squared99

IE7

During the past few weeks while we were also launching our website, luckily enough Microsoft starting pushing Internet Explorer upgrades for IE7, the % of IE7 users to IE6 users is slowly crossing with 7 gaining steadily thanks to auto updates. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.

This is wonderful news for all of us web developers out there, especially freelance consultants. Just think of all the great upcoming high-priced projects fixing sites so that they work in IE7 and IE6 now. Yes, there have been improvements on the standards compliance, but there are definitely some obvious deviations that have become apparent already. Luckily, (or unluckily depending) the old IE6 work around dont work, IE7 ignores those ‘hacks’, as it should. So the best way to code around those new quirks is to use the IE only conditional syntax and load in some special ie7 only rules.

see: http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html

also for the best information on IE7 see: http://www.ie7.com

iPhone

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

niiiiiiice, very nice. Definitely has me wanting it as a replacement for my blackberry. A lot of blackberry users are probably thinking the same thing. It jams a lot of functionality in there, its called iPhone but really it is one hell of a micro laptop with osx, full safari support for real web browsing, not to mention videos, music, widgets. Oh I think you can talk on it too. 8 gigs aint all that much but not too bad if you can sync often.

I’m curious as hell about what special widgets etc you can develop for it and what this will mean for voeveo as far as the content creators market. Will get back on that. Also this type of thing just continues to cattle prod service providers into allowing full web access as well as faster, open data plans. So all good IMHO.

Just a quick note on content. related story below.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54421.html

Microsoft recently released its Zune, the iPod killer! ummm no. Microsoft has made the same mistake a lot of companies have made, they assume they can sell a product and limit the content accessible on that product. As long as the product is cool enough, and they can hopefully hide the fact that there isnt a lot available for it, the the customer will be happy.

Wrong.

How blind do you have to be not not notice that what drives consumer demand is access to content? That is what drove the iPod, TiVo, et al straight to the top. And forget the red herring of ‘internet piracy’, consumers have already proven they are willing to pay for a reasonably priced and convenient service that gives them access to content. (iTunes music store, Netflix, etc).

Mobile carriers make the same mistake, they assume they can provide access to the devices, the services and the content. No matter how much content a provider has they will never be able to provide as much access as would be available on the net. Consumers will migrate to the least restrictive, most convienent service provider that allows access to the most content and that is the model mobile operators should be shooting for.