My Little Corner of the Net

Facebook is Becoming MySpace

Written by Kodiak on 08/16/2007 — Leave a Comment

I got frustrated last night when part of a project I was building failed to work as I had expected.  Lacking the motivation to find a solution I began surfing around on Facebook.

I’ve always liked Facebook because of its clean, clear interface.  It is easy to figure out, easy to navigate, and not overly cluttered.  Being a coder and web geek myself, I also give props to the developers for opening up the Facebook API to developers and for creating the Facebook Platform that lets developers integrate their custom apps into the Facebook site.

In contrast, I’ve never much cared for rival site MySpace because of its cluttered interface and the fact that they apparently do no filtering of user-entered HTML code–which not only allows users to create hideous and unreadable profile pages but also allows scammers to add annoying potentially dangerous JavaScript code to the site.

Facebook seems to handle the security side of things a bit better than MySpace (by opening up the API, however, they have created a potential to let users’ data into the wrong hands, but they also do a good job of warning users about this before allowing them to connect to third-party apps).  By launching the Platform, however, Facebook has kissed their clean interface good bye.

Since most third-party apps are created by “hobby” developers there isn’t a lot of thought or design going into them.  Unlike the original interface–which I am sure was designed by a professional designer–most of the applications I’ve seen seem to be slapped together with no thought for the look or usability.  This is, unfortunately, to be expected—very few code-types have a knack for design—the whole left-brain, right-brain thing.  This, combined with the fact that most users seem to add every application they can find to their profile pages, is leading to Facebook profiles that are almost as obnoxious as  those on MySpace.

This rant notwithstanding, I still find Facebook to be the superior product and I still enjoy using it to keep in touch with old friends and on the goings-on of groups in the community.  I wish I had a solution to clean things up, but because of the nature of the beast, I really don’t think there is one.

Posted in General, Websites

Worth A Mention: Klee’s Car Wash

Written by Kodiak on 06/14/2007 — Leave a Comment

Nothing beats washing a car by hand, but that takes time I don’t have and, especially when my car is particularly dirty, a quick run through an automatic car wash is the next best thing. That was the case today. After a trip to Massachusetts last weekend my car was completely covered by bug guts and bird droppings—some of the hardest stuff to get off. I took the car to Klee’s Car Wash on Jefferson Road at lunch today to take car of that problem.

I’ve been going to Klee’s for years. They are locally owned, which I like. They also offer a discount to RIT faculty, staff, and students, which is nice. Neither of those reasons is the reason I go, however. I go there because they really get my car clean.

Today, for example, the guy working the entrance spent a good 10 minutes spraying my car with cleaner and power spraying it down to ensure that all of the bugs were gone, before my car even entered the car wash. At the other end another very friendly guy chatted with me while he hand dried my car, making sure that nearly every last drop of water was wiped up.

Another semi-locally owned chain down the street is better known for their car wash, but my car always looks “kinda clean” when it comes out. They also charge me a “large vehicle fee” since I have an SUV. Why does it matter what size my car is? Its not like it takes their machines any more time or effort to clean my car just because it is a couple feet taller than a sedan! At Klee’s my car always come out totally clean and they give me a discount to boot.

Posted in General, RIT, Rochester

A Windows Safari

Written by Kodiak on 06/14/2007 — Leave a Comment

Several years ago, when Apple first released OS X and with it the Safari browser, I was rather excited. The browser was fast and standards compliant. It worked great, had a nice clean UI, and didn’t come with a lot of bloat. There was just one little thing that prevented me from adopting it: I’m a Windows user.

Yesterday, while reading Eric Meyer’s blog, I discovered that Apple had released a public beta of Safari 3, including a version for Windows. Eric links to other blogs that suggest that Apple is doing this to allow Windows-based developers to test their web apps to prepare them for the iPhone.

I downloaded the beta this morning and installed it. The installation was smooth and uneventful. Once done, I closed out the installer and clicked on the new Safari icon on my desktop. Safari loaded quite fast and presented me with a page on the Apple site. Just one problem, though: no fonts! No menus, no buttons, and no text on the page. A quick Google search revealed that I am not alone and that font support seems to be a major issue for WinSafari right now.

