Archive for January, 2010
Google To IE6, “Die already!”
Jan 31st
I’m a big, big fan of Google Apps. Their decision to allow people to piggyback on their services with their domains was nothing short of brilliant. Every domain I have set up since has used their service and I have nothing but good things to say about it.
Friday they gave me another reason to love them by sending me an e-mail informing me that:
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
For those who need a translation:
We at Google, after careful observation of the Analytics trends for our Google Apps usage, have noticed a single defining characteristic shared by 100% of our problem users. This characteristic is an affinity for Internet Explorer 6. Therefore, in an attempt to rid ourselves of as many idiots as possible, we are dropping support for their favorite software. Stop using Internet Explorer 6 or stop using Google, we don’t care which.
This is a bold move by Google, although completely necessary (and inevitable) if they want to make the best applications the web has to offer. And honestly, I wish more companies would take this stance. But on the heels of telling China to shove it I’d say Google may have decided that they are now well established enough in both the political and technical arenas to start throwing some weight around.
I generally don’t like when big companies start using their size to dictate trends, but when I think about it that’s probably because almost always the big company does this to further their agenda. Rarely does my agenda fall in line with theirs. From a technology standpoint, Microsoft is the most frequent offender on this front, and we all know that when Microsoft throws its weight around it’s in an effort to make more people see things Microsoft’s way, not in an effort to make the world see things the agreed upon standards way. At least so far, Google seems to be forwarding web standards which are something that for better or worse we as a technical community have agreed upon as good.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords… As long as those overlords hate IE6 as much as I do.
Trillian 4.1 – One Giant Twitterific Leap
Jan 20th
I’ve been using Trillian Pro for years. It has always made managing the various chat mediums I have to stay contacted much easier and that makes my life better, so I’m willing to pay for the app. Now, though, with the introduction of Trillian Astra, the team over at Trillian seems to be honing in more and more on what exactly I want to have as an every day social power user. The newest release, Trillian 4.1 (released today) is no exception, catching me a little off guard with some of the great options it has provided me with.
In addition to using every available chat medium to stay in touch with different groups of people, I use Twitter… a lot. I have several accounts for several different reasons and they all have unique needs. In the past these unique needs have made me do a lot of juggling to be able to manage everything.
No more, thanks to Trillian’s new release of Astra. I mean, the client has all of the basics that you would expect, but in addition to those basics are the following reasons that Trillian Astra is now my favorite Windows based desktop Twitter client:
Multiple bit.ly Account Support
Sure, lots of clients allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts. I’ve been using TweetDeck with decent success on that front for some time. Then there are some clients which actually allow you to integrate with your bit.ly account, so that when the Twitter client automatically shortens a link for you the link is added to your bit.ly account so you can track it like you would any other. But what about clients that let you manage multiple Twitter accounts which are each attached to their own unique bit.ly accounts? Is it really that mind-boggling that this would be something a power user would want? Who knows, but Trillian Astra got it right. Add your Twitter account then right click on the account in your contact list, click settings and WHAM-O you’re ready to enter your bit.ly API key and go to town.
Intelligent Character Limitation Counting
Something else that other clients should get on the ball with is knowing how many characters things like image uploads to TwitPic are going to take. No more wondering, biting your nails and hoping that your image upload URL doesn’t throw your character count over by one character, ending your perfect digital planetary alignment.
Tweet Screenshots
This one is really nice for technical tweets / blogs / etc. Basically, you can use any image in your tweet via TwitPic by dragging it into your message. But if you right click in your message, you have the ability to actually trim out a screenshot to use. Nifty!
Side Docking
I don’t check news sites any more. I don’t check my favorite band sites any more. I don’t have to, because I have a constant stream of updates that interest me flowing through Twitter. Now, thanks to Trillian’s function of docking to the side of your monitor (reserving space so that maximized windows don’t overlap it), something they’ve had for a long time, that stream is constantly available at a literal glance to my left.
There are, of course, still a few issues that exist (when you open a retweet you have to type / delete a character for the character counter to register) and some functionality I’d love to see added, but nothing that overrides how awesome the new Trillian is at managing my fairly advanced Twitter needs.
Notification Placement
This isn’t a Twitter specific update, nor is it unique to Trillian. But the ability to place your notification popups where you want them, even with multiple monitor support, means they don’t get in the way of something else that you were trying to do. It’s a really nice touch that makes a big difference to me.
Nice job guys! Now, about that post I made on your forums asking for the ability to have a transparent background with fully visible text…
Windows 7 Boots Slow – Check Your Wallpaper!
Jan 19th
Let me start by saying I have a monster of a machine. I use it for more demanding tasks than most people will ever ask their computer to do and it performs all of them admirably and quickly, all in 64-bit glory. Then, I upgraded to Windows 7.
Now, at first, things were unbelievable and I was in love. And truth be told, they still are and I still am, except during the boot sequence. Whenever I boot, the OS takes forever to load. It literally just sits, no disk activity, no notable processing, no informative messages on the screen, nothing. And then, all of a sudden, everything loads almost instantly. It’s almost as if there was an intentional delay or something. Suspicious, right?
So I started researching this today. I’m not exactly sure why it surprises me but apparently there is a bug in Windows 7 that causes a 30 second delay during boot if you use a solid color as your wallpaper. Silly me and my minimalist approach looking for better performance. I thought not loading a wallpaper would be easier for the machine to do than loading one.
I found the original article over on Lifehacker. Within that article they provide links to a hot fix and some workarounds. But I figured creating another article couldn’t hurt, just so people would know what was up.
Trillian Astra – The Dark Side (of skins)
Jan 13th
I don’t have enough time to make a short post here, so I’ll likely be leaving a long, rambling one. You’ve been warned. ;)
I’m a Trillian user. I love it. I bought it, I will continue to give them money as long as their product continues to meet my need of having EVERY chat network known to man connected at the same time. I know my IRC pals laugh at me for using Trillian, but whatever.
There were a couple of things I wasn’t crazy about in Trillian Astra, however. The primary being that the default skin was bulky, and the included secondary, minimalist skin (Cobalt) didn’t contain any dark themes. I’m sorry, but using a white background on chat windows just makes me feel, as a friend said, “flashbanged” every time I chat.
Surprisingly, there aren’t that many good skins out yet using the new features provided by Astra. There are a few, however, if you can figure out where to look. So I’m going to make that easier here and provide a collection of links to resources I used to get what amounts to a dark version of Cobalt.
Listing: A list of Astra Skins, Plug-ins and Mods
Skins: Cobalt Black Magick (Fixed) | Avion Pro
There, maybe I’ll come back later and write up how to disable specific sounds without losing the ones you want.
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Update – 01.20.2010 – A new Trillian build was released today that improved, among other things, Trillian’s support for Twitter. This could change the way I use Twitter, moving me away from TweetDeck. However, the skin I had been using (Cobalt Black Magick) doesn’t yet support the new character counter functionality. So I’ve added a link to the other skin I love from the list, Avion Pro. – DG