zimbabwe

I've always been curious about Jobs's relation to LSD. I know his famous "Bill Gates should have dropped acid" line, but I'd like to see how he related hallucinogenic use to his outlook on design.

I'm not defensive. You're the one who just got into a little minirant. I was explaining why I prefer Safari for development and you returned with the little gems like "Excuse me for not caring very much for Safari, when Firefox is my main browser and does everything I need." You know, some of us here don't comment just to "beat" you. Sometimes we comment because we honestly think you've raised a point worth debating and discussing. I'm sorry for responding to you like you wanted a debate, instead of assuming you were a prick.

If you are talking about speed, I honestly don't care. If you are talking about CSS3 feature-set, I honestly don't care either, because using any CSS3 features while people are still using MSIE would be messing up the experience for about 50% of your visitors.

So there's no room for graceful degradation, then? If CSS3 lets me craft a better user experience for some users, then I'll give it to them. It's why we don't primarily design for IE 6 and its crippled users. We give other users what they want, then focus on stepping down.

As for Safari being "one of only two browsers that fully supports HTML5"... You know that HTML5 is only a draft at this point? The spec isn't even finalized. The Acid 3 test even admits this much, saying it's testing features which may or may not end up in a official spec.

Safari supports what there is at the moment. That's better than Mozilla's "We don't need to do anything re:HTML 5 and our competitors are evil for supporting the standards" line that they touted last year.

I'll test my shit in Safari, but that's as far as I'm willing to go with exposure to craptacular Apple software on Windows.

Ignore all the other stuff I commented on, since it's obvious you'll just disagree and neither of us will get anything out of it. What makes Safari craptacular? Safari 4 on Windows has a native feel, it runs 3x faster than Firefox, uses less memory, has a smoother interface in many ways, and has quite a few features (including that anti-aliasing) that Firefox lacks. Perhaps it's not your choice for a web browser, which is totally coo', but I resent your calling it craptacular and implicitly insulting all the Windows users who think Safari 4 is worth their using.

Two browsers can each be good without one rendering the other entirely useless. Safari's development environment is in many ways better than Firefox's, so why not use it when you've got it (which is 99% of the time)?

Those crazy kids are a fickle bunch, and throughout history they've wanted to not be where their parents hang out.

But with Facebook the two groups are separate. Think of it as a house: It's all one place, but each group has their privacy. The parents can have a dinner party upstairs while the kids get drunk and party in the basement.

This approach works for the iPhone, which is standardized completely, but not for the complex and varying desktop browser scene.

Since when was "things are prettier" a bad thing? I do extensive Windows testing using browsers, and Safari's rendering engine is leagues ahead of everything else, its developments tools are more polished than Firebug and easier to figure out, and it's one of only two browsers that fully supports HTML 5. Firefox renders things shittily (even on the Mac, which has possibly the best rendering engine out there available for all apps by default, it fails Acid 3 at the moment, and while Firebug's great for some things, at other things it fails hard.

That's smarmy. I'll admit a teensy bit of bias, since I've never understood why people are so worried about being tracked. My letters to college professors I'm fine with Google scanning; love letters are about as embarrassing as my Google communications get, but I'm not exactly worried about them leaking to the world.

If you don't want to use Google, don't use Google. Use DuckDuckGo for search, set up your own webmail, don't use Chrome, don't use the Google Toolbar, don't use Android, and Google has absolutely no power over you. You're free!

Meanwhile, Google makes their business out of studying data, and its users all seem to think that's worth getting access to Google's stuff.

I hate this sarcastic mode of writing posts wherein it's a given that the company's evil, so you're allowed little jabs like:

After all they are using web-standards to do the stuff they do, so it can't be bad, right?

Nobody mentioned fucking web standards, man. Nobody would ever use that as a counterargument. You're raising strawmen to be baked in gas chambers.

I don't use my Google account at all nowadays. Google doesn't seem too upset by that. I'm satisfied with their level of control if they're not assholes about it when I stop being enslaved.

If not from that, there'll be real world impact from the fact that it's by Google.

My favorite rumor is the Apple vs Nintendo rumor, because first off it makes more sense (iPod touch vs DS), and second off because both companies make excellent products but design them from different points of view, Nintendo focusing on innovative gaming and Apple focusing on its outright perfectionism. The one that would be my favorite rumor but is absolutely true is Google vs Facebook, and that's the one that interests me most if Google's making its own OS. Facebook acquired Parakey a few years ago, and since then rumors of it launching a webOS have been scattered about. Interesting to see how they take advantage of this announcement.

I understand not having a preference, say, but thinking there's no functional difference is ignoring a decade of user studies and reports and a lot of common sense.

EDIT: Dammit, its Gaia theme is a third-party remake that's very glitchy. To its credit, it didn't delete system-crucial files when I removed all the testing themes.

OS X used to have an awesome theming app called Shapeshifter, which doesn't yet work for OS X. There was one ultrapervasive theme called Gaia that I've always wanted to play with and couldn't, since I came in on Leopard. Check it out: http://macthemes2.net/2007/08/10/theme-review-gaia/

-admonished zimbabwe

It would be interesting to try to figure out how to handle social situations and encode them into a game. How do you stop somebody from abusing the system? The first thing that comes to mind is Super Smash Bros Brawl, which uses random situations to stop one player from being too much of an asshole. (When I play with my asshole friends, they disable items and force the level to the ultraflat Final Destination so as to be able to abuse the game most effectively - but in a more relaxed social setting, it's not as easy for an obsessive to completely mess with the other players to a point where the game isn't fun. Are there similar set-ups in any MMO?)