Brian Sweeting

I’ve been penning a couple of posts recently, that I just don’t think are well thought out enough. So until I get them in shape, I wanted to catch up so here’s a hodge-podge of notable things that I’ve ran across lately.

Microsoft Gets Agile

The WSJ has a great about Microsoft realizing the mess Windows was in and how they made the call to drop the legacy code and start fresh with their flagship product.

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers – the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Read the full article.

Have a strategy for your website

A great article by Greg Storey in issue 205 of A List Apart. Something I wish all my clients would read. Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

AJAX Dialog Windows

Not a “how-to” but a “what for” for designing AJAX dialog windows by Luke Wroblewski. Quoting Edward Tufte…

“The border of an active window should be light in value (to avoid clutter with other windows), yet deeply saturated (to provide a conspicuous signal). Yellow is the only color jointly satisfying those conditions, and therefore proves valuable for bordering windows.” -Window Research: Color Guidelines

Looks like there’s as more importance to the “yellow” than the “fade” in the “yellow fade technique” .

TypeTester

TypeTester allows you to compare fonts for the web, tweak them to your heart’s content, and then export the CSS. This is a must for designers working with developers.

My Kingdom for a good Web-based RSS Reader

I have been a bloglines user since it’s inception. The problem I ran across lately, is that they do not support RSS feeds that require authentication. So I’ve been hunting around for something else. I tried NewsGator’s online aggregator since it seems they are becoming an RSS Reader empire. They do support authenticated feeds, and the interface is pretty, but there isn’t enough separation between the blogs I read when viewing entries as groups of feeds. I also wish the category/feed navigation was either in frames, or it floated along as I scroll down the page.

I’ve also tried Rojo. Didn’t like how it only allows a flat listing of feeds (gotta have my folders). Google’s Reader, but I could only get it to import about half of my RSS feeds and it doesn’t seem to support authenticated RSS either.