Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

Dashboard: Benevolent Pragmatism

Who would have thought the “Little Browser That Could” would create such a flap in the web standards community? After reading Dave Hyatt’s explanation about what HTML extensions Apple is adding to WebKit, I am simply in awe at how far little-known KHTML has come under the tutelage of one very talented person at one very idealistic company. To do what Apple has done with this rudimentary rendering engine in less than two years is nothing short of amazing.

So now that Dave’s fit WebKit with a gown for the ball, Apple is looking for some glass slippers. Enter Dashboard extensions. Enter shortly thereafter, Eric Meyer. Eric rightly questions Apple’s implementation plan, yet recognizes and respects what Dave and his team are trying to accomplish. Instead of offering a blanket condemnation of everything Dashboard stands for, Eric clenches his fists a few times, breathes deeply, and offers constructive suggestions that only he and a handful of other people in the world are even capable of thinking of. As a result of these suggestions, Dave listens, thinks, and responds positively before the dust can even settle.

This is what happens when two smart people listen to each other.

It is commendable enough that Apple has been this open with the development of Safari, but to show this sort of flexibility and transparency is a huge break in tradition for the normally covert company. After all, we’re talking about an operation who has fired people for discussing the tint of aluminum used in their cases. Apple, past and present, is legendary for its ability to keep a lid on things, and yet with Safari it not only breaks this model but turns it completely on its face.
Read more…

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Creating Sports Fans, One Baby at a Time

Little ESPN Malachi McCall turns three years old next month. The smiling boy from Pampa, Texas, pictured on the right, will be getting a visit from us as part of a two-hour ESPN25 television special in which he and two other youngsters named after the network will be featured.

Here is a quote from reporter Lori Yount of the Amarillo Globe:

“His middle name is a biblical messenger of God, so his parents sometimes call him ‘the sports messenger’.”

Oh my.

This kid should have no trouble making the football team.

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Bloglines Redesigned!

Well it’s about half past midnight right now and it looks like Bloglines just relaunched a few minutes ago with a spankin’ new design. It’s always weird catching redesigns as they happen. You’re at the old site one minute, then you click a link and it’s like the Wizard of Oz all of a sudden.

Although I’ve only played with the shiny new interface for about 20 minutes now, I have to say that I am thoroughly impressed so far. It feels like there is quite a bit of new functionality to enjoy, and yet I don’t feel disoriented or sick to my stomach as with some other recent redesigns. A huge part of the challenge in redesigning a major site is to inject freshness while not alienating loyal users. I salute thee, Bloglines, for succeeding in this regard.

Among the new features are:

A simple point-and-click publishing system for creating your own blog
A new Clippings metaphor to replace the existing Saved Items feature
A skinnable blogroller
A slightly retooled reading interface
A more informative front page
Enhanced searching and sharing capabilities
Sliding-Doors style zoomable tabs (a la Douglas Bowman)

… and lots of other stuff I’m too tired to test out right now.

All in all, this looks like another successful improvement of what is already my most visited site on the ‘Net. Sure I’d like to see more interactivity, more out-of-browser functionality, and smarter aggregation routines, but in the meantime, I’m happy with these incremental improvements.

Content aggregation has not even entered its golden age yet, but Bloglines continues to show us the way when it comes to no-nonsense web-based information gathering.

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HTML Language Equals Javascript

Today marked the launch of Microsoft’s vaunted new MSN Search site. The new front-page design is so clean you could eat off it. With such a simple, spartan layout, you’d think the code would be museum-quality as well.

I am not one to bring out the firing squad for minor validation errors, but the very first line of MSN’s search page is pure folly:

Yes. I’m not kidding. HTML language equals javascript. And English equals C++. It took the MSN Search team exactly 7 characters to mess this up. I guess that’s what $100 million buys you these days.

Here is an archive link in case things have changed by the time you read this article.

If there was any doubt whether or not most major sites have caught the standards bug yet, the answer is clearly no. We love our MSNs and our Googles and our Yahoos but none have yet to exhibit any real effort with regard to designing with standards. As I’ve said in previous posts, it is more important to judge web sites on what they offer versus whether or not they validate, but spectacles like this show just how far some companies are from even making a decent effort. I will reserve overall judgment on the new MSN search site until I see how well it works for me, but this just doesn’t look like a great start.

History says that regardless of user experience or code quality, the new MSN search site will be relatively “popular” once it’s baked into every corner of the Windows environment. So the question is, with this power to pervade, does it really even matter how good the code is?

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Treoing your Tivo

Jason Shellen, of Google, wrote briefly today about his experience programming a Tivo from a Treo 600 cell phone. Jason was using Tivo’s new “Online Scheduling” feature and sounded very impressed with the whole experience.

I’ve been scheduling recordings on my Series 1 DirecTivo with my Treo 600 phone for several months now, but I’ve been using the open source TivoWeb software instead. Installing the tiny TivoWeb package on your box turns it into a full-fledged web server with access to the outside world. The end result is that from any browser in the world (including the nice one on the Treo), you can access every aspect of your Tivo’s interface. You can even search for programs or physically change what channel your TV is tuned to… all via IP. And since TivoWeb is HTML and CSS driven, it’s a snap to create stylesheets which look great on desktop browsers and handheld devices as well.

So I’m wondering… has anyone tried both the official Tivo Online Scheduling feature and the TivoWeb Project’s open-source implementation? Are there any compelling reasons to use one over the other? I’m sure the lack of command-line setup and other Unix scariness is a big plus on the side of Tivo’s official service, but is it as powerful as what the TivoWeb Project gives you? In other words, can I freak housesitters out by changing channels from halfway across the world?

