It’s been a while since my last Twessenger-related post. Twessenger was really just a personal project that I decided to put up here on this site, so it (pleasantly) surprises me to see that it continues to draw in a very sizable amount of traffic even four months after the last release. I’m glad people are finding it useful. :)

So anyway, the first bit of news is that the last release of Twessenger is, in fact, compatible with the latest beta release of Windows Live Messenger (v8.5.1238.0601). It’s been working fine for me, and I haven’t received any emails telling me otherwise.

The second bit of news is that Twessenger was apparently included on the cover CD of the June issue of Internet Magazine in Italy. One of their editors had emailed me for permission a while ago, and I was happy to give it to them. So, hello to all my new visitors from Italy. Keep those tweets going! :)

Tags: im, messenger, twessenger, twitter, wlm

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Picasa is a great photo management app on the desktop. The one-click photo fixing (which actually works very well), the fluid UI, the numerous printing options, and the fact that it’s free make it hard to beat. Since I’ve been using Picasa to manage my photos offline for a long time, it was only natural that I would try the “Export to HTML” option to publish my photo albums online. It worked pretty well for a while, but there were limitations.

Since the “Export to HTML” feature (not to be confused with Picasa Web Albums publishing) simply produces static HTML pages, maintaining lots of albums quickly becomes quite cumbersome. For instance, changing the look-and-feel involves republishing each album individually after making changes to the template. And since there’s no central administration section, adding and removing pictures, or adding captions either involves republishing or going in and editing the HTML manually.

I had encountered zenphoto before, but never actually realized what a great management interface it has. The online demo doesn’t allow you to login to the admin section, which is what I think really makes this thing shine. Thanks to a tip from Omar, I decided to try it out myself, and I loved what I saw. Creating a new album is dead simple - just upload all the pictures to the albums directory via FTP/SFTP, or use the admin pages to upload a ZIP file containing all the pictures. This simplicity, combined with the smart use of AJAX throughout, powerful templating support, and support for comments was enough to make me switch all my existing albums over.

If you’re looking for a PHP+MySQL based photo gallery, I would highly recommend downloading a copy of zenphoto and trying it out for yourself.

Tags: photos, picasa, zenphoto

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Last Saturday was the official graduation day for the UCLA Class of 2007. If you’re in my Facebook network, you’ve probably already seen the pictures, but they’re also here now, in the newly revamped photo gallery (more on that in the next post).

It was fun meeting friends again after being away from school since March (which is when I actually completed my coursework), and interesting to hear where everyone’s headed in the near future. When I was still taking classes and working through those intense 10-week quarters, I couldn’t wait to get done, but when I went back three months after leaving, I realized that a part of me is starting to miss the place already. Those of you who just got done last week will probably feel the same way in a couple of months. :)

One journey ends, another one begins…

Tags: graduation, ucla

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The Outlook team at Microsoft has just launched a new official blog.

Outlook 2007 is undoubtedly one of the most used applications on my computers - the central hub for all my email, contacts, appointments, and todo lists - so I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this one. Subscribed!

Tags: microsoft, office, outlook, productivity

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Joel Spolsky has an interesting post today about the differences in the way Microsoft and Apple choose to render on-screen fonts, and some of the possible reasons why these differences might exist.

Clearly, it seems like there’s no “right way” and what we tend to prefer is just that - a preference.

Tags: apple, cleartype, fonts, microsoft, typography

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In yesterday’s post, I wrote:

If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.

And there’s a reason why I said a more native interface is unlikely, even after the browser leaves the beta stage - it’s because I’m almost certain that the OS X look-and-feel was actually preserved intentionally.

Think about it. There’s good reason why Apple made the decision to release Safari for Windows. Jeff Atwood spells it out in a follow-up comment to his original post.

Safari is unapologetically a Mac app and does almost nothing the “Windows way”, with the possible exception of maximizing behavior.

I think this is absolutely by design. You have to understand that Safari isn’t so much a pretender to the IE/Firefox throne as it is a *Mac Emulator*. It’s intended to facilitate development of Safari compatible web apps (and technically iPhone apps) by making them dead simple to test. You no longer even have to beg, borrow, or steal a Mac to see if your web app behaves under Safari. Just download and go.

