“As the Wall Street Journal reported, the mouse was considered a miss: “Useless,” said Charles L. Mauro, president of an engineering firm. “It isn’t all that easy to learn,” said Amy Wohl, president of a corporate consultancy. “I think it’s awkward,” added Clem Labine, a newspaper publisher. “Since it doesn’t get you away from the keyboard altogether, why go back and forth?”
Posts in stories
Apple’s Long History of Lousy First Reviews
The Mozilla & Metalab Fiasco
I guess they’re gonna publish a statement tomorrow saying that you can’t blame inspiration. And of course, we won’t believe that.
But you know, worst part is Mozilla could have used some copy for Firefox - next time choose wisely which project to rip off for.
Being Flash Free
Interesting post over at Cocoia’s blog. It’s true, uninstalling flash precludes you to a lot of content on the current web - so you keep it installed on your computer.
And that’s exactly Adobe’s strongest point in why you shouldn’t uninstall Flash.
Doing Less with More - A Maximalist Workflow
There’s a huge misconception about minimalism, and it’s in regards of graphical minimalism and workflow minimalism. Whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, one of the most popular trends of the ’00s has been that of adopting a minimal and simple approach to computing. As the trend went by and people even wrote books and essays about it, the original purpose of the whole concept slowly faded away, leaving place to users who only care about making their computers minimal and simple to their eyes. Yet the original purpose is still there, and I want to focus on that.
Virgin America Rejects Flash. “HTML Is Good Enough”
“Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.
Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: “I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].”
See? It’s that easy.
html5media Enables The HTML5 Video Tag In All Major Browsers
Earlier today I posted a tweet regarding this new project I found on Google Code, html5media. With only two lines of code in the <head> of your webpage html5media allows you to use the <video> tag in almost every browser by simply calling two .js files.
From the wiki page:
“The html5media script scans your page for video tags, and checks whether your browser is capable of playing the files they contain using a HTML5 media player. If the browser can play the contents of the video tags, then the script does nothing.
If your browser does not support HTML5 video, then the offending video tags are dynamically replaced with a Flowplayer instance, providing the same functionality as the original video tag.”
This makes me think how ridiculous is the debate on keeping the current Flash alive. There’s something better out there, even for you porn aficionados.
Relative Performance of Rich Media Content Across Browsers and Operating Systems
“Flash does not necessarily perform worse on Mac as opposed to PC.
All rich media content, including that created with JavaScript / HTML 5 content show (sometimes widely) varying levels of performance across browsers and operating systems.”
Still, it performs crap.
Secrets of the Apple A4 Chip: The iPad as Wii
“In the end, I keep coming back to the idea that Apple has stayed quiet about the A4 because any real magic or “wow factor” that the iPad delivers will come from the software—the efficiency of the OS, the user interface design of the OS and apps, and the snappiness of the overall experience all come from the software team.
Perhaps an even better analogue for the iPad is Nintendo’s Wii, which is another product that relies for its success not on its processor, but on its novel interface and broadly accessible software.”
Couldn’t agree more. But there’s one thing in the iPad / Wii analogy that Stokes doesn’t consider - 3rd party developers relations. Just think of a “Nintendo App Store-only” Wii. Now you get the idea.
Shawn Blanc on the iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader
“I don’t want another iPhone feed reader, I want a better one. Because apps like Tweetie, Twitteriffic, Birdhouse, and Birdfeed are all outstanding Twitter clients — each one is clever, polished, and fun. And who says feed reading can’t be as enjoyable as tweeting?”