15 - 19 March, 2000
We're still
traveling so you won't hear much from us for a few more days.
Cop a (design) feel. Does Caroline Ambrosio's
squirtonline.com look
familiar? You bet it does. But don't get all huffy and send her a nasty note. Caroline asked first before copying our crude style. Besides, everybody's doing it, from
Fireland to
Mozilla to hundreds of others – including all those popular
weblogs the kids like so much. Even our pal
Matt has taken a feather from our quill. (And improved it, the talented bastard.) Some day we may compile them all, the way
Alice (who also copped our dumb design tricks) compiled
swooshes. But our time would probably be better spent redesigning anyway.
If we had the time. Since we don't, we're updating a couple of pages here (guess which?), then it's off to Dallas, where we'll spend the next few days consorting with the noble citizens of
Populi.
Thanks to
Peyo,
Michael, Token, Per,
Dominika, and the fine folks at
InfoHighway for the great days in Stockholm; thanks to MTVEurope and the hotel cable channel that showed
The Matrix every two hours for getting us through the long Swedish nights.
See you soon. (If you get bored in the meantime,
use this.)
14 March, 2000
At 5:00 a.m. Swedish time we were packing our bags in Stockholm. Fourteen hours and eight time zones later, we were back in New York. Tomorrow we leave for Dallas. Think of the 611 messages in our in-box that we're not responding to. Think of the phone messages. And the Affidavit of Fraud from the credit card company. And the final statement from the cancelled card showing we'd been billed twice for our flight to Stockholm (at $8,000 U.S. a pop). And the bills and the tax forms and the Census Bureau form and the rest of the stuff we're basically ignoring to jot this note to you. Because you are a special snowflake.
The city was cold, the people were warm. In Stockholm we met with some of the best web designers and programmers in the world. If we'd had any sleep in the last 48 hours we'd tell you about it. Sooner or later, we will. Tomorrow we travel again. Patience, sweet Snowflake. More will be revealed.
6 - 14 March, 2000
We're taking this show on the road. First stop: Stockholm, to speak at a web conference. Then Dallas, Texas, to meet with a partner and examine the grassy knoll. God willing, we'll be back around the 20th. No email, and no Daily Reports, 'til we return. (We told our girlfriend we're taking her on a "vacation.") Love ya. Mean it. Back before you know it.
6 March, 2000
[10:24 am]
Released
A List Apart Digest No. 218, on everything you wanted to know about web font sizes but were afraid to ask. ALA Digest is written and read by 13,000 web designers. It's useful, it's smart, and it's free.
Join us!
5 March, 2000
[5 pm]
Was it good for you guys, too? Until now, nobody has made the obvious connection between sexually transmitted diseases and webmaking. Think about it. Sex is dangerous. Therefore young, single people spend their nights grinding away at redesigns, journals, and weblogs – instead of grinding away at other young, single people.
And web activity does not disappoint; it parallels all the thrills of the forbidden dance:
There's attraction ("new design") and seduction ("what do you think of the new design?"). There's flirtation (in the form of links), swinging (in the form of links), and commitment (in the form of links). There's pride taken in displays of prowess and technique (popup windows, bookmarklets, embedded media). There's that tender
sharing of daily events that follows or precedes intimacy.
There are apologies and excuses ("Sorry I haven't been able to update for a few days"). There's the humiliation of poor performance ("my server was down"). There are
public quarrels. And of course there's the main event:
Falling asleep when you run out of steam.
[1:03 pm]
Updated the
Netscape crash bug information.
[5:37 am]
It's
Pete Zeldman's birthday. Wish him a happy one!
The daily log at
Siteexperts.com is linking to our
Day the Browser Died piece for
A List Apart magazine, and the renewed interest in that article is bringing a flood of
reader mail on Netscape's CSS woes. (Also in today's
Guest Book, rumors of a
Lawrence Welk casting couch.)
In fairness to Netscape, we should point out that a memory leak flaw in Internet Explorer for Windows is currently plaguing the webdesign genii of
Kaliber 1000. Why is it so hard to build a flawless web browser? After all, TVs and VCRs work as advertised, and software like
Adobe Photoshop does what it claims to do. So why do
browsers suck? Because, with rare exceptions, competitive pressures force engineers to release them before they are ready. And who suffers? People who use the web, and people who build it. God bless the engineers and protect us from the marketers.
