For the best part of 3 years, I've used RapidWeaver. I live and breath (somewhat unhealthily perhaps) it and today I'm finally able to reveal why I've been missing in action for a while: today is my first day as a full time employee at Realmac Software. I've left the music behind, and very tragically the great city of Manchester too, however after a far-from-dull few weeks, I've bitten the bullet / swallowed the pill / signed on the dotted line and will be working at Realmac in Brighton full-time as of Monday 22nd October. I firmly believe that 'you've got to make your own kind of music' and Realmac has offered me the opportunity to do just that.

So what does this mean? The answer is, actually, nothing. Well. Not for anyone who follows what I publish online! The terms of my contract for TUAW & DLS mean that I can still write (but I'm avoiding Realmac related items of course). I'll be here (hell, I'm in the middle of a re-design for this baby) and many, many other places too (hint), so enjoy. If you're heading to London for this week's MacLive Expo, you'll find me around the Expo (Thursday) as I cover it for TUAW, or find me on the Realmac booth (#834) on Friday and Saturday. Please do come and say 'Hello'.

There's a fair few thank yous in order. I've had the good fortune to have so many people offer me support and advice over the past few weeks, and without that, I'd be a wreck. I'm not going to name names here - you know who you all are. All I can say is a most since and heart-felt thank you. Seriously.

You've got to make your own kind of music,
sing your own special song,
make your own kind of music,
even if nobody else sings along.

Tags: RapidWeaver, Realmac

One of the perennial questions encountered seems to be 'How can I get auto-loading music to play on my website'? The short answer is simply 'don't do it'. Here's the long answer (Hint: it's roughly the same as the short answer. Just with swearing and a bit of detail).

Introduction

Ever since the days long before the gawdy monstrosity that is MySpace came along, people have been able to poison the internet by putting sound files somewhere on webpages (MIDI files, anyone?). Some people even hide the bloody things via CSS or other joys - they're the worst - as when I visit the site, if I can't switch the god-damn thing off, I'll just close the tab and never return. People's justification for it is generally "I want *this* ambience when people visit my site", and that's OK when it's you visiting your site. But how often are you really going to do that when it's a live site, and you're burning bandwidth serving some (presumably legitimately licensed) media up? Bandwidth, whilst being a something that might be at the back of your mind, is the least of your worries.

How Are You Playing It?

Your first answer is "I'll just pop in some tags somewhere on the page". The first problem here is, if you're on a frameless HTML page, perhaps like this, that the audio will cut out when they navigate to a different page. There goes the ambience you so wanted. Oh, sure, you could use frames and put the media player in its own, and ....... bleurgh. Have fun sorting that out. So, you want to have a cohesive user experience, the ambience to stay intact, and the audio on the page regardless of the content. That means Flash - something that's incredibly useful, but also so incredibly annoying as a user to have to interact with. My favourite example of all things wrong with Flash is, ironically, the Adobe store. Half Flash, half HTML and ColdFusion, it's a slow loading dinosaur that, thanks to the Flash sector, renders the 'Back' button mostly useless. And Flash also likely means loading times. With the average user wanting to wait no more than around 4 or 5 seconds for a page to load, if your Flash page loads slowly at the expense of audio (remember, not everyone's sat on top of an academic network like yours truly) people will simply not bother. Flash also removes the ability to navigate to bookmarked 'subpages' and if people have to faff around and re-navigate your (likely poorly implemented Flash UI) every time they visit, again, they just won't bother. Trust me. I don't.

What now?

Now that we've eliminated pretty much every 'in-window' option, you may think "Pop-up"! Not so fast, there. Pop-up blocking is a standard feature of web browsers nowadays, so getting a window open when someone visits your site is actually pretty tricky, and unless visitors are visiting to hear samples of your audio work, they're not likely to want to open the window anyway. Yes, that 'ambience' you so desire is going down in flames pretty quickly.

There's more than just the technical reasons for avoiding this auto-loading all singing-all-dancing idea?

Yes. It's not the numerous technical hurdles that make it futile to put auto-loading audio or video on your average site - there is one more I've not really mentioned: that Microsoft's ActiveX controls (used by Flash et. al. on Windows) no-longer auto-start as the result of the Eolas patent spat. It's the fact that by putting on auto-loading audio, you're showing a fundamental lack of respect to your visitor. That's me. I, like many, many others no doubt, surf the inter-web with iTunes open and blaring media of my choosing. When you're visiting the site for a movie, audio is expected, so I'm completely willing to pause iTunes as I want to see that content. But if I'm visiting a BBQ sales website, I won't want to interrupt my listening to put up with whatever tune you think is appropriate. If I come across a site that does auto-play audio, or for that matter, ANY audio-visual content when it's not expected, rest assured by only visit will be a swift one - and when I leave, I'll run like a bat out of hell.

