Tonight I came across an update from the IE team. This topic was also covered at A List Apart. Its best to read those articles first - its on a key Web Standards issue (short version: to trigger ’standards mode’ in IE8 a new meta tag will be required on your pages) and I think a thorny one.

Sometimes you read something and instantly you feel that something is awry. I wasn’t alone either (although the author the esteemed Eric Meyer comes out with support for the solution):

As I read through Aaron Gustafson’sBeyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, my immediate gut reaction was deeply negative. The version-targeting mechanism Aaron described was just wrong, completely backwards, the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. Every one of my instincts, honed over a decade-plus of web development, was in opposition.

I should begin by saying - I am not one to bag all things Microsoft - I think too many people anthropomorphize companies like Microsoft and Google. In this situation however my gut reaction is to disagree with their proposed solution because it feels like yet another complication is to be added to publishing web content.

The burden of majority market share and a user-base of many millions is certainly something that will throw all sorts of confusing considerations into their pathway and thus I expect some missteps along the way (as I would from any organization).

The great thing about having the IE team blogging however is that there can be dialogue with the community and the best pathway can be illuminated through that dialogue.

The aspects that I feel are wrong about IE8 requiring a meta tag to enter standards mode are :

• The list of things developers need to do to accommodate for IE grows again.
• It feels like we are forced to trade an extra meta tag to get IE to behave.
• The article argues our mothers will have IE8. Maybe our Mums can wait for IE8 until the sites on the web incorrectly accommodating for IE7 are corrected? I implore you - ask your Mum about IE8 tonight - let me know what she says.
• I don’t like documents ‘knowing’ about what renders them.
• Something Mum once said about putting your best foot forward.
• IE9 will require a golden key embedded in your page to unlock its level 23 rendering engine.

The weird thing is I do like versioning things - we use versioning as a safety net - much as its being proposed for IE8. I guess it just doesn’t feel like the web I know. I like the idea of browser companies trying hard to render my site correctly rather than me trying to test and code for all the browsers out there.

I hate reading posts of dissent which don’t provide alternatives so here’s my hastily constructed one; Rename IE and no longer use any trace of that name to identify it.

The existing web with IE specific code only kicks in for IE. The new branded browser from Microsoft ditches the older rendering engines - drops its weight and runs like its a new entrant to the market.

Anyway, I note it here; I disagree.

I used Macs a lot at University and whilst I didn’t completely revile them they certainly weren’t compelling enough to convert me. Price-wise the divide was large and software support was niche at best. Apple has come a long way since then playing an excellent strategic game supporting the progression of the Mac hardware as the ‘every-platform’ through BootCamp and their support ofvirtualization software, Parallels.

For me however the seduction was not one of purely access to a large variety of software - I’d seen the Mac find leading software products in almost every category of software I cared about. For me the issue was the taxing burden that poorly realised user-interfaces on Windows Pcs that wore me down. As time becomes a more precious commodity I found time wasted battling interface which could have been spent doing frustrated me to despair.

A few weeks into owning my new Macbook and I am still amazed at how few battles I’ve had to fight to be productive on it. I am discovering new software to replace my Windows favorites - where it was FeedDemon its now NetNewsWire (I think Newsgator may be able to attribute a portion of sales to the growing numbers of Mac converts); Windows LiveWriter (which I commended the Windows Live team highly on - Mac version please?) is currently surplanted by a trial version of MarsEdit; Firefox has surprisingly been replaced by Safari - I don’t know how long this will last as I am a great fan of the rich set of plugins available for Firefox but for now its probably the lighter information load I am dealing with on the new machine that is making Safari such a pleasure.

On the bang for buck front - I went with the standard MacBook and am glad I did so. For the price of a low to mid-range laptop you get a faster, quieter more pleasant to use machine. For all the tasks I’ve thrown at it I’ve not yet hit anything that has made me need to think about the hardware. And that’s the way it should be.

