Well, surprise, you didn’t even see it update… and you got Google Chrome 3 already. I guess you’ll just have to wait for TechCrunch to make an article. I’m pretty sure they’re as much taken by surprise as I am.

Between all the skepticism that FHTML must be facing now, I kind of understand their motivation. Sometimes, as a web developer, you’re thinking there must be a better way to make web sites out there. And you’d want that to be native of course, and all integrated and not complicated.

So an attempt to rebuild HTML always has understandable motivations. However, I’m not so aligned with FluidHTML’s. Alright, so, why do I say that? What’s FHTML?

FHTML is a special script that blends Flash technologies (so I imagine ActionScript) with HTML, to make it easier to make Flash. It runs dynamically on the server-side so you don’t have to do any compilation, and generates your Flash on your web page from there. It’s also SEO friendly.

If you’re already an experienced web developer, my guess is that by now you must have gone “What!?” by reading what’s here.

So here’s a list that describes how I think FHTML is pre-dead.

1. It’s not Flash but it’s still Flash
   The web community has one tendency right now, and it’s going away from Flash or any other non-open non-native code in existence the fastest possible. The developing community is all up for open stuff like native HTML 5 video on Firefox in an open source codec called Theora (yes because Safari uses AVC instead, a large part of the community has back-lashed on Apple’s HTML 5 support). Pushing a technology that just makes more Flash isn’t gonna work.
2. It’s dynamic server-side Flash generation
   Dear god FluidHTML, do you have an evil plan to clog up our web servers or what? Generating Flash content takes much more than simple PHP session handlings or text generation. I really don’t know how they would do it but if I had to name the single most stupid thing about FHTML is that, server-side dynamic generation. I know, dynamic is dynamic; “Look M’ma, I don’t even have to compile!” But compilation makes stuff so much faster. Why would you want to make dynamic something that has the ability to eat so much CPU (talking about Flash btw).
3. Yes, it’s Flash
   Well, Flash is an already existing product with a fairly big following. It already has tons of developers, already has its community, already has this and that and that. If FHTML is Flash, I seriously don’t see where we’re going further in all of this. Might as well make real, much faster Flash (or better, Flex, never heard of this?). I could understand Microsoft’s attempt with Silverlight, and JavaFX from Sun, at least they’re different products, but FluidHTML… no, just no, it won’t happen, ever.

So here you have it, my hate mail, well, blog post, about FluidHTML. I mean… really?

Wouldn’t it have been easy to just recompile it in 64 bit. Why not?

But I think the real question, should you care? Maybe you shouldn’t in fact, unless you plan for iTunes to use more than 2 GB of memory at once. It’s true, afterall, you won’t really get any benefit out of 64 bit for iTunes. Slightly faster memory operations, but still, you don’t need that for music.

In any cases, I think my wish for iTunes to be 64 bit is just a wish of unity and speed increase. Truthfully I think iTunes has always been a slow piece of software, albeit very useful and IMO immensilly superior to other platforms, much like the iPod anyway if you can overlook the Appleness.

There’s one thing that’s much faster though, pausing and playing music through your keyboard. I know huh, how was that supposed not to be responsive before…

You’ve heard the talks. They want you to stop shaking hands à-la-anglo-saxon, they want you to stop “la bise” à-la-French, all for one single reason: H1N1.

Let’s become Asian together

Apparently, kiss on the cheeks or hand shakes are too much for personal hygiene nowadays. Because of a simple virus deemed very dangerous, we should all stop shaking hands and kissing each other on the cheeks, as well as stuff our hands with alcohol-based sanitizers.

Yes, Sacrozi’s Government has even proposed making the French Bise illegal.

Based on demographics, if it isn’t for the normal spread of a disease, shaking hands is the most dangerous action, probably because we keep puting our hands all over ourselves for various reasons. Seconding that would be yes, bowing, and than the French Bise, because Japan has had more cases than France.

