…But dan Will
Someone’s got to make crazy Apple predictions, damnit! And if Mike’s not gunna step up to the plate…
Dan’s Super-Accurate Prediction Number One:
A bluetooth-enabled iPod and bluetooth ear buds. Yeah Yeah Yeah, Apple released two new iPods just a few months ago, but don’t you think that video iPod is getting a little shabby? Time for a new one and give that old wired clunker to your little brother.
Dan’s Super-Accurate Prediction Number Two:
Dell will drop Windows on all desktops and laptops and sell OSXI. You read correctly, my friends. Not only will Michael Dell announce that Microsoft pissed him off once too many times, but on the same stage he and Our Steveness will announce that they’re skipping OSX 10.5 – 10.9 and skipping straight to 11.0. OSXI will extend spotlight search capabilities to indexing all the books on your bookshelf, all of your DVDs (both movies and TV series), along with the contents of your pantry and refrigerator.
In an attack of retro glee, the new Dells will ship in colors of ‘sweet violet’, ‘beaujolias’, ‘cadet’ and ‘khaki’. Initial sales will be impressive, until the blogosphere explodes with the discovery that ‘beaujolias’ and ‘cadet’ aren’t really colors at all, and that ‘khaki’ looks oddly familiar…
Dan’s Super-Accurate Prediction Number Three:
JHymn development will resume, with support for returning our Fair Use Rights back to the content that we pay for. This one is more of a hope and a prayer then anything else.
Mike Won’t Do a MacWorld Predictions Article
…
Seriously. I’m not gonna.
…
I got into the mix plenty last year, and this year’s rumors just don’t have the zeal of the “$499 Headless Mac” from last year. Its not like an Intel Mac is really much of a surprise. That, and I think there should be at least one guy on the internet that refuses to give his 2 cents about it. Right?
Run IE 5 and 6 on Windows XP
As you can imagine, we are going through the debug process with the new site I just put up and the need arose today for a copy of Internet Explorer 5.0. We looked around the office but the old computer we had was ironically too old. Windows 3.1 in fact. Google to the rescue though…I found a great little tutorial about how to take a IE 5.1 install file and make it work as a stand-alone browser, perfect for testing.
Just thought I would pass it along to all web designers that don’t know, or you freaks that want to use IE 5.1 and think about the good old times.
Windows Vista: Deja Vu All Over Again
Microsoft recently gave a preview of Vista at CES and someone decided that the speach about the great new interface sounded a little like some other OS. Here’s a video that illastrates the point:
Windows Vista: First of a Kind Features
The mac-geeks will get a kick out of this.
People Can Stop Giving BoingBoing Awards Now.
Hey, did you see the big news? BoingBoing won another award for being the “best blog”? God! Can you believe it? The shock nearly blew me out of my chair. I mean to think of little BoingBoing actually getting recognition…awesome.
Seriously though, I love BoingBoing…you love BoingBoing…everyone loves BoingBoing. Do you think thats why they win everything. Of course it is. Its no contest, everyone reads them because they are one of, if not the “greatest blog of all time.” So why are they still up for all of the awards? At what point can we just officially acknowledge that they are one of the all time greats and leave it at that? How many times do they have to win the award for “Best English Speaking Blog” given out by some group no one has heard of until we decide to give someone else a shot?
Please don’t take these as sour grapes. I’m not suggesting that lowly Hell Yeah Bitch! .com should be up for any awards (Except for possibly “Best Name For An English Speaking Blog”). All I’m doing is suggesting that we give BoingBoing one more award: Name them to some “Blogging Hall of Fame” and let someone else collect some semi-pointless jpg awards.
I Know Where Dvorak Buys His Frames Online
Do you listen the This Week In Tech podcast? Of course you do. In this week’s episode there was a short discussion on what thing each of the pundits buys online. John C. Dvorak stated that he got a great deal on frames from some place he found online, but he couldn’t remember where. Well I know. He got them from the company I work for. I was digging around in the database yesterday morning when I heard him say that, so I ran a quick search, and there he was…
Dvorak got them from Frames By Mail.com, a site I just finished a complete redesign of. (Side Note: Of course we had server issues this morning when we were going to switch the whole site to my version so today was a rough day, thus not much in the way of riveting content. Sorry.)
I really try not to talk about work on there, but I just thought I would fill in the blanks…and promote some of my work. Isn’t it weird how everything just comes back to me like that?
Microsoft To Buy McDonalds and Taco Bell
Deciding it wasn’t enough to just make computers bad with their cumbersome OS and Office products, Microsoft is in talks to buy both McDonald’s and Taco Bell in order to also be responsible for making our meals bad as well. An anonymous source familiar with the nearly finalized proceedings, stated “We at Microsoft know that people run out of the office at lunch to take a break from their Windows computers, and if we can figure out a way to get into the lunch game and somehow ruin the one break these people have, we would make every effort to do that.” When asked about the rumored “Google PC” sporting a possible new OS, directly from Google, the source merely scoffed at the notion. “Most people don’t need another PC, but they do need to eat, everyday, without fail. Our approach is flawless: Get them where they eat. We can do anything, put advertisements on the buns or taco shells, whatever we want. People can switch to Mac or Linux at the drop of a hat if they want, but the fat-asses in this country will never stop coming to McDonald’s or Taco Bell. Never.” Before walking away, the source interjected “Plus, lets see those dumb-ass rumor-mongering tech blog writers see this shit coming!”