So from that perspective– and I can’t think of any others that make any business sense– the closer Safari’s behavior is to the Mac version, the better.

There you have it. Making the Windows version of Safari almost identical to its Mac counterpart is actually beneficial for development testing, which is undoubtedly the primary reason why Apple is bestowing Safari upon the Windows world.

End-users on Windows are surely not going to be happy about this, just as Mac users dislike the way Firefox paints non-native widgets on OS X, but that’s the way its likely to stay. Perhaps a team of enterprising individuals might spin off a project to build a WebKit-based Windows browser that fits in better, similar to what Camino does with Mozilla’s Gecko, but it’ll take a long time before something like that reaches the level of maturity that other mainstream browsers on Windows have achieved by now. Swift, for instance, is still far from really being usable.

P.S. If you like the textarea resizing feature in the Safari beta, you might want to try the Resizeable Textarea extension for Firefox that I’ve been using for several months now. :)

Tags: apple, browsers, firefox, ie7, safari, wwdc

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Something rather unexpected happened at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this morning - a Windows version of the Safari browser was announced, and a beta build was made available for download.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours using it on my desktop running Vista and here are my initial thoughts and impressions. Comments are welcome.

The Good:

• Speed, speed, speed: As always, Apple has posted lots of numbers for you to chew on, and I was initially skeptical of the claims made. But after repeatedly testing Firefox 2, IE 7 and the Safari 3 beta on a pretty wide variety of sites (including those with 100+ images, heavy Javascript, etc.), I really do feel that Safari is perceivably the fastest of the three. This could be the one thing that could get me to switch browsers, if only it weren’t for the other limitations (read on). FYI, I’m on a dual-core Opteron system with 2GB of RAM.
• WebKit for Windows: This is perhaps the best part of having an official version of Safari for Windows. Web developers can now run their work through the WebKit rendering engine even if they don’t have access to a Mac. It certainly beats using the old browser screenshot services. :)
• Did I mention it’s fast? :P

The Bad:

• Am I still using Windows? If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.
• Who turned off ClearType? Somewhat related to the above point, Safari renders fonts differently from every other application on your system. This can be good or bad, depending on your preference, but it’s certainly disconcerting at first. I could probably get used to it with time, and the “Light” font smoothing option looks better than the default “Medium” setting to me. Try it.
• Look ma, no borders! This is one of those things that throws me off every time I use OS X, and now Windows users can get a piece of the aggravation too - you can only resize the window using the tiny gripper at the bottom right corner. Who in the world thought this was a good idea anyway?
• It’s no Firefox: As with my experiment with IE 7, I miss my extensions. Enough said.

The Ugly:

• Wonky mouse support: I could live with most of the limitations outlined in the previous section if I really, really had to, but this one’s a deal breaker, hence the new “ugly” section. The back and forward buttons on my mouse simply don’t work in Safari, and the scrolling speed with the mouse wheel is far too sluggish. This singlehandedly makes the whole browsing experience just dreadful. Apple, please get this fixed ASAP. And while you’re at it, how about letting us middle-click tabs to close them (as IE and Firefox do), rather than having us aim for the tiny “X” buttons?

So yeah, it’s not all bad, but it’s not all great either. Many of the shortcomings are forgivable, considering this is the first beta release of an application that they’ve never released for Windows, but they’re certainly enough to prevent me from using it as my primary browser. That said, it has found its place in my web development toolbox, giving me a way to finally test sites in WebKit quickly and easily, so not all is lost. :)

Tags: apple, browsers, firefox, ie7, safari, wwdc

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A few weeks ago, I signed up on WOWIO, a site that legally offers copyrighted eBooks for free (currently to U.S. residents only). The library includes works from a variety of categories, including classic literature, comics and graphic novels, magazines and journals, scientific and reference materials, etc and is constantly growing.

The eBooks are simply PDF files that can be opened and read using Adobe Reader on all supported platforms. WOWIO’s stance on DRM is also great:

Since anyone can defeat the most “sophisticated” DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud. Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users. To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each ebook is serialized with the reader’s authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders.

In order to help spread the word about the service, the company is offering free iPod shuffles to users who refer 10 friends to the site. I got some folks to sign up, and received a shiny new orange shuffle in the mail the other day. So check out the site and tell your friends about it. :)

Tags: ebooks, ipod, wowio

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