Mad Web Skills

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.

Not only does this article have one of the greatest main-stream-media headlines I’ve ever seen, but the actual article (and accompanying YouTube video) is just as funny.

Michael Bay’s proposed script for The Dark Knight is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.

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.