One final note: having used the Mac’s DVI out for connecting with my telly I think if you have a DVI enabled TV then a MacMini represents incredible value for you.

I am on Dreamhost which I find a pretty neat service - it has Mysql, subversion, php5, one-click installs of wordpress… One thing that I always seem to stuff up though is my upgrades of Wordpress.

This is not Dreamhost’s fault (although I would encourage them to have the option of deploying apps into Subversion so that applying deltas after one-click upgrades would be a cinch) but really down to me not remembering to do every step.

Here are my steps so that I and anyone else looking to solve an issue after upgrade may find resolution :

1. Do the 1-click upgrade and then actually wait for confirmation it has occured (I often forget about it completely and hence never get to step 2 or 3).
2. Make sure you then run the db upgrade script (wp-admin/upgrade.php). WP didn’t remind me to do this or I overlooked it. The consequence of not doing this could be a broken feed due to a missing table error.
3. Reapply any changes you have made - for instance I have added an ‘ob_end_clean’ before generation of RSS feeds to ensure there is no whitespace that annoys XML parsers - something that became an issue for this blog a while back. Again the consequence of not doing this could be a broken page or feed.

Simple, huh? Except I forget at least one of these steps every time. It goes to show that those things that are seldom on your mind get filed away in a manner less retrievable than the search function on this blog. Hopefully I remember to read this post next time!

I used to get frustrated when someone beat me to a post, especially when my post had been delayed due to other committments. I’ve shrugged that off these days as I like being economical and afterall, linking to existing related work is sort of the point of hypertext, right?

One of the blogs I subscribe to, ‘Software As She’s Developed’ by Michael Mahemoff covered and extended upon some thoughts and frustrations I’d been having with ecommerce sites recently (or forever, I guess).

I’d recently decided that I should get over my disappointment with the I-Mate KJam and should get a new phone. Having been burnt before I wanted to research the phone well and feel like I had surveyed what is available. Being in the field I am I surmised that online would be the place to undertake this research. It would be a pinch. A saturday morning would do it, surely.

I have now decided, after days of research, that it is impossible to do thorough shopping research painlessly online. I can only assume that the expense of setting up a good online shopping experience is beyond but the biggest of players. And even the good examples I found are not yet frictionless from frontpage to checkout and are also rarely localised to Australia yet.

This post covers a few technical reasons why many sites are more costly from a time standpoint than they need to be. I’ll try not to restate too much of what is said there as the post already covers it nicely and is worth a read.

Instead i’ll raise some additional rationale for why commerce online is still in its infancy and why many likely abandon it for the bricks and mortar encased sales-people of the real world.

So firstly, lets explore the why of the activity.

Why shop online at all?

If its easier to just go to the shop, compare products side-by-side and to interact with the sales people to clarify facts you are unsure on then why bother with online shopping at all?

Well, I did, in frustration abandon an online purchase for an offline one but I felt a few basic drawbacks from the experience :

• Sales people’s incentives do not always align with yours. A quick way to test this (and I did) - ask them a question about the product you already know the answer to and you will notice the response usually was what they felt you wanted to hear rather than factually correct.
• Its a massive task to compare products within a store as well as across competing stores. It strikes me as being suited to an online activity where data processing is common activity

Shop front clutter
Many sites lose me on the front page. I dig around a bit but generally a front page brimming full of thousand of links and thumbnails doesn’t bode well. Only oddball bric-a-brac types appreciate clutter - and only because they know it means normal people wont have found their precious treasures yet. I don’t want to see all your products and specials and categories on your front page if it obscures the basic information I am after (like, do they even sell phones?). With the phone buying experiment I found it hard to locate a full list of phones sold by a particular telecommunications provider.

Shop fronts on the web are not equivalent to shop fronts in the real world. They are more like what a shopper sees as the enter a real shop - everything! It of course could be much more effective than a real shop because you should be able to search for exactly what items you are after and get straight to them. My supermarket still fails me in this regard because I often find myself scouring the isles trying to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind why they placed the milk next to the pet food and not near the bread.

