Nikoport

A couple of days ago, Microsoft has launched open beta version of the Internet Explorer 8, also known as IE8. This should be quite an important release, which actually should have been IE7, because of the complete CSS 2.1 implementation, for which all webdesigners around the world have asked, screamed and cried for quite a number of years.

The final release of the IE8 be passing the ACID 2 test, which depending on the release time, may be even ahead of the Firefox. (Opera and Safari are already passing it for some time). Besides ACID 2 being just a synthetic test of the CSS 2.1 standard, it is quite an important mark as well – it at least tests some of the important functionalities of the Cascading Sheets and represents the dreams and wishes of a lot of webdesigners for years. I hope, that there will be an ACID 2.5 test, including some of the most complicated situations in CSS standard, especially those where the major browsers are still having problems. Such test would always be a motivation for browser developers to improve their respective products and for the rest of us mortals a simple comparison tool to see which one is making bigger effort in providing a higher quality product.

The most interesting thing about IE8 web standards compliance is that it won’t support standard compliance mode like IE7 by default. One will have to use much talked and contested “X-UA-Compatible” header. I do not like this idea at all – but i have no illusions that no scream of web developers community will make Redmond change its mind.

2 interesting technologies included in IE8 are those to combat Google: Activities (think embedded Google Maps,) and WebSlices( selecting a part of the web page for saving for later viewing – for years there are quite a number of plugins for Firefox allowing this functionality).

Activities will allow to check out the address on the webpage by selecting it and then viewing it on the maps (microsoft maps, of course), and also social services links like digg it, facebook share links, etc. There must be a number of plugins in the future to include your preferred social services. I hope it will eliminate all those useless social links on the pages in the nearest future. =O)

I am still testing IE8 beta and still not sure if i keep it for more time. What i am concerned at the moment is whether we will have a possibility to have 2 browsers at the same time on the same computer – we are about to have IE6, IE7 and IE8 active – i don’t remember seeing 3 Microsoft browsers being in statistics for quite a number of years… With the recent death of the Netscape browser it brings a lot of nostalgia to me. I do not think about having IE6 on Vista – it is impossible, but for argument’s sake i need to have IE7 and IE8 on Vista, cause i won’t buy another license for a virtual machine just to get 3 browsers working at the same time.

p.s. A lot of sites are broken, quite broken if i might add – some of mine are included. Also there are a lot of cases when text adjustment does weird things, and IE7 emulation is far from perfect – many cases text justification sometimes is quite weird, but i do understand that it is just a first beta.

Besides launching today a page for a friend of mine, who gives explications of geography, i am working on a big project, which will be hopefully launched in March. It is a quite a big site for environmental community, written completely in Drupal with a big number of modules.

At the moment we are close to start beta testing and there are just several functionalities that are not quite optimized, that i am refining. Besides normal modules, there are some areas where online payment is going to be used, so it will be probably one of the biggest project based on Drupal that i have done untill now, so i am very excited about finishing this one. =O)

Microsoft is offering this staggering money for buying out Yahoo – 44.6 billion dollars in money and share. They hope for a bigger share of advertising market, and i hope that this deal will fail, we need more enterprises in the internet area and not 1 or 2 which control the market completely. Right now, there are 3 major players out there in the internet: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – and i see absolutely no reason for .

Last year there were rumors, that Google were considering into buying Yahoo – that is not a good thing either. I would welcome any company into competition with those 3 but not one of them buying out another one.

I know, that Microsoft’s offer is also about 62% premium on share price, but i hope for reason and greed (this one should work better then the first one in the major corporations) to resist this offer. I feel that if Microsoft will get their hands on Yahoo there will be nothing good for all of us: besides less competition i believe that Yahoo and all what it stands for will disappear in a couple of years.

I have designed a new version of a website for TARH lda, which was finally launched a couple days ago. The site at the moment is completely static xhtml (php version is already in plans for the end of the 2008). Besides reworking graphic concept the new version includes a home page with news and archive, and a special page for the firm CEO José Martins Carvalho, also the work is being finished to add Spanish and English versions for the international visitors.

TARH Lda is a portuguese geological company in the area of ground water development. They are one of the most respected portuguese specialists in the project and supervision of ground water research as well as working with mineral water for spa and bottling and geothermal purposes. They have a very vast curriculum of doing works on 3 different continents and with no doubt are one of the finest portuguese firms.

At the moment it contains only a portuguese version, while english and spanish are still under revision, but they should arrive in the next weeks (english is almost ready, just a couple of small things are being reviewed and refined). The PT letters which stand for portuguese bellow the main menu are basically the start of the international menu.

The site of TARH was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 with a fluid design which is viewed best with 800×600+ resolutions.

Some words of dis appreciation go to the infamous Arsys hosting: no .htaccess access – guys, in which century are you living ? Anyway – enjoy the rest of the prepaid year – because it is the last one when TARH is still hosted on your servers. 2GB of traffic per month seems to be like a bad joke to me, especially in the year 2008 when most providers offer you no limits on the web traffic.

Last week, Apple has released the new version of their browser Safari to all operating systems – Safari 3 final version was included into the 0s X 10.4.11 update for Tiger users, and Safari 3.04 for Windows users. It was quite an important update remembering that a couple of weeks ago, with the release of the Leopard, Apple has launched the 3rd version of Safari for the OS X users who has upgraded their system. The new Safari has brought some restyling to the user interface – now it has the unified look and feel of the Leopard operating System. Also it finally includes (after 4 years of waiting) the possibility of styling the form controls with a css. This is a major improvement for GUI development, i believe every web developer went nuts with Safari, because of not being to style the controls.

This is a major upgrade for all systems. On windows a new beta version is much faster then the previous version. Not only the so called “cold start” but also the navigation, loading times and all the rest appears to be quite faster then before.

The list of the recent improvements to WebKit – on which Safari is based is quite impressive – it includes stability and speed improvements, improvements to the Enhanced Rich Text Editing: it includes TinyMCE and FCKEditor (think visual editors for Drupal and Wordpress), SVG (after Opera and Firefox one more player coming to this market, IE team – are you still sleeping ?), XPath and XML improvements (think XMLHttpRequest and Ajax).

OS X safari version include some development tools, which must be enabled by hand (do they continue to be in alpha stage?)

There are some bugs though to work on the Windows version – thats why it is still a beta, i believe. I have managed to see Safari loosing its look and feel and some of the windows control buttons appearing (quite an unpleasant change).

Apple is taking quite serious this Safari offensive, and if they will spend just a little more time implementing Web Developer tools and stabilizing the Windows version, i believe the time when some users will start switching to Safari.

A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

The brand new version of the GIMP is already available on www.gimp.org. It seems that i was a kind of sleeping for the last month or so, since i completely missed this so much awaited and needed release. The 2.4 Version has been released on the 24th of October bringing all the changes that were made during the last couple of years by the GIMP developers. The most important of them for me are:

• Scalable brushes – one can finally scale brushes while editing the photos, it has been a pain doing it without this feature
• Selection resizing – you will wonder how have you lived all this years without it
• Foreground select tool – yes yes yes !! no more suffering watching Photoshop users doing it on a instant basis
• New crop tool – no more “keyboarding” for a simple operations

One thing i am very excited to see if the GIMP developers has managed to improve the color handling – in a lot of situations it was quite disastrous in the previous versions (2.2), but hey i am so grateful for having the Gimp that i am not whining, really =O)

The only missing thing at this moment is the absence of the MAC OS X port of the GIMP 2.4 version. The latest release available is still the 3rd release candidate. If you are an open source user and you are doing some visual stuff from time to time then you do not wish to miss this release.