May Contain Nuts

Yesterday, Hulu announced Hulu Plus, a service that users can take advantage of to watch Hulu content on mobile devices (such as iOS devices) and consoles (such as the PS3 and Xbox 360). The service costs $9.99/month, and retains all advertisements currently embedded into the free web service (their release calls it an “ad-supported subscription product”, which seems rather oxymoronic if you ask me). It’s not entirely without additional benefit though, as many more back episodes of many shows (such as X-Files and American Dad) will be available to subscribers, and they can be watched at 720p (the website only offers video in 480p).

As interesting as it is to see Hulu come to the iOS platform, I feel like someone in the executive offices still doesn’t really understand the way the internet works, or how converged our devices are becoming, and is trying to artificially segment the availability of their content to score additional revenue according to outdated concepts of viewership. Ultimately I guess it’s not that surprising of a move, since “Big Content” (ugh, now I feel like a conspiracy theorist/dirty fucking hippie) has historically proven itself to be completely opposed to changing its business model in the face of new technological challenges, but it is still disappointing nonetheless.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that the content providers are still trying to distinguish between television screens and, well, everything else. They’ve even taken it one step further now and turned mobile usage into a premium-only experience that goes completely counter to the trend in video consumption over the past few years. This all started, of course, with Hulu’s media overloads expressing displeasure with the fact that Boxee was allowing users to legally consume content from Hulu’s own openly-accessible feeds, ads and all, without using Hulu’s website to do so. Worse, you could do it on your television! The horror! So, Boxee got banned from accessing Hulu, and they’ve been in something of an arms race ever since to get around the arcane distinction that Hulu has created between watching their content on a computer connected to a monitor, and watching that same content on a computer connected to a television screen. The EULA for Hulu’s own Hulu Desktop application actually expressly forbids you from installing it on a computer connected to your TV. Like that’s even remotely enforceable.

It’s like Hulu understands that the internet is an important platform, and even goes so far as to make their service trendy and modern with things like show queues and RSS feeds for available content, but totally misses the point of the internet as a ubiquitous-access platform, and is instead trying to protect their existing distribution methods while making token concessions to the internet-savvy crowd.

I think advertisers are also behind the curve on this one, which isn’t helping the adoption of internet-based services by content providers. Online ads are notoriously less profitable by a wide margin, compared to television ads. I understand why this is true for traditional web advertising, where banners and buttons are incidental content that can be easily ignored (or even blocked) by users. But when it comes to advertising on services like Hulu, where ads can be highly targeted, and are shown in a way that creates a captive audience, I would think that despite the smaller number of eyeballs, such ads would be more valuable to advertisers because viewers are more likely to actually pay attention to them.

Hulu really could make a strong case for charging premium prices for online advertising. The ads themselves already exist in most cases, since they’re just running existing TV ads, so there’s no additional overhead for creating them. They can be targeted to users based on their preferences, so they’re immediately more relevant to the end consumer than TV ads. There are a limited number of ads that run in a Hulu-broadcast episode or movie, which should again increase their value, not decrease it. Finally, because of this limitation on the number of ads being run, users are more likely to actually watch them than they are TV ads, which run for upwards of 5 minutes per break, giving users ample time to leave the room and perform quick tasks, and thus decreasing the viewership of your ad. With Hulu’s 30-second to 2-minute ad breaks, it’s much harder to go to the bathroom without missing something (assuming it’s more convenient to stay seated than to have to scrub back to the start of the segment, which for me it generally is).

When it comes to the whole Hulu Plus thing, I again think someone in the board room has misunderstood what I think could be called a generally-accepted social contract for advertising online. Namely, free content is very probably going to have ads. That’s understandable – and even acceptable –though depending on how the service provider chooses to implement them, folks may get grumpy about it. Paid content, however, is usually paid for so you can skip or avoid the ads. Hulu Plus doesn’t do this, instead opting to double-dip with both subscription and ad revenue. I think this is the source of much of the angst being expressed online about paying for content with ads, even though we already do so in so many other venues (cable TV is the oft-cited example, but it also applies to newspapers, magazines, DVDs, and even movies at the theater). People are used to buying into a web service to remove ads, and Hulu Plus doesn’t provide this convenience. That, combined with the $10 price, leaves a lot of people (myself included) feeling a bit put off.

As I mentioned earlier, this is further compounded by the fact that Hulu is only available on mobile devices with a Plus subscription. There’s no access to the existing free service through the Hulu app in the App Store, you have to pay for Hulu Plus in order to be able to use it. Again this strikes me as a move destined to leave money on the table. There are hundreds of millions of video-capable mobile devices that Hulu could put itself on to increase its viewership pool and thus improve its leverage against advertisers for more expensive ad rates simply by offering a free Hulu app. Instead, they’ve made a move that looks greedy (even if it actually isn’t) by instituting a pay wall on mobile devices.

Ultimately, for a company whose stated goal is to offer TV anywhere, they’re going pretty far out of their way to put up a ton of road blocks to that goal. Whether this is because of an internal lack of understanding of the internet (which I doubt… the Hulu guys themselves seem pretty savvy), a panicked move to try and improve their revenue stream (which is possible considering how many PSA ads get run these days), the result of external meddling by their largely technology-inept content overlords, or a combination of the three, it’s just frustrating to see such a promising service continue to shoot itself in the foot when trying to connect with its most fervent supporters.

I’ve actually come pretty much full circle on Hulu since it launched… at first I was initially skeptical of the obvious stick-it-to-Apple nature of the service’s unveiling just after NBC ditched the iTunes Store a few years ago, and was not even remotely interested in it. It eventually won me over because of the breadth of its offerings and the convenience of being able to watch shows whenever I wanted without tediously long ad breaks. Then they started doing week-long delays of new episodes (again, a concession to a media empire that just doesn’t “get it”) and losing providers, which decreased its value. The final straw for me was when they banned Boxee for entirely pointless and completely stupid reasons at the demand of their primary stakeholders, who happen to be NBC and Fox. Since then, the service seems like it’s been on a downhill slope in terms of mindshare and usage share, and Hulu Plus is a rather desperate bid to try and regain lost revenue without actually bothering to understand the reasons for their declining popularity in the first place.

Needless to say, I won’t be subscribing to Hulu Plus. I would almost certainly have put the app to decent use on my iPad if it offered the same level of service for free as their website, but I don’t need it nearly often enough to justify spending $9.99 for the convenience of being able to watch on the go a show or two a month that I might have missed, or want to revisit. I just don’t watch that much TV in the first place. I also tend to prefer buying the few shows I do watch on iTunes, since it’s generally cheaper and faster than waiting for the DVDs (even in HD), and the episodes are almost always available the following day if I miss one.

