Blaze New Media

If you’re a regular user of CSS, you may have come to realize that there are many limitations with borders and backgrounds.

Kevin Lawyer, who is AOL’s representative to the CSS Working Group is looking for your feedback on the CSS3 Borders and Backgrounds module. This is a rare opportunity to put forward your ideas, and perhaps influence the final recommendation.

Some of the things that really interest me are the ability to set the radius of individual corners of a border, as well as multiple backgrounds for an element. Gradients would also be a plus, as long as they were highly customizable, and will degrade gracefully at lower bit depths. Without that I think people would skip it, and just use photoshop to get the exact gradient they want.

Go ahead and have your say.

I’ve spent much of the weekend looking into this new approach to web applications. It’s been thrust into the limelight over the past couple of months and I was wondering how exactly do you say “Ajax”?

Now being from England and a huge fan of football (yes, soccer….) I’m pretty familiar with the dutch football team Ajax and the way that this is pronounced – ‘Ai-yax’.

Then again, there’s a trusty all purpose cleaner in the UK also called Ajax – pronounced ‘Ay-jax’.

So what’s it to be? Does anyone really care?

No, probably not. I just don’t want to sound like a complete tit when i bring it up in conversation for the first time.

I’m eagerly anticipating the release of OS X 10.4 “Tiger”.

I’ve been following the new features for the last couple of months and I can’t wait for the new versions of Mail and iChat.

I’m only a recent convert to Apple Mail but the new Tiger version looks light years ahead of the current one. The smart mailboxes look seriously funky, and I can already see myself over sorting, just because I can. It also has a new UI look, which to me looks like a third major application skin alongside aqua and metal. Maybe Apple needs to do some standardizing?

iChat has also had some work done to it. I use it everyday to chat to my parents and girlfriend, I’m hoping that the introduction of the new H.264 protocol will improve the video quality over my somewhat limited home broadband connection.

Oh, and the last thing…. Spotlight. I’m really eager to try this out, if it works as quick as it does in the demos then it could drastically change the way I use my computer. Here’s hoping.

I’m looking forward to mid-April the end of April.

Last week I received my brand new PDA/Cell phone hybrid and have been playing with it non-stop since.

Along with it I bought a SD memory and Wi-Fi combo card, so that I could walk around my house surfing at broadband speeds.

Anyway, the screen is small. Smaller in fact than any other fully-fledged PDA on the market (320×240) but this is something that attracted me, I didn’t want to carry a phone the size of a house around with me all day.

One of the first things I did once I had everything set up was to check this website to see how it rendered on the small screen. The answer? Surprisingly well in fact, using the built in slim line Internet Explorer, I could barely see any faults with the site below the navigation area, which was the one part that didn’t seem to sit in the right place.

Even though it rendered well, reading any of the articles on such a thin screen was tedious, even when Internet Explorer’s ‘one column’ mode was turned on.

So the obvious answer was a simple handheld stylesheet, I’ll add the line of code into the header, turn all the background images off, as well unset heights and widths and finally make the text a little smaller. Easy stuff.

How wrong I was. I should have been clever and remembered the excellent article by Doug Bowman on this subject a few weeks back.

Most Pocket PC browsers at the current stage render your screen stylesheet as well as your handheld one. Now of course this is ridiculous – it means if you want to slim everything down for a PDA, you need to copy all of your screen stylesheet into your handheld one, then go through and over-ride all the key properties one by one.

Another View

Why would they do this? Well, I have one pretty good idea. Companies want to make your PDA as much like your computer as they can.

Lots of PDA’s have Wi-Fi, feeding them broadband connection speeds. Who wants to browse black and white text based sites with minimal images? Can you imagine the average user booting up their PDA, then surfing their favorite sites to find they are all slimmed down and only have the basic functionality?

I can see this as a valid point. Perhaps it may be too early for developers to adopt the handheld stylesheet. Right now most designers would just reduce their site down as simple as it will go.

However, maybe we are taking the wrong approach? What if designers were to come up with some beautiful handheld designs for their site, to see the small screen as benefit not a burden?

Most of the arguments against this idea have been lifted in the past couple of years. Screens on PDA’s and new cell phones have become as crisp and vibrant as your average TFT monitor. The support for standards on PDA browsers is surprisingly good. Browsers on cell phones can still be shaky, but these are improving very rapidly due to the speed at which the cell phone market moves forward. Bandwidth is also a major issue, but the take up of Wi-Fi has helped improve this, and most cell phone operators offer GPRS which gives slightly faster than dialup speeds. Dare I mention 3G?

This doesn’t of course give the creators of handheld browsers the right to render your screen stylesheet. By doing this they are going against standards and are causing many headaches in the short term.

However, in my view the only way that we are going to get this to change is to adopt the small screen as a challenge, to move forward and create, rather than stepping back and giving handheld browsers the web of ‘94.

I’ve always taken the time to look around cities that I visit for a good Internet cafe.

I recently visited Montreal with my Powerbook and was happy to find that most of the Starbucks offered free wireless Internet access, something rarely utilized back in London.

At the moment I am in Cape Town, way down in the Southwestern tip of South Africa visiting my parents and family. It’s been quite the contrast in web accessibility; broadband Internet is expensive and slow (512kb ADSL for around $160 per month!). This does of course write off any real chance of a fairly substantial Internet cafe starting up.

Things are moving forward though, costs are reducing due to increased competition, and people in South Africa are starting to warm to the idea of a fast internet connection.

My parents who live here in Cape Town are looking into the idea of opening a sandwich bar/Internet cafe somewhere in the city. What do you look for when choosing an Internet cafe on your travels?

Personally, the price is a big factor for me, but other factors like privacy, atmosphere and speed definitely play a part in my decision.

It would be interesting to hear what people consider before walking into an Internet cafe, and what you would personally like to see, whether it be good food, a friendly atmosphere, or even a room packed full of G5’s.