Tagged: www

Finally, a real web IM


Check out [[http://meebo.com/|meebo]] — no really, I mean it. Do it — you’ll be surprised.

I was shocked at how well it works. Almost as good as gaim, kopete or trillian. I could log in instantly, it showed me my offline messages, I could chat with one accounts signed into meebo and the other one on my desktop. It was freaky. Damn cool stuff!

The [[http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=2|team]] looks interesting — young, vibrant and mostly female :-) (no, I’m not trying to be sexist). Do check out the [[http://blog.meebo.com/|meeblog]] and the [[http://forum.meebo.com/|forums]].

Wow.

Towards an online desktop


Lets see what do we have so far:

* A [[http://writely.com|word processor]]
* An [[http://meebo.com/|instant messenger]]
* A [[http://tadalist.com|todo list]]
* A [[http://basecamphq.com|project manager]]
* A [[http://www.protopage.com/|generic scratchpad]]
* A [[http://bloglines.com/|RSS aggregator]]
* An [[http://kiko.com|online calendar]]
* Ofcourse [[http://gmail.com|email]]
* and [[http://del.icio.us|bookmarks]]
* and [[http://www.backbase.com/|many]], [[http://www.ajaxian.com/|many]], [[http://www.techcrunch.com/?cat=97|more]]

Now all we need is a good replacement for photoshop, powerpoint and excel and integrate them all together into a single portal (Yahoo? Google? M$? other takers?) and there you have — your online desktop!

Of course, easier said than done. But things are moving fast. Very fast.

Problems with ALA 4.0


I was just looking through the [[http://alistapart.com|ALA]] website, when I noticed a few quirks:

* its a //fixed-width// design, so if you try to view the site in a narrow window (anything less than 600px should be enough to demonstrace, I think) you’ll see a scrollbar show up at the bottom and then you have to scroll horizontally to get at all the content. I don’t quite understand why ALA didn’t opt for a more fluid design, when they have a [[http://alistapart.com/topics/design/layout/|plethora of articles]] on creating [[http://alistapart.com/articles/negativemargins|flexible]], [[http://alistapart.com/articles/elastic|elastic]] [[http://alistapart.com/articles/flexiblelayouts|designs]]
* they don’t have a separate stylesheet for print media. That would have been perfectly fine, if the site printed ok. I just tried a simple “Print to file” from Firefox, and for some weird reason it seems that columns of text in subsequent pages increasingly keep shifting towards the right until after about the 3rd or 4rd page, no text is visible on the page. Maybe this is a problem specific to printing to file from Firefox, but I’d still say its a problem.

But otherwise, really great design. Excellent choice of fonts, and colors. I like that they don’t overuse images in their design (basically just for the logo).

IE fix


As pointed by Adrian in [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/08/21/135/#comment-36|this comment]], I have now updated my blog to include the [[http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/|IE7]] scripts. Hopefully now the blog looks better on IE. If someone is using IE to view this blog, please leave a comment as to how the blog renders for you.

In particular, I’m interested in knowing if the blog is filling up the entire width of the screen? Ideally, the width of the blog should be capped to 900px, but if it is filing your entire window, let me know.

I’m still debating what to do about font choices. Typically I avoid specifying particular fonts, and just stick to generic font families (like serif, sans-serif and monospace). However, the default font settings in IE are just horrible. Times New Roman for serif and I think Helvetica/Arial for sans-serif.

Also, now that I’m using the IE7 patch, I might play around with some rounded borders.

IE sucks


So I booted into windows (ok, don’t give me that look now, I had to use the webcam!!), and while I was at it I figured I’d take a look at how the blog and my website were rendering in IE.

One word: //pathetic//.

The font rendering was horrible. Some really useful CSS properties such as ‘max-width’ aren’t even supported. Why does IE suck so much? I even tried some of the hacks I found, but even they didn’t work (most involved using the ‘expression()’ method to set the width)

Anyways, I don’t have the time and patience to fix layout right now. So if you’re using IE and you think this site looks ugly, thats fine by me. But you’ll be better off using a //real// browser.

Sheesh.