Archives

The Many Crimes of Internet Explorer

Internet ExplorerSome people just think that my efforts to warn Internet Explorer users that the fidelity of this site is compromised when viewed in that Web browser is just a showy way of picking a fight. Maybe a little. But I’m being genuine when I say that the way Subtraction.com renders in I.E. is maddeningly imperfect, and I just haven’t the time or patience really to try and troubleshoot the problems. What I do have time for is a nitpicking catalog of those imperfections.

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Miss Manners Guide to Opening Links in New Windows

New Window IconAt work we had a debate late in the day today about whether the links to projects in our portfolio should, when clicked upon, open up in a new browser window. My feeling is that, no, they should not, citing various usability recommendations against the practice (more here and here), and also the fact that the way the Web is evolving, popping up new windows is a practice most often used in hard-sell situations (insert links to any given hard core pornography site here).

Personally, it annoys the heck out of me when a Web site opens up a new window, as I think it’s bad manners and has the feel of amateurishness. But I admit that viewpoint could be just a combination of a skewed, blog-centric view of the Web (few if any weblogs open links in any new windows, by my count) and my own personal capacity for stubbornness.

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Lose Your Head

The 2005 edition of Macworld San Francisco is next week, and the Mac-focused Web sites are all worked up, as is their wont, over various, rumored announcements that may or may not come during the keynote address. There’s talk of a “headless Mac” in the US$500 price range, and also murmurs (and circumstantial evidence) of a productivity suite called “iWork.” These completely unqualified murmurings have me a little worked up too.

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Voice-over-IP for Dummies

Vonage PhoneSince about 1998, I’ve been using the prepaid calling services at Big Zoo which, for my money, was one of the best long distance deals to be had anywhere: 3.9¢ per minute to phone anyone in the continental United States, and extremely cheap rates for international connections. Given those prices, I would spend as little as US$5 a month (paid through their Web site at my discretion and in increments of US$10) on calls to friends and family scattered around the country.

Big Zoo did require the inconvenience of dialing an 800 number and then entering a PIN to access my account, but I didn’t mind it, especially given that, over the past several years, the service was remarkably reliable. But then the company announced in December that they’d be shuttering their doors at the end of this month due to excessive competitive pressures with which they couldn’t keep pace. Bummer.

The idea of returning to plain old long distance rates as sold by AT & T now seemed ridiculous to me, so I decided to look into Vonage, a leader in the much ballyhooed voice-over-IP market. Through their Web site, I signed up and ordered a home connection kit, which was delivered to me in less than a week. I received it just after Christmas, and tried to hook it up this past Thursday night.

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Keys to the Keyboard Kingdom

Matias Tactile ProLots of people have been singing the praises of the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard, which bills itself as the resurrection of “the best keyboard Apple ever made.” According to Matias, the Tactile Pro is built from the same “premium keyswitch technology” behind the original Apple Extended Keyboard, which many longtime Macintosh users tend to remember with great affection. That one had a satisfying ‘clickety-clack’ quality that suggested solid construction and a definitive level of responsiveness to typing fingers. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it had a very macho quality in comparison to today’s more cheaply made keyboards, which are often referred to as ‘mushy.’

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Dear Outdated Online Diary

Eagle-eyed readers may notice that I used to boast of having started posting here way back in December 2000, but with this redesign, the Quick Access area in the right-hand column now says July 2000. The reason is an early, abortive attempt at an online journal — a kind of proto-blog — that I tried to keep that summer, without the aid of any kind of blogging software. It started when I was under the illusion that the great heights of the Internet bubble were sustainable enough to set me up in style at my then-employer’s new offices in Singapore. Ha. That turned out to be not quite the case.

As I prepared to leave the States, it occurred to me that an online journal would be a good way to keep friends and family abreast of my progress in the East. This was before I was smart enough to use Movable Type or any kind of software that might have made my life easier. I wrote and produced this journal over the course of the next six months using only BBEdit and a painfully time-consuming willingness to code the pages by hand. The entries were fairly long and heavily edited, and each one took way more time than I spend on a typical post today.

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New, Improved Original Flavor!

Version 7.0This is it, the site is launched. As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll send out an email announcement and update the feeds so the new posts will start showing up in news readers. Not everything works perfectly yet, but it’s mostly here. If you’ve been patiently waiting for this day, I thank you for coming back.

Things have changed around here fairly dramatically, but I’ve tried to keep some sense of the old design. For comparison, here’s a post from last year with the Six.5 design, and here it is again with the version 7.0 design. Different but the same, right?

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love I.E.

Internet ExplorerUsers viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice just above the navigation that says, effectively, that that browser won’t “display this site quite as it was intended.” This is obnoxious, I know, but when I made a game plan to produce this redesign, I deliberately chose not to take too seriously the way it would look in Microsoft’s still-dominant Web browser.

This is partly because it’s loads easier to design for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and OmniWeb, and with so little time with which to make the redesign a reality, I decided to save myself an additional 20% heartache and pretty much ignore IE.

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Grid Computing… and Design

The layout grid I used for Subtraction Six.5 was improvised and inconsistent — I hobbled it together without much consideration or foresight, more interested in getting something finished than building something that would continue to make sense as I got more and more serious about the writing I post here. Over time, by virtue of repeated use, I became increasingly and lamentably invested in its tremendous shortcomings. When you make fairly liberal use of illustrations in your posts, you essentially wed yourself to the particulars of the CSS you’ve established, creating graphics of a certain width or ordering content in a particular method. It works in the short term, but it presents problems when you sit down to redesign.

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Back in the Saddle

It feels a little weird to sit down and write a post after a little over a month on hiatus, but here I am, doing it. I’ve finally got version 7.0 of this Web site in a state where it’s practically ready to launched. If everything goes correctly, I will stick to the announcement I made a few days ago and release 7.0 to the public on Mon 03 Jan, just in time for everyone to get back to surfing their favorite blogs after New Year’s day.

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