Check that out: I can make up rumors too! It doesn’t take an “A-List” blogger to post wild rumors, we here at Hell Yeah Bitch! .com can do that just as well as the big boys. Seriously, one look at tech.memeorandum.com and you think all the tech business leaders hung out all Christmas break smoking weed and eating Cheetos thinking up crazy deals. It can’t be all true. It just can’t. Lets just all remember that when we check out the news around the “blogosphere” in the next couple of weeks.
Examples:
When $80 Billion Is Not Enough
Blog debate: is Apple making a game console?
Industry Feeling Presence of the 800-Pound Google
The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain
Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
Chuck Norris once ate three 72 oz. steaks in one hour. He spent the first 45 minutes having sex with his waitress.
More Random Chuck Norris Facts
And the Washington Post article that brought this golden nugget of web humor to my attention.
AJAX or Flash? Where is the Line?
I just completed a complete redesign of a site for my company and part of it was to create a web application that allows the user to play with a myriad of options and configure the product how the want it all while giving them a preview of their progress and a continually updated pricing list. They had something like this on their current site, but it was old, and clunky perl CGI with lots of refreshing and rebuilding after every change the user made, so I opted to go with an AJAX approach. After many changes and feature tweaking and adding, I found myself staring at a small-ish group of PHP files and one very large file of javascript. Its finished now, and seems to work well, but as I look back on this aspect of the site that seemed to be growing every day, I wonder: I should have done it in flash?
AJAX has been a great tool for the modern web designer and it has allowed the creation of even more dynamic web applications with relative ease, but at what point of complication do you drop AJAX and move to a more cohesive tool like Flash? One of the first things I heard when AJAX became vouge was the flash people screaming: “We could already do this!” and its true. Flash has always been the go-to platform for web apps of the more complicated nature, but now AJAX has cut Flash off at the knees with its ability to do things like Google Maps without having your users download the latest Flash upgrade and wait to download the app. So when does an app cross the line from being “Perfect for AJAX” to being “Wow, that sounds like a Flash app.”? Or does it have to? Is 700 lines of javascript to get an app working with AJAX still better than having to go pick up a copy of Flash MX? What about 1000 lines? 2000? If you drop that much time and effort into a cool AJAX app, are your worried about how easy it is to get a copy of the code with just a right-click?
I think it depends on many things: Your familarity with Flash (ActionScript) or AJAX (PHP/ Ruby/Perl…, CSS, XML, and JavaScript) and your time. Play to your strengths so to say. The obvious answer, I know, but I also think that AJAX, in its present form, can only take you so far. That might not be the case in a few years, but currently, for a complated app, like the one on SpreadShirt Flash seems like the best option. Couple that with the on-going issues with standards compatibility on the world’s most popular browser: Internet Explorer, and if you are going for a complicated web app targeted to everyone, Flash seems like the clear choice. For everything below those tough standards, things like Backpack, Google Maps and Yahoo! Mail (in beta), AJAX seems to be working fine. Hopefully in the future, they will become competing methods where a developer can use one or the other at anytime, like PHP and ASP. For now, it looks as though one must be able to learn both and adapt to the project at hand.
Hell Yeah Bitch! .com Needs a Logo
Ok, we have a new design, which I hope everyone likes. We also have a crappy logo that I know no one likes. Here’s how I plan to fix this:
Logo Submissions.
The basic rules: Basically, I’m, looking for a design that has our name, and if you are artistic enough and so inclined, a picture / logo design in it. Size should be constrained to roughly 500 pixels width and 100 pixels tall. I say roughly, because thats what I mean…try to stay in that neighborhood, but you don’t have to. It should also be said that I’m not really looking for a “header” That goes all the way across that site because I’m trying to distance us from the “every other blog design” with a crazy header with text underneath it and a footer under that. Also, if you haven’t noticed, the width of the site changes with the width of your window, so a picture might not always work. However, I’ll keep it open by saying if you have a rockin’ idea that revolves around a header, go ahead and submit it anyway.
Of course, any design that is picked will get full billing and maybe a t-shirt or something. (If my bills are all paid first.)
To submit, you can just post a link or display the header image in the comments on this post. After a while, I’ll hold a little vote (assuming we have any submissions) and then I’ll throw out the vote and pick what I want while telling people I got some verbal votes from people you all don’t know that changed the vote in the direction I went.
Sound good? Fire up Photoshop (You paid for your copy right? Sure you did.) and make us a logo!
Editor’s Note: If you can’t host the pic on your own, please just email your submissions to me: mike at hellyeahbitch.com. Also, if you suck at photoshop like me, but you have an idea written comments about an idea will also be welcomed.
Follow Up:
I cyber-doodled a little thing that might be able to be incorporated into a logo by someone better than me.
It looks like this, and you can download the psd file here.