Apple made some upgrades to MobileMe’s web services last night. While I don’t use them terribly often (since I have a Mac at home and at work, plus an iPod Touch and now an iPad), I do still find myself dropping into them occasionally. With that in mind, I took a look at the new site to see what’s what.

Overall

Apple has replaced the gray color scheme with a somewhat higher-contrast blue one, extending all the way into the login page, which has also gotten a facelift. I don’t recall if it was there before, but there’s now a quite prominent link to sign up for a 60-day trial right next to the news block. I like the new color scheme, as it feels a bit more engaging and interesting than the previous austere gray. Oddly (though perhaps intentionally, to illustrate the importance of the task), the gray scheme is retained on the re-authorization dialogs used to access Find My iPhone and the Account settings page.

What I don’t particularly care for is the new app switching method. Prior to today, switching from Mail to the Gallery was a one-click process. Now, probably because of the new design of the header toolbar and the way it ties into the various applications on the site, all of the applications are hidden behind a MobileMe cloud button, which brings up a patently oversized OS X-style task switcher display. Switching apps now requires two clicks and a considerably larger amount of mouse movement.

The new MobileMe Task Switcher

I would much rather have preferred that the original switching method was retained, since it provides more immediate discoverability of features. Since the new design precludes that, however, I think a better approach would have been to tie the MobileMe cloud icon to a pop-out menu, similar to the one used in the account drop-down on the right side of the header. The design could even be kept similar to the current design (either horizontal or adjusted to vertical), but by making it a fancy drop-down menu and ideally resizing the images, it would have greatly reduced the amount of travel time and distance required to perform such a simple and frequent operation.

Mail

The New MobileMe Mail

I don’t intend to touch on every app individually, but I do want to talk about Mail in particular, because it’s seen the largest amount of improvement and alteration over the old design. Apple launched this as a beta about a month ago, and has now made it available to all with the web services upgrade. It’s frankly miles above the old web app, and much more pleasant to use. The service loads data much more quickly, and the new widescreen viewer mode is really nice. It retains a number of desktop-y features like multiple (and discontinuous) item selection, as well as drag-and-drop message moving (and adding drag-and-drop folder reorganizing, yay!), while adding more web-ish things as well, like the Move icon in the toolbar, which functions similarly to the move command in iOS.

Perplexingly, Apple has decided to roll their own scrollbars in Mail, something it has not done for any of its other web apps. This has the net effect of overriding my preferred scrollbar behavior of having the up/down buttons split instead of joined at the bottom of the scroll area, and makes the UI inconsistent with both the rest of MobileMe and the rest of the scrollbars on my machine. I can understand the condensed scrollbar overlay for the folders listing, but the redundant full-sized custom scrollbars in the message list and preview pane are kind of annoying.

They’ve also added an Archive feature, pretty much pulled straight from Gmail as far as I can tell. It will be interesting to see if this feature manages to migrate out of the web application and into Apple’s other mail clients in the future.

Other new features include push mail in the web client, some composition window improvements (including some slick auto-completion and a nice “add contact” dialog with live filtering and To/CC/BCC checkboxes for all contacts, but lacking the self-contained pill items on recognized contacts from the desktop Mail client), fetching of mail from an external address, the ability to send an email from an alias (or said external address), support for vacation auto-response setup, server-side mail rules, and a long-overdue implementation of https communication.

Overall, a very nice upgrade to the Mail app that brings it on par in many ways to the web apps offered by other mail services. It also still retains some of the desktop application feel that Apple seems intent on maintaining on the web, and brings some iPhone/iPad-like additions into the fold as well. Very solid, though obviously more evolutionary than revolutionary. This feels like what MobileMe should have been from the beginning, but I’m glad Apple has been busy putting effort into polish since the original launch 2 years ago.

Other Apps

As a whole, the entire set of web services feels much faster than it did yesterday. I have no idea if this has anything to do with Apple’s new data center in North Carolina, or if they’ve just gotten better at query optimization, but in any case, it’s welcome and appreciated. Pretty much the only service that’s still sluggish is the Find my iPhone page, but that has some external limitations that I don’t think are nearly as easy to overcome. The UI is much improved though, and features a really nice custom Google Maps integration with some slick pushpin annotation stuff for device location features.

As an interesting side note, the Gallery icon has changed from the iPhone’s “Photos” icon to the iPhone’s “MobileMe Gallery App” icon. While this provides some consistent branding, I think I’d much rather have the MobileMe Gallery functionality built into the iPhone/iPad Photos app than tucked away in a separate location on my device. Considering that the Photos app already allows you to upload files to MobileMe, it seems like it would make more sense to keep those files all accessible and manageable in one spot. This is more of an iOS rant than a MobileMe rant though, so I’ll leave it at that.

Summary

As a whole, the upgrade isn’t a huge change from what was previously available, but it’s a solid evolution of the service (Mail in particular seems to have been the focus of this update), and I hope that this is a sign of more good things to come.

So it’s been more than a day since Apple’s big announcement, and I thought I’d weigh in on it with my own thoughts, for whatever they may be worth.

First off, I’m not sure if this will be the game changer Apple thinks it will be. I can see potential in it, but I don’t think it will change the computing landscape outside of the portable realm… The desktop and even the pro laptop have too many things that they’re better at than what can be accomplished on a mobile device, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I also don’t see this replacing PMPs and smartphones entirely, since it’s just too big to be practical in those terms.

That said, I can see what sort of market Apple is targeting with this device, and it’s not the computer whiz population. Those of us willing to put up with poor performance and shoddy build quality in exchange for a mini laptop that can run a browser and an email client at the same time, and theoretically run the same applications as a desktop machine, are probably going to be ill-served by the iPad, and that’s fine. I think there is still plenty of space in the market for things like the Eee PC and the MSI Wind for those who want a familiar desktop operating system and the capabilities that go along with it. However, the poor market performance of tablet devices thus far seems to indicate that for the average consumer, the existing products are not the sort of experience they’re looking for.

I think Apple’s take on the mobile space has been vert refreshing compared to the offerings from Redmond. Microsoft wants to put Windows on everything, even when its user interface and complexity get in the way of accomplishing everyday tasks. Apple on the other hand has built an entirely new interface for their mobile platform from the ground up, with the explicit goal of making it user-friendly, touch-oriented (rather than simply touch-capable), and intensely intuitive to use. The key factor to their success with this platform, I think, is how spatially-oriented it is. The interface behaves like a physical object and responds naturally and intuitively to user input. It also provides considerable visual feedback when changing screens, so users have an easy time understanding how they got where they are, and how to get back to where they were. Apple has also done a great job of building an entire interaction system on 3 basic gestures: tap, swipe, and pinch. Without expanding their gesture library, Apple has built much more advanced functionality into the iPad OS, which is both incredible and praise-worthy. It would be easier to create all manner of new gestures for more complex tasks, but Apple has resisted this impulse and built on a simple interface language that their users are already familiar with.