I tried a few of the workarounds that I found, finding one that fixed the font issue on the rendered page, but I still had no fonts on the UI (which, BTW, prevents me from typing a new address into the location bar). I’ll continue to hunt for a fix as I have time, but at the moment I don’t have time.

Three or four years ago having Safari on Windows would have been a godsend. Back then my browser choices were Microsoft Internet Explorer 6–with all of its quirkiness–or the slow and bloated Netscape 7. Mozilla at the time was still too unstable to use as a primary browser platform. Since then Firefox has come into its own as a very stable, mature, browser and has become my primary platform. At the moment I can’t imagine giving up my highly customized (via extensions) Firefox install, even if Safari is a bit faster. Still though, WinSafari does have potential.

Posted in Cool, General, Web Design & Programming, Websites

I’m Addicted to IconBuffet

Written by Kodiak on 06/13/2007 — Leave a Comment

OK, its official, I’m addicted to IconBuffet. IconBuffet, if you aren’t aware, is a icon site. It is a commercial site that sells icon sets to software and web developers. That, in itself, isn’t all that exciting, even though their icons are very nice looking and relatively inexpensive. What’s cool about the site is the Free Deliveries and the community behind them.

In a nutshell, Free Deliveries are small sets of themed icons. The developers occasionally send members a random set and the recipients are free to do as their please once they get it. The free icons can be used for personal or commercial projects, modified, whatever. About the only thing you can’t do with them is sell them to others. One thing that members can do however is share their deliveries with other members. Each month every member gets a set of tokens that can be exchanged for icon deliveries from other members. Icon sets are marked as either bronze, silver, gold, or diamond and each level costs a different number of tokens. To send icons you need stamps—sending an icon set costs you one stamp, and for every set you receive you also receive five stamps so that you can share it. The community is very friendly and someone is always willing to fill a request if you ask.

Sound cool? Sign up using this link and I’ll send you whatever sets you’d like (provided I still have the stamps available). Just whisper your requests to me (via “The Box” on my profile page) after you sign up. In case you’re confused, my username on the site is “kodiak.”

Posted in Cool, General, Websites

YAHOO! User Interface

Written by Kodiak on 02/28/2007 — 1 Comment

I generally consider myself a back-end guy, preferring to program in languages like PHP to generate dynamic web pages. The front end and the user experience is still important, but that is the area that I, admittedly, give the least thought. I do make every effort on the server side to ensure usability and accessibility of my pages, but that’s generally where I stop. I’ve never been a fan of using JavaScript simply because a) you can never be sure that it will work in the user’s browser, b) every browser does it differently, and c) having JavaScript “widgets” on a page in a non-JavaScript browser generally means that there are things on the page that are not accessible–a big no no in my book.

My thoughts, however, are starting to change. Several months ago I discovered the YAHOO! User Interface library (or YUI for short), the same JavaScript library that adds all the dynamic eye candy you find on YAHOO! owned sites like Flickr and Upcoming.org. Like so many others probably have, I downloaded a copy of the YUI library, extracted the files, and played with the examples. Then, of course, I stopped and moved on to other things.

Last week I had a sudden renewed interest in the YUI. I downloaded a new copy and started playing with the examples again. This time I actually started looking at the code and the docs and started doing stuff with it. In my experimentation I discovered that the YAHOO.util.Event object is a really powerful piece of code, giving developers consistent event handling across browser platforms. In addition its onAvailable() and onContentReady() methods allow you to register event handlers that will fire as soon as an element is detected in the DOM, but before the page loads. This gives you the ability to add content to a page dynamically AFTER the page has left the server, but before the page’s onload event fires, making it possible to add JavaScript-required features to a page once you’ve determined that the browser supports them. Non-JS users will just get the page as is from the server–they’ll miss out on the “bells and whistles,” but they won’t lose any accessibility either (assuming the page coming from the server is accessible, of course).

So far I have created one custom widget: a popup date picker object based on YUI’s calendar component. It exists in a custom namespace (IB.datepicker) so that it can be dropped in to most any page without worry of naming conflicts. All you need to do is call its initialize() method to set it up on the page and attach() it to as many text input objects as you’d like. I plan to release it (under BSD license) once I do some more testing, but if anyone is interested in beta testing it, just leave me a comment and I’ll hook you up.

Posted in Cool, General, Site News, Web Design & Programming, Websites
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