Category: Tech

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I’ve been seeing a lot of those “I just found your blog by searching and it’s the best thing since sliced bread” comment spams lately, some even slipping through Akismet. But this one was just hilarious in its unreadability:

Virtuous what I used to be in search of and quite thoroughgoing as floor. Many thanks for placard this, I noticed a yoke diverse associated posts but yours was the optimum thus far. I outlook it stays updated, adore worry.

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Google has just launched desktop notifications for Gmail using HTML5 technology. Of course, they’ve had a separate pop-up notifier for quite a while now. How does this one compare?

Improvements:

  • Will run on any operating system.
  • Doesn’t need to be installed on your computer.
  • Doesn’t require a registry hack now that GMail requires SSL on everything.
  • Doesn’t require you to enter your login & password in a separate app.
  • Lets you choose between only chat notifications, only email notifications, or both.
  • If you use Priority Inbox, lets you choose between all new messages or only those PI has marked as Important.

Downside:

  • Needs Gmail to be open. No biggie, as this is true of pop-up notifications for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. But since the old notifier was a separate app, it could run on its own.
  • Only works with Chrome so far.

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If you’ve been following the Firefox 4 betas, you’ve probably noticed that they’re dumping the status bar. OK, a lot of people didn’t use it, but here’s the thing:

When you hover over a link, the status bar tells you where it will take you.

This is important (especially for security) — important enough that they’ve moved the functionality elsewhere…but in a broken manner. They’ve put it into the location bar — you know, the field where you type in a URL, or look to see where you are.

The problem is that there isn’t room in the location bar to show the full URL of a hovered link except for very short links. The status bar has the entire width of the browser. The location bar has to share that space with the navigation buttons, the search box, the feedback button (during the beta), any custom toolbar buttons, the site name on secure websites, etc.

Just about every link I hover over ends up with critical information cut off in the “…” between the start of the hostname and the parameters at the end. That’s almost useless. (Almost, because at least the hostname is visibla, but it would help to see the page name as well.)

Displaying the target URL in some way is core functionality for a web browser, and you shouldn’t remove or break core functionality. In some ways this is worse than the proposal a few years ago to remove “View Source,” because that at least isn’t core functionality for a browser (though it is core functionality for the web, because it encourages people to explore and tinker and learn how to make their own websites — which is exactly why that was put back in). It’s crazy that I need to install an add-on to get back something as basic as a working preview for links.

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I haven’t quite found the time to write up my experience at the Adobe MAX designer/developer conference, but here’s a digest of my Twitter posts. As usual, photos are on Flickr.

Sunday

Adobe Max Entryway (Los Angeles Convention Center)

  • Watched a nearly-full moon set into the cloud layer behind the LA skyline on my way to Adobe MAX.
  • Obligatory pic of Adobe MAX entryway.

Monday

  • Made it to the keynote just as, I kid you not, Martha Stewart took the stage.
  • Nice demo of dynamically wrapping text around image content (not box), to be contributed to Webkit.
  • Content aware fill demo on a tablet – “performing witchcraft” on the progress bar label.
  • Multi device link: iPad as classic color palette mixer for desktop Photoshop.
  • Blackberry Playbook approach: don’t dumb down the Internet for mobile devices, bring up the performance of the devices.
  • Green Hornet game demo: same app running on desktop & touch screen phone, auto-detecting input methods.
  • The Green Hornet car. I wasn’t expecting overlap between a tech conference and Comic-Con
  • Something else Adobe MAX has in common with Comic-Con: Flash fans.

Tuesday

  • When I got here, the line for Starbucks was about 5 people. Now I can’t see the end.
  • Managed to scarf down a sandwich from Starbucks before the evening session. Interesting mix of tech crowd & Lakers fans.
  • Ok, I am officially a geek. I ranked 7th in a phone-powered Star Trek trivia contest with several hundred people at a tech conference.
  • And then tweeted about it.
  • Adobe MAX sneak peeks’ method of keeping people from going too long: A Klingon with a phaser creeping across the stage.
  • Very cool demo of auto-converting long video to a tapestry for better scene selection.
  • Nifty Photoshop demo: post process photo based on a model. “what if this photo had been taken by Ansel Adams?”
  • Nice! Automatically compensating for camera motion blur!

Wednesday

  • Gotta love LA traffic. I left for Adobe MAX 40 minutes earlier than yesterday and arrived at the same time – too late for my 8:30 lab.
  • Funny how you can get nostalgic for your first version of Photoshop. (Sadly, 2.5 is missing.About Photoshop 3.0
  • MAX is definitely less crowded today. No problems finding a table for lunch, and the cell & wifi networks are a lot less congested.