Archive for October, 2005

Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox team on reaching their 100 millionth download yesterday.

• Mozilla Press Release
• C|Net Coverage

If you’re in Oregon, you can celebrate this coming Saturday with some of the Spread Firefox folks. If you’re not going to be in Oregon this weekend, you can still upload a photo to be part of the celebration.

MarkMS posts screenshots of the yet-to-be-released Flock browser, which is apparently in Developer Preview release.

The Flock folks also have Flock Radio for the latest news.

In addition to the great DHTML Accessibility code available in Firefix 1.5 (currently in beta) that I wrote about earlier, Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 supports the second preview of XForms 1.0.

Micah Dubinko (blog) served as an editor and author of the XForms 1.0 W3C specification, has written many articles for XML.com, and I’m happy to say is a recent addition to the ever-growing Yahoo! team. He’s a smart guy, and I’ve already had many interesting converstations with him on everything from XForms, to the role of the W3c, to Microformats.

He’ll definitely be part of the post I’ve been meaning to write about about all the great people that I get to work with. It’s almost getting silly - brilliant new people are coming onboard around every day. There have always been great people here, but the influx of new energy and ideas is, of course, wonderful. Just today: Tom Coates.

This showed up in my inbox today:

We’re happy to store all your memories at the Kodak EasyShare Gallery, but because you haven’t made a purchase in the last 12 months, we may begin deleting stored images from your account. Don’t risk losing your photos!

You’re gonna delete my images?!!! You gotta be kidding me. Don’t you get it?

Picture are irreplacable treasures. Digital information is hard to maintain. (Fried hard drives. Obsolete file formats. New computers.) I want my grandchildred to have a digital shoebox of all my photos, so they can enjoy them as I enjoy my grandparents collections. I think anybody who shoots digital photos worries about this. Apparently Kodak - the people responsible for the shoebox of photos from last century - doesn’t get it.

Storing things online let’s me outsource the upkeep of my data. That’s a key part of the value proposition. I can let somebody else worry about backing up the hard drives, and maintaining redundant data centers to prevent Act of God loss.

I initially put some photos up on Kodak for exactly that reason. I was worried about using a startup service because maybe they’d go out of business and disappear some day. I wanted a trustworthy brand that would be around well into the future. Guess I was wrong - guess these old companies really don’t get it afterall.

As the records and artifacts of my life move online more and more completely, the network has a tremendous responsibility to safeguard and maintain that info. Any service that doesn’t take the seriously has no place in my life. It goes 10x for photos.

Hello Flickr. Hello Yahoo! Photos.

Jakob Nielsen published another installment of Mistakes. This time, the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005.

He’s been sometimes off the mark over the years, but all10 ring true this time. At least 8 of the 10 regularly annoy me both as a user and as a web developer.

Give it a read. Even if you already know what they are, it’s worth hearing it and seeing it one more time.

(Of his ten, #3, #7 and #10 are the most annoying to me as a user. Which do you dislike most?)

The great news continues to flow. Just a few hours ago it was announced that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo family.

(I stole the “family” phrase from Upcoming.org’s own Andy Baio. I must admit, it’s great to hear people are as excited to join the work here as we are to already be doing it. There is great work going on here, and and it is a great place to work.)

For those that haven’t been playing with Upcoming yet, here’s their blurb:

Upcoming.org is a social event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Manage your events, share events with friends and family, and syndicate your calendar to your own site.

As a side note, I’ve been playing with Microformats for a few things at work. “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” Upcoming.com was an early adopter of these semantic markup structures, so I’m excited to have the experience around now. Of all the types, “events” are the perfect use case for this emerging technology.

Read more about Yahoo!/Upcoming on the ysearchblog, or any of the Upcoming.com guys’ blogs: Andy Baio, Leonard Lin or Gordon Luk.