Author: Bob Martens

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Technology

The Return of Odysseus

After a long and arduous process over the past two months I finally purchased my development laptop. Oh, you thought this was going to be about Greek mythology? Sorry, I just happen to use Greek mythos for my computer and networking names and Odysseus has been the name of whatever laptop I currently have with me for a long, LONG time.

It was a longer process than I was hoping because I’m both very picky and very cheap (right now). Since purchasing a house, the available money for extra expenses hasn’t just dried up, it has also been fired in a kiln. However, that didn’t dispel the need for a mobile development machine and that is what Odysseus is going to be.

So, what did I get?

I knew that a Mac was out of the question (at least for a while), so that narrowed it down in one way and opened up Pandora’s Box of Windows-based machines in another. However, I was able to quickly narrow it down when the defining thing I needed was Linux-compatibility.

Quite simply, I can’t develop very effectively in Windows. I’m not sure what has happened since early 2005 and now, but my use of Mac OS X and various distributions of Linux has rewired many parts of my brain to just expect a bash-like command line for me to work with. So, I’ll be running the newest releases of Ubuntu for the time being or until something better shows up.

Now, back to the hardware (sorry for the diversion there). I narrowed it down to IBM/Lenovo and Dell as the two I was going to focus on. Keep in mind that I am looking at used machines and I like to be able to “toss around” my laptop a little bit as I move from place to place. With that in mind, I focused on the business-class of machines from both as well. So it was ultimately down to the Dell Latitude D-series and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X/T series as well.

Spending a month or more looking around I finally fell onto a deal on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and decided to give it a shot. That’s what I’m currently typing this post on right now. I’m hoping to keep it around for a while and wear it out as my traveling companion so that I might be able to save up some money for something smaller and lighter in the future. For now, however, it does everything I need and runs Ubuntu 10.10 like a champ. Not too bad for under $250.

Content and Mission

I am currently in the middle of reading Clout, a book by Colleen Jones, and a sort-of-companion-book to Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. First, if you haven’t read these two books and work with web content at all, you should pick both of them up and read them. There is so much great stuff in both of them that I cannot possibly recommend them highly enough.

However, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this little post is to put down my current thoughts on content and mission and where they intersect. It came to me in the shower (where most of my decent ideas come), and I’m kind of ashamed that I didn’t have this in the forefront of my mind to start, but here I go.

To set the stage, my current job is to complete “revamp” the website for Martin Luther College. The college is not just from where I graduated, but also resides in the town I grew up in and provides pastors, teachers and staff ministers for the synod I am (and have been) a part of. To put it simply, I have a vested interest in the institution.

One request has been to include a Bible passage on the homepage (the new one). While a worthy goal, and something I hope to incorporate in some fashion, it got my brain working for the past couple of months and I never really understood why it was working. My mind tends to do that.

Finally, it hit me. The talk was about a specific piece of “content” on the homepage, but it never went any farther than that. People were so caught up in the minute details that they has missed the forest in front of them. The idea was to incorporate the mission of the college (to train people for the public ministry) onto the homepage. But, it stopped right there and no one talked about it any further. From that point forward all of the talk was of portraying us as “just another college.”

However, the mission should not stop as lip-service on the homepage (for anyone) and should permeate all of the content on every page to portray what makes you, you. This goes for a college, for a business, for a government agency and for you individually (and for me as well). The content and the mission are so vital and intertwined that to try and separate the two is both foolhardy and dangerous.

Do I have the answers? No, of course not, but I’ve at least calmed that part of my mind for a little while. Maybe I can devote some of that to solving some other issues.

Which browsers do you support?

I came across this older blog post today and it got me to thinking about which browsers you, as a web developer at the university level, support. The author had some nice graphs in there which listed which browsers he supports and to what extent he does.

I’m writing mostly to get my own thoughts down at this moment in time. I’ve recently been hunched over my own college’s analytics to make some determinations on how our website redesign is going to commence. So, I’ll just list off some general categories and what I’m doing within those categories.

Internet Explorer

Luckily, we are dropping IE6 this time around because its usage has dropped below 1% of all total traffic. That is not the ONLY reason for dropping it because IE6 also needs some annoying hacks to get things to work, encourages me not to use modern web technologies without providing an alternative, and would increase development time. IE7 is still there, rearing its ugly head for the time being, but its share is dropping as well and I can only hope that it will disappear within the next couple of years so that we can drop that too.

IE7, IE8 and IE9 will all be supported and I’ll be testing all three. IE8 is currently the default browser on campus but I am hoping to push IE9 through as soon as it is released. I would love to drop all of the older versions, but they are going to be around for a LONG time because Windows XP will only be able to be updated to IE8. I would encourage anyone who is stuck on XP to use either Firefox or Chrome to make things much faster.

IE7/8 will not, however, receive all of the graphical “candy” that some other browsers will. This mainly is due to the lack of CSS3 support on those browsers, but everything will still be accessible and looks good.

IE9 is going to be targeted to be as compatible with all of the candy as possible just to see how far I can push things. It should be fun.