No feature comparisons
If you are looking for a phone, a tv, a car (and these items seem quite popular among humans) then you usually find yourself in a ‘feature-off’ where feature-laden products vie for your approval. Of course, certain aspects about you will help determine which features are important to your purchase decision (your bank balance/credit, existing items you own like the Blueray enabled PS3 you just bought etc.)

Having a dozen or more tabs open is a terrible way to compare obscure details between each of products. At this point I must give some kudos to shopping engines like the one powering tech.yahoo.com which facilitate easier feature comparisons. Why are their still so few ecommerce sites that support this functionality (and, indeed, when can I see a version of tech.yahoo localised here in Australia)?

Can’t bookmark ready for easy comparison

Hopefully most sites support bookmarkability these days (those that don’t are definitely missing out on sales) however, as cool as modern bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us are, they do not cater specifically for shopping and can’t extract the attributes of the products you’ve shown interest in. I’ve a feeling that before long we will see an extensible product microformat become widely adopted which browsers or shopping spiders could read however for now we must rely on the site to provide this functionality.

I’ve a feeling I could continue this list forever but I am interested in frustrations you’ve had with online commerce. What improvements can online stores make?

I think my account (or indeed the shard that I am on) has been upgraded with a hotted-up version of Gmail. This post explains the approach the team took to prepare Gmail for the future.

I am strong believer that the performance of an application is a key influencer in whether people continue to use it or not. For core applications (such as mail) it is critical that no unnecessary wait times be incurred as users notice when they are spending a disproportionate part of their day, everyday, battling their client.

For application authors, web or otherwise, who are seeking to place their app into the core group of applications users access frequently performance will be key. The goal is to remove friction between the user and the completion of their task.

On the topic of speedy Gmail, a few months back I wrote about web applications breaking out of the browser. Soon afterwards I came across the xul-runner-based Webrunner (apparently renamed Prism in the latest version) and used this to break Gmail and Gcalendar out into their own applications. I highly recommend you do the same. The suppositions I made in my post all held up; applications perform much better in their own process away from other web pages. The applications themselves are also much easier to access having been made available on the taskbar.

Webrunner and similar initiatives all have further to go but are already very usable and will save you minutes or longer everyday.

My inability to publish a post of late is due to my inability to switch out of verbose mode.

Most command-line scripts have a ‘-v’ directive which reveals all sorts of generally redundant information. I feel like I’ve flipped that bit on permanently and I am finding it contradicts both the times (in which sound bites rule) and the format of blogging - my favorite blogs are succinctly presented.

Some judicious editing will be required to shift a few of my drafts that have been blocking the flow like some fat kid stuck halfway down water-slide.

My first attempt to overcome the word glut was to send down more fat kids in the form of further meaty posts but they too are now stuck. Now, in a change of tact, I send down a runt in the futile hope its the fabled straw that put a camel in traction.

Fingers-crossed.

One of the things that made me a proponent of tabbed browsing was that the myriad of browser instances which contained my random travails across the net hogged the space on my taskbar, rendering it useless.

At around the same time (in my adoption of it at least) windows started to group up instances of programs into single tasks on the taskbar and Mozilla browsers introduced tabs. This cleared up the clutter and the taskbar became useful again.

Since then I have some new frustrations that have evolved out of that shift in functionality.

Firefox hogs resources

I use Firefox because of its extensibility - I only run extensions that extend my browsing habits but because I run quite a few of them, Firefox’s memory footprint by late in the day is consuming 300-500 meg of memory.

Web-based applications are harder to get to, slower to switch to

Firefox is regularly tardy to respond, often busy undertaking loops for hundreds or thousands of Javascript loops which may appear to have equal priority. Windows is not great at managing multi-tasking either however I do think that it does take a more sophisticated approach than a browser’s internals.

This tardiness really frustrates me and creates friction for me getting to my core applications quickly enough.

