The Wii U is on life support. Can it be revived?
Let’s face facts here: The Wii U’s life so far has been an unmitigated disaster. Nintendo has struggled to sell the thing to consumers, third-party developers are hesitant to commit, and to top it all off, they seem to have had a time time convincing the public that their new system is even a system at all. More
We don’t type “http://” in our browsers anymore, so why use “www”? Let’s make the traditional URL syntax sandwich more noticeable, by turning it open-faced.
Source: tasteofhome.com
Once upon a time, if you can believe it, web surfers who wanted to visit a site needed to enter in the entire URL into their browser before hitting Go. Not just the “www” prefix, but the entire line of a standard URL: http://www.sandwich.com/. Back in the nineties, browsers didn’t have autocomplete functionality, they didn’t have search engines built into the Address Bar, they only had barebones Bookmarking and History functions; they were primitive, to say the least.
Most importantly, the functionality known as “commercialization”, “.com”-ification, or “cannonicalization”, which allows browsers to essentially guess the remaining portions of a given URL based on trial-and-error, was in still its infancy. It was also extremely bandwidth-intensive on dialup modems of the day, making incomplete address entry unpalatable to users. More
Last spring, as part of my ridiculously long hunt for a job for after graduation, I decided to make myself a set of business cards to hand out along with my resumes at job fairs. I knew I wanted something that would stand out with recruiters, and reflect my personality.
After researching tons of crazy business cards, and coming across an origami-inspired business card from a local designer, I came up with a crazy new concept: a business card that doubles as a paper airplane. Years of folding paper airplanes as a kid came in handy as I experimented with the best approach to my folding card, as I iterated my initial design. I knew I wanted my business card to be able to fold flat like a traditional 3 1/2″ x 2″, so it wouldn’t be cumbersome for employers to deal with when in ‘business card mode’. That required using thinner card stock with no gloss layer, and coming up with a folding mechanism to hold the wings of the plane in place while folded up. More
Who wouldn’t want to spend the first few years of their life in this room? Hell, I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life there.
Make that, a hand-painted Zelda nursery.
As a consumer, I’m outraged; yet as a designer/ developer, I’m tempted to stand up and slow clap. Aussie online retailer Kogan has imposed a 6.8% tax on all purchases by visitors who view their site on Internet Explorer 7. Customers who do choose to visit Kogan’s site via IE7 are greeted with a blatant, slightly snarky popup explaining that if they proceed to make a purchase they will incur an extra 6.8% fee on their goods.
It’s actually a fairly ingenious way to get around having to deal with the grueling process of cross-browser compatibility for those who insist on using outdated software (or are too computer-illiterate to know better). More importantly, if Kogan’s idea catches fire and other sites begin adopting similar policies, that could potentially accelerate the glacial rate of adoption for new browser versions across the web- and with the exciting features of HTML5, WebGL and other new web tech moving painfully slowly towards mainstream adoption, I for one am excited to see someone finally taking a real stab at browser standards enforcement.
Besides, every browser’s updates are free, and for those too inept to figure out how to do it themselves, the site’s popup contains handy links to the latest versions of the most popular browsers, so the tradeoff between disrupting customer satisfaction and working with outdated technology is pretty well balanced in this case. And doesn’t it make sense to encourage everyone to update who still runs a browser not capable of doing so itself? There’s virtually no way that those who update from IE7 would see any meaningful drawbacks from a newer browser, at least not in the long run, and doing so just once makes the entire web an easier place to build for.
After all, a rising tide raises all boats (except, ironically enough, for Netscape Navigator).
What Is?
Hey! I'm Mike, this is my blog. and my dream is to use my middling tech skills to make the world a better place (not in the techno-libertarian, "the world is a better place if I get mine" sense, but in the actual, "I want to help" sense).