Firefox

I will be trying to aim for Firefox as one of the standards for browsers (along with Chrome). Firefox is available on Linux, Mac and Windows so that way I can provide a comparable experience on all three platforms (same with Chrome). Firefox 4 is going to be an interesting beast, if they ever launch it, and I’ll do my best to support that browser as well. Not too much to say here other than Firefox 3.5+ will work.

Chrome/Safari/Webkit

I’m lumping the three of these together even though they are not the same browser, but the first two share the same rendering engine (Webkit). Chrome is available on Linux, Mac and Windows and is the second of my standard testbeds. I actually do all of my coding with Webkit browsers in mind first and then make tweaks from there to accommodate any oddities that arise. It has worked well in the past.

I’ll also be making sure that Safari 4+ on the Mac works as needed, even thought Safari 5+ will be officially supported. Anything newer and I will probably end up pushing you to another browser (more than likely Firefox for the older machines).

Mobile

One of my goals is to provide some kind of mobile experience for iOS and Android devices. Sadly, Windows Phone 7 will probably not make the cut nor will the newer Blackberry phones. I’m not sure what I am going to do about the older Blackberry devices because there are a great many of them still in use on campus by faculty/staff/administration, but they provide such a minuscule amount of traffic to the current site.

I need to look at either providing a m.mlc-wels.edu or looking into media queries to handle different devices. This is a longer-term project, but one I am excited about.

Conclusion

Main thing is that I’m shipping with IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, Chome 5+ and Safari 4+ support for the website when it will originally ship. The pairing down of needed versions is something I will continually try and do to cut back on code needed to support different browser versions.

With the upcoming rolling-release development cycle for Firefox (which Chrome already does), I’m hoping that it will push web standards farther ahead by incorporating them when they are finished instead of waiting for the next big release so that you can have more bullet points in a press release.

Categories
Technology

Untethering your iOS Device

Listening to the most recent This Week in Tech, I heard the same thing from certain panel members that I hear from tech journalists all of the time: I just don’t want to plug in my iPhone/iPad/iPod into the computer (or something like that).

The want/need for an untethered experience for your iOS device seems to be the holy grail/unicorn-wearing-leprechaun-trousers for certain members of the technology press for the “one thing” that Apple needs to do to get them to drool over iOS.

It’s easy to get into the mindset that your needs are what the greater consumer needs, but many times that just isn’t the truth. I can think that people need to ditch Windows for Linux so that I don’t have to worry about supporting that OS, but that isn’t the reality of the situation.

The “tethering” of your iOS device to some computer serves some very important purposes that are just NOT REASONABLE AT THIS TIME to do over a wireless network (which is most often what is brought up as the alternative).

First is content movement back and forth between the device and the customer’s machine. Music, movies, pictures, apps, settings, etc. all travel back and forth between the iOS device and the computer via a USB cable. That can be GBs worth of data going back and forth at any one time, and doing that both in a timely fashion and consistently really is only doable over a cable.

Sure, streaming services can provide many of those services (as far as content is concerned) but with the reality of data caps and inconsistent network connectivity, that’s a non-starter for most consumers. Media stored on the persons device is infinitely more reliable than that streamed from the internet. Now, if you don’t use your device for media then who cares?

The second, and more importantly to me, is data backup. When you sync your iOS device with iTunes it makes a complete backup of the entire system. The importance of that cannot be overstated. I have had my wife’s iPhone fail (long story), but all of the data was safe because I had been able to backup the device the night before and I could restore it back to its former settings with no problem.

Professionals talk of getting consumers to backup their information, and Apple is maybe the most successful at this by, to an extent, forcing customers to plug in their iOS device to do certain things and doing a backup at that time. Working for the Apple Store for four months (shout out to all of my friends at Bayshore), I liked being able to tell someone that they will be able to get all of their stuff back just by plugging into iTunes are restoring from the last backup. That’s powerful and useful.

Finally, for now, networking is hard. Getting a wireless network up and running can be hard work depending on the house, the internet coming in, and the hardware you are using. People are reluctant to spend money on decent networking equipment, but if you are going to be pushing GBs of data over that wireless network to sync information and make backups then you are going to need some beefy networking equipment along with better standards supporting higher throughput.

The idea of having an untethered experience with your iOS device is awesome and I hope it comes one day, but there is a lot of infrastructure work to be had before that reality is going to come to pass. Apple is a forward-thinking, but also very conservative company that will more than likely not be moving to this until the very last moment that they have to, and when they can ensure that it will work well for customers.

Besides, think how fast things will be when we finally get Thunderbolt?

Categories
Technology

Firefox Moving to Chrome’s Dev Model

Firefox is moving to Chrome’s development model of rolling releases, getting away from the large, cumbersome release schedules that have been the norm for the project for a very long time.

Of course, the first thing they need to do is release Firefox 4, finally, and then ramp up the new production model to try and release new features as they are ready instead of setting milestones and rolling them into large releases.

I welcome the change and hope it will push Firefox ahead as fast as Chrome has been moving.