It’s remarkable how Google scored this low, but everyone must admit that Google turns out to be the least visual appealing. Maybe that did it.

clipped from www.news.com In a blind “taste test” searchers chose Google, then Microsoft and Yahoo. That’s according to the results of a poll created last week by the Google Operating System blog. Participants could try out three unidentified search engines and vote which had the best results. The results are in and 51 percent of the more than 2,000 people who voted said Google had the best results. That was followed by 35 percent for Live Search and 30 percent for Yahoo. In comments to the blog post people said they were surprised Microsoft was ahead of Yahoo, but also surprised Google’s percentage wasn’t higher. Interestingly, some of the most frequent queries included “Google,” “Microsoft,” “sex,” “cow” and “Liverpool.”

tashian.com:

“What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2007, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original.”

The principle is to feed a perfectly normal English sentence into the automated translation, which in turn will process it through ten languages and every time back to English. The result roughly corresponds to the aforementioned description. Some apt examples:

•  ”When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”
  becomes “If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.
• “A cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.”
  becomes “Biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.” [Hilarious!]
• “This machine talks gibberish, more than I do!”
  becomes “The word says more when queerer than this preoccupation in the unit of me.”

Try it out yourself.

Chris Pirillo:

“What Browser do you Use? Are you happy with your browser, or do you feel it’s lacking?”

To many this may be too heated a discussion to engage in, but all one needs a zealousless perception of things and some honesty. Yes, Internet Explorer rendered itself a horrible reputation throughout the years and has probably partially retained the image, despite the numerous enhancements. When facing facts, though, IE7 did finally mature into a decent browser with adequate security. Amongst other caveats, it still lacks web standards conformity, though Microsoft claimed to have resolved the latter to a satisfactory degree. Another major aching-point is the lack of c13y (a.k.a. customizability, without wanting to appear fancy). This issue’s importance is up to the beholder; whilst advanced ‘internauts’ value this a great deal, casual internet users probably couldn’t give.

That’s where Firefox coasts in. With it steadily gaining market share (more concretely, snagging bits and pieces away from IE, consistently) many alike are discovering Firefox as a credible alternative for day-to-day web browsing, along with its (nearly) boundless array of extensions and plug-ins, which makes it so popular. From ad-blocking to mouse gestures, the idea is you start out with a barebone (quite a competent one, nonetheless) and add the desired functionality as you go. This has given Firefox a lot of lift, even to the point of neglecting some crunching issues like memory-leakages and bloat.

All the consideration given for both competitors, one could also give Opera a spin, which is a back-to-basics type of browser. With ‘basics’, I mean making agreeable setbacks for the Greater Good, being:

• Tiny filesize
• Free!
• Fast
• Passes the ACID2-test graciously

The smaller user base might be a testament of the lack of c13y, and perhaps marketing efforts. Nonetheless, Opera is a great browser, yet might be aimed at the more purist type of web audience.

I snapped up some cites from Chris Pirillo’s blog via ClipMarks:

clipped from chris.pirillo.com IE 7 is already being touted by some as the “best” browser ever created. Many say that the features and enhancements far outweigh any security problems that still exist. Research does show that the largest percentage of Internet users DO use IE for all their browsing needs. Firefox is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. Firefox is definitely the most customizable browser Each browser will take you around the Internet. Each does basically the same thing. The best advice we can give you is to try them all.

ClipMarks Remarks: IE7 is NOT the best browser, no matter who’s touting it. I’m the first one to admit that the enhancements were welcome, but it doesn’t make it the best one around, just yet. I don’t agree with the remark that Firefox is “it” either, in its current state, seeing it’s prone to memory leaks and ends up being slow after extended use. Maybe Firefox 3 will bring solace. I firmly concur with the last clip.

clipped from www.simplebits.com Webkit now supports the @font-face CSS property, enabling the designer to specify downloadable fonts in their web pages. The worry that all web pages will be suddently ruined with crappy free fonts everywhere overshadows the fact that some good can come out of the ability to at least have a choice to use those crappy (and/or potential useful) fonts. Give us all a chance, eh? imagine using a downloadble dingbat font for displaying icons instead of GIF or JPEG images. Suddenly text and icons become truly scalable together. Finally a way to make MySpace look even worse (-;

WebKit is the open source browser engine driving many Mac OS X applications like Safari (the browser), Dashboard, Mail, etc., and is a derivative of KDE (familiar to some geeks) technology.