How Irrelevant

See how irrelevant this is? Really, I don’t think avoiding contact with other humans will really help. You might as well catch it by putting your hand on your pencil at that rate…

So, I really don’t know what to make of this disease. But my own advice would be to stop bad habits like eating your nails and try to stay away from shady restaurants where “clean” is not at least a 4 on 5. There’s plenty of freak stuff you could do to, like not licking your finguers while eating, but arguably this is pointless because by then the infected food is already in your stomach…

Oh, and, wash your hands where it counts. Researchs proved your keyboard is actually dirtier than a public toilet seat (assuming you’re in a relatively clean environment, high schools don’t count).

Everyday now when I go to Google Search I’m surprised. It’s changed, the search box and fonts are bigger. It’s uglier, the buttons seem even more bland than before, and I seriously don’t know why they changed the font size.

Did someone really had a problem with readability of the other one? Now it’s just too big.

So despite Google not getting prettier at all, it’s surprising how such a small change can be disturbing to the eye. Maybe it’s because there’s so few elements on the page it’s hard not to notice.

Something surprising came to my brand new Vista installation on a Snow Leopard Mac. While the deception of problematic Windows 7 boots on Mac came along (mostly due to the fact Windows 7 does not run on a single partition like pervious Windows installs and includes somekind of space very much like SWAP on Linux), the Snow Leopard disc came with a brand new driver that is much appreciated.

Yes, read support for HFS+ (and regular HFS I guess). So while you won’t be able to write to the disk, which looks more like a UNIX to Windows permissions translation problem than an actual write incapability, you can now read HFS drives!

I’m wondering if this isn’t a new Windows capability, but I doubt so.

MediaTemple’s Twitter account recently linked to a very interesting article on CSS support in email clients.

Now, while every knowledgeable techie in the industry knows email has always been a crappy platform when it comes to content, the results of the research conducted by CampaignMonitor is surprising. On a total of 65 CSS rules, Gmail only supports 33 of those, with 1 with partial or buggy support, and on top of that doesn’t support any Style or Link element in either the Head or the Body.

I mean, what? My favorite email client is actually one of the worse? Maybe not, let’s look at some other stats:

Hotmail supports 43 rules, 10 more than Gmail, and does support Style and Link elements in either the Head or Body (like the majority of recent mail apps). Yahoo Mail is the 2nd most advanced of Web Mail applications, supporting 53 CSS rules. Of course, Yahoo Mail supports the Style and Link elements in the Head and the Body too. Why Gmail’s lack of support for Style/Link elements is worrying is because only one desktop email client lacks this support too, IBM Lotus Notes 6 and 7. Version 7 was released in 2005 with a level of support already well surpassed by Outlook two years earlier, so go figure at how late Gmail is.

Coming in at a surprising 60 rules support, only missing 5 not so important rules (except 1, the e:hover pseudo-selector, supported by both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail but not Gmail), is AOL Web Mail.

And then you have Apple’s foray into the web mail space with Mobile Me, with a competitive support rating in at 52. However, it does not support Style or Link elements directly in the body, despite supporting them in the Head, although this could be seen as an effort to promote more standard HTML and CSS practices in emails by Apple rather than an actual lack of support.

On the desktop side, things are both expected and unexpected. Apple’s integrated OS X Mail app lacks support for only one of the rules, rating in at 64, while Mozilla Thunderbird is the gold standard by supporting it all, not surprising as Thunderbird runs on Mozilla’s Gecko platform, the same thing that powers Firefox. In fact, it is most likely that Thunderbird has an email rendering engine leaps ahead of other clients because of that.

On the unexpected side of the desktop comes Outlook 2007, with less support than 2003, Windows Mail which basically has the exact same rendering engine as Outlook 2003, and probably the most unexpected one, Entourage 2008, Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac per say, which has the exact same level of support than Apple Mail, making it highly suspect of using the same engine. I wonder what’s going to happen to that with Office 2011 for Mac, which Microsoft said will get rid of Entourage and have the first Outlook for Mac.

