Dave Balmer

IE8 is looming on the horizon for release into the wild later this year. It looks promising. According to what I’ve seen so far, it’ll be largely compliant with HTML 5 and the latest and/or greatest CSS specs from W3C. Awesome!

And yet… 30-40% of the installed Windows base out there seem to still have IE6, one of the buggiest browsers in existence (motto: “IE6: now powered by more interns than ever!”).

IE7 has been out for, well, a long time now. It’s not too bad, and offers the casual surfer a good browser experience. So what’s the holdup? Why was user adoption so pitifully slow?

Are we going to see a similar adoption curve with IE8? Because I’m really not looking forward to supporting three different IE browsers at once.

For the first time in, well… a long time, I’m actually interested in getting a beta version of IE.

So far, I’ve spotted what looks like support for HTML 5 CSS transitions (physics-based animation of CSS properties), some document messaging thing which I haven’t played with yet, and client-side storage (SQL based persistent storage).

Thanks to Parallels, I can investigate safely inside a VM without blowing up my test versions of IE6 or IE7. I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to downloading IE. I hope Steve Jobs will forgive me.

“The SDK is free!”

Mostly. If you want to be able to distribute your apps to anyone else, you’ll need to fork over $99 to Apple. Oh and remember, you have to have OSX 10.5 to even run the version of XCode you need. So be ready for fork over another $130 if you’re a Mac developer, or even another $500 or so to get a Mac Mini if you’re a PC developer who wants in the iPhone developer game.

“Test in the emulator or an iPhone!”

Yes and not quite yet. The emulator is very good, but you can’t test any app which reads data from the accelerometer. No problem, just plug in your iPhone, right? Oops, that’ll wipe out your phone data, which you’ll have to restore later. Oh and you can’t really unless Apple have sent you an iPhone with the 2.0 software on it. Till then, it’ll be emulator only for most of us.

The SDK is fine to start playing with native apps, and I’m really happy Apple put it out. The instant gratification of “download this, code up something cool, and put it on your iPhone” just isn’t there yet. Alas.

Here’s some JavaScript code for grins:

 
dave = {
	show: function() {
		this.style.display = 'block';
	},
 
	hide: function() {
		this.style.display = 'none';
	}
}
 

It seems to work, but it jams a ton of “style” tags into the source. Not a good example of coding for someone who does this sort of thing for a living. I’ll look for another plugin.

Hey, this thing looks like it just sort of… works. Without having to login and such, it’s a nice app.

MarsEdit 2 by Red Sweater Software

It’s pretty fast, and hooks up to Wordpress nicely. It has code editing which I prefer to WSYWIG, and the preview is decent. It supports category selection, and even lets you create categories on the fly.

I wish it had the ability to add normal Wordpress tags, but since I’m not using the tag cloud until I have a bunch of posts, it’s fine for now.