I think if more people were aware of features like remote scheduling, we wouldn’t see the levels of DVR/VCR ambivalence we still see in the market today. Why is Doogie Howser telling me how to pause football games when a less annoying celebrity could be telling me about remote scheduling?

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Making Visited Links Radical

Everyone does visited links differently. Jakob Neilson flunkies use the old school blue-and-purple combo to help show visitors where they’ve been. People with actual design taste use more palatable colors, or perhaps a font-weight variation instead. When Mike Industries launched, visited links differentiated themselves with a subtle grey background.

Although I liked the grey background implementation, it started to look more like a highlighter pen than anything else.

I decided to rethink the situation.

Since doing normal stuff is no fun, I decided to experiment with the :after pseudo class. What character could one insert after a link to indicate that the link had already been checked? Hmmm. How about a checkmark? The standard ISO character set gives us the mathematical “radical” sign (√) which looks remarkably like a hand sketched checkmark at small sizes. So this should be easy, right? You’d think something like this would do the trick:

a:visited:after {
	content: " &radic;";
	font-size: 75%;
}

Nope. It turns out that prints the actual encoded character series for radical after each link. But by using the unicode entity instead ( \221A ), the checkmark renders perfectly after each visited link:

a:visited:after {
	content: " 1A";
	content: "a:visited:after {
	content: " \221A";
	content: "\00A0\221A";
	font-size: 75%;
}
A01A";
	font-size: 75%;
}

* Thanks to Jens Meiert for improving this technique as illustrated above by using a non-breaking space before the radical, instead of a regular space.

I am not so naive to think this has never been done before, but I certainly do like the effect. Sure, the :after pseudo class isn’t supported in PC IE, but at least it degrades silently in feature-challenged browsers.

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Mike Industries Zeitgeist: Week One

Well it’s been a good first week here at Mike Industries. Over 50,000 page views, plenty of scathing editorial and healthy discussion in the comment threads, and not a single piece of hate mail! Not that readers might be interested in such things, but I thought I’d share some of the nuggets gleaned from ShortStat during the first week:

Total Page Views: 50,304
Top Platforms: Windows – 69%, Mac – 25%, Linux – 2%
Top Browsers: Firefox – 41% (wow), IE – 23%, Safari – 17%
Top Three Referrers: Mezzoblue, Zeldman, Kottke
Most interesting referrer: The “Eater” (what the hell is this?)
Coolest blog discovered via referrer: Thought Anomalies
Number of deaths reported from the Invalidator Badge: 0*

Anyway, more ramblings are on the way this weekend. Thanks to everyone who has put up with them so far. Expect updates to this site once or twice a week as excess mental energy allows.

* In case there was any doubt, yes, the Invalidator Badge is clearly hyperbole.

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You Know You’re a Design Dork When…

You know you’re a design dork when this is just about the funniest comic you’ve ever seen:
(Original comic available at bancomicsans.com)

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Converting CGI Movable Type Templates to PHP

I love Movable Type. I really do. But there are two things about it which really chap my hide. The first is that it doesn’t offer dynamic page serving, so I must recompile my entire site after making a change. I can live with this problem as recompiling is just a question of hitting a button and waiting awhile.

The second problem, however, is that Six Apart left a few important pages as raw CGI queries. I’m talking mainly about the Search Results page, the Comment Listing page, and the Trackback page. I understand why the company initially set things up this way since when Movable Type first came out, not nearly as many people were using PHP as they are now. But now that PHP is so widespread, it would sure be nice if the company offered its customers an easy way to convert these templates to PHP.

Short of this, I’d like to share the ways I de-CGI’d these templates on Mike Industries. If you build portions of your pages dynamically with PHP, this entry is for you.
Read more…

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Giving Full Typographic Control to the User

So I have this friend named Lavina who occasionally sends me e-mails and instant messages set in Comic Sans. I have told her repeatedly that this font has been officially banned, but she “just likes it” and continues to use it in various pieces of correspondence… even if it is just to piss me off.

So that got me thinking, should a website allow you to explicitly set the typeface of what you’re reading? Most sites set the typeface for you. My site gives you several choices derived from what I find to be very readable faces: Lucida Grande, Verdana, Helvetica, etc. But what about the edge case that just really loves Comic Sans? Should I throw Comic Sans in my dropdown menu on the right side of this site? Clearly not, unless I want to be publicly ridiculed at work.

What I decided to try instead was adding a custom font field to the Readability section on the right side of this site. Click the “Or, specify your own…” link and type in any font you have installed on your system. Then, hit the “Set” button and voila! Mike Industries will reluctantly render in whatever twisted typeface you happen to think of that day. Even Comic Sans. Or worse yet, Giddyup (see picture above). The only downside is that you need to type the font name in exactly as your system labels it. So for instance, on the Mac, “ComicSansMS” works but “Comic Sans” does not. If you have a particular font you’d like to specify, just try a few variations of its name, with and without spaces, and you’ll get it after a few tries. If you don’t get it, the site will just render in whatever your default font is.

One thing I’d really like to be able to do with this is have a dropdown menu with all the fonts a user has installed instead of making people type a font name in. Does anybody have any idea if this is possible? My suspicion is that if it is, it may require writing something OS-specific… bad.

So for now, please enjoy the Custom Font Selector, and let me know if you have any ideas to improve it. I feel like this functionality is best suited for OS X users right now because we get to view true anti-aliased Postscript fonts in our browsers, but as mentioned with regard to Comic Sans, Windows users can “benefit” too.

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