On the mobile side of things, the landscape is widely different and special. The iPhone is the most advanced, with support than Mobile Me, although not quite on par with Apple Mail, just 3 rules behind. Android Email is far better than Android’s Gmail app, actually coming in second with the Palm Pre not far behind.

Android Gmail comes slightly under its Web-based Desktop Client with 31 supported rules, followed by BlackBerry, which only supports 23 rules, making it the worse email client, for exception of Lotus Notes 6 and 7 that support only 11 rules. Yes, even Windows Mobile 6.5 and the very old Palm Garnet OS have better support, which brings in the question, why is the BlackBerry considered the epitome of enterprise communication? Of course, if you’re in the industry, you know why (there’s plenty of valuable reasons), but still, even more modern BlackBerrys not intended to save you bandwidth, like the Storm, have the same horrible render engine. In my opinion RIM products have just been getting worse over time. I guess being Canadian doesn’t make you competent in technology.

So what’s all this jargon of talk means for you?

Well, whatever situation you’re in, it means email is one of the worst communication material to send any kind of non-raw data. Just looking at Gmail’s growth and Thunderbird’s near non-existent market share shows how unimportant display has been in the email world and how you should maybe think of only sending text in your emails after-all.

Although as a fan of standards support, I would consider going Yahoo Mail Plus instead of using Gmail. But is it worth the effort? Gmail is so useful for so many reasons, and blends so well with Google Docs and stuff, and all of the Yahoo Mail Plus features are free on Gmail.

I respect Yahoo’s effort, but it might not be the right thing to focus on. Still, Yahoo has as almost as much active email users as Hotmail, Gmail and AOL combined, and a lot of these people rely on their actual Yahoo email address to do their daily messaging. In these scenarios, switching mail service is much harder as you have to give up your address. I know what it is, I’m tied to my Gmail address for my daily needs, and switching to Yahoo can be scary, especially since it’s such an unstable company right now. I’m considering switching to a corporate email address for daily use though, which would get me rid of that switching constraint.

One other hardly-covered aspect of that weakness in email is what newer services like Google Wave could bring, or even Twitter or Facebook. The odds are there, although for Google Wave it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better; pointing at the face Google Wave is a Google product after-all, and Google surprisingly is a horrible company when it comes to HTML standards (just look at your source on Blogger, or Google Docs…)

Edit: Whatever happened has been fixed. Maybe they were updating their application’s back-end or something…

Am I hallucinating? Am I the only one that noticed Dictionary.com Premium just seems to have gone poof recently. As far as I know, I was browsing Dictionary.com ad-less for 20$ per year before I got Snow Leopard, which means just a few days ago.

Now I can’t even find the Log In button and the ads are everywhere. Stuff that used to be premium is now available to everyone, like audio pronunciation, and it just looks like, just like that, without any notice or justification to my recent expense, premium is gone.

Anyone has an idea? I’m gonna go beserk on them if they really shut this down.

When you boot up Snow Leopard, you might be surprised to find that your total disk space looks to have augmented. Your 320 GB hard-drive suddenly jumped from a mere 299 to a near full 319 GB. What happened?

No, your drive space didn’t magically get bigger because of Master Boot Table tricks (yes, I really thought so at first), rather, Apple changed the way they report the size of data.

Traditionally, Apple used to report data the wrong way, or old way if you want. That is, assuming 1 KB is 1024 bytes instead of 1000. In the new standards of today, 1 KiB (kibibyte) is equal to 1024 bytes, but 1 KB is equal to 1000 bytes.

What changed on Snow Leopard? Nothing visually striking, they still use GB instead of GiB, but this time however, they changed the count to the correct amount of bytes. In Snow Leopard, GB are correctly represented, and it’s one of the first OS to do so (Windows 7 still gets it wrong, as well as various Linux distros, bash shell > surprisingly including OS X’s bash terminal too, etc.).

Chapeau Apple