Monthly Archive for June, 2008

So much new stuff!

Ever since starting with Zenbe, I’ve found myself feeling refreshed and newly invested in the web community - so much to the point that I can’t pick a singular thing to blog about tonight.

I\'m blaming this on Zenbe...So, I’ll mention them all. First up is a site called Mint, which is just brilliant. You sync up your bank account info with them and they put your finances together in a spectacular array of animated bar graphs and pie charts. It also helps you manage your budget and find ways to save expenses. It’s also full of cute little statistics like the Starbucks data to the left (which apparently helps you realize you went a little crazy with the lattes). I’m a total nerd for this stuff, and the app, which is built in Flex, is smooth and responsive in ways which almost make me feel like a fool for sticking with this javascript stuff.

Besides Mint, there’s also a lot of other applications of all types that have been coming around. First, Versions is finally out, and it’s quickly found it’s way into my ‘most used apps’ list. There’s also 280 slides, which does amazing things with web-based presentation tools; Fluid, which turns any website into a self-running webkit-based application; a youtube/last.fm mashup, and more. Much more.

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It’s Firefox Day - help with the transition

Most people who would be reading this blog know that today Firefox 3 is released to the public. I’ve been itching to get this release for a while - FF3 uses a totally different graphics engine and already I can tell that it’s a lot slicker, smoother, and overall just kicks some ass.

The FF3 update is pretty massive, and there’s a lot of reasons we all will want to switch over to it as soon as we can (not just the graphics thing). However, within 30 seconds of running the app - I noticed that it has new rendering differences (improvements) from the FF2 version. Quickly this turned into a sticky situation, as I was in the middle of debugging some CSS in FF2 that, well… worked perfectly in FF3. It brought home the sad fact that as web developers, we’re still totally owned by browser compatibility issues* and need to support FF2 for a while - until the 3.0 transition is long a thing of the past.

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