I am not just browsing any more

It occurs to me that many of my Firefox tabs are not instances of browsing content but rather applications that I use either to do my job (web-based task systems, in-house utilities…) or to run my life (webmail, web-based calendar, contact manager…).

Applications should not be hidden amongst your browser tabs or competing for priority within a browser’s sub-system. They should have their own space, be easily accessible and be able to interact with other applications and your OS infrastructure (for example, notifications).

AIR, XULRunner to the rescue?

By making applications available in standalone, browser-based applications I think there is scope to bring our core applications back to surface rather than hiding them within the browser-space. Save that space for your research and other web meanderings.

Frameworks such as AIR  and XULRunner offer opportunities to rescue your core web-based applications from the fray.

In an earlier post I posited that the folks behind Twitter were about building a short-messaging platform that went far beyond the prosaic visage they masquerade behind.

With the recent announcement of Twitter securing venture funding there was much discussion of Twitter being unfettered by a business plan. Apologies to anyone who actually knows this to be true however for now I will remain skeptical that this remotely true. I think it would too difficult to attract the engineering talent required to get something like Twitter off the ground if the sole stated aim was to attract users and see what happened next.

Business plans are over-rated?

The VCs involved quipped about investing in a company without a business plan had worked out previously for them and felt it would again. Andrew Parker believes that companies are busy working on traction because business plans are pointless until you get some. In a similar vein Umair Haque and Paul Kredosky also reinforce this meme and believe that companies might avoid a business plan to make themselves a small target when under the scrutiny of a VC. You can’t criticize what doesn’t exist is the thinking, I guess. This strategy seems a little too transparent to me, to be effective. Actually I think I will nickname this strategy ‘the Aardvark’ (in case it catches on!) - where companies roll up into a ball so VCs can only see the protective plate-armor; their millions of users who are waiting to spend their money as soon as the company thinks of something they can spend it on.

Alright, smart-alec, where’s the evidence that there is more to Twitter?

Twitter’s innocuous ‘What are you doing now?’ query, the broadcasting of which is the key function of the service currently, offers an activity which is novel enough to generate interest in the service but is also disarming enough for people to underestimate their strategy.

Dave Winer who loves thinking publicly about these things believes that Twitter’s democratic approach to its API is part of its strength. 

Twitter’s API is very simple. It covers the entire functionality, leaves nothing out. You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API.

The openness of the Twitter API differs from many other offerings which limit functionality available via API to keep users loyal to the main interface of the respective service.

Often people cite the simplicity of things as being their strength but what I think they mean is the level of abstraction and the constraints applied. A clean abstraction is economical in its language, avoiding permutative options - those can be achieved through combining with other abstractions.

The API has been kept abstract and open because Twitter are betting on people finding applications for a short-message nexus which can find you whilst mobile, working or at home. Designing the API like this may have been a natural tendency of the engineers in charge however when viewed alongside the extensive IM and SMS gateways they are maintaining worldwide there appears to be too much shape for a company supposedly looking purely for traction.

I borrowed an i-mate to capture some small thoughts of our trip as we traveled. I didn’t write much because even with the K-JAM’s QWERTY keyboard it was pretty painful to type.

First a precious few thoughts from near the end of our flight into Istanbul. 20+ hours of travel, the second part of which, with a higher majority of Turks onboard was much rowdier than I’ve ever been used to on a flight.

We are one hour from Istanbul and the flights children are getting restless. Feels a bit like a family birthday party - a bit much after 20 something hours of travel and a full-on work day before that.

Our first challenge once we are free from the airport will be to tram to Sultanahmet and try locate our hotel. We will likely walk past the blue mosque and other locations of interest along the way but the yearn for a hot shower should stymie the temptation to linger too long.

Tomorrow’s tour should see us back there anyway but with someone who knows what we are looking at.

