I think it’s a good idea, and I applaud Apple for doing it.
It’s always good to have more options / competition to keep the quality level up all around, even now when browsers are probably the best they’ve ever been in many respects.
I do wonder how they’ll get convince people (the “average user”) to download and use it, though; perhaps they will bundle it with iTunes like they did with Quicktime.
Just bought our tickets for our New York trip next month. Can’t wait!
E-mail is not a platform for design - by Jeffrey Zeldman
Amen, brother! If you really, really “need” to show some visually styled presentation, send a link to a web page, because that’s where HTML & CSS belong.
Senate Begins Real Push on Habeas Corpus - from The Nation
Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an important bill to restore habeas corpus, the sacrosanct Constitutional right to challenge government detention in court, by a vote of eleven to eight.
Habeas corpus was revoked by last year’s Military Commissions Act, which has been assailed as unconstitutional and un-American by leaders across the political spectrum. Today’s habeas bill was backed by the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Chairman, Patrick Leahy, and its Republican Ranking Member, Arlen Specter. “The drive to restore this fundamental right has come from both sides of the aisle,” said Sharon Bradford, an attorney at the bipartisan Constitution Project, in response to today’s vote. “Restoring America’s commitment to the rule of law is not a partisan cause; it is a patriotic one,” she added.
I love this idea:
City fights illegal gig posters with CANCELLED stickers - from Boing Boing
The city council of Glasgow is fighting illegal handbills with science: they’re paying city workers to go around and stick “cancelled” stickers on all the illegal gig posters put up around town.
And they have already had an impact on some rogue promoters who have been inundated with complaints from music fans.
People who have bought tickets to some of this summers big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been cancelled.
(OK, I’m sure it wasn’t imitation, but…)
Recently Microsoft has started branching out and publishing various frameworks (in coordination with new releases of their development platform) that can be used to construct applications on top of their technology (similar to what has been popular for a while now in the Java world, but in this case, the .NET platform).
Interestingly, while looking into some of the more recent stuff I stumbled upon one particular implementation that looked very familiar - because it was extremely similar to the underlying framework that we’ve built for the main project I’ve been working on for a couple years. Even down to the names of the various internal components, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t go into any more detail than that about it publicly, but suffice it to say I was a bit surprised.
At the end of the day, I take it as a good validation of the design we came up with, because at the time there were some questions about it since there didn’t seem to be anything else out there like it. Sometimes in software development that means that you are either on to something good that no one else has thought of yet, but much more frequently it’s an indication that there’s probably something wrong with the way you’re thinking about doing it, and there’s a reason no one else has done it that way already. It feels good to see things emerging now that seem to indicate that it was the former rather than the latter in this case.
For all you WordPress theme designers out there, there’s a cool new competition going on right now (until the end of July), with a bit of a twist.
The Sandbox Designs Competition is a WordPress design competition based around the excellent Sandbox theme. The theme is very well structured and thought out, and (perhaps to illustrate that) the competition is CSS + images only, no PHP modifications (ala Zen Garden). PS - there’s prize money involved!
After looking at Sandbox, I really like it, and plan to use it as my default theme, or perhaps base it around some of the highlights from the competition. The WordPress developers are currently thinking about including it as one of the “out of the box” themes you get when you first download WP (in case you didn’t take my word for it being cool).
I won’t be entering in the competition, because I’m not much of a graphic designer, but the great thing about a competition like this is it really provides a huge benefit to the community. I really love the idea of not allowing PHP modifications as well; keep the structure consistent, and they will be SO much easier to support (from the perspective of theme/design modders and plugin authors).
About a year ago, I mentioned Mark Pilgrim’s switch to Linux in a post.
This last weekend, he posted a progress update, framed around a response to a particularly snobbish comment he received from the operating system community he was leaving behind.
The comment:
What exactly do you think you will be doing with Linux when you install it on that fancy ThinkCentre? You’ll be tweaking MORE, configuring MORE, installing MORE because NOTHING is as packaged and polished. … Enjoy your time with Linux, and when the endless Google searches to fix some miniscule package dependancy version problems finally drive you away, you will of course be welcomed back.
His update, one year later: (excerpts)
I am happy to report that that has not been my experience. I have spent some time tweaking, but only by choice — not to make things work, but to try some radically different ideas about workspaces and workflow that quite frankly would have been impossible to accomplish on a Mac.
…
In fact, none of the usual complaints about Linux (hardware drivers, X configuration, package dependencies) have affected me in any significant way. … On the contrary, working on a Linux system has made the weaknesses of other operating systems more painful to deal with.
He goes into quite a bit of detail about how keeping a system up do date is a hassle on the other “big two” operating systems, whereas in Linux (for most people) it is a simple one line script that can be scheduled to run without manual intervention at all.
Finally…
One year later, I look back on comments like this, and I just laugh. Sorry, Anonymous Commenter, you couldn’t have been more wrong. You got it exactly backwards. When your operating system finally comes with a package management system that is both comprehensive and extensible, you will of course be welcomed… to the 1990s. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy my time with Linux.
A belated congrats to the team at Fedora for releasing version 7 of their distribution recently.
I figured it was only fair to post on this since I recently promoted the latest releases of my distros of choice (Debian 4 and Ubuntu 7.04). I haven’t really had time to check out Fedora 7 yet, but it looks like it’s got a lot of cool new stuff.
They dropped the “core” from their name as well, which is nice, since “core” doesn’t seem appropriate for anything that is distributed on five cds. 
(just a little Linux geek mockery).
But seriously, I have to give them credit for a great distro and respect their conservative stance on the issue of “free software”. I haven’t actually used Fedora on a regular basis, but I do remember Red Hat (version 4) being the first Linux distribution I used on a regular basis for work (back in 1997-98). I had experimented with Slackware a bit before that, but never really did anything other than spend time messing with it.
It has certainly come a long way since then, and it’s pretty impressive today.