Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

The Firefox project really started to stagnate for a while when it came to performance.  FF2 felt as glacially slow as the Mozilla Suite that it replaced.  Thankfully, and I believe in part due to competition from Safari, the FF3 betas are incredibly fast.  The speedup is as staggering as the jump from IE6 to what at the time was called Phoenix.

Which is fantastic, because it means that I can use Google Docs, Zimbra, and other cloud applications on my Fujitsu P2120.  Opera was fast, but it’s DOM implementation was just too quirky.  FF3 is still in beta, but it renders like a gecko browser.  The web just works. That’s important because it makes all the cheaper, but less powerful, sub-notebooks appearing on the market practical.  FF2 was painful for surfing the web on machines with that level of processing power.  In FF3, I can actually get something done, on a 4 year old machine with questionable usefulness when it was new.  Thanks Mozilla for making my laptop useful again.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 a while ago and have started drawing some conclusions.  Stuff I like:

• It didn’t break my existing theme
• The overall feel of the admin interface is cleaner
• The visual editor sucks less
•  Built in tag support
• The comment moderation page shows which post the comment is on

Stuff I don’t like as much:

• Aksimet doesn’t have a ‘recheck queue for spam’ button on the comment moderation page
• The save/publish buttons are un-intuitively to the left of the post. (years of web use have taught me that these belong on the bottom)
• Tags and categories are under the post.  While it gives them more space, they become somewhat hidden.
• The checkbox for categories is at the bottom, but it still a scrolling list one-column wide.  If you’re going to move it, at least use the extra horizontal space.

Overall, I like it a lot better, but I think most of that is the colors are softer and the interface is brighter.  For my standard tasks for writing something and marking comments as spam, the experience is only moderately improved.  

Safari’s really fast. It blows Firefox 2 and my previous favorite, Opera away.  However, I’ve held back from using it as my primary browser because the one thing that bothers me more than slowly loading websites are websites that insist on playing music or showing a video as soon as I load them.  

This was a complete deal-breaker until I rediscovered SafariStand.  SafariStand is a small set of plugins for Safari that includes little features like colorizing html source, a sidebar that shows the thumbnails of all open tabs, and a way to block flash animations from automatically loading.  

It’s mac only, and if I read the broken English right, will be that way for the planned future. If you want your Safari experience to be even better, it’s worth checking out.

I just had the absolutely horrible experience pleasure of using Flex again.  For details why, check Appcelerant in the next few days.  However, there were a few things that I couldn’t help but get off my chest.

• The documentation sucks, especially for their command line tools.   I will readily admit that this is partially my fault, but I don’t quite understand the relationship between ActionScript, MXML and Flex. I spent about a day just getting bogged down in figuring out what I need to get things done.  
• Related to above, there aren’t enough good examples.  At least on pages that are easily accessible for free, there wasn’t very much actual code that was helpful.  Most of what I was presented with, I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
• Flex/Flash (Flesh?) is actually quite good when you want to do something visually snazzy.  It should be used in these cases.
• ActionScript is adequate when you don’t know Javascript.  However, it is piss poor when you get accustomed to the power stemming from javascript’s dynamic nature.  It’s not long before you really start to miss things such as being able to bind variables to a function that will be called by an event handler.  
• c.verticalScrollPolicy = ScrollPolicy.off; c.horizontalScrollPolicy = ScrollPolicy.off; Are the most crucial lines when it comes to developing in Flex.  Otherwise, Flex will put ugly scrollbars oneverything.
• The Flex-Ajax Bridge is really cool. While this does suffer from the same documentation pitfall as Flex proper, the bridge is really neat.  The biggest benefit is that it allows a developer to use Flex for it’s strengths (snazzy visuals, scrollbars, etc) and use something else for the rest.
• You can’t index a Flash Movie.  If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.  

Flex is not something that I want to use everyday, nor something that I would use to build a significant potion of a website.  It’s useful for little visual effects and flashy things.  Otherwise, you’re better off learning how to use CSS.  The web is still the best technology for delivering web applications.