is CSS. Turns out its the secret to making awesome sites in much less time than used to be required.

I’ve only been kind of slacking with this site redesign thing but its going to be pretty cool when its done.

Web design is one of those fields I’d love to do as a ‘real job’ if I expected to actually get a ‘real job’ as a designer. But maybe thats just the half empty glass talking.