Apple seems poised to capitalize on the ultra-portable tablet computing market by taking what they learned from the iPhone and scaling it up, rather than trying to pare down Mac OS X to fit in the confines of a tablet space. Again, this is a clearly different strategy from that of the rest of the industry, which seems intent on trying to put the familiar Windows desktop on even the lowliest and least-capable portable devices possible. I think Apple has the right idea, though. Desktop operating systems are needlessly complicated for everyday one-off tasks like checking email or browsing the web. The iPhone OS, on the other hand, is built to be always-on, highly responsive, and easy to directly manipulate with your fingers. For a device intended to be used for quick, light computing, that sort of OS makes much more sense than Mac OS X or Windows.

I’ve seen a lot of people decry the iPad as a giant iPod Touch, and while this is true on it’s face, it ignores the depth and richness of the iPhone OS app space, and what additional capabilities a large-format display like the iPad’s can afford developers in the future. In this way, the iPad isn’t really aiming to solve any specific problem; instead, it’s a vessel into which people can put their own problems to be solved.

I’ve also seen a lot of complaints about the lack of multitasking on the iPad, and to a certain extent, I can agree with this as being something that Apple will eventually need to address as the platform matures, especially on the larger-screen devices. Being able to run apps in the background like Pandora or Skype would be a huge boon to the device’s capabilities, and I think it will get here eventually. For now, though, Apple is focusing on making the OS do one thing at a time very, very well, and maturing the OS before wildly expanding what can be done via background processes. In terms of productivity though, a singletasking OS like the iPhone’s isn’t that much farther behind an underpowered multitasking OS on smaller netbook devices. iPhone apps remember their state far better than desktop apps, and in general they launch much more quickly than their desktop brethren too, so little time is lost swapping between apps.

People have also, bizarrely, been lampooning Apple’s decision to develop a version of iWork for the iPad. I think it’s a wonderful idea, and I think charging $10 per app is beyond reasonable considering how much power there is in the apps, and that the desktop suite sells for $80. I can’t help but wonder what Microsoft would charge for an Office suite on this device… (incidentally, I’d love to see Office on the iPad; competition is good!). I think folks who wanted to see iWork on the iPhone are reaching; it’s just not something that translates down to a screen of that size without becoming practically useless. The iPad screen, however, is much larger and the interface far more capable than the iPhone’s, and I think a productivity suite makes sense on such a device for light work that can be transferred to and completed on a primary work machine.

I want to close by presenting a theoretical use case for the iPad, since so many people seem utterly perplexed by who could possibly use it. I will be taking a few liberties by assuming the iPad-specific development of a few apps that already exist on the iPhone, and treating the iBookstore as a mature product, but I hope you’ll agree that none of the assumptions I make are out of the realm of possibility.

Assume, if you will, that I’m a college student with an iMac at home. I also have a 16GB iPad that I got for an educational discount at $479, and have been able to buy most of my textbooks on the iBookstore for a fair amount less than it would have cost at the college bookstore. I have a reasonably sizeable iTunes library, a handful of games, the iPad-optimized version of Notebooks from the App Store for taking notes in class, and the iPad and desktop versions of the iWork suite. While other students are lugging around 10 to 20 pounds of textbooks, an iPod, and a notebook full of paper (and possibly a laptop as well), I can grab my iPad and take off to class with nothing else. After class, I can go to the library to research a paper, taking notes and working on a preliminary outline in Pages while roaming the aisles. On my way home, I plug my iPad into my FM transmitter and listen to some tunes while I drive. Once I’m home, I sync my iPad and keep working on my paper on my iMac. The next morning, I sync it back to the iPad along with a Keynote presentation that’s due today and head back to class. To present, I just plug my iPad into the projector with the docking cable and get started immediately. Between classes, I can hop on the college wifi network to browse the web, or play a quick game of Star Defense while I wait for the teacher to arrive. For the sake of brevity, I will leave out the scene where I get mugged for my iPad in the parking garage.

I think this device will be most popular in the educational market, especially higher education, but its usefulness as a teaching and learning aid can be seen at almost every grade level. If Apple scores big anywhere, it will probably be there, especially with their aggressive pricing and educational discounts.

The iPad may essentially be a giant iPod Touch, but there is a ton of potential in such a device for people who want an appliance-like computer, not a car-like one. Apple is going after the 10,000-miles-without-an-oil-change “it should work like my microwave” crowd with this, not the gearhead crowd that replaces their car’s computer ROM or changes their own transmission fluid, and I know for a fact that there are more of the former than the latter in the consumer marketplace.

I have some more thoughts to expound upon, but it’s late and this post is already beyond long enough as it is.

From an Ars Technica piece that has the recording industry comparing music piracy to global warming (I wish I were joking):

… the music business has now tried its hand at being “innovative” and “customer focused.” It disaggregated albums, it allowed music to go up on everything from Amazon to iTunes to Spotify to Last.fm. It sued users, it launched education campaigns.

Because suing users is totally innovative and customer-focused… what planet are these people from?! (Also, I’m surprised that none of the commenters on the Ars piece have picked up on this little nugget of stupid.)

The RIAA, the MPAA, and the rest of the audio/visual media industry (TV studios, film companies, etc.) need to get it into their heads that the world today is not the same as it was in 1990. 20 years ago, it was perhaps maybe somehow acceptable (or at least, possible) to release a movie or TV show in Australia 6-12 months later than in the United States without negatively impacting the product’s performance, because the ability to openly connect Australia to the US was largely limited to phones, post, airplanes, and boats. Now, with the internet and high-speed connections to it, films can be read about, reviewed, and even posted online (albeit illegally) for advance consumption by people who haven’t been deemed worthy enough to get the product locally. The industries’ own refusal to accept that the world is more connected, and that staggering releases internationally is likely having a huge impact on their revenue in those countries because rather than wait for the studio to get around to releasing content in their area, people will go and get it wherever it’s available, and in most cases, it’s illegally obtained on the internet in a matter of hours (or even minutes, if you’re in a country that actually values its communications infrastructure, unlike the US).

