centre{source}

You have likely already seen this video. Google interviews a number of people in Times Square to see if they can answer the basic question: What is a Browser? Less than eight percent guessed correctly, and you can be reasonably sure that figure translates well into the general public. When it comes to the Internet, one of the single most integral pieces of the experience often gets overlooked.

Some of us at centre{source} have been running the latest version Firefox (version 3) which is currently in it’s beta stages. It’s VERY cool and VERY fast…Beta 3 Release 4 just came out today: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0b4&os=osx

After installing, we were extremely happy to notice that Flash is once again working as expected, and it’s all running a lot faster and more stable. It definitely is a huge improvement over Firefox 3 Beta 3 (which itself was light-years of improvement over Firefox 2!)

Try it out, and let us know what you think!

“I’m trying to think, but nothing happens.” – Curly

Crib notes, quick guides, Cliff Notes, cheat sheets – whatever you choose to call them, they come in handy when the web developer brain goes ___________ .

The guys at Smashing Magazine (we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.) have provided probably over 100 cheat sheets from Ajax to CCS, MySQL to XML. One could print them all out and fill several notebooks full of cheat sheets, but that’s not being environmentally green (unless you’re really green.)

Anyone that has written HTML and CSS has undoubtedly, at one time or another, faced a major headache attempting to acheive crossbrowser display uniformity. It’s a problem that’s not going to go away anytime soon, so we all just have to live with it for the time being.

I’ve noticed over the years, that everyone has a different approach to tackling this issue. Some prefer to use multiple stylesheets, one always for IE, the other for everyone else. Some code one stylesheet, but forsake uniformity for subtle, sometimes unnoticable, differences. I myself have used both of these techniques in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with either method; the end goal is to have a webpage that looks roughly the same in all the major browsers (IE 5-6, Firefox, Opera, Safari), and most importantly, without using tables for layout.

A friend of mine pointed me at this site: http://www.mapable.com/. A neat, but forgettable site. It uses the Google Maps API to display a map with real-time chatting between people on .. the map. It uses the client IP address to extrapolate geolocation and display it on the map, so they can talk in tiny width-restricted fields. Example:

Person in Algeria: So, you’re in Canada, eh?
Person in Canada: Yep
Person in Algeria: Soo..
Person in Canada: Can you see anything I write longer than 50 charact
Person in Alergia: Nope.