Without wanting to sound ignorant, but I haven’t really kept up with Apple software, so if I’m completely honest, I must admit I wasn’t aware of WebKit and looked it up. That put aside, as the folks at SimpleBits suggest, this property raises excitement amongst the web design addicts. It’s so enticing because as a web designer, you want your creation to strike the users in all glory, fonts-galore included. The latter has always been a problem due to the variety of systems and browsers roaming the Internet and inherently, because of this variety, one webpage can look 10 times different in 10 different setups. To aid this, the @font-face property allows the designer to designate a single font which will automatically be downloaded in case the visitor doesn’t come equipped with it.

While this may sound like utter web developer ecstasy, the Internet could (and more like will) become (even more, if at all possible) contaminated with sickening free fonts/dingbats. Amateur wannabe designers will indeed, as stated in the last remark, be given the opportunity to make MySpace look even worse.

It’s funny how recognizable these mistakes are, as I usually get worked up when I encounter these dorky mistakes and near-instantaneously click the back-button. To me these are obvious mistakes, yet oh so omni-present.

• PDF files are print, not online reading
  – Agreed. There’s nothing worse than plowing through a big-butted PDF that takes ages to load (don’t get me started on the way Adobe Reader loads every page individually whilst scrolling…)
• Don’t violate design conventions
  – While you might think putting your navigational elements at the far bottom of the page is cool, I think your page isn’t worth browsing through to look for them.
• Don’t use totally wrong color-themes, like white on yellow (no!)
  – It really does hurt to read yellow text on a white backgroud, believe me.
• Make your text scan-able
  – Or at least make an effort.
• Don’t use fixed font sizes
  – No, this does not only apply to old people, since I’m the kind of person who likes to enlarge text on a website for prolonged reading. I do this so I won’t strain my eyes for too long, as I use a pretty high screen resolution. I’m sure others agree it’s not very agreable to read a wall of text at a font size of 8 or 10. Spare me or I’ll click away (it’s fine to design this way, but please, let me use my ‘CTRL-+’, thank you).

Follow the link below for the complete article:

clipped from www.articlefollow.com Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky. They (users) form their expectations for your site based on what’s commonly done on most other sites A wall of text is deadly Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read. Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms

Ever tried to insert a flash animation into a valid XHTML webpage? I certainly have, and it always breaks your markup. The standard markup flash uses to render its animations stems from an ancient era of semantically misused tags and properties. There must be a better way, I hope…

Several methods have independently been developed, each with their own benefits. There are two major techniques to choose from: the first being the “Flash Satay” method, the other kinda remains nameless. Let’s start with the Satay method.

Flash Satay

The full directives are listed at the notorious A List Apart website.

In short, this method basically incorporates a container movie, into which you load the actual animation, preserving your content, with a friendly wrapper. This produces fairly nice markup, but it’s kind of a hassling experience — nonetheless effective.

The other method

The other technique uses the omni-valid tag called “object”, which is recognized by [nearly] all major browsers. No container file is used: you provide the user with an image containing a friendly error message. This is the way I do things. It’s a clean thing to do, but leaves a white backdrop on transparent framed flash movies (like those from YouTube). I’m certain there’s a way to cure this, but I haven’t had the (uhm) chance to look into it yet.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="yourflash.swf" width="288" height="128"> <param name="movie" value="images/banner.swf" /> <img src="error.gif" width="288" height="128" alt="banner" /> </object>

Either path you choose, there are always drawbacks. For instance, when a visitor doesn’t already have Flash installed, he/she will not get a direct link to Adobe’s website (unless you make the effort of defining it yourself). Nevertheless, standards compliance is the way to go, although I know we’d all appreciate an out-of-the box solution — someday soon.