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Well I finally just went and bought a Mac Book Pro. It was pretty insane but I’m so happy I waited for the 17″. I just can’t believe I am now a Mac guy as well as a Windows guy (kinda of). Its taking a little time to adjust but it isn’t too bad.

The Mac Book is so sleak and fast as can be. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. It better be for the price$. Jezz. I will be working this off for a while. Ha.

I don’t really have anything new to post about it since everyone in the planet is currently posting about it. But I can tell you that I only got this because I needed an upgrade from my current PC, Compaq desktop. It was just my time for an upgrade, even though it was a HUGE one. But as they say, ‘go big or go home’. So I did.

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In a time of rapid change on the web, it’s about time to increase the standard resolution for web development. 800×600 is dead. Get it a casket and throw flash, frames, table layouts, hideous forms, word generated html, animated gifs, and giant repeating watermark background images in with it and bury them. Forget them. It’s time to move on.

To learn more, join your local city refresh group. Or, if you are in Des Moines, IA, you can check out ours. (FYI - the design is placeholder)

tags: design, web design

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Now that everyone is releasing their own AJAX frameworks, Google decided not to be left behind on this one. Check it out:

“Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.”

It’s available at their code site and you can get updates via their blog.

What’s wrong with this? It’s JAVA. boo.

Want more toolkits?

Yahoo UI Library

Microsoft’s Atlas, although I prefer AJAX.Net pro for ASP.Net web applications

Adobe’s Spry, which I wrote about earlier

There are many, many more.

tags: ajax, web development, google

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There’s a quick article worth reading today at Fast Company about the trends and adoption rates of ‘Distributed Offices’, or telecommuting. This is often a hard aspect of management to grasp for what I call ‘old school managers’ - those reluctant to change and very adverse to new ideas (which is odd for technology companies who thrive on new). Old schoolers see this as a time for workers to, well, not do anything.

Personally, I am much more productive working from home. I get my coffee and get in the zone. I don’t have anyone interrupting my flow. I block IM’s. I have two 20″ flat panels :). Whereas at work there are always distractions whether it’s someone’s phone ringing or someon asking you a question. Don’t get me wrong I think a certain level of interaction facilitates team building.

It’s ironic that if I am left to work at home for a day I often times put time and a half in — that’s right I work more. I like working when I am creating value and 90% of that comes when I’m sitting alone by myself, with my iPod and coffee.

Jason Frieds of 37Signals wrote about it in their last book, but here is an excerpt he posted on Vitamin.

Workplace 1.5 | Fast Company
How to Shut Up and Get To Work | Vitamin

tags: management, time, business, lifehack

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Microsoft started talking about its Expressions product line quite some time ago but it is a solution for designers, which is something Microsoft has always lacked. I think it’s about time Microsoft started embracing designers and they have been following through. They are trying to implement standards in IE7. They have release a very cool CSS Control Adapters package (more later). Microsoft has release a nice (and long) article on designing ASP.Net sites with web standards.

It’s just a shame that a majority of Microsoft developers either don’t care or do not care to learn this side of web development. I have always had this problem in being a Microsoft developer and a web standards / semantic markup advocate. It seems to me that Microsoft hasn’t embraced the adoption of these standards in its products thus not giving any reason for developers to adopt them.

Well, they are trying. And hopefully there’s something I can do to get the message out to ASP.Net developers — You’re sites can be designed beautifully. You can build sites on standards, using semantic markup. You can create scalable managed code simply.

Sorry, enough ranting and time for what I actually wanted to portray — Microsoft’s new line of designer design products. There are three in the suite versioned for your role as a designer: 1) Expression Graphic Designer, 2) Expression Interactive Designer, and 3) Expression Web Designer. Of course I am more interested in the Web Designer. You can view a bunch of demos here.

The product’s features claim the following:

“Create CSS-based, XHTML 1.0 Transitional–conformant Web sites by default, and work better across browsers, simplifying deployment and maintenance. Configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML/XHTML/Strict/Transitional/Frameset and CSS 1.0/2.0/2.1 in addition to browser-specific schemas. Validate your site with Compatibility reporting and use the Accessibility report to verify your site against Section 508 and W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).”

And, after watching the demos for the entire product line I see a lot of promise. Although it will be tough to compete with Adobe, integration of the Expression product line into existing Microsoft Development environments will be a quality niche for this line of products. I will definitely be checking them out.

The only thing I am wondering is what’s the difference between Visual Web Developer Express and Expressions Web Designer?

Proof Microsoft is reaching out to web designers:
Microsoft, IE, and the Web Standards Project
Building ASP.Net 2.0 Sites using Web Standards
CSS Friendly ASP.Net 2.0 Controls

More to come…

tags: microsoft, design, css, web development

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