The music industry can hardly be said to be behaving in an innovative manner by any stretch of the imagination. They’re reacting defensively to the encroachment of a new content distribution platform and its resulting global connectivity, doing only the bare minimum of what is necessary to appease the demands of their customers. It’s hardly surprising that their revenues and profits have shrunk in the past 10 years. When given the choice between buying a CD for $18.99 at Barnes & Noble and buying the same album on iTunes for $9.99, or even just buying the tracks I really want for 99¢ (which may be only one or two songs), I’m going to go with the cheaper option, especially now that music from the iTunes store is DRM free.

Further, the industry seems to be doing a pretty good job of colluding with one another to set prices at different levels for different online distributors (iTunes: 99¢/song, Amazon MP3: 79¢/song. Um, what?) in an attempt to try and force the market into the shape it prefers, rather than going where their customers are and catering to them there. They also fought with every fiber of their being against internet radio stations like Pandora by trying to bury them with drastically more expensive licensing fees than what they require of broadcast radio. These are hardly innovative behaviors, unless you define “innovative” as “acting like an asshole”…

Similarly, the TV and film industries are also failing to get out ahead of the needs of their customers, instead only choosing to do the least amount possible to not lose a portion of their revenue stream (which is selling viewers to advertisers). Efforts like Hulu are interesting, but ultimately disappointing, because while the Hulu team seems to understand the importance of their service to viewers, industry execs who are still fearful of time-shifted content distribution are stifling its ability to really flourish in a way that would please the people who are most willing to use the service and thus generate additional revenue for the industry.

Case in point: both the Hulu website and the Hulu Desktop application prohibit users from interacting with the service or installing the software on a device that is connected to your television, and Hulu has gone out of their way, at the request of the industry, to block applications like Boxee from accessing the service. The problem is, most people don’t want to watch time-shifted television on their computer. They want to watch it on their television, where they have a big screen, a really nice sound system, and a comfortable couch to sit on. Despite the sometimes horrific performance of Hulu’s Flash player in the Boxee builds for the Apple TV, I watched a considerable amount of content on Hulu, and sat patiently and understandingly through the 2-3 minutes of ads inserted into each show (though like many of the ads on TV, I ignored them as much as possible because they’re annoying). Since they blocked Boxee, I’ve watched two things on Hulu: an episode of Family Guy, and the Cosmos series from PBS. By trying to artificially restrict their content to specific platforms, the industry has lost revenue from ads it would have gained by showing them to me. Since often I watch time-shifted content because I missed watching it on the air, they’re also already not getting ad revenue from me looking at the TV when their show is on, so it’s a double loss on their part.

I also continue to be annoyed at the fact that I can’t rent a movie through iTunes on the day and date of the DVD release. I can go to Blockbuster, sure, but that’s often more expensive, and even has additional costs associated with it (gas, time, uncertainty about whether the movie is even available [which results in wasted gas and time], dealing with people [you'd be surprised how much this factors into my decision-making sometimes...], etc.). Warner Brothers has even successfully convinced Netflix not to allow the rental of WB films through their mail-order service for a month after the DVD release, so as to not negatively impact retail sales. That’s bullshit, plain and simple.

As an example, I’ve seen @ddfreyne post several times on Twitter about Moon, and decided that I should probably look into watching it since it sounded interesting, and the trailer piqued my interest. Lo and behold, it came out on DVD recently and is even available for purchase in iTunes for $14.99. However, not knowing if I’ll actually like the movie, dropping $14.99 on it seems like a bit of an outlay for me. I’d much rather rent it for $3.99 (or hey, $4.99 in HD! You hear me movie industry?) and see if it’s something I like, and then spend $14.99 on it (and yes, ultimately, I’ve spent more on it if I end up liking it, but I’ve saved money if I don’t). But I can’t rent the movie until some time in February (I forget when), and knowing me, I’ll have forgotten about it by then, which means the movie industry gets nothing from me.

The internet is a serious came-changer, and as it matures, it continues to impact industries in ways that seemed impossible (or at least, unlikely to happen outside of Star Trek) just a few years before. Music, TV, film, and even print media are all struggling to compete with each other and themselves in this space, but are hampered by obligations to older content distribution channels and an apparent desire to legislate the future away rather than embrace it. The media landscape is evolving at an astonishing pace these days, and the major stakeholders are doing a pretty poor job of keeping up. Maybe they’ll catch on, or maybe not. All I know for sure is that the one thing that isn’t going to work is shouting at the ocean as the time comes in. Standing still is irresponsible simply from a business standpoint, and it amazes me that the shareholders of these companies aren’t boggling at how ineptly their interests are being handled by those in charge as we march (or, in the media’s case, are dragged kicking and screaming) into the future.

So apparently an email marketing software development firm decided to directly address Microsoft’s woefully inadequate treatment of HTML email in Outlook 2007 and the impending 2010 by starting a Twitter campaign. Microsoft responded by basically saying that Word is the most awesome HTML email composition tool on the planet, that “there is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability” (WTF?), and that since the whole thing was cooked up by an email marketing software company anyway, both the Twitter campaign and the Email Standards Project of which they are a major backer were worthy of complete and utter disdain (because ignoring and/or deriding third party developers is totally the way to win hearts and minds). If an email marketing tool developer can’t be trusted to lead a discussion on email standards because of their vested interest in the outcome, why should we listen to anything Microsoft says about computers?

Is it just me, or is Microsoft actively getting into the business of pissing off the people who develop tools and software for their platform? First they spend years ignoring the sorry state of the web that IE6 has left developers to deal with, put out a half-assed, still-busted update with Internet Explorer 7, and 3 years later followed it up with CSS 2.1 compliance and large amounts of mockery and derision towards CSS 3, HTML 5, ACID3, and the JavaScript performance race. Now they’re actively ignoring the fact that Outlook 2007 and 2010 display HTML emails worse than the ten-year-old Outlook 2000 by putting on a song and dance about the ability to use SmartArt and other Word capabilities when composing email.

In essence, Microsoft is completely missing the point of the Fix Outlook campaign. Web and desktop app developers trying to meet client demands for consistent branding in email communications are clamoring for improvements from Microsoft on the email rendering capabilities of Outlook. Microsoft on the other hand is trumpeting the capabilities of Word as an HTML email composer, and looking detached from reality in the process (“the best e-mail authoring experience around” is hardly the expression I would use to describe Word, especially when it comes to creating HTML).

