Recent U.I. Progress for Firefox 4.0 on Windows

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Longtime Firefox user interface designer Stephen Horlander offers an update on his continuing work on the browser’s next Windows version. It’s a fascinating peek behind the scenes at how an intensively scrutinized design project balances platform evolution, user feedback, team input and new ideas. It’s well worth a read, as is this wiki page that more formally documents how the user interface is changing with upcoming releases.

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Basic Maths on Sale This Week

When Allan Cole and I released our WordPress theme back in November, we set the price slightly lower than we originally intended, in order to make it as affordable as possible straight out of the gate. But the response was so great that we ended up just leaving it there at US$45 — until now. As a sort of holiday special, Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. That’s a terrific deal for a one of the very finest blog themes around on any platform. If you haven’t already got your copy, here’s your chance to get a great deal on it. Click here to buy.

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The Black List 2009

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Fantastic, insider-y preview of promising movie scripts that the film industry is keeping an eye on. “Compiled every year from the suggestions of 311 film executives, each contributes the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.”

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NYT: Data Shows AT&T Has a Better Network Than Verizon

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Randall Stross digs deeper and finds that despite customer satisfaction surveys that suggest Verizon has a clear advantage, independent research shows that AT&T actually has better data throughput and signal strength than any of its competitors. In fact, design flaws in how the iPhone connects to cell towers — and the device’s massive popularity — may contribute to the poor network experience that most consumers attribute to AT&T.

“AT&T’s besting of Verizon in these tests is all the more remarkable considering the sudden jump in the volume of mobile data that its network has had to handle with the introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008: approximately 4,000 percent.”

Waiting to hear the alternative arguments…

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Backing Up Over Broadband

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested a number of online backup solutions, and found them all lacking. Some are disappointingly constructed and others seem feature-poor, but no matter how well they were designed they all share a single fatal flaw: consumer broadband in the United States is insufficient for backing up the dozens of gigabytes that an average user requires.

Still, the fact that broadband is the problem is progress, given my past experiences with backing up my data. I used to find that backup solutions were expensive or complicated to implement — a decade ago, I used the completely bewildering Retrospect and a prohibitively expensive tape backup system to back up my files — or tried to, anyway. The setup was unwieldy enough that I ran backups erratically, at best, and an erratic backup is not much better than none at all.

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