Later in the trip I revisited the memory of our first day and wrote a second document on the K-JAM - this time evidentially more stalwart, more determined to capture my thoughts…

Arriving in Istanbul airport saw us stumbling around until another traveller, a german I think, confirmed our feeling that a visa was required. No trouble, they are purchased for 20 lira right next to immigration.

A wait in a throng of european tourists and then we were through hurtling into the airport, bags arrived at the conveyor belt just after we did and so after all that flight we had slipped easily into Turkey without a hitch. A friendly Turk at the info desk pointed us to the metro and showed us our line and changeover on the map.

The metro is modern, efficient and runs on time. We experienced a brief amount of confused delay at the changeover as we searched for corresponding names on our map but nothing too stressful though as it was still mid afternoon and the weather was perfect and we were soon on the correct tram to Sultanahmet.

From the Sultanahmet tram stop you could spy the minuets of the Blue Mosque. To welcome us, it almost seemed, the prayer song began to ring out from the speakers placed atop each of the mosques towers and we were drawn towards it like argonauts to the sirens.

The clerics voice was alternating from tower to tower to create an omnipresent effect and did I mention it was maddeningly loud? Deliriously tired by this point and knowing we could only be not more than 100 metres to our hotel it became impossible to think clearly to determine how we could locate the small street our hotel was located on when the map we had did not name small streets.

We decided to sit and wait the cleric out in the beautiful warm environment however when it was obvious the cleric had much puff and as far as we knew might continue throughout the afternoon we started looking for other maps. Found them - covered in calamine lotion of course. Note to self; carrying containers storing liquids in a plastic bag is always a good idea. Try do that next time.

Hotel found, only a step or two off the main street we were quickly checked in and up to our room, remembering too late the guide books advice to tip the bag boy. Exhausted we soon were snoozing. I woke a few times feeling guilty we were sleeping through the end of what appeared to be a stunningly beautiful day in Istanbul but the exhaustion of 40 waking hours won out.

Well that feels good to have got that to print (its been trapped in the phone for weeks waiting for my rescue). I hope to follow up later (probably days, hopefully not weeks) with more fragments of my trip and a few photos at some later point as the trip for me was quite perfect and magical.

A point I covered in earlier posts about Twitter which I would like to revisit is that of Twitter’s usefulness being less about letting people know ‘What I’m doing now’ (which, as readers of this blog may remember, I don’t find that useful) and more about it as the nexus point between various gateways.

Reviewing what I said in one of the earlier posts :

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural - the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

Being a platform is hard work

As anyone using the service would have noticed - its hard work maintaining gateways and services and in general ’being the platform’ or nexus point for a variety of different consumers.

Some proof of this; another company, IMified who are in a very similar business to Twitter, recently plugged Twitter into their own service whilst the Twitter IM bots were out of action to allow users of Twitter to keep on Twittering :

Over the weekend we added Twitter as a new IMified service. We definitely feel their pain trying to keep an IM bot up and running. We’ve had our own issues in case you haven’t noticed ; )

And this cheekiness :

It appears the Twitter IM bots are still down, but have no fear, we just added support for notification updates to go along with the release of status updating last week. What can I say, we’re opportunists!

But being a platform can also pay off…

One of the coolest bits of functionality that’s actually useful that Twitter has afforded another service I use, RememberTheMilk, is the ability to use the SMS and IM gateways to post tasks to my task lists. This saves me money and time when I am out and about and I think of something I need to do/remember.

A ‘QuickAdd via SMS’ option to Google Calendar should be a straight-forward (and bloody useful!) addition  if utilizing the Twitter platform. I am sure a variety of other services leveraging SMS/IM will appear (Google/Yahoo/MSN Search?) benefiting from the effort the Twitter people have undertaken to ensure the infrastructure they provide stays accessible (and I am not saying they are there yet…).

If I make bold (and possibly long) assertion; assuming people continue to find use for these short message/short instruction services and the Twitter team can keep it all hanging together, ironing out the kinks and interruptions, we will see them become the platform of choice for short-message-in/short-message-out type services and in the acquisition path of a multi-national telco!