As is usual, Google is pushing the Web forward with their innovations in Web technology – this time around, we have Chromeframe, a plug-in that gives IE Chrome browser capabilities … that is to say, HTML5 ability.
From Google:
Enable open web technologies in Internet Explorer
Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:
* Start using open web technologies – like the HTML5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
* Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.
My take on this:
I’m not sure how practical this is for most web designers, but for the adventurous sort, this maybe something to explore. For instance:
– how well does the plug-in work?
– how easy is it to install: could you convince your IE7 and IE8 visitors to install it?
– can you degrade Chromeframe implementations gracefully?
So, if you are beginner or you are a hard-core in-your-face, I got no time to waste working web designer – forget this post for now.
I just made a blog post on killerphp.com about the Killersites University, you know … a little shameless self promotion to stoke the flames of capitalism.
Anyway, within minutes of making the post, Google emailed me an alert (a ‘Google Alerts’) about the post I just made – I’m talking literally 2-3 minutes!!
… Google is getting to be hyperbolic fast – jacked up on search engine roids or something!
😉
What are Google Alerts?
Just in case you don’t know, Google has this service called Google Alerts, where you can ask Google to send you emails about any keywords you want to spy on. For me, I track the term ‘killersites.com’ to see who’s stealing my content and to track what the general buzz is, if any, on what I do here.
What can I say … Google kicks ass. Good luck to Bing and Yahoo.
After a couple of months of hard work, we finally got the new video tutorial subscription system up and running.
About the University:
The Killersites University is a subscription based service that gives you total access to our GROWING collection of web design and web design related training videos. Not just a collection of tips and tricks videos, we provide complete video courses on popular subjects like:
* HTML
* CSS
* Dreamweaver
* PHP
* Javascript
* and much more
Now that we have the University up and running, we will be able to focus a lot more time on new videos. Subscribe to the RSS feed or one of my newsletters to keep up-to-date.
I just installed VMware Fusion Version 3.0.1 (215242) … and it seems to have solved the problems I listed below. Thanks be to the nerds – I use Fusion a lot!
The original post …
Hi,
I use both Windows and Mac machines at work. But still, when on the Mac, it is useful to have Windows available for those rare occasions where you need to jump quickly into Windows … some programs can still only be found on Windows.
You have a few choices when it comes to installing Windows on your Mac, but for me, Vmware Fusion has been my favorite because it works really well and hasn’t given me any problems … until now.
VMware-Fusion-3.0 is Buggy
I just installed and soon after, uninstalled the latest version (VMware Fusion 3) because Fusion 3:
– ran really slow as compared to VMware Fusion 2.x
– could not connect to the netwok adaptor card and thus the Web.
So once again, I broke my own rule of NEVER upgrading software, until at least a few months after the release date … for the bugs to work themselves out.
… For Microsoft software, I would extend that to as long as a year!
Facebook is one of the predominate social networking platforms out there today … ok, we all know that. Anyway, I have problems with many social networking sites … Facebook though, is a special beast.
The top 3 things that I don’t like about Facebook:
Security issues.
Privacy issues.
Lousy user interface.
Security
Putting all that information out there for everyone to see, for Facebook to catalog and sell … makes it really easy for people to create detailed profiles about you. Maybe I’m just an overly cautious nerd programmer, but I’m thinking that having all this personal information out there is not a good thing.
Privacy issues
Very much related to the security issue I just mentioned, privacy is lost when you start posting everything about yourself on Facebook. Another problem is the social aspect of it all – you may find yourself ‘connected’ to people by accident you may not want to be connected to.
It happened to me once, a friend of mine, who was friends with these Russian girls (that I did not know) … anyway, the Russian chicks started posting stuff to my profile page (something called The Wall) and that got me into trouble with someone, though I really had nothing to do with this.
.. Russian girls on Facebook can spell trouble!
Lousy user interface
Without a doubt, Facebook has a really sucky user interface. You’d figure with all that venture capitol money being pumped into that beast, they could get that right. Sending emails is a pain and Outlook, Thunderbird and just about every other email program works much better.
… The short time I used Facebook when I was traveling around Asia, I wasn’t sure half the time if what I was writing was public or private! It got to the point where I was a little nervous about posting anything.
As you may know, I am a big WordPress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the WordPress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the WordPress admin user interface.
What is Gears?
Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the WordPress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.
.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:
You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:
Once in a while, I use email questions sent to me as the subject of an article, this time the question is about whether someone should use a Mac or a PC if they want to get into web design.
… I’m thinking of becoming a web designer and I was wondering if I would be better off with a Mac or a PC? Is there any advantage to using one over the other when building websites?
Thanks,
Jason
Short answer: there is no real advantage on either PC (Windows) or Mac when it comes to web design. Here are the two reasons why:
The technology’s behind websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc…) are universal.
All the major software used in web design production can be found on both Mac and PC. The one exception maybe Web Expression from Microsoft.
Outside of web design, some would argue for Mac and others for PC. I use both, but I can see how some might prefer one or the other. That said, prior to the soon to be released Windows 7, Mac has had Windows beat hand-downs … all things considered.
With Windows 7 coming out though, I’ve heard from many reliable nerd sources, that Microsoft has really improved things a lot.
… I will almost certainly be upgrading my XP box when Windows 7 comes out.
Conclusion:
If you are looking to jump into web design, you are pretty much free with regards to which type of computer to get. I would be making my computer choice based on other things, for example:
I just updated to Firefox 3.5.2 in hopes that it might fix some issues I have been having with it on Mac. I can’t say if it has fixed anything yet, but I did discover something new: Firefox now supports the free Open Video Format.
What? Don’t we have Flash already?
Yes, we have Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and others to embed video into our web pages, but in all those cases, we need to use an outside plugin. With this new video format, you just use plain old HTML!
Some details from Wiki:
As originally recommended by HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:
* Mozilla Firefox 3.5
* Google Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 [1]
* Opera video build
–
Theora is the name of this free video compression format/codec and it produces video quality that is about the same as h.264 – the video format Adobe has decided to use to replace their own FLV format. So it should be pretty good.
To encode your videos into Theora, you will need to find a video encoder that does this. There are already several out there and I am sure more will come out over time … since already several browsers can play Theora videos. For now, you may want to try a video encoder that you can install right into Firefox!
This is cool except for the fact that until Internet Explorer allows us to embed Theora … it’s a no go. Internet Explorer still has the vast majority of browser market, so we as web designers have to build within its’ limitations.
I’m a big fan of Firefox and it has been my primary browser for a few years now. That said, Firefox can never seem to get it right on the Mac – it always seems to have some problem somewhere.
At this time, I am using the latest release of Firefox for the Mac (3.0.13) and this release fixes some earlier bugs Firefox had that made it crash a lot. But in exchange, now the Flash player is not working to well .. it doesn’t seem to respond to mouse clicks and I have to use the keyboard to do things like play a Youtube video.
… The solution maybe to reinstall the Flash player, I still have to try.
The Larger Point
Maybe it’s me, but the consistent problems that Firefox on Mac has, is not something you see on Windows. Yes, Firefox on Windows seems to work just fine. The Firefox team should push a little more of that donated money towards Mac development.