I'm not anti-audio - I'm a musician for goodness sake - but when it comes to websites, please do us all a favour: leave the auto-playing media out. Please.

Tags: RapidWeaver, Web Design

Microsoft is a massive company - seventy-six thousand employees in 102 countries - and I have no doubt the folks there are exceptionally smart, genuinely nice people. But people are suggesting the Redmond beast is dead, or rather irrelevant, today. To be totally honest, whilst Microsoft is by no means dead, it's a company that's becoming more and more irrelevant. Even Yahoo, whilst making losses, is relevant - Pipes and Flickr are slick innovative homegrown and purchased produce. Google too is pushing technologies - Spreadsheets and Documents (also a mixture of purchased and home-grown technologies). Microsoft are playing catchup in numerous arenas - web standards, digital audio and games consoles - and whilst that's not disastrous (Office is still dominating, as is Windows, and Microsoft are hardly losing money overall), the three are perhaps the most pertinent topics at the moment: Firefox is gaining market-share at the expense of the lacklustre Microsoft Internet Explorer; Apple's iPod+iTunes is killing Zune and many other players through sheer market penetration, marketing and ease of use; and despite pouring bucket-loads of the Microsoft war-chest into Xbox and others in the Home and Entertainment division's product portfolio, it's been a year where Nintendo has dominated with a genuinely innovative console. But before I regurgitate my reasons for generally thinking that Microsoft is a headless chicken, onto Internet Explorer - a piece of software that, contrary to the fact that its use is widespread, is loathed by web developers building standards-based web pages.

Internet Explorer is loathed is because it epitomises Microsoft's attempts to dominate the internet in the late nineties, by completely obliterating open web standards and ensure competing browsers went the way of the dodo. As web designers, we hate IE because it pushes a monopolistic corporations agenda that's no where near as relevant as it once was. People may counter this rant on Internet Explorer with the 'But Firefox and Safari etc are not absolutely completely 100% standards compliant' chant. And yes, it's worth noting this before people think I'm living the illusion that all non-IE browsers are fully compliant (comparison here), I'm well aware of that - my point is that comparatively, IE is not standards compliant. Many of you will be familiar with the Acid2 browser test - if not, then try it here and read up on it over at webstandards.org. Safari is, if memory serves me correctly, the first browser to fully support the test - and whilst it's certainly not the be-all and end-all standards test, it certainly gives us a clear idea of what each browser supports in relation to what developers are using to design and style their pages. Internet Explorer has issues.

The history of Trident (the rendering engine behind Internet Explorer) is an amusing read. Worthy of mention are the facts that Tasman (the IE for Mac engine) was actually more standards compliant than the windows-only Trident (presumably at the time of its release) and that the latest Office 2007 HTML edit & rendering engine is unsurprisingly worse at standards support. It also talks about Microsoft's Expression Web product - which claims to have 'the most accurate rendering engine available today'. That's great, Microsoft, it really is. But it really ought to be shipped and forcibly installed on Windows systems for Internet Explorer's rendering around the world before it actually means jack-sh@t - although I must admit I'm intrigued by this claim and part of me wants to see for myself what it's like. Too bad it's Windows only, and I lack (for the time being) Parallels!

People have asked me whether I believe Microsoft should just simply stop IE development and aid Mozilla and WebKit development, and whilst the 'mac-based web developer cliché' makes me pray for that, my ultimate reaction is 'no'. Competition is healthy - it keeps companies hopefully wanting to make better, ever more innovative products - just as the Zune is some sort of competition for the iPod, and Xbox 360 is for the Wii. All I want is for IE6 to die a short, and highly painful death. If you are a Windows user who has chosen not to install IE7 - please, please, please do so. Whilst IE7 may not be Firefox, it's a huge improvement over IE6 - standards support is better, some transparent image support, and, finally, tabs - although the UI is somewhat confused and certainly a departure from IE6. Whilst you may not think it matters, your choice of browser does. It makes peoples lives less stress free and allows designers and developers to spend time doing what they want with a project, not trying to fix the inadequacies of a comparatively out-dated browser.

Tags: RapidWeaver, Internet Explorer, Rant