uCommerce, my ass

October 30, 2001 by Steven Garrity

So I’m flipping through Jakob Nielsen’s new book, Homepage Usability:
50 Websites Deconstructed (he scratches my back, I scratch his), when I come across his criticism of the consulting behemoth Accenture’s homepage. While lambasting the site for its ambiguity, with just cause, Nielsen and his co-author Tahir, applaud Accenture for using the heading “eCommerce” to link to a section about what Accenture calls uCommerce (Ubiquitous Commerce). Nielsen’s point is that people won’t understand jargon your organization has made up itself.

Accenture made this animation, not me
Ok, this make sense so far, but, uCommerce!? I made that shit up! I don’t know how long Accenture has been hawking that bologna, but I made a post last January on this very site describing the concept of uCommerce or Ubiquitous Commerce.

The lesson I took from this and recommend you take from it as well is as follow:

Beware, the people that run the world are no smarter than you and the bullshit they create is no better than the bullshit you create.

I wonder if posting on your blog is the same as mailing myself a sealed envelope…

aov complies with the w3c

October 29, 2001 by Steven Garrity

Warning: what follows may be considered boring by some readers – especially non-geeks (if there are any).

Ladies and gentlemen, actsofvolition.com is now compliant with the The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML 4.01 Transitional recommendation*.

The good people at The Web Standards Project can explain why adhering to standards matters.

Those who work in web development will know that adhering to these standards is not always easy since some popular browsers don’t interpret them correctly. Netscape 4.x, for example, will have problems rendering a perfectly standards compliant page. Web developers must choose between breaking the standards or having glitches for Netscape 4.x users.

New browsers are much better at interpreting the standards. Internet Explorer 4, 5, 5.5, and 6 all do a decent job and have gotten better and better with each new version (although there are still problems. The new Mozilla browser (aka Netscape 6.x) does an excellent job as do most other alternative browsers such as Opera, iCab, and Konqueror.

The trouble is that loads of people still use Netscape 4.x. While global stats put it’s usage at below 10% of web users, this site and others I help produce have up to 30% of users running Netscape 4.x.

Here on aov, I can (and have) decide to screw Netscape 4.x users in favour of the standards. There are better browsers that are easy to get. However, as a professional web developer (which I am, apparently) I can not make that decision on behalf of my clients. Company XYZ is interested in selling their widget, not ensuring web accessibility and cross-platform-interoperability. Ignoring users is not good business. That said, it is possible to make sites that adhere to the standards (for the most part) and still work relatively well in NS4.x.

Exciting, isn’t it?

* If you actually run our site through the W3C’s Validator, you’ll notice that it doesn’t actually validate, but that’s only because it’s a little confused about some of our URLs and some non-standard characters, which I’m working on.

explodingdog book!

October 29, 2001 by rob

Finally!

The greatest thing in the world happened!

Exploding Dog has finally released a 220 page book of 10 short stories he drew! From Sam:

This book is 220 pages of 10 short stories i drew over the last year. One story is over 80 pages long some are as short as two pages. Over 100 full color pages with all new pictures and stories about moon monsters, love, flying and other fun explodingdog stuff. I published this book myself. If you like Explodingdog, you will probably like the book. Please buy one so I can make some of my money back. The image on the left is the graphic on the cover. The book costs $30.
thanks
sam

I have been looking forward to this forever. This is great.

XP is a frog

October 26, 2001 by Steven Garrity

According to a story at the Microsofty news site ActiveWin, frog design (don’t you hate companies who’s names are all lower-case?) was involved in the design of Microsoft’s new Windows Media Player look and the new Windows XP flag logo.

I also discovered recently that icon design gurus IconFactory designed the new Windows XP icons. They are very pretty (although, as I’ve said before, simply maaaaan). This crew also made a nice transition from the pixel-perfect to the new big-ass smooth Mac OS X icons for Audion (also see their gallery of other OS X icons – some of the nicest I’ve seen – be sure and check out all of the ‘client samples’).

frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.

I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. A beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC world’s earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.

I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.

a third of AOV remains unrecognized and underappreciated

October 26, 2001 by rob

Some may have noticed that both AOV Matt and AOV Steve have been recognized. Some of you might be thinking, “AOV Rob hasn’t been recognized yet, what’s up with that? He must not be a genius at all.”

Well. I can explain. The thing is, both geniuses were recognized when they were twentysomethings. So, the reason I am not recognized has nothing to do with my lack of blinding genius. But my lack of being able to legally consume alcohol in Texas (or possibly my spelling).

So, it is still my goal to achieve public genius recognition (not so much for myself, as I am self motivated, but so the world will be able to share in the knowledge of my existence).

Stay tuned.

I’m not being angsty, I just noticed I was the last unrecognized genius and felt like my fly was down and that I had to make a ‘fly is down’ joke.

XP is a frog

October 26, 2001 by Steven Garrity

frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.

I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time that meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. A (then) beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC worlds earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.

I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.

posterized video

October 26, 2001 by Steven Garrity

Check out this visually interesting movie trailer for Waking Life (requires QuickTime – link via A.WholeLottaNothing.org).

unrecognized and underappreciated talent gets recognized and appreciated

October 22, 2001 by Steven Garrity

I’ve had a hard time keeping this one under wraps for the past few weeks, but as of this morning, I’m finally allow to brag. My fellow silveroranges and I have gotten big props from the guru himself, Jakob Nielsen.

I’m hoping that this award will remain in our hands and not be lost to a technicality like our last award.

every PC today is really a macintosh

October 20, 2001 by Steven Garrity

When asked if he felt miffed about being left out of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the PC, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak replied that fundamentally, every PC today is a Macintosh. True enough.

When asked how he would improve the Mac today, he says he would:

…come up with a set of user interface guidelines that’s shorter than the book that Apple used to make […] and come up with a very strict set and go back and make every program that Apple is associated with everywhere possible consistent with those and to write higher level APIs that pretty much lead any application to that same type of consistency.

Listen to this great audio interview with Steve Wozniak (link via Slashdot. The interview is about an hour long and starts 55 minutes into the audio stream.

Woz strikes me as a simple, good person, who was bulldozed by fame, wealth, and success. But I’m sure its uneducated presumtions like this one that make life difficult for someone like Woz.

pervasive connectivity

October 20, 2001 by Steven Garrity

My cell phone can handle voice and data (web/email). The voice works are you’d expect – quite well for a cell phone. The data works as you’d expect – like shit. It’s ridiculous. Typing on the numeric keys is so slow it’s embarrassing and the three line screen is just too small.

There is hope for those of us who have some type of phobia of disconnection. Danger is a company about to release a handheld device that is about the same size as my cell phone works are a traditional cell phone, and has data features that look as though they may actually be usable.

The device is mostly screen and slides open to reveal a full thumb-keyboard. It can handle all of the web/email data features of my current phone, as well as always-connected data features such as instant messaging (not sure what protocol).

Handspring has a similar device coming out with more advanced PDA functionality, but will not be ‘always-on’ connection ready until next year. It is available with either thumb keyboard or graffiti and was designed by the bad-ass geniuses at IDEO.

Is any of this necessary? We threw out necessity as a factor years ago. I wonder if our language will eventually discard the word ‘necessary’ the way equatorial languages have no word for snow.