thisStrangeEngine.com

Hey gang, I’ve been at the SxSW interactive festival for the past several days. This is the first time I’ve come back to the conference since 2005, and it’s both bigger and more fun than I remembered. I’ll talk about (maybe?) in more detail when things settle down. In the mean time, I have to say I’ve been inspired to perhaps hit the reset button on my technological presence with this site and others. This site is down about 50% of the time due to my faulty router’s port forwarding issues, so it’s clear no one’s going to miss it much if I take it down for a little restructuring maintenance. First thing, of course, would be to replace that router…

Tags: sxswi

I’ve decided that thisstrangeengine.com is finally too cumbersome even for me. The main portion of the domain is seventeen characters long, and in addition can be tricky to spell since it all runs together and the last letter of the each word is the same as the first letter of the next. I’m looking for something short (~ 10 characters or less) but memorable, and quirky is always good.

I already have some candidates, but I could always use suggestions.

During today’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that both OS X Leopard and iPhone are on schedule for they previously announced release dates, but also a dropped a small bomb in announcing the release of the Safari web browser for Windows. Apple claims that the Safari browser is faster than both Internet Explorer and Firefox in loading and page rendering. From it’s initial release on the Macintosh platform many years ago, Safari has been held in high regard the web design community for it’s adherence to web standards, and it is now a welcome addition to the Windows space. A beta version is currently available.

I can’t help but look at this as sort of a throwing down of the gauntlet by Apple. Long ago, Microsoft created an Internet Explorer for the Macintosh OS, thereby having a significant presence on both platforms. When Microsoft announced that it would no longer develop IE for the Mac, Apple then released the Safari browser to much critical acclaim…and now making it available for Windows sort of smacks of “turnabout is fair play.”

Lifehacker, a blog about using new technology and apps for practical living, has listed what it thinks are the best applications of 2006. A lot of the software listed are free, and some of you may be interested in taking advantage of what they recommend. Free VPN software, woohoo!

I haven’t talked about it at all, and that’s probably because I haven’t been terribly interested, but version 2 of the Firefox web browser is ready to launch any moment now. I haven’t been paying much attention to it because I’ve been extremely happy with Firefox 1.5, and I usually get wary of major version number upgrades in case the changes are too drastic to my liking. However, typicially being an early-ish adoptor of these kind of things, I decided to download the Release Candidate version this morning and give it a shot. I’m glad to say that it’s stil largely the same Firefox I know and love. The improvements are subtle but nice. However, lots of themes and extensions aren’t quite compatible with it yet. So if you like your extensions, it probably would be a good idea to wait a while to upgrade, especially since the improvements aren’t major and 1.5 is still a great modern browser.

I also installed Internet Explorer 7 on my laptop, and I’ve only toyed with it a little bit. I haven’t put it through the ringer for CSS rendering, which is my main interest, but the initial reaction that it is definitely an improvement. Yay for full PNG support! The UI is actually a little off-putting. It’s a bit changed up from the way IE has been doing it since IE 3. I know Microsoft is on this “let’s try to innovate the UI” kick, but this may be a bit much, especially for all the people who have used their browser for so long. People will eventually find their way around it, but it’s a little jarring. Of course, it’s also nice to finally see IE natively have tabs.

Also, out of the gate for some time now is Opera 9, which is a very solid browser with a lot of great features - many of which were innovated by Opera and has become popular features in more widely-used browsers.