::: We've posted links to some nicely-designed sites in Kaliber's front-page
News section. Here are two more sites we didn't post there:
Sipesifik kltr hazinesi (Turkish-language culture portal) and
rayvium.com (partial site, this one by 14 year-old designer Boyd).
It seems there are now many people who design beautifully for the web, and many others who write well for the medium, but rare indeed is the talented writer who also designs well. Which brings us, of course, to the frighteningly gifted
Lance Arthur, whose new
WHOQUIK! widget sits on your browser's menu bar and allows you to search for available domain names.
As if that weren't enough, the terrifyingly talented Mr Arthur gives us
Role Playing, a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical satire on the state of the web biz. It's a brilliant piece – an ideal companion to ALA's
Being Jakob Nielsen – and it would be required reading even if Mr Arthur's design skills were as limited as
Mr Nielsen's. Which, of course, they are not.
Warning: Mac folks, use Netscape when visiting Mr Arthur's site. Mac versions of Explorer seem to choke on Glassdog's scrolling menubar widget, even though they should handle it just fine.
If you've noticed that our site, k10k, and Glassdog all suffer due to serious bugs in different web browsers, congratulations on your perceptiveness. If you think the web should be free of these problems, join
The Web Standards Project.
Finally, if you've noticed that this lengthy entry is mainly made up of links, it's because we're preparing for our trip to Sweden, and we don't want you to be bored while we're away.
4 March, 2000
[5:17 p.m.] Alan Herrell has more on the
evils of DoubleClick's anti-privacy marketing schemes.
Camworld points to ArsTechnica's incredibly
thorough assessment of the upcoming Mac OS X. (The OS we've been complaining about on this page.) Author John Siracusa has no axe to grind. He's not anti-Mac, not pro-Mac; if anything, he is pro-human interface design. Every Mac user should read this piece. Every interface designer (regardless of platform) should read this piece.
Go there now, we'll wait.
We've gotten preliminary reports of
continued crashing with the latest version of Netscape Navigator. (See "Crash Test, Dummy," immediately below.)
[5:42 a.m.] Crash Test, Dummy: Netscape has come out with a new version of Navigator 4 that fixes many of the
crash bugs we've
bemoaned. See today's
updated bug report for the cheerful details.
Attention, K-Mart Stalkers: We've obtained a
360 degree tour of the room where we'll be staying in Stockholm. Footage courtesy of
Hotel Continental, Stockholm. Quicktime VR
plug-in courtesy of Apple. Pillow mint courtesy of Svensk Filmindustri.
Youth Before Beauty:
n i n e l i e s 4 0 4 is a visually accomplished personal site any designer would be proud to call her own. Note that Janice, the site's creator, is 13 years old. (Attention,
young bucks, you are old bucks now.)
New. Nice.
Swallowing Tacks is three days old – and looks like it was always meant to be there. From Elise Tomek, creator of
ZestyWeasel2000. Hat tip to
Heather for finding it first.
You Noticed. We've gone white. Yes, our ongoing quest for design innovation has come down to this. A shift from off-white to plain white. We are giddy with pleasure.
3 March, 2000
[1:40 pm] New stuff in
True Tales of Advertising Madness.
[3 am] For the first time in many moons, there will be no new issue of
A List Apart magazine this week, due to our imminent departure.
We'll be flying to Sweden on 6 March to deliver our speech on A Creative Revolution for the Web. Spent the day stealing ideas.
Cost of last-minute round trip air fare for two: $8,000 U.S. We hope that includes a meal.
[11:55 am] Speaking of obvious segues, CNET asks:
Who Wants to be A Net Millionaire? Bet that meme won't be going away any time soon. Wonder why religious broadcasters haven't picked up on this popular notion yet. "Who Wants Eternal Life?" Checked
christianbroadcasting.com to see if there were any shows like that yet. Got a Server Application Error. Wonder if
DoubleClick knows our religious preferences, too.
