fortybillion

From what I understand, the iPhone doesn't use sub-pixel font rendering either, because of the high pixel density (which is not even as high as the Nexus One).

Since the display rotates, normal desktop sub-pixel rendering algorithms won't work anyway.

Same here. I used Win 95 through XP without ever installing AntiVirus or AntiSpyware, and I never had malware.

We've been using Grails (Groovy) at our startup with great success. A few warts early on with regard to how Grails wants to handle packages and URLs, but we push a lot of transactions through this system (sorry, I don't have exact numbers) and Grails has held up remarkably well. It also cut our initial development time by about half.

Having had both central vac and a Dyson luggable, I vastly prefer the Dyson. Carrying around the 30 feet of tubing for the central vac was hardly convenient at all.

The SIGGRAPH presentation video for this is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKjs8ZjQNg

When I took an AI class back in University, the professor noted that the term AI is usually only applied to the problems we can't solve. As soon as we determine an algorithm for something, they no longer call it AI.

So technically, it was a Data Mining class I guess.

When dealing with digital content, isn't accuracy what you're looking for? Properly calibrating a display would take care of the precision.

(Unless I'm confused here, which is entirely possible.)

The main difference is with the technology used in the panel -- cheaper panels (TN panels) generally only use 6 bits for each colour element of the display (Red, Green and Blue), meaning that it is capable of producing a much more limited range of colours (the thousands indicated by the article).

For playback purposes (DVDs, games, etc), most consumers won't notice the difference. For content creation, though, 6-bit panels are a disaster. I've seen cheap panels from Dell that simply could not display colours in the light blue or light yellow range correctly, and light greys not at all.

Wikipedia has an excellent article about the different types of LCD panels available, but the takeaway is basically "you get what you pay for."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lcd_monitor

This article seems to indicate the exact opposite; that the new Pro displays (including the 13") have markedly improved colour accuracy.

"Colour accuracy in the three MacBook Pro displays is as right as we've seen in a laptop display, equal to or better than some midrange desktop displays and not that far off the level of colour correctness found in a premium desktop display."

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10041-...

That can work if you remember to add the right margin onto the block level element as well... by default I believe Blueprint only adds it to divs.

Blueprint. You can clean up all the extraneous "span-x" classes with the semantic_classes property in the generator if you're worried about semantic class naming.

It does trend towards div-itis, but I find that most complex layouts do over the long run anyway.

Looking forward to using CSS3 layouts in about 5-7 years... sigh.

The problem is when you use CSS for interface elements (such as dialog boxes, UI controls, etc), a broken IE6 implementation may mean those users can't use the site at all.

How relevant this is to your income, of course, depends on the site. For a blog, it may not matter at all, but there's a good reason why Facebook is notifying IE6 users of a degraded experience. They use a ton of CSS/Javascript for their UI, and I'm sure the cost of supporting IE6 is very measurable and very high. But they probably can't just tell IE6 users to go away entirely.

Not sure where you're getting your 40% number, but my sites see less than 3% of users using FF2 (these are sites which still see 20%+ IE6 use, so not skewed towards developers).

This stats page shows FF2 use at 3% of total, which would be around 7% of Firefox users. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_firefox.asp

Know of anything similar in Calgary?

I imagine it would be disabled if you had a passcode set up.

I would like to see a refresh of the notification system, and status messages on the lock screen, which I believe was hinted at a while back in a patent filing.

Would be nice just to hit the home button while the device is in standby and see a list of recent emails, SMSs, etc.

Push Gmail would be doable on 2.2 if Google enables the feature in their ActiveSync implementation. They already have contacts and calendar sync working.

3.0 could add shortcuts like Yahoo's though, to make setup simpler.

Did you have to create a working implementation and submit it to a contest, hoping to get paid after the fact?

More than anything, I'm amazed people are willing to devalue their own time by participating in these contests.

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."

A valid point. Out of curiosity, what environment do you develop for that uses IE6/7 and has latency constraints? Is it a network performance problem, or just the parse speed of the library?

Crazy that people still try to solve this stuff by hand instead of leveraging a library like jQuery or Prototype. The Taconite plugin is my favourite way of dealing with this specific problem. http://malsup.com/jquery/taconite/

Interesting site. My biggest issue with listening to DJ sets/podcasts in iTunes is the lack of trackname visibility and accessibility. I really wish iTunes supported an Audiobook chapter-style interface for these types of tracks.

I really like what you guys have done with the interface, and have a fairly good selection of sets. I think the biggest problems are portability and integration. Whenever I'm listening to a streaming set through a browser, I inevitably tap the "pause" media key on my keyboard out of habit, setting off a nice random mix of streaming audio and whatever happens to be cued up in iTunes. I also tend to download sets to my iPhone and listen to them in car.

I wonder if down the road you could address the portability issue with a iPhone app that mimics your site's UI, and the integration by providing custom streams to iTunes (or winamp, or whatever) that include tracknames in the stream.

Do you have any plans to support user-submitted DJ sets?

It's amusing to watch server programmers come up with a thousand different ways to abstract away HTML. If you've ever worked with a good interaction designer, the best thing you can do is let them write views in something as close to HTML as possible. Every attempt to auto-generate sections of the view is something that will need to be worked around at some point. A lot of these frameworks seem to come from the mentality that design is just a programming problem that can be solved by pushing code out from the backend. A lightweight templating language (smarty, velocity, etc etc) should be all you really need. Poking holes in the HTML and inserting data is precisely the right way to do it.