tuesdayDeveloper;

If you read what I’ve written before, you know my answer to this question: a touch-ready system must be built for touch, not keyboard and mouse, from the beginning, but that doesn’t mean that the two can be closely synchronized.

While I would prefer one touch-based system to run on all of my devices (which may or may not ever really happen) because that makes things easier to use, I understand that that is rather hard to develop. There is a reason why the iPad is so limited and it really boils down to the battery and processing power.

You may say that it is limited because it is a touch-based OS, I disagree. There is no reason why any software, program, or system that runs now on a desktop OS cannot run on a touch-based OS. True, I wouldn’t want to see the current iteration of some pieces of software on a touch-based tablet, but after it is redesigned for touch input any piece of software on a touch-based system can do the same things that a piece of software can do on a mouse and keyboard system.

In the mean time, there seems to be something on the horizon coming from Apple. Now most people are saying that this will automatically change from one OS to another and (as in the article cited) I agree that this could be implemented poorly, but there could be a way to make it work well. Imagine editing a document in Pages (for thous of you who aren’t fortunate enough to enjoy Pages, it’s a word processor that in my book is a pleasure to use, but that’s my opinion) on Mac OS X and then thinking to yourself about how tired you are of moving your mouse around all the time. You think to yourself, wouldn’t it be easier if I could just touch the place in the paragraph where I need to edit. With this new system you would just pull the screen towards you, it automatically changes to iOS with Pages running, and you start tapping away at the screen and editing as you were before. You could seam to OSs together without a seam. Now, I hope that this patent means that Apple is working on a desktop-touch-based OS, but if nothing else I think that this idea could work.

Disclaimer: I wrote this post after I looked at the results (see below) of a project I’m working on. IE did not preform well.

I make no secret to my dislike of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It is, in a word, primitive. IE has made some great strides recently, but it’s still lagging behind the rest of the market. If I were rank my favorite browsers the order would be thus: First place: Google Chrome. Tied for Second Place: Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. After that, there’s no one worth mentioning. Of course, if you look at the market the order would be Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari (pretty much tied for now), and then Opera.

So why my acidic review of IE? There’s a few reasons. First and formost is because when developing web sites all of the different browsers look alike (or at least mostly alike) until you get to IE. IE is a pain to develop for while keeping all of the other pages pristine. If you’re using IE, then you probably see a great big gaping error on this page which I haven’t gotten around to fix yet… someday. Anyway, compare a recent screenshot of IE compared to the exact same code as rendered in Chrome.

Now I will admit that I used a lot of CSS3 code which isn’t officially supported by a few browsers, but you can see that IE will be causing me a lot of work that I won’t have to do with the other browsers. I estimate that it will probably take be about five times as long to work out the solution for IE than it took for me to write the code for Chrome. I’m convinced that Internet Explorer (or at least its programmers) enjoy inflicting pain on developers.

Of course, I have other reasons why I don’t particularly like IE. It’s slow. It takes up my precious screen real estate. It’s not very customizable (meaning it forces me to work the way it wants me to rather than the way I want to work). Oh, and there’s the fact that a lot of websites only work for IE and since I’ve been a Linux/Mac guy for a while now, it’s rather frustrating when I can’t view a page.

I would call it poor practice to only support IE, but well, let’s face it, almost everyone in the industry uses Windows and uses IE and even if they do use another operating system they probably have Windows too. So I completely understand why companies develop exclusively for IE.

Will I stop developing for IE? I’ve thought about it, but there’s that whole 60% of the market thing. Will I ever succumb and make IE my default browser? Never!

What are your thoughts on different browsers? Why do you prefer your browser of choice or dislike another? Have you noticed the same issues I’ve had?

There’s a lot of talk about net neutrality, or the idea that regardless of the type of information it should be treated equally (e.g. not slowed down) by ISPs. There are arguments on both side of the fence, both for and against the idea. Google (probably net neutrality’s biggest proponent) and Verizon are all for it, but there seems to be a lot of people against it. Personally, I don’t know which side I’m on, I see value in both propositions.

As a consumer I want my content delivered as fast as possible, in fact I want it sooner than that! I don’t want any of my data slowed down for the sake of other’s data, but there are drawbacks to that. See, when my content is not slowed down (say a bit torent) then I’m happy. The only thing is, I’ve downloaded maybe three bit torrents in my whole internet career. What should that tell me? It should mean that I wouldn’t mind if bit torrents are slowed down for the sake of all the other data out there, but what when my data is slowed down (after all, bit torrents aren’t the only thing that are affected by net neutrality) what when my pictures are considered a lower priority by my ISP? As far as I know image files aren’t hindered in any way, but they do take up a lot of bandwidth, perhaps my ISP would consider limiting their speed.

So that’s why I’m not sure where I stand. Yes, I want my data faster, but does that mean I’m for net neutrality or against it? I think that depends on who you ask. What are your thoughts?

Well, Google Wave in no longer going to receive support. I’m in a funk. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

I used Google Wave for a lot of things, a little bit of collaboration, but mostly I used it as a study journal. I found it to be a great place to keep notes, make them searchable, and organize them in ways that made sense.

I also would have used it to organize events, gatherings, projects, etc. with other people, if they had had Google Wave—but they did’t, in fact, that is the reason why progress on the Google Wave project has been halted, there wasn’t enough adoption.

Personally, I think that Google could have had more adoption if they had integrated it with their gmail. If it is integrated into gmail, then there will be more adoption, people won’t have to check both their email and their Wave account. What if they had a “Create a Wave from this email” button? Other recipients would have access to the Wave and would be able to see the updates (live and otherwise) that were made.

Oh well, now I just need to find some alternative, anyone have any suggestions?

Am I the only one who gets excited when I see a new update is available for my computer?

Today’s update: Inertial Scrolling and Three-Finger Drag Gesture.

It’s pretty cool, now I can flip through a web page the same way I would on my iPod touch. Just flick with two fingers and let go and it will keep going.

I can also now drag an open window without clicking the trackpad (something I’ve wished I could do since enabling one-click dragging has led to problems). Of course the only problem with this is that I now have to choose between using the three-finger gesture for navigating web pages or for being able to drag a window—the choice is easy, I’ll use it to navigate—window dragging isn’t that cool