Now, I know a lot of folks have really nasty things to say about HTML in email. For the most part, I agree, heavy HTML content isn’t something email should be used for. In particular, Apple’s stationary stuff in Mail is rather over-the-top (though its complexity does make Mail a best-in-show client for pretty much all HTML email handling, so that’s a plus). However, major corporations like banks and online retailers like to make use of HTML email because of the ability it provides to create visually pleasing, distinct messages with richer capabilities (ever gotten a shipping notice from NewEgg? The order info and tracking link are there courtesy of HTML, and it’s a lot easier to read and generate than tab-delimited plain-text “tables”) and branding that is consistent with the rest of their web presence. Non-profits and small businesses are replacing paper-based communications with email newsletters to save money. It’s these companies and organizations, and the developers who serve them, that Microsoft is not only ignoring, but being openly hostile toward by pig-headedly focusing on Word integration over standards-compliance.

And on the subject of Word’s advanced compositional features being built into Outlook, when was the last time anyone used Outlook directly for stuff like SmartArt etc.? Most people in the corporate world are application-oriented enough that I don’t think it even occurs to them that Outlook supports building complicated graphs and charts. These folks are going to do it in Word and attach it to a rich-text email because that’s their workflow. Anyone not in the corporate world is almost certainly not going to take advantage of the Word feature integration in Outlook, because really, who the hell would use it, and what the hell would they use it for? The whole thing seems like an effort on Microsoft’s behalf to further their vendor lock-in (since non-Outlook clients will almost certainly vomit all over Word’s fancy-schmancy complicated and completely non-standard HTML) and put an extra feature bullet on the back of the Office box.

I think the most mind-boggling part of Microsoft’s anti-standards screed is the argument that using IE to render HTML content is a major security risk. If that’s the case, the Trident engine still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the world, then. If disabling JavaScript execution, ActiveX loading, and defaulting image loading to “off” is something that the Trident control isn’t capable of supporting, the IE team loses even more points for not providing a powerful, flexible, and most importantly, secure tool for other developers to build into their applications. The Office team is making the IE team look incredibly lazy and unconcerned with security by making such a claim. Either it’s true, or the Office team is just really lazy and more interested in their marketing bullshit. Whichever it is, someone at MS is still apparently not on-board the secure and open standards movement that’s supposedly been sweeping the Redmond campus the past few years.

I guess all of this could be rendered moot if Word were able to generate and interpret standards-based HTML. Of course, this will happen the day that pigs fly and the Earth falls into the Sun, because Microsoft doesn’t give a rat’s ass about HTML compliance in Word. It “works”, and there’s no sense breaking something that “works”. If this requires another 5+ year campaign like what it took to get IE’s creaking, bloated carcass moving forward again, it’s going to be a cold day in Hell before I can use background-image in an email and have it appear correctly in Outlook.

Can we finally abandon the myth that Microsoft looks after its developers? Or that Microsoft is on the cutting edge of the web development platform? Or that Microsoft cares about standards? Because they don’t, they aren’t, and they most definitely have a vested interest in ignoring them.

So Digg and Reddit have been ragging on this for over a day now, but as a web developer, I thought I’d chime in with some longer-than-140-character comments on Microsoft’s new “IE8 is the most awesome thing ever invented” comparison chart. While the “reasons to install” page is fairly reasonable,  the comparison chart is complete and total bunk, and also tremendously condescending. Taking it point by point:

1. Security - I’m tempted to give them points on this, since Vista and Win7 run IE in a super-restricted access mode. However, Firefox seems to be much faster in pushing out security patches when they’re needed, and neither it nor Chrome have such deep-seated access to the OS that compromising them has the potential to cause widespread damage to the OS. Also, IE’s restricted process mode isn’t available in WinXP, which I think is still the dominant OS by a wide margin. Further, IE8’s “ScreenFilter” (seriously, what’s up with the CamelCase features?) has already been implemented by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. FAIL.
2. Privacy - And so the outright lying begins. Both Chrome and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5 have identical private browsing features (and in fact, Safari’s had it for years), and Firefox 3 even has an add-on you can use to gain this capability now without downloading the Fx3.5 beta. FAIL, Microsoft.
3. Ease of Use – I have two words for you, Microsoft: Information Bar. This thing is a hyper-sensitive waste of my time and an extreme annoyance on a daily basis. Also, have you looked at your preferences screen in the past decade? Jesus Christ… Minor points for Accelerators (with deductions for stacking the deck with your other products), but Web Slices are arguably a complete waste of time, and the rest of the browser is just an absolute mess (good luck trying to uninstall an add-on by yourself, by the way… the IE dev team had to post a how-to on their site for that!).
4. Web Standards – Yes, I will give you congratulations for finally making it to where everyone else has been for the past 5 years. You do at least deserve that. However, your ongoing dismissive attitude towards CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript performance, and the ACID3 test are not encouraging. To be sure, ACID3 is not a test of established standards the way that ACID2 is (and lordy did you crow about passing that one). However, passing ACID3 is about much more than meeting obscure draft standards. Look at the blogs that the WebKit developers posted in their race to beat Opera to 100/100; they mention making deep-seated performance tweaks and fixing long-standing rendering glitches in order to attain the coveted perfect score. ACID3 is as much a stress test of a browser’s existing capabilities as it is a future-facing standards test, and on both counts, IE is failing miserably, and getting thoroughly spanked by Gecko, WebKit, and Opera. The competition isn’t standing still here…
5. Developer Tools - Now you’re just being insulting. Every web developer I’ve ever talked to considers Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar the gold standard in web developer tools. WebKit’s developer tools run a close second (they’re a bit more tedious to use when editing content on-the-fly). IE’s developer tools are junk. Sure, they’re bundled into the browser, which I guess is good news for the <1% of internet users who do web development, but they’re clunky, it’s difficult to add properties or make changes to existing attributes on-the-fly, and the enable/disable style feature seems to be completely unreliable in my experience: changing a style in the developer tools, uncovering a “fix” for a rendering issue, and implementing that fix often results in a completely different rendering outcome than the one implied by the developer tools. FAIL again, Microsoft. And an even harder FAIL for slapping developers in the face with your crappy tools and saying we should be thrilled about them. And why is this on the consumer-facing facts list? What average computer user is going to care about this? It’s like advertising Visual Studio Express on the Windows 7 features page…
6. Reliability - Another lie. Chrome supports both tab isolation and crash recovery (though not explicit automatic crashed tab recovery [which seems stupid... if a tab crashes, you're probably not going to want to automatically re-launch it, because odds are it's going to crash again], so you get a few points on a technicality), and both Firefox and Chrome are far more reliable than IE8 in my experience. You could possibly win points over Safari on Windows, but that’s like beating the kid in a wheelchair on a 100-yard dash. Uphill. Nobody’s going to give you any credit for it (yeah, Safari on Windows still has some stability issues, but I’ll still take it over IE any day of the week).
7. Customizability – Now I know whoever made this chart is a complete idiot. For all its awesomeness, Chrome is hardly customizable, so I’m not sure why they tried to make it look good by giving it a check mark. That said, IE’s customizability selling point seems to be that Microsoft has already done the customizing for you. That seems wrong somehow (it also seems like something they enjoy accusing Apple of doing)… And they then go on to mention the 1700 add-ons for IE in the Mythbusting section (which I’ll get to), while simultaneously denigrating Firefox’s much larger add-on library. Can’t have it both ways, Microsoft. Major FAIL.
8. Compatibility – I hate you so fucking hard… if it were up to web developers, IE would be the least compatible browser on the market, but we can’t exactly do that when it controls over 60% of that market and people expect their websites to work. And you have no idea how bad it looks to only give yourself a check mark for compatibility when developers are already building in progressive enhancements to support the more advanced rendering features in other browsers like CSS rounded corners and SVG canvas support. IE is only more compatible with SharePoint and ActiveX-reliant sites, and speaking from experience, I hate both of them, and want them to die in a fire. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.
9. Manageability - Finally, something IE can honestly claim to have the upper hand in: enterprise distribution and lock-down support. I would frankly love to see Firefox pick up some enterprise-level GPO support, because it would only further erode IE’s market share (what are the chances of the GPO controls being impossible to build into open-source software though? Possible dick move alert…). The biggest base of IE6 users seems to be corporate enterprise and the US Government (at least, that’s what everyone cites when defending IE6’s ongoing existence). Get Firefox 3 with the IE Tab add-on on every one of those machines and watch public IE usage drop like a fucking stone. And they’d never have to upgrade off of IE6 for their internal sites (this is how I use SharePoint at work).
10. Performance – Please, this is just pathetic. From a usage standpoint, IE’s interface is painfully slow. Opening new tabs is glacial thanks to the tab isolation implementation that IE uses. And gods help you if you want to install more than a few add-ons from IE’s huge 1700-strong gallery, because they’re only going to make the problem worse (seriously, throughout IE8’s development process, the only fix provided by the IE team for slow application launch and tab creation was disabling your add-ons… that’s sure customization-friendly!). IE8’s JavaScript performance is at least a generation behind modern browsers, and the disparity is only going to get worse as web applications put a larger and larger strain on JS DOM manipulation, and HTML5+CSS3 take the place of Flash and Silverlight for most website glitz and glam. One more FAIL for you, Microsoft.

