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What’s wrong with Outlook? – Tatham Oddie

John — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:12:10 +0000

It has been an interesting few weeks in the world of web standards for email. The boys from Campaign Monitor executed a successful awareness campaign in the form of fixoutlook.org which rapidly racked up over 24,000 Tweets and overtook the Iran Election in Twitter’s trending topics. Unfortunately for all of us, it has been a case of message received – but not understood. via What’s wrong with Outlook? – Tatham Oddie.

I build quite a few emails at work for a variety of clients, and time and time again I have to do some creative image slicing, and then build with nested tables in nested tables in nested tables, etc. just to get emails to work in Outlook 2007.

Building emails should be as easy as building a simple HTML page with some standard HTML and CSS. Since outlook 2007 uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine, email developers are now forced to write bad, bloated code to make sure that emails work correctly. Not only do we need to adjust our code, we need to adjust the designs as well, because guess what, Outlook 2007 (or rather the Microsoft Word rendering engine) has no support for background images.

There is a campaign over at fixoutlook.org – if you’re on Twitter, you can send a tweet to your account from there to help send a message to Microsoft.

Collecting add-ons

John — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:25:11 +0000

Mozilla has recently re-vamped their addons site, and with it publicly released Collections.

Collections is an essentially an awesome way of grouping a bunch of add-ons for Firefox. You can then subscribe to these “Collections” and manage them using the “Add-on Collector” add-on for Firefox.

You can make your own collection or select one that’s already made filled with the add-ons of the author’s choice.

This is going to make installing all those add-ons on a fresh copy of Firefox just that much easier. You can use this for your own personal installation(s) of Firefox, but think also of the Sys Admins here, they can make a collection of default add-ons that they want all users in the organisation to have installed – handy, I think so.

At the moment you need a Mozilla account (you can register for free) to create collections and subscribe to them, you do not need an account to browse through the publicly available collections and download the add-ons within.

Naturally I couldn’t resist and I made a collection of Web Dev add-ons that I frequently use.

IE6 Upgrade Warning – Google Code

John — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:11:15 +0000

I do always like a nice way to stop IE6 from further harming people’s computers. Telling them they should upgrade is but a small service website owners can use to help people upgrade their browser.

The ie6-upgrade-warning is a little script 7.9kb that displays a warning message politely informing the user to upgrade the browser to a newer version links to newest IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome are provided. The webpage is still visible behind a transparent background, but access to it is prevented. The idea is to force users to upgrade from IE6 and avoid the website from a bad reputation that website is not rendering correctly in IE6.

via ie6-upgrade-warning – Google Code.

Don’t Click Here – Placing Links in Context

John — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:27:18 +0000

If you’re interested in reading this article, click here. On second thought. Don’t. It’s a common usability problem. Links that don’t mean anything. How are you using links on your website?

Don’t Click Here – Placing Links in Context | Build Internet.

A short article to let us know it’s ok to not tell people to “click here”. If the links are clear enough, the user doesn’t need to be told where to click!

New Paper Shredder Actually Recycles Paper at the Office : TreeHugger

John — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:18:27 +0000

A vision for the future: no more sorting, paper separating, curbside collection. Just feed your business papers into the shredder, turn the Meiko SEED system on and overnight the used paper is recycled into a clean, fresh pile of 1500 new sheets of paper. The Meiko SEED paper recycling system was introduced recently at the Eco-Products 2008 convention in Japan. It sounds like the ultimate solution for paper recycling. But what are the costs? Can point-source recycling compete with large scale collection and recycling on energy and environmental impact? New Paper Shredder Actually Recycles Paper at the Office : TreeHugger.

This is pretty cool!

15 Must Bookmark Sites for Design Inspiration

John — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:35:10 +0000

SitePoint » 15 Must Bookmark Sites for Design Inspiration.

Is Online Censorship On the Rise?

John — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:26:23 +0000

Censorship of the Internet is definitely alive and well in countries where oppressive government regimes seek to control the flow of information, such as China, Uzbekistan, Cuba, and Iran. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that there are 125 journalists behind bars around the world as of the start of this month. That’s actually a drop of 2 from 2007, but given that 45% of imprisoned journalists are bloggers or work exclusively online it is clear that the rise of the Internet as an information source has led to a parallel rise in censorship. SitePoint » Is Online Censorship On the Rise?.

Userfly: Usability From Your Actual Users

John — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:17:53 +0000

Chris Estreich, a senior engineer at classifieds site Oodle today soft-launched a new site aimed at web developers called Userfly. Using JavaScript, Userfly captures and records browsing data from your visitors and lets you plat it back as a movie later. The site is really rough — this is a very beta release — and probably isn’t quite ready for any press coverage, but I was so impressed by the demo (and had a lot of fun playing with it), that I couldn’t resist. SitePoint » Userfly: Usability From Your Actual Users.

Very cool site if you want to optimise your site’s usability.

P2P? It’s TV’s fault

John — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:39:01 +0000

As there’s clearly not enough handwringing over Hollywood suing iiNet, I should add my two cents – it’s Australia’s miserly free-to-air broadcaster wot’s to blame. Elsewhere in the first world, the film, television and music industries have warmed to the idea that setting lawyers on ISPs and consumers isn’t the most effective way to stamp out piracy. P2P? It’s TV’s fault.

I couldn’t agree more, free-to-air tv is crap, thus downloading content of the internet makes much more sense. Other venues to watch content are much more attractive. I much rather buy the season of a TV show on DVD then having to wait up until I can watch it on TV, and then I can still generally only watch one episode per week.

I’m looking forward to seeing more ventures that promote watching content online, legally. I don’t mind paying a few bucks for a service that will let me watch TV shows that I want to watch and will let me watch them when I want to.

Australia’s Net Censorship Sparks Outrage

John — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:28:34 +0000

One of the most important Internet stories in Australia right now is that country’s federal government’s plan to start requiring ISP level censorship of the Internet. As part of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s AU$125.8 million Cyber-saftey plan. The plan requires that ISPs deliver a “clean-feed” web service to homes, school, and and public web access points. The government will maintain two blacklists, one that filters out illegal material, mostly child pornography, and another that filters out objectionable material as determined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The first list will be mandatory, while users will be able to opt out of the latter. SitePoint » Australia’s Net Censorship Sparks Outrage.