Seems we're not the only ones perturbed by the visual and functional horror of Apple's upcoming Mac OSX (see
29 Feb.); as Charles Moore notes in yesterday's
editorial at Applelinks, "I Don't Want To Lick My Computer, I Just Want To Get My Work Done."
The
5K Award appears to be generating serious interest among designers, the
mainstream web press, and even UNIX-based
webloggers (which makes sense when you think about it).
Refreshed the
usual pages here, and worked on lots of stuff we can't show you yet.
2 March, 2000
Two of our LaMusica sites have gone live:
La Ley 94.1 (San Antonio) and
La Ley 97.9 (Los Angeles). These are "hybrid" sites – initially designed by
us, then handed off to our client, who fills in the content and modifies the design on a daily basis. Oddly enough, our
column for Adobe Web Center discusses the problems that arise in this kind of collaboration.
1 March, 2000
[3:51 p.m.]
Our
Ad Graveyard has been nominated for
Cool Site of the Year in the Humor category. You can
vote for it if you want. The Cool Site of the Year Awards Show takes place 27 April at Webster Hall, NYC. Compare and contrast with the 5K Award mentioned earlier today (below).
[5 a.m.]
Is food the new heroin? Lately we fall into a dead, dreamless sleep immediately after eating anything. The coma lasts until someone wakes us, and then we are up for hours – until the next meal. Is it us? Or something in the food? And shouldn't the first meal be free?
Lose weight fast: The
5K Award is unlike any other web design contest, because your creation must be 5K (five little kilobytes) or less. For comparison's sake, this page is exactly 40K, and many would claim there's nothing in it.
As you know, most web awards are meaningless, and most traditional awards favor million dollar advertising sites over trivial things like original content and accessible design. All the more reason to jump on an award that views the web as having limited bandwidth and technology, and asks what you can do within those restraints. We're honored to be among the
judges, and we eagerly await the entries.
Smoked fish and longhorns. In a few days we leave for Stockholm, to speak at an Internet conference, sight-see, and hang with old friend
Peyo Almqvist and new friends
toke & mschmidt. Peyo told us cigarettes cost 35 Krona, and Joan bought a new winter coat, so we're pretty much good to go.
Then in mid-March we recross the Atlantic to consult with Dallas, Texas-based
Populi, whose mission is to fill the web talent gap, and who've promised to supply us with
Macs and burritos.
During these voyages, we will likely stay offline except when working, and that means these Daily Reports will be few. It's not that we can't buy a
laptop, open a
Hotmail account, or download
Blogger. It's just that we'd miss the point of traveling if we did those things. (Those are good things for people who are slightly less, uh, obsessive than we are.)
[In May we make our annual pilgrimmage to San Francisco, viewed by many – particularly
those who live there – as the capital of the web, and we'll
still try to stay offline. We do this to avoid pecking at tiny keyboards when we're supposed to be seeing our friends and the world. But that's just us, our problem not yours, no hidden messages, and please don't flame us – it's not like we're talking about
Linux, or anything.]
29 February, 2000
Okay, so we goofed. Today is the last day of Black History Month. We avoid wristwatches and calendars, not from lazy bohemianism, but because paying attention to our schedule would cause our brains to melt.
Fiona Webster and Adam Bramwell are the latest to point out that certain sections of this site crash some versions of Netscape Navigator 4. Adam forgot to leave an email address, so we have to answer him
here. (FAQ revised this
morning.)
Jakob Nielsen, considered the world's leading authority on web usability in spite of the
ugliness and incomprehensibility of his site, is the focus of Slashdot's
Ask Jakob Nielsen Almost Anything. Anonymous Coward asks the best and worst questions. Scariest moment: one of the posters points out that Linux has no standard interface, and begs not to be flamed for making the observation. It's hard to say which is the more suicidal gesture: making anti-Islamic speeches in Iraq, or questioning anything about Linux in an Internet forum.
And while we're making enemies, are we the only ones who feel slightly queasy about
Mac OSX? Of course,
memory protection and multi-tasking are long overdue, and rooting the OS in the stability of UNIX makes sense. But why is Apple throwing out the Mac interface? And why are they replacing it with something resembling an unholy cross between
AOL and a
Geocities homepage?
You know, we're just asking. Please don't flame us. It's not like we're talking about Linux, or anything.