The Mythbusting page is just as bad…

1. “Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome.” – Again with the speed comparison. They even link to a video that uses the phrase “as it turns out” to prove their point (a phrase which my favorite author, Douglas Adams, once said made it possible to prove anything without backing up your statements… I think we have a case in point here). The video does nothing but compare page load times… no JavaScript performance comparisons, no comparisons of actual operations within pages like performing drag-and-drops, not even a demonstration of their Accelerators (which is what I thought the video was going to be about… when it comes to speed, pretty much the only point that could be made in IE’s favor is Accelerators, because they’re certainly going to be useful to some… though the lack of Google-targeted Accelerators is probably going to deter their use for many, because Google is synonymous with everything from search to translation to driving directions). As I said before, developers and other browser makers are not standing still. IE8 may meet today’s JavaScript performance requirements (and I personally don’t think it even manages that), but it’ll be at least another 2 years before we see even the beginning of IE9, and by then, who knows where things will have advanced? IE is definitely not leading the pack as it so bizarrely claims (and unlike Apple, whose claims that Safari is the world’s fastest browser are still questionable, IE isn’t even in the running for second place).
2. “Internet Explorer is less secure than Firefox. “ – I’m amused by their use of the phrase “catches almost twice as much malware”… sounds like an affliction the way they’ve worded it, but whatever. I also don’t think it’s wise to make a claim that you respond faster than any other browser maker to new threats when evidence to the contrary is easy to come by… even the NSS Labs report on malware blocking indicates that Firefox is faster to block new threats than IE8. Kudos on using a MS-written report on security fixes to back up a MS-written marketing blurb though, and points for being on top of malware problems. Is MS using a different validation system than Safari/Fx/Chrome? Would they be willing to share for the benefit of all browser users? (Fat chance there… this is like the only point they’re scoring on.)
3. “Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.” – Seriously, you’re going to try and refute this claim? For real? Are you on crack or something? Even if I give you the point for having more features out-of-the-box, half of those features you think I want are things I turn off during the setup process (Web Slices, Suggested Sites, virtually all of the Accelerators because most are pretty useless to me…). The things I do want, like spell check and ad blocking, are things I have to go find an add-on for anyway. Let’s also ignore IE’s lack of a download manager, and their absolutely worthless developer tools (I can’t really even say they’re better than shooting blindly at the problem, because of aforementioned discrepancies between developer tools-made changes and actual implemented code). Further, their boisterous claim of 1,700 add-ons is totally smashed by Firefox’s almost 7,400. Hell, there’s more add-ons in Firefox’s “other” category than in IE’s entire library. As to their claim that IE implements “almost all of the features [in] the most popular add-ons in Firefox” (their words, not mine), here’s a list of the top 10 most popular add-ons on AMO:
   • AdBlock Plus
   • FlashGot
   • Video DownloadHelper
   • NoScript
   • DownloadThemAll!
   • Greasemonkey
   • Personas
   • Firebug
   • IETab
   • Cooliris

   Of those, I think IE implements Firebug (sort of), and obviously IETab. Yep, that’s totally almost all of the features in the most popular Firefox add-ons. Isn’t there some sort of truth in advertising requirement FAIL going on here?

4. “Internet Explorer doesn’t play well with Web standards.” – Again, I’m willing to begrudge them a lot of points on this because they have come a long way even just from IE7, but they’re still not off my shit list. I spent a whole day building a new skin for DPWR in IPB3.0 and had to essentially reboot the whole damn thing because I hadn’t tested it in IE at the time (I was working on my Mac and didn’t want to have VirtualBox running), and when viewing the site in IE8 and IE8’s IE7 Compatibility Mode, the entire skin was almost entirely unusable (topic view especially was impossible because anything after the first post was simply missing). And this was after building it using validating XHTML code and CSS 2.1 definitions. AUGH!

