Mad Web Skills

It’s Web Directions time again! Man, I love this conference.

I’ve been to Web Directions for the last couple of years and every time I walk away with not only new ideas, but renewed enthusiasm to get stuff done and innovate. (That’s not to say that stuff will actually get done, but it feels great!)

This year I won’t get to hang with Travis, who I met at WDS06 (back when it was just WD06) as he’s currently jet-setting across the US of A, so if you see me kicking about on my own, please come over and say hi.

The funny thing is that its only around the time of Web Directions that I really get interested in social networking on the web. My Facebook page gets more active, there’s more tweets flying across the place and the Flickr account gets dusted off in anticipation. (I’ve got a nice new camera, so there’s no excuses.)

But also, as with every year around this time, I get the same regrets. This year’s regrets include:

• I never got around to making that “NOT SNOOK” T-shirt I was thinking about making in order to avoid confusion this year.
• In fact, my trendy T-shirt collection is kinda lame, and it’s too late to get an order from Threadless to me before the conference. (I’m hoping to pick me up one of those cool molt:n ones at the event, but I can’t decide whether I like design or code more.)
• My website is STILL using a free WordPress template. *facepalm*
• I was really hoping to get OzChat up and running in some form by now. I’ve still got a bunch of OzChat.net bubble pens and stuff that would be good swag to hand out to cool people.
• That seems to be the theme with many of my personal projects: not a lot gets finished. Client work gets first bite of my time, and when that’s done I tend to relax offline. I’m sure this is common among full-time + part-time-freelance web developers such as myself, but it would still be nice to have something cool to show off.

I’m currently in a mad rush to try and get all current work off my plate so I don’t have to worry about anything next week, so I’ll see you at Web Directions.

PS. I found some notes I’d taken from WDS07 that I never got around to posting. I’ll pop them online and back-date it to last year if I get time.

In browser news, we’ve recently seen the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, as well as the surprising (for me anyway) Google Chrome.

First, IE8B2. I’ve been playing with the new beta on and off over the last couple of days, and I can honestly say it’s actually pretty good. I would say that this release has more right to call itself a beta than its predecessor. I’d always felt that Beta 1 was of “Alpha” quality at best, if not “Technology Preview” standards. There’s still a-ways to go, and I won’t be changing my default browser to IE any time soon, but I believe that IE8 can only do good in this world. (Please don’t prove me wrong, Microsoft!)

Now, the infamous GBrowser has been predicted for years, but finally, and without warning, it’s here. Google Chrome for Windows (with the Mac version on the way) was announced via Scott McCloud comic yesterday. I downloaded it this morning, had a bit of a play and found it to be pretty damn good for a first release. It reacts very swiftly, although Firefox is also pretty quick in vanilla, no-addons mode. The interface is nice and simple, certainly better than IE7+, although it could do with a Firefox-like extensions/add-ons API. In fact, that’s about all that’s stopping me from switching right now. There are just too many awesome add-ons for Firefox that I can not do without. The Webkit rendering engine, which admittedly I’m not too familiar with, is quite good although I’ve come across the odd weird CSS glitch when viewing some my sites, but I think it’s more due to my inexperience with Webkit’s intricacies.

After spotting the Google Street View car in Shepparton about 7 months ago, the surprisingly-complete photos of our local streets are now online.

I’m not quite sure when this happened. Australia may have been all switched on at the same time to coincide with Google Maps UI’s recent redesign or it may have been a gradual thing implemented over the past few months, but I think it’s all kinds of cool.

Privacy issues aside, I think this is a great tool as well as an awesome toy. I wonder how often Google plan on updating the street photography.

In a post I wrote almost a year ago (and in the ensuing comments), I pondered the possibility of someday being able to define variables natively in a CSS document without the use of server-side scripting.

Well it seems that in their most recent nightly build, WebKit has added support for this.

@variables {
    CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12;
}
div.logoContainer {
    background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor);
}

I’m not sure if this is based on any particular official CSS3 recommendation or if its something that WebKit has just grabbed and ran with in the hope of it going mainstream, but its certainly a step in the right direction.

A nice surprise just hit my feed reader. Microsoft has just released the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, a micro-site containing download links for IE8 beta 1 as well as useful information for web developers.

I’m not sure, but I think I’m actually getting really excited about this release. While I haven’t installed the beta yet (I’m working on something at the moment, and I know that it’s going to want to make me restart Windows, and that would totally kill me groove ), the features listed on the site look great. I’m especially looking forward to experimenting with the new Ajax navigation options which enables the back/forward buttons through use of the window.location.hash (as I’d always thought it should).

Firefox is still my browser of choice, however Firefox’s stupid crashes, crappy scrolling performance (especially on pages with lots of Flash) and gargantuan memory consumption (eg. this current firefox.exe process is taking up over 400MB) is starting to annoy me. If IE8 had a flexible addon/extension api, I think there would be a tougher decision to be made.