The Unheard Word

For me, one of the great beauties of working for myself is that, to a large degree, I can create my own challenges. Work doesn’t have to get stale, which has the added benefit of positively impacting my whole life. (Hmmm hang on. My work is my whole life. Hmmm)

Well, if Doug Bowman had a hand in the design of Google’s new public beta of Google Calendar and said it’s a really good appplication to use, even compared to iCal — that was good enough for me and I went to try it.

A big thumbs-down to Google because it doesn’t work with Safari.

It’s been a while since I posted, so this seems a good time to mention that I’ve been invited to speak at TODCon 8 in Orlando, Florida, in May 2006.

A fellow Webweaver is “switching” from PC to Mac, and asked the Mac users on the email list what we consider to be our must-have Mac software aside from what is already pre-installed. So as a follow-up to the Apple Mail post, I decided to compile a list of my favourites.

I didn’t mean to do it. I swear I didn’t. I just can’t help myself. I just really, you know, needed a fix.

I’m a software junkie.

A couple of days ago I discovered a fantastic page of Apple Mail plug-ins…

There has been much discussion by web professionals everywhere about the future of their favourite applications since Adobe acquired Macromedia last year. Recently, on the Webweavers discussion group, Lynn Grillo posed a question that sparked quite a discussion.

Lynn asked, “So do you folks think there is room for two web editors from Adobe? You know, aimed at different markets?”

A recent conversation with a widely known and respected web designer friend in the U.S.A. raised the oft-asked question, “Where are the women in web design?”

My friend found herself in a situation where she was asked to fix the work of a relatively prominent male in the area of web standards.

Happy New Year to all!

I thought I’d start off the New Year by upgrading to the new version of WordPress, my blogging software. I’d read some less-than-enthusiastic reviews and so didn’t do it immediately on its release. But over the New Year weekend, I didn’t want to actually work so I placated myself by doing something work-related instead. 🙂

In my ongoing search for the elusive “perfect browser”, I have been back and forth a bit lately. I’ve gone from Safari 2.0 (a very fast and elegant browser), to Firefox (for the zillionth time), to Flock, back to Firefox, over to Camino and am now back with Safari. Here’s why:

For those that didn’t catch the heads-up on 456 Berea St, what a magnificent article by Chris at Wait till I come!. Chris notes how difficult it actually was, in the early days of the web, to build and maintain table-based websites that worked across browsers — and how (contrary to what some of the old-school diehards would have us believe) building websites using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layouts is not any more difficult, once you accept CSS for what it is.

He makes the very pertinent point that the design should fit around the content, not the content be made to fit into our designs.