I’ve harped on this before, but Microsoft seriously needs to get their shit together when it comes to IE. Rather than actually dedicate more time and resources to getting a quality modern browser on all fronts, Microsoft still seems to be taking the path of least resistance and over-hyping their accomplishments to the point of fabricating outright lies about the competition. Every other browser developer is pushing strongly into HTML5 and CSS3 territory while back-filling what are frankly tweak-level CSS 2.1 compatibility issues (I think supporting content:before and content:after on fieldset tags was brought up on the IE dev blog as an example of IE8’s awesome CSS 2.1 superiority… how many times have you needed to use that?), and pushing JavaScript performance into frankly obscene levels. Meanwhile, the IE team is trumpeting their support for CSS 2.1 (we’ve only been waiting for you at this party for 5 years now, guys) and deriding other browsers for focusing on JavaScript performance and supporting draft standards (when you’re already supporting the vast majority of the CSS 2.1 spec, there’s not much else to focus on but the future…). The problem is, IE is already still well behind the pack with IE8, and with IE9 easily 2-3 years away, they’ll be even farther behind on supporting those emerging standards and performance benchmarks, while every other browser will have them in spades.

Don’t even get me started on their mobile platform, which in 2010 will still based on IE6. Urge to kill… rising…

I’ve been ruminating on this for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft still isn’t taking Internet Explorer very seriously. Sure, they’re taking it seriously enough to continue development and make overtures to improved standards compliance, but let’s face it: Microsoft is not funding IE’s development because it wants to make the web a better development platform. Microsoft is funding IE only because browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are starting to seriously erode the monopoly that Microsoft held over the browser market for the better part of 5 years, and they want that share back. The problem is, this is precisely why Microsoft is still losing ground in the battle for browser market share: they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. In fact, Microsoft – and especially cheerleaders for the company -have been taking what seems to be an increasingly hostile role towards web developers who dare to argue that Microsoft isn’t doing enough to satisfy their needs. The attitude seems to be one of “you’ll use it and you’ll like it, now STFU!” This from the company whose CEO famously leapt around a stage screaming “DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!” Blamer had it exactly right… the way to build a platform is through developers… nobody will buy it if it won’t do what they want. What boggles my mind is that they’ve let other companies and organizations completely trounce them when it comes to the web as a platform.

WebKit and Gecko have been blowing IE’s Triton engine out of the water for years now, and despite Microsoft’s best efforts to play catch-up, the gap is widening. Gecko and WebKit already support several components of the HTML 5 specification, such as the <audio> and <video> tags, as well as offline storage databases and numerous portions of the CSS 3 spec, most notably stuff like border-radius, @font-face (for reals, not the proprietary MS implementation), and text-shadow. They seem like such minor things, but they really can make a world of difference in a web design, and doing them with CSS rather than Photoshop makes it so much more flexible and compatible.

Meanwhile, the IE team gives us dubiously-useful Web Slices, occasionally-useful Accelerators, tab grouping (which I find both useful and supremely annoying), and the bare minimum of CSS 2.1 and HTML 4 compliance. Their JavaScript engine is orders of magnitude slower than every other competitor, no matter how they care to doctor their statistics on the matter, and still lacks some DOM selection and manipulation methods. And while their Developer Tools are certainly much appreciated, they’ve driven me up the wall more times than I care to count because of how poorly-written they are, especially compared to Firebug, which is pretty much the gold standard for browser developer tools.

It’s really no wonder that developers and designers are starting to actively revolt against Microsoft’s browser platform. We were ignored for almost five years, and have been getting pretty marginal improvements at a dreadfully slow pace since development started up again in the face of an impending Firefox Apocalypse. Even today, Microsoft is still more concerned about making sure the HTML file you saved to your hard drive in 1997 will render properly than they are in ensuring that their browser can compete in the current fast-paced browser market.

This brings me back to my main point, namely that Microsoft isn’t taking IE seriously. (Or perhaps, that Microsoft isn’t taking the web seriously. Still.) There seems to be a fair amount of schizophrenia at Microsoft about how to handle the web, and it doesn’t help that they’re a massive company trying to compete against all comers. The simple existence of Silverlight as a Flash competitor is evidence that they’re dealing with a relatively fragmented web strategy aimed at dominance rather than support. It also, I think, hampers efforts to ensure that IE supports the latest and greatest HTML/CSS standards, because the counter-argument (which I’ve actually heard a few too many times by now) is simply “do it in Silverlight”.

Further, even the Windows Mobile team isn’t taking IE seriously. They shipped Windows Mobile 6.5 with Internet Explorer Mobile 6. And if you think the 6 is a typo, or somehow a misrepresentation of the IE version to keep it in line with the WinMo release number, you’d be sadly mistaken. Microsoft shipped the Internet Explorer 6 engine on a new product in the year 2009. It’s likely that release timetables kept them from even remotely being able to put IE 8 into WinMo 6.5, and it’s possible that architectural differences between Windows and WinMo prevented them from bundling IE 7, but simply put, it’s inexcusable and frankly embarrassing that an 8-year-old product has been bundled as the default browser on a new mobile OS in the year 2009. Blessedly, Microsoft has elected to provide proper 24-bit PNG handling and a more recent version of the still-glacial IE JavaScript engine for this build of IE 6, but Triton is still the same old non-compliant, glitchy, buggy POS that it’s always been on the desktop. If this situation doesn’t change with Windows Mobile 7, it will be just another nail in IE’s coffin of obsolescence. But hey, at least they’ve finally gotten away from IE Mobile 4…

What I’m most interested in seeing is what they do with the browser in the forthcoming touchscreen Zune HD. The Zune folks (like so many at MS) seem to be big believers in NIH, judging by the fact that the Zune desktop software and Windows Media Player development continue apace simultaneously for no apparent reason. As a result, any number of things could happen with this new Zune. They could go with the WinMo build of IE Mobile 6, and be an utter laughing stock. They could go with a third-party browser, like Skyfire or Fennec (though given Fennec’s current level of development, that seems unlikely). They could even build their own browser based on WebKit or Gecko (or, quixotically, the latest version of Triton). It’ll be interesting to see which possibility wins out, though I’d personally put more money on the IE Mobile 6 possibility than anything else, with a home-grown Triton-based browser a close second.

The really bizarre part of this whole escapade is that the IE team themselves seem fairly committed to reaching feature parity with other browsers’ rendering engines, and other departments within Microsoft are actively promoting the expiration of IE 6 support in future releases (like SharePoint 2010, which is opting to focus on ensuring broad compatibility with IE7 & 8, Firefox 3, and Safari [and speaking as someone who has the IE Tab Firefox extension installed just to deal with the slow-ass SharePoint 2007 at work, this is a welcome development]).

It may be a furtherance of the schizophrenic behavior I noted earlier, but some portions of MS seem to be trying really hard to embrace the modern, open web, and all that that entails, while others are still clinging – either through neglect, laziness, or stubbornness – to the outmoded days when IE 6 controlled about 98% of the browser market. As a whole, I really don’t think Microsoft is willing to put the sort of serious effort into Internet Explorer that would actually make it a modern, first-rate, first-class browser. It may be because there’s no profit engine behind such a move when other proprietary technologies like Silverlight can be used to much more powerful effect to control the web rather than operate within it, I don’t know. But I do know that Microsoft is starting to turn off wave after wave of their vaunted developers with their ongoing antipathy toward pushing Internet Explorer into the same category as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of them trying to turn that ship around, and because of it, their market share will continue to decline, to the betterment of the rest of the web.

Boxee has been asked to remove Hulu support by Hulu at the behest of its content providers. This is completely counter-productive on the providers’ part: it pisses off the people most likely to abandon this legal, ad-supported venture in favor of ad-free, access-anywhere torrents, costing them money, and gives them a ton of bad press in the tech world, costing them precious mindshare (of which they already have very little remaining).

On top of that, it’s utterly ridiculous that Boxee be discriminated against as a viewing medium; it displays all of the ads that Hulu serves, and even went out of its way a couple of releases ago to redesign the Hulu plugin a couple of builds ago to better match the look and feel of Hulu’s website. All this ultimately does is force me to use a mouse and keyboard to browse their site for content to play on my TV using a different computer (as opposed to the Apple TV, which is just a computer with a really simple interface and input device), so I’m not exactly sure what the providers are hoping to gain from cutting off access to Hulu from Boxee.

This also isn’t the first time they’ve done something retarded when it comes to giving Hulu their content. Their most popular material – including BSG, House, and (for me anyway) Eureka – is time-delayed by 8 days. I can’t watch an episode of BSG, House, or Eureka on Hulu until over a week later! While I totally understand the desire to push people into watching the shows during their initial broadcast, this is downright excessive, and actually pushed me from watching BSG and Eureka on Hulu to watching it via torrent back when it was still off the iTunes store (now I watch it live Friday night on SciFi since we have cable, and then I buy the HD version the following morning on iTunes… never let it be said that I don’t support content I truly enjoy when it’s possible for me to do so).

Since I only use Hulu to watch a handful of shows, and since those shows are almost all available elsewhere (either through other channel plugins in Boxee or through iTunes… or at the very least through torrents), it being pulled off of Boxee is a disappointment and a frustration, but ultimately it’s something that just makes me go elsewhere for stuff I was happy to watch on Hulu, despite its less-than-awesome performance on the Apple TV. Comedy Central has streams of Daily Show and Colbert Report that I can watch, and I’ll probably just start watching House through iTunes. Until Hulu comes back to Boxee, though, I’m voting with my wallet and taking my viewership elsewhere. Hopefully it’ll send the message far enough up the chain that the providers do the right (and smart) thing and relent.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in .

So, I’ve been fiddling around with IE8 Beta 1 today, and have a short list of notes thus far.  I haven’t put it through any serious paces, so this list will probably grow over time, but for now, here’s the shake-down…

Nice:

• “Super-standards” mode on all non-quirks pages out of the box.  “Nice” is an understatement.
• Passes Acid2 (as long as it’s on the webstandards.org site; acid2.acidtests.org fails, apparently due to a cross-domain request issue that’s being worked on, so it’s a conditional passage, but still way better than the grenade-victim look of the smiley face in IE7).
• Wide buttons successfully render their corners in Windows XP.  Previously, if a button became too wide, the edges of the button would become super-pixelated.  Looks like someone back-ported a fix to IE7/Vista for this release.  Thank god.
• An “Emulate IE7″ button is included to force the browser back to IE7’s rendering mode and user-agent.
• Based on the demo at MIX this morning, there’s a sweet set of developer tools, including in-engine JS debugging.  This trumps even the Web Developer toolkit for Firefox, which is sort of a gold standard for dev tools (Safari’s ain’t bad either though).

Not so nice:

• Buttons still scale horizontally out or proportion with the contents of the button itself.  It’s like every character you pile on adds some number of pixels to the left and right padding for reasons that completely escape me.
• IE8 scores a 17 on the Acid3 test.  While it’s better than the score of 13(?) that IE7 gets, it’s still woefully far behind Opera 9.26 (46/100), Firefox 2 (51/100), Firefox 3 Beta 3 (59/100), and Safari 3 Build 31A15 (76/100).  While I won’t be placing bets on who passes Acid3 first, I’d be willing to put money on who passes it last…
• The “Emulate IE7″ button requires a complete restart of IE before it will take effect.  I also somehow doubt that this feature will last into the final release (especially if it remains this mean to the user), which is sad, because it’s obvious enough what it does that it could help alleviate some of the headaches that will inevitably arise from MS “breaking the web” again (and hopefully for the final time, though I wouldn’t count on that given the Acid3 compliance).
• The developer tools are apparently really, really buggy.  I thought this was a developer release… whoops?
• The UI is still crap, but that’s aesthetics, not web standards, so whatever.

Otherwise intriguing:

• Activities looks like an expanded take on Microformats, which I actually wouldn’t mind seeing other companies like Google, Mozilla, and Apple jumping on the bandwagon for.  Apple’s already got the whole data detector thing going on in OS X, with hooks for it in more than just Mail by the looks of a few tips on macosxhints.com, so this seems like a decent enough initiative to adopt as well.  It’s even being released under a Creative Commons license, so hooray for non-proprietary-ness…
• WebSlices look like Microsoft’s version of WebClips, only built into the bookmark bar instead of the Dashboard (or Sidebar… guess they couldn’t do the Sidebar integration if it’s supposed to be an XP feature too…)  Practically speaking, I think I prefer the WebClips approach, which lets you capture any portion of any webpage, rather than just those sections that the web developers of certain sites have deigned it appropriate to let you save.  The bookmark bar integration is admittedly more accessible than the Dashboard though, in most instances, though, so that’s nice.
• Domain name highlighting looks like Yet Another Useless Feature to try and keep people from doing retarded things online.  If red (well, pink) address bars, huge certificate failure notifications, and phishing alert notifications in the browser aren’t enough to get someone to realize they’re about to get themselves scammed, making the domain name stand out from the rest of the URL sure as hell ain’t gonna do anything to help.  I’m betting on it being more confusing than anything else, honestly…

I will be following IE8’s beta cycle with supreme interest, if only because I want to see just how much more work Microsoft is going to make me do to get my sites to render properly in IE8, but so far all of my work-related stuff seems to be doing well, which is hardly surprising given that it renders